How to evaluate a speech - Evaluate to Elevate - An educational session by Scott Brown

for everybody to start with this morning. How many of you joined Toastmasters because you knew that you were an amazing speaker already, that you commanded a room, that people came to you because you were just that good? How many of you were the perfect speaker when you walked into Toastmasters? I have never heard anybody say, oh, that was me. I was amazing when I first went to Toastmasters. We all came to Toastmasters because we needed help with something. Nobody came here because we thought we were great, we wanted to do it alone. We all came because we knew that we needed help within the process. We wanted to become better communicators. My journey was a serendipitous journey, but I want to take you back to October 2017. October 2017. I found myself sitting at a round table at the Fort Augustine Golf Resort in St. Augustine, Florida. Sitting beside me to my left was my best friend in Toastmasters, Jeremy Udell. He and I drove in there from Orlando, Florida for the district finals for the evaluation championship, the last fall conference we were having in Florida. As the stage darkened and the lights started to come up, we realized it was time that they were going to announce the winners. Our district director at the time, Bob Fisher, called out, "In third place..." But before I get to how we finished, I need to go back a little bit because in those moments when he was announcing the winners, the past 8 years or 5 years ran through my mind of how I had gotten there. I walked into Toastmasters in 2012 not even knowing what Toastmasters was. I walked in, the first thing I thought at a morning meeting was, where are the mimosas and where are the Bloody Marys? But while there was no alcohol, what I found was a group of people that were invested in doing something else, invested in helping people get better. A few months later, it came time for that very first evaluation contest in 2012, and Jeremy at the time was my mentor, and he said, "I'm going to have you enter the evaluation contest." I was voluntold. Now you probably know the way of voluntelling is how many of us became officers in the first place, but my first experience with voluntelling was when I got voluntold to enter a contest. And I went to the club contest and evaluated a speech and somehow won, even though I'd only been a Toastmaster for a few months. And I said, "Great, what's next?" And they sent me on to an Area contest, and my club showed up to support me, and I evaluated another speech and somehow I won. And I said, "Well, this surely is the end of it." And they said, "No, no, you have to go again." So I went to a Division contest the following month, and I evaluated a speech, and I won. And I said, well, that's got to be the end of it. No, one more. I went to the district finals that very first year and I came in third place. Third place in District 84 after only being a Toastmaster for a few months. I thought, this is really cool. You get to join and they give you big trophies. That's really a fun thing to be able to do. When I went back to the club, something interesting happened. They said, "You're the first person from our club that's ever made it past the area level. We didn't know that was possible for us." They had already decided—

Wow.

Alright, I'm back. Is everyone else here or no?

Everybody's here.

Have you ever had a bird flying to the back of your camera while you're doing a Zoom meeting and knock your camera out of the tripod? I can now say that I have had that happen. That was a nice direct hit from a rather big bird. Apparently thought that it was food. Sorry about that.

So, sorry Scott to interrupt in between. I think you might need to Turn your camera, it's coming 90 degrees perpendicular. Sorry.

Oh, yeah, this is better.

You want to take a minute, that's all right.

Well, I could see myself. I can see me.

Yeah, we can see you. It was—

can you see me or no?

Yep, we can see you now. It's all right. That time it was coming 90 degrees, so we had to tilt to see you. It's perfectly fine now. Thank you.

Perfectly fine.

Okay.

All right, apparently the bird did damage. All right, so as I got back to my club One of the first things they said is, "We've never had anybody who's made it this far in a contest. We didn't know that we could do that." They had told themselves the story of, "This is who we are and how far we can go." In that moment, something hit me. None of us joined Toastmasters to be a better Toastmaster. We all joined to do something else. But what else we're trying to do is sometimes limited by the stories that we tell ourselves of who we are. That club, that Articulators Club, from that moment forward became dedicated to the art of evaluations. Not because I just won a trophy, a third-place trophy in the art of evaluations, but because we realized that the most important thing we could do, the greatest gift we could give to anybody, was our investment of time and energy into helping help somebody else get better. We knew that if we help you get better, we get better. From that day forward, everything we did was about evaluations. Over the next few years, I made it back to the finals a couple of more times. In fact, in the first 5 years I was a Toastmaster, I made it to the finals 6 times over 3 different types of contests. The last year that I was in Orlando, My friend Jeremy turned to me and said, "I really want to compete against you in the district finals. How do we do that?" I said, "I think I know a way. I'm going to go join a different club in a different division." So I went to a different club. I went to Division E in District 84 and joined a club there. I ended up becoming club president there, and I competed from Division E. And that last year, 2017, Jeremy and I both won our club contests, we both won our area contests, we both won our division contests, and now here we were sitting side by side at the district finals in St. Augustine, Florida. And as Bob Fisher that night started calling out the winners, he went from third place to second place, and Jeremy and I both put our heads down and kind of looked at each other out the sides of our eyes with this big smile But this is what we had been hoping for all along. We wanted to compete on the biggest stage and see who was the best evaluator. He called out in second place, Jeremy Udell. Jeremy jumped up, almost did a cartwheel, ran to the front and got his second place trophy. And I knew that I had won. And a minute later when he called out my name, I jumped up. I gave everyone high fives on my way to the stage. And I left poor Bob Fisher standing holding a trophy as I ran directly by him to Jeremy in the biggest bear hug we could possibly have, swung each other around on the stage because we knew that that's what we had always been going for. What we didn't realize is trophies like this aren't why we do evaluations. It's aren't why we're here. They're a nice thing to have. They're a nice reminder of what we're trying to do and why we invest in other people, but it's not why we're here. We are not here to help ourselves necessarily get better. Toastmasters come to help other people get better, and in the process of helping someone else to get better, of teaching, of investing, of helping someone else grow, we end up growing ourselves. Over the years, we've talked a lot in our clubs about what is an effective evaluation, why is it so important, and I will tell you this from experience. I have now been in District 84, District 47, back to District 84, and now District 11, and one thing holds true everywhere I've been. The clubs that are heavily invested in providing robust, meaningful evaluations are the clubs that that develop relationships and are the clubs that are the healthiest for their members. They're the clubs that retain people. Think about it for a second. We said at the beginning, before the bird knocked my phone out of the tripod, that none of us joined Toastmasters because we thought we were great. We all joined Toastmasters because we wanted to get better, and the greatest gift is to help somebody else get better. So the evaluation process really is the cornerstone of what Toastmasters is about. It's the cornerstone of what builds confidence, what builds empathy, what builds the engagement in our clubs so folks come back year after year, speech after speech. So what is it that is important in the evaluation? I think we can start with first what an evaluation is not. Evaluations are never about you, the evaluator. They are always about the speech that you are evaluating. They're about the table topic you are evaluating. They're about the presentation you are evaluating. They are an investment in someone else. It is never a chance to make you feel better. Evaluations are never an opportunity as a rebuke to a speech. You've heard someone talk, and for whatever reason, their point of view is different from your point of view. Maybe it's a different political view, maybe it's a different dietary view, maybe it's a different life view. Whatever it is, it's not your opportunity to rebuke whatever their content was. It's an opportunity for you to invest in helping them get their message out more effectively. It's also not a rebuttal. It's not your opportunity— it's not a roast. You don't get to get up there and say, "Well, I didn't like what you said, so now I'm going to talk about you to make myself feel good." So evaluations are never a rebuttal. They are never a rebuke. They are never about you. And most importantly, every time you give an evaluation, the one thing you can never do is make someone feel small. You can never minimize someone's journey. It doesn't matter if somebody stood up in front of you at a lectern, put their head down and cried for 5 to 7 minutes. We should stand up and celebrate their willingness to do that. That might be the best that they can possibly do. And as an evaluator, our opportunity is to help them get back up and do something again. So what is an evaluation? Evaluations follow, as Toastmasters says, kind of a couple different principles, and we'll get into those in a moment. But what an evaluation is, is an investment in the relationship. Now, I've left District 84 multiple times. I'm still friends with people from District 84. I'm still friends with the folks that are in my Articulators Club that I go and visit on Zoom every Thursday morning at 7:30. That relationship that we developed is why we are all still connected. It doesn't matter that I've lived in other parts of the country. What matters is that we're invested in each other. The evaluation is an investment. The second thing that the evaluation is, is an opportunity to give somebody the confidence to get back up and try it again. And the third thing that an evaluation is, is specifically measured by criteria. Now it's easy to say that evaluation is kind of like feedback, but feedback is often unwarranted. Feedback is often the thing that you don't want to hear, that someone just offers you advice because they think that it should be good. For instance, I lived in Los Angeles and I remember getting on an elevator in a parking garage in Los Angeles and a lady standing beside me and looked me down and up and back down again, and then said, "I have a wonderful low-carb diet that I think you should try." Ouch! What she meant to say was, "I think you're too fat, and I'm going to give you unsolicited feedback on how I think I can help my life, put my lifestyle on you." That's not what an evaluation is. It's never that opportunity to give unsolicited feedback. An evaluation is based upon specific criteria. That's why we have evaluation forms that come with every Pathways project. That's why we had wonderful evaluation forms that came with all of our legacy manuals. It asks us to evaluate on specific criteria to help a speaker get better within a specific context. It's never just, "I'm going to offer you unsolicited feedback." So how does one form an effective evaluation? Well, there's really, I think, 4 great steps to forming an evaluation. If you take a piece of paper, fold it in half, on one side draw a plus, on the other side of the fold draw a minus. During the speech, you're going to record all of the things you loved about the speech under the plus, all the things that you wish they would work on under the minus. Across the top of the page, you're going to write their title, and as you go throughout the speech, you're going to write down something memorable that really stuck with you emotionally to open your presentation with, to open your mini speech, your evaluation with, to get their attention, to draw them into what you have to say. As you get up to present, I do not recommend using notes because it's a conversation. You're not going to be re-reading all of the things you filled out on that evaluation form. Because much like we don't want to recap someone's speech because everybody's already heard it, we also don't want to recap what somebody has written on the evaluation form in order to give them a verbal evaluation. They can read the evaluation form themselves. You're going to give that to them. But what you're going to do is have a conversation with them based upon the things that they did extremely well and the things you would like to see them work on. Now those things that did extremely well may be things like vocal variety, tone, pacing, anchoring, facial gestures, recovery from a phone falling off a tripod at the behest of a bird. Whatever it is that you think they did extremely well, you're going to recount that first. Then you can offer them 3 things you would like to see them work on. And again, it's not a rebuttal. You don't want to see them change their point point of view, you want to help them present their speech in a more effective manner. What are the 3 things that you would like to see them work on? I would like to see you work more on pauses. I would like to see you be more effervescent and lively. I would like to see you smile more because we can hear a smile in your voice as well as see it on your face. As you are giving them the advice that you would like to see them work on, and you're giving them the positives, don't just tell them, show them. Anchor it within your own evaluation. So if you're telling them, "I would like to see you work on pauses. You went a little bit too quickly, and pauses would accentuate your points better." In those moments, pause. If you want to see them work on a smile, smile while you're talking to them. If you want to see them anchor, explain to them how you can have one space for now, one space for tomorrow, one space for yesterday, and help them work through that spacing and anchoring. And then at the end, you're going to wrap that up, and you are going to give them something hope to come back and try it again. We've all seen speeches that are hard to evaluate because there wasn't much there, that you knew that person was struggling so hard. The one thing we can always do is offer hope, offer an opportunity to let them try again and maybe fail a little bit less next time, but fail forward in their pursuit of whatever goal they're trying to have. Now Toastmasters wants you to present evaluations in terms of a sandwich method. Something good, kind of the opening of, "You did a great job," which is the bread. The meat of the evaluation are those 3 things they did well, the 3 things you want them to work on. And then a closing to offer them to come back, which is also kind of another piece of bread. They call it the sandwich method, and that works sometimes but not every time. Sometimes it's better to give an evaluation based upon what you heard, what you saw, and what you felt. As somebody who's been around for a little while and has won some contests, I hear all too often, "It's hard to evaluate you. I feel intimidated. I'm brand new. I don't know what to give to you." Anyone who listens to you present can always give you feedback, an evaluation on what you heard, what you saw, what you felt. They can always tell you how that speech moved you against that criteria upon which we started the project. The last way that you can give an evaluation is really to use kind of an HR technique. Things I would like to see you stop, things I want to see you start, and things I'd like to see you continue. Kind of red light, yellow light, green light. Any one of those works. It depends upon your style, what you think is best, and how you can connect best to that audience and particularly to that person. Now, as you're giving an evaluation, remember you might be talking to the speaker, but you're also talking to an entire room. So don't spend so much time focused just on that one speaker. Talk to the entire room. Make eye contact with them through all of your points. To draw them in as well. What you say is always being heard and judged by the folks that are in the audience. They are learning from everything you have to offer. Now, it's been a couple of years since I won an evaluation trophy, and it's okay. I stepped away from competing to go into district leadership because I thought that I could be more effective and have a bigger influence in that way. But it remains my passion. Every club that I visit, I want to help become a better evaluation club. I want every evaluator to be able to invest a little bit more to become a little bit better. I want every person getting evaluated to walk away with that warmth of knowing somebody cared enough to give the best of what they had to them. I hope all of this helps clarify a little bit about what an evaluation isn't what it is and how to deliver it. Maybe you'll win a contest, maybe you won't, but if you win someone's heart, that is the most important thing. Because at the end of the day, when you walk out of those club doors for the very last time, your legacy isn't about what you did, it's about who you helped. Everybody can be the tide that raises all ships. We can also be the tide that sinks Let the evaluation concept of every meeting, of every time you evaluate, help someone get just a little bit better and take a little bit of a step further of where they're trying to go. I thank you all very much, especially for staying with me while we had to reconnect, and I hope this was helpful in terms of how to deliver an evaluation. I'll be glad to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you so much, distinguished Toastmaster Scott Brown. It was indeed one of the fabulous sessions that I have attended so far. I actually made notes of whatever you told in the session because it was so intriguing and interesting, the way you narrated the whole thing. And we have a little token of gratitude for you. So I would request Toastmaster Haritosh Srivastav to present his screen for that token of gratitude for Scott Brown. Over to Haritosh Srivastav.

Thank you, Scott. Thank you so much. This was an amazing session, and the way you gave the bird— I believe she was also waiting for the session.

If anybody has questions, I'm more than happy to answer anything that you have.

Sure, we can take a couple of questions. So anybody have any questions, please unmute and ask the question to Scott.

Yeah, hi Scott, Kit. So if I can speak, right at the end of your piece you talked about the evaluation being for everyone. I completely agree with you that the evaluation shouldn't just be for the speaker, that a lot of the points are valid for everybody. It therefore isn't a conversation between the two of you, and I feel that the mixing of the use of the speaker's name, he and you, works very well because it means that you're addressing the audience but occasionally addressing the speaker himself. But all of the examples you gave, you use the word "you." Correct.

You can actually do it both ways because if you are acting out the parts of the speech that you would like to see them work on and that they did well, you can act that out and say, "In this moment, when you anchored yourself on this side of the speech for this particular reason, that worked extremely well." And you can talk to that throughout the room as well while you're still talking to that one person. It's not just how you— it's not just what you say, but it's how you say it and how you act it out as well. Body language is incredibly important. If you anchor your evaluation to give more meaning to the words behind it, the I and you and he and we can necessarily blend together to become more of just a conversation with the room instead of just a person. You're absolutely right.

A very good phrase that I've heard that seems to work quite well is 'What I thought John did very well is that you—' Correct.

That's great feedback. That's absolutely a wonderful way to be able to open and to phrase a jump into an evaluation. You're absolutely right.

All right, we can take one more question. One more question, sorry. Okay, okay.

Thank you so much, Scott.

Over to Toastmaster Taiwak.

Thank you, thank you for having me.

Thank you so much. Haritosh, when you get a chance, share the, share the recording also so we can post it on D11 as well. I will do that. Yep. All right, my friend, be well.