Playing Games is Good for You

As I'm prepping for my speech today I decided to go through the Toastmasters directory on my laptop.  There was a particular file I'm looking for and I came across a multitude of interesting-sounding documents in that directory.

Most of the files were word documents from previous speeches or other roles.  It is hard to resist taking a moment to re-read a document called "Pirate Questions", which were the Table Topics I gave during the Pirate-themed meeting that was on Talk Like a Pirate Day.

If I was unable to resist "Pirate Questions" you know that there was no way I could ignore the document simply titled "Beer".  I was Toastmaster for that meeting and chose beer as the theme after watching a fascinating documentary on the subject.

Special Occasion Speeches, Project #4

Last week I was asked to assist my mentor with her speech.  Usually the help goes the other way around, so this piqued my interest.  She wanted to do Project #5 from the Special Occasion Speeches Manual, which is Accepting an Award.

She wanted me to give project #4 from that manual, which is Presenting an Award.  I was more than happy to help....I just needed to know what the award was.  She told me yesterday, which gave me a day to write and prepare the speech.

At the meeting I asked the Toastmaster to have the evaluators for both our speeches give the objectives together so we could run straight from my speech to hers.  He agreed and I communicated the change to the timekeeper so she could keep accurate times.  I think she was a bit off with mine because she clocked me in at 2'47", but my time clock showed yellow, which for a three to four minutes speech should mean 3'30" to 4'0".  From what little practice I had I'm guessing the clock was right and the recording of my time was a bit off.  It's not a big issue since I still qualified either way.

This was my speech (with the recipient's name altered):

"Fellow Toastmasters and honored guests, thank you for joining me today in awarding Jane Doe the Leadership Excellence award.


Toastmasters International is well-known as the place where better speakers are made.  Our organization’s recent rebranding has placed emphasis on the connection between speaking and leadership.  Now Toastmasters International is being known as the place “where leaders are made”.
Although mastery of public speaking skills is part of the path to leadership, it takes a lot more work to be able to walk down that path.  Toastmasters have many opportunities to practice non-speaking leadership skills.  In order to progress along the leadership track towards Advanced Leader Silver, members must take leadership roles within their club and complete a three-part practical workshop that is known as the High Performance Leadership program. 


Tonight we recognize Jane Doe with the Leadership Excellence Award for completing her High Performance Leadership program and her efforts to help make a couple hundred Toastmaster leaders.  Jane led the team responsible for the winter 2009 Division A & B Toastmaster Leadership Institute.  For those of you unfamiliar with Toastmaster Leadership Institute, it is the training event for club officers.  This training is so vital to the Toastmaster program that the training is tracked as part of the Distinguished Club Program.  


Jane Doe efforts directly contributed to the success of approximately 30 clubs from 3 different states.  As you might imagine, coordinating such a large event takes months of work.  Venues and trainers have to be located, materials and supplies have to procured, and there is always the inevitable snafu to be overcome.  Throughout the planning and execution of the 2009 winter Toastmaster Leadership Institute I’m told Jane was the proverbial duck on the water.  On the surface, everything was calm and serene, but underneath she was paddling like crazy to make sure the Toastmaster Leadership Institute was enjoyable, entertaining, and enlightening for everyone involved.


Please join me in honoring Jane Doe with the Leadership Excellence award."

Competent Communicator Speech #10

Tonight was my tenth and final speech from the Toastmaster's Competent Communicator manual!  This means that I've earned both my Competent Leader (CL) and my Competent Communicator (CC). I've also completed all of the requirements towards my Advanced Leader Bronze (ALB) except serving as a club officer for six months. That requirement will be fulfilled come January 1st, 2012, which also means I've earned a Triple Crown Award for completing three educational awards within six months.

I'm fortunate that my club, Boise Club 61, has been very supportive in my quest to earn my CC and CL.  More than likely they've actually pushed me a bit harder than I would have otherwise towards those goals.  My club is very active within the District and that's just how we roll.  We have quite a few District Officers in our club and we tend to pitch in wherever and whenever we can.  Boise Club 61 is already a Select Distinguished Club and 89% of the way towards President's Distinguished Club, which at the latest will be completed the second week in January.  I should mention we were voted District 15's Club of the Year out of 80+ clubs.

It's not hard to be motivated to excel in getting your projects done in a timely manner.  My goal was to get my CL and CC in one year, and my anniversary came and went several weeks ago.  I voluntarily pushed some speeches back to let another member bear down and give his last three speeches in a row to finish his CC.  I also added two education speeches I hadn't planned on giving into the mix, so all in all I'm not disappointed in "failing" to make my self-imposed goal.

It is tradition in our club that the first and last speech in the CC Manual be given as the 1st and 10th speech from the manual and that the speaker's mentor be their evaulator on both. Speeches 2 through 9 can be given in any order.  Most speeches run five to seven minutes while the last speech runs eight to ten minutes.  The tenth speech is also supposed to be inspirational.

I chose to speak about the Be the Match Program and very lightly on my experiences donating bone marrow.  Since I've posted far more about that experience than I would come close to touching upon in my speech, I'm not posting it here.  I had some issues getting to write this speech and was only able to start this afternoon.  Getting up to speak I was a bit weaker than I expected to be and spent too much time making sure I was using the table for support.  Being as I can walk around and pretty much stand without difficulty I think the added stress of presenting for a prolonged length of time was more of a chore than expected.

As usual, the speech I gave wasn't exactly the one I had written.  I did manage to speak more slowly than I usually do, which is good, but it through off my internal timing.  The timekeeper had a problem with my clock and the timing light went green when I was halfway through the speech!  This flustered me a bit and I mangled almost a page of content from the written speech.  The light blew through yellow and then red and I wasn't near enough to done, so at that point I decided I didn't care and I just kept going.  In my opinion I finished on a strong note and when my time was called, I was within my parameters even though the timer had to have been red for a minute or two as I was speaking.  Evidently my internal clock wasn't as far off as I had thought.

It felt good to finish that minor milestone.

Games Are Good For You

I gave another speech at Boise Club 61.  Actually I made two speeches in two weeks, but one was an "Educational Speech".  Educational speeches are basically "canned" speeches that come from Toastmasters International that you have to give reasonably close to verbatim.  I took the material, made some minor changes and gave it as a PowerPoint presentation

The last speech was a bit different for me.  Lately I've been trying to write the speech the morning of the presentation and practiced working more short-notice.  This time I knew what I wanted to say for the most part and I almost didn't write a speech.  My gameplan was to simply write an outline and attempt to get the parts timed right.  Since I was familiar with the material I thought this would be a lot more like a series of Table Topics.  This didn't work too well in practice.  I found I was spending my time mentally writing the speech, spending too much time on the introduction, and didn't have any real bullet points.

In the end....and it felt like the end because it was almost 2 PM, four hours before the meeting started, I finally just "broke down"and started writing my speech.  I had most of it in my head so it wasn't hard to put it on paper.  Once I wrote the speech I read it, did some minor edits, and then created my small bullet list from that.  I had a quote I was planning on using so my bullets were just written down in pencil on the back side of the note card with the quote.

The speech went OK.  I ended up going three seconds too long and was disqualified for award of the Best Speech.  It might be more proper to say I was ineligible to be considered.  Wasn't like I was awarded Best Speech and then had it stripped away in some scandal.  Before I started my speech I explained to the audience that my back was hurting and I was going to remain behind the lectern for support.  One section that was written as two sentences turned into the verbal equivalent of an extended paragraph.  I was very happy with my evaluation though, because my evaulator managed to highlight what I noticed as shortcomings.

Games Are Good For You

        When I was growing up, games were for children or maybe a family event.  Playing games usually meant pulling out a deck of cards.  My parents, like many others, didn’t think gaming was important and they really didn’t know anything about Role Playing Games, or RPGs.

        For the purposes of this speech I am going to assume that you are all much like my parents.  Maybe you have a child who wants to play this odd game you don’t know much about, or maybe you are just naturally curious.  I’m going to try and explain what a role-playing game is and why gaming is an enriching experience.  While I am going to focus on Role Playing games, many of the positive aspects to other types of games as well.

        Regarding my role-playing qualifications, I’ve been playing assorted RPGs off-and-on with the D&D Blue Box set in 1977.  I was the 1996 German AD&D National Grand Champion and ended up placing in the top 10 at the European GenCon.  I run/play HackMaster now and I run the HackMaster Association on behalf of Kenzer & Company, the producers of the HackMaster game.

        On occasion I get asked, “What is a Role-Playing Game?”  The Oxford Dictionary gives a great short answer, “a game in which players take on the roles of imaginary characters, usually in a setting created by a referee, and thereby vicariously experience the imagined adventures of these characters.”  My usual response is bit more complex, but I think it helps get the point across.

        How many of you have seen Lord of the Rings?  I liken playing in a fantasy role playing game like participating in the movie, but there is no script.  Instead you have a Game Master, kind of like a narrator, a scenario, and character sheets.  The Game Master, or GM, presents you the scenario, in this case you have to destroy the One True Ring.  Everyone has rule books that help explain how the mechanics of the game works, dice to help determine success or failure, and character sheets that tell you what your strengths, abilities, and weaknesses are.

        Right from the onset participating in a role-playing game is an enriching experience.  RPGs are educational and social events that spark creativity and reinforce critical thinking skills.  Role playing games generally require a higher level of reading and writing ability than other recreational activities.  Basic math skills are practiced while playing.  RPGs use many sided dice as a game mechanic, teaching probability and fractions.  It doesn’t take many players long to realize that they have a 5% chance of rolling a natural 20 on an icosahedron.  The first dice used in Dungeons & Dragons actually came from an education supply house where they were used for teaching shapes, probability, and colors (they were color coded).

        Participating in any game, especially a role-playing game, is a social event.  It is a way for friends to get together and have a good time.  Most role-playing games are rather open ended and don’t necessarily end when some victory condition is met, like in card or board games.  Using the Lord of the Rings example, the Fellowship of the Ring, didn’t just quit when the ring was destroyed.  There were still things for them to do.  The long term social aspect of the game generally reinforces teamwork and cooperation among players.  The game is a group effort even though there could be some friction.  This happened in Lord of the Rings when Boromir felt the Ring should be destroyed.

        More than anything, playing in a role-playing game fosters creativity and surprisingly enough encourages critical thinking.  Even though some games use props and there is a lot of written material, at its core, most role-playing games are played within one’s imagination.  The players interact with each other and the game-master’s setting on a virtual playfield.  The players play their unscripted part under the guidance of the game master.  While a game is unscripted, it isn’t unorganized, at that is where the critical thinking comes in.  A good game master tries to guide players along a general path, giving them options and choices.  The players have to analyze those options and determine their own course of action in order to meet their goals.

        Outside of a particularly rewarding work environment, few things have the potential for the level of enrichment provided by a good role-playing game.  Role playing games are educational because they encourage better reading, writing, and math skills.  Role playing games are fundamentally creative social events that also reinforce critical thinking skills.  Next time you are contemplating a recreational activity think about the difference between watching The Lord of the Rings, or getting together with nine of your friends and playing the Lord of the Rings.

Every Drop Counts

Below is the last speech I gave to Toastmasters Boise Club 61.  I had to refer to my notes three times during the speech even though I thought I had it down  after a couple hours of practice.  I noticed that I usually run afoul when referencing numbers.  Since I make a deliberate effort normally not to memorize numbers, trying to do so for a speech is problematic.

The responses from club members was rather unexpected.  I had badly flubbed my speech such that a good chunk of information got muddled and some of the important part, from a organizational/thematic standpoint go removed from the speech and barely added in as part of a rather sloppy conclusion.  Of course I tend to gloss over the part where my audience doesn't know my speech so they don't know how badly I mangled it.  My evaulator caught a piece of it and mentioned that part of my speech should have come before the conclusion, but he really liked how the beginning went.  I need to remember to put some of the figures onto a note card I can fit in my hand if I need to reference numbers in a "memorized" speech.

Every Drop Counts!

Did you know that human blood is a vital medical resource that cannot be manufactured or harvested?  In the next few minutes I will tell you why blood is so valuable and why “every drop counts”.  I’ll try to put the need for blood donation into perspective and tell you what you can do to ensure that you and your community are protected.

Questions: In the last year, how many of you have donated blood?  How many have donated twice or more?*

Using some 2001-2002 statistical data, and updating for current usage trends, within the next year, four members of Boise Club 61 will require hospitalization and one of our group will require three pints of blood.  On the surface it seems we have more than enough donations within our group to cover our needs, until you factor in that whole blood has a very short shelf life of 3 to 5 days.  Assuming it was possible for Club 61 to meet all of our own blood needs, every member would have to donate a pint of blood at the maximum rate allowed just to break even.  For our group, “every drop counts”.

We are fortunate in that we don’t have to provide our own blood supply within the Club, but we do have to supply blood within the community at large.  As we expand our group beyond the Club to incorporate our families, our friends, our neighbors, the margin between having enough blood and falling short widens, but still “every drop counts”.

Blood is perishable.  Whole blood is usually broken down into three components: platelets, red blood cells, and plasma.  These components of a single pint of blood, referred to as a unit (which weighs about one pound) have shelf-lives that range from 3-5 days for platelets to a year for plasma, which can be easily frozen.  Red Blood cells can also be frozen, but it is difficult and expensive, which means most Red Blood Cells are refrigerated for a maximum of 42 days.  Separating blood into blood products, along with new technologies for reducing the need for blood helps extend the current supply, but the need for blood is currently increasing at a rate of 6% per year.  Today the need for “red gold” is such that “every drop counts”.

In the time it has taken me to tell you how valuable blood is, 120 Americans have needed blood with 10 of them needing not just blood products, but transfusions of whole blood, the kind that only lasts a few days.  Blood is needed everyday to meet the need, but our society often only thinks of blood donation during times of major catastrophes.  The largest users of blood are during surgeries, cancer treatment, and treatment for blood disorders.

The US network of blood banks tries to maintain a three day supply of blood.  Three days is a pretty small window that doesn’t have a lot of room for error.  In the last year American donated 15 Million units of blood against a need of 14 Million units.  This sounds good because that means we had an extra million pints of blood, hardly a situation where “every drop counts”.  The truth of the matter is that the less than 7% margin has to be spread out over the course of the year for the entire country, which means that there are shortages some days or places and overages in others.  The blood banks are situated near large commercial airports, but would you want your doctor to “come up short” until they could ferry some blood from LA or Seattle?

What can we do as Americans to help ourselves and our community?  Simple: donate blood on a regular basis, every two months.  The American Red Cross collects nearly half of the blood donated in the US.  They make it as easy as possible, requiring only about an hour of your time.  The actual collection process only takes 10 minutes.  You can also get on the National Blood Donor Registry and be notified when your region is experiencing particular shortages.  When “every drop counts”, even something as simple as knowing your blood type can prove to be useful, helping to use the blood supply in the most efficient way possible.

Like anything else in life, our individual and community health needs have to be balanced.  Despite the best efforts of modern western medicine, human blood is the one essential resource that only we as individuals can provide for the community.  Without regular blood donations Americans are at risk because the margin between having enough blood and falling short is very small.  Our blood supply is a perishable, but renewable resource that is in such high demand that “every drop counts”.  Please consider donating tomorrow.

*I had fully expected to get at least on member of Club 61 to have donated blood in the last year.  I had to make an on-the-fly adjustment to my speech because nobody had donated blood in some time.