Toastmaster

This certificate makes me recall the one year time during 1995 when I was a member of Glenfield Toastmaster, one of the many clubs under the Toastmaster International. It is a non-profit educational organization aiming at improving the communication, public speaking and leadership skills of its members. It is commonly known as speech club. When one is fear of speaking publicly or talking to a small group of people formally, he is most likely to be referred to the speech club.

To the majority of people, public speech might be one of their most scared challenges, and I am not the exception. It is even worse to me, because not only that I am scared of public speech, I am supposed to be speaking in English, my second language. Being a new immigrant in the English speaking New Zealand in 1992, I realized that if I want to make life easier in this new land, I have to overcome the speech phobia, especially the English one.

One day in 1995 when I and my wife shopped at the Milford Bin-Inn, this kind couple who ran the shop, Ron and Margaret, chatted with me about issues an immigrant might have. Ron and Margaret were immigrants, too. They were from England a few years earlier than me. Ron soon spotted my concern about how to improve communication and public speaking with my not-so-good English. He introduced me to Margaret, and asked her how they could help me in this regard.

Margaret was a speech club enthusiast. She told me she would suggest me to visit the Glenfield Toastmaster meeting on the coming Wednesday evening. They met twice a month. As a club visitor, I would not be assigned with a role to practice. I was only supposed to watch how the meeting going, how each assigned role fulfil their task. She would meet me there if I would like to have a try. I was eager to upgrade my ability of spoken language. So I said yes to her with slight reluctance.

On the appointed time, I appeared at the entrance of the community centre where Toastmasters met. I could hear people chatting in one of the rooms. That must be the meeting room. I walked nervously toward that direction. Soon I saw a brightly illuminated room with a reception table by the door. There were already some members being busy with preparation for the meeting. Standing behind the table was Margaret. I relieved a little bit upon seeing her. She told me her assigned role that night was the receptionist. After having signed on the attendance sheet and got the program leaflet, I was seated at the back row so that I could watch how the whole meeting underwent.

I could not recall the details of the meeting. Generally I felt everything there was performed formally. The receptionist, the meeting conductor, the topic presenter, the time keeper, the tea server and the volunteer who tidied up the kitchen, all these roles worked closely in accordance with the agenda of that night. The meeting went energetically and smoothly. Some members were already very eloquent speakers. Humorous words flowed on and on like the everlasting clean mountain spring. Most of the speakers experienced freezing somewhere, and their face turned red, but immediately, they were supported by lot of hints from the members in the audience, thus the speech carried on and the embarrassment disappeared. The atmosphere was very friendly.

During the tea break, some members approached me about my feeling of the program. I held a glass of juice in one hand and a cookie in the other, and told them what I felt, and they seemed to understand what I had said. Instantly I felt I was part of the new country, I was ok to become a member. That night, I felt I was like a Member of Parliament attending a conference.

I enrolled as a member after two more visits to the meeting. Before long, I received a bulky manual and my name badge sent from the headquarter in US. Wow! How cool it is! But the challenge had just begun after receipt of the manual; I was supposed to present my first speech of 5 minutes long on introducing myself sometime in the first month following receipt of the manual.

I spent a lot of time after work to prepare and rehearse the speech. The day approached rather swift, ready or not, I had to stand behind a lectern to present my speech on the scheduled date. Now, recollecting these bits and pieces of memory, I am surprised to see what kind of huge stress I had once been able to bear when I was younger. Obviously, power of resisting stress reduces as we age.

The title of my ‘Ice breaking’ speech, meaning a new Toastmaster’s first speech, was no longer in my memory, but it focused on describing my personal traits. My heart thumping wildly and my body as hot as a fire ball when the meeting conductor announced my presentation and invited me to the lectern. I inhaled deep breath, put my speech notes on the lectern, and scanned the audience with big smile as that was suggested in the manual. Oh! Dear me! Those staring eyes from audience frightened me, yet I made myself calm to start my speech.

“Madam Chair, fellow Toastmasters…” I began with a formal greeting followed by strings and strings of words that seemed just going through without any flavour. Then when it came to a stage where I stated about how I was nicknamed as ‘saint’, I said to the audience: “because one of my first names is ‘sen’ which sounds so similar to ‘saint’, and also because of the fact that I behave like a monk, so one day during a period break at school, one of my classmates suddenly called me ‘saint’, and this has become my nickname since then.” I continued “but fellow Toastmasters, please don’t regard me as a saint because I am not deserved to this title ….” Waaahahahaha! There was a long and thunderous laughter erupted among the audience. Time was almost up, so I made a conclusion and bowed down, finding a great relief inside me.

During the tea break that night, many fellow members approached me to congratulate and give comments. “Morris you did very well. I love the bit when you said ‘please don’t regard me as a saint’…” One gentleman who worked for Fisher & Pakel commented so. The meeting conductor of that night even commented at the end of the meeting saying “Morris is the star of tonight”. Not just these compliments, the club awarded me a plaque to mark my success in the first speech. Wow! What a great encouragement they had given me.

I had played the roles as a receptionist, topic presenter, tea server and time keeper during the one year time. Then, I found my commitment to my work, family, voluntary job was increasing so I talked to Margaret about my situation and quit this lovely program.

I am grateful to all the fellow members because of their friendly support. I am also grateful to Margaret and Ron. Without their mentorship, I will never be able to go through the one year time and have learned so much.

Volunteer

This picture shows all the Chinese volunteers of Auckland Lifeline gathered together in their annual meeting in September 2001.

Auckland Lifeline commenced its service in 1965 providing telephone and face-to-face counselling to the public. When people are overwhelmed by any sort of difficulty and feel it hard to talk with anyone they know, then, talking to a trained and experienced counsellor through a telephone may be a good choice. The Chinese community in New Zealand began to increase rapidly in late 80’s. So in 1992, Auckland Lifeline set up Chinese Line to cater the needs of Chinese speaking immigrants.

I brought my whole family to New Zealand in 1992. Soon after I had settled the major issues such as driving licence, schooling for my children, getting familiar with local customaries, I found that there were anxiety and worries within me. In where I was from, these would not be much of concern, because you have close friends there to help and everything is just too familiar to you. But living in a new country is another story. Everything you encounter is new. You are supposed to deal with all the new things with your inefficient English. At times, I felt these challenges were too much for me. But immigration is a one way route. You have to just move forward.

One day, a fellow Taiwanese immigrant living on the same road, whose name was William Chen, asked me if I would be interested in working as a volunteer for Chinese Line. He was already a volunteer of that team, but they needed a lot more to fill up the roster. Thinking that we are in the same boat and we should help one another, I decided to enrol on the training program and become a telephone counsellor.

The training started in July 1994 in a sunny winter day. Four new volunteers of us were accompanied by two senior volunteers working with the trainer, an old English lady called Joyce. The training would be running in three consecutive weekends. That was the first time in my life I was taught the skill of how to listen carefully, how to establish rapport, how to correctly reflect the caller’s feeling, and how to help the caller to sort their problems out.

On the second day of the training, we underwent practice of self awareness. Each one of us including the trainer was supposed to draw pictures or symbols representing our own story in each stage of life either up or down on paper. We called this picture our life map. After everyone had finished the drawing, we took turn to present our story of happiness or sadness to the whole group. This activity is designed to help bringing us to face the unhappy or traumatised past under a caring and supportive environment.

When it was the youngest trainee’s turn to present her life map, she stuck at a point where her unhappy past must be too awful to her that she burst into cry uncontrollably. So she was allowed to do her presentation again in the next session. But the same problem occurred to her in the second attempt, and the trainer could not but explained to her that she should seek for professional assistance before she could help others. So she was dismissed on that day. That was the first time I saw a person collapsed mentally, and I wondered how many were out there in need of caring support.

The training was completed in the third weekend. We were made familiar with the telephone room and other facilities in the building before we left. Then, after having attended another three meetings we were officially placed by the telephone to take calls.

Time flies. I could not count how many nights after a day’s work I drove to fulfil my roster. Sometimes I was on duty by my own for the three hour duty, but most of the times I had a colleague, who took calls of Cantonese speakers, working together, so we could chat when there was no call.

Although it was quite a big load to me as a father, husband, son, and worker and in addition, a lifeline volunteer, I felt meaningful and so I had worked for this organization for ten years till October 2005 when my driving ability was reduced due to my illness.

I am no longer able to travel to Lifeline by car to refresh the friendship with those co-workers. But I am still able to get in touch with a few of them by e-mails. People needs friends and socializing, and that’s why provision of free telephone counselling is a significant offering to the society.