For years I have promoted Toastmasters as a key “goal setting tool.” In fact, we strongly encourage all of our Champions Club members to join Toastmasters. As James Allen says, people “do not attract that which they want, but that which they are.” As you become more, you attract more.

Amit Chaudhary had a great post on his blog about Toastmasters and his experience and I have included most of it here:

Toastmasters International is an organization of clubs around the world which help members in public speaking. The clubs tend to be small in size to ensure everyone gets a chance to speak.

Late Jan 2008, I went ahead and attended the Yahoo ToastMasters club in Sunnyvale, called Yapsters as guest. It was definitely worthwhile and I became a member and have delivered my first speech.

It is obviously about public speaking, however it is useful in many ways:

As Amit mentions, Toastmasters can help you even if you don’t have any intentions of using in for public speaking. It will give you tremendous confidence and most importantly — you will be surrounded by like-minded people — and that’s a huge key to success.

If you would like to find a club near you go here….

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The first letter of the acronym for SMART Goals, the letter “S”, stands for specific. And it’s long been taught by the sages that a goal has to be specific to be effective. Now there’s some scientific evidence to back that up.

Here’s part of a story from Psychology Today: “When it comes to working out, you might think trying your best would be the way to make the most of your exercise time. But you’d be wrong. For a study at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University that pitted several motivational techniques against each other, researchers had 56 female undergraduates attempt to do as many sit-ups as possible in 90 seconds. Those who were given the vague directive “do your best” averaged about 43 sit-ups on each day of the four-day study. On the other hand, women assigned specific long-or short-term targets–”do 10 percent more than you did last time”–managed 56 sit-ups by the last day’s session.”

And it doesn’t just apply to sit-ups. Being as specific as you can possibly be “turns on” an internal system much like the homing device in a guided missile — it makes it far easier to hit your goal when your system is “on.”

To read more from the Psychology Today story go here….

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