Words by Anton Frian Yohanes Reynaldo – Institut Teknologi Sepuluh November

“Hi guys, our nice juror Anthony is inviting you to present your TedTalks at Toastmasters club next week. Please see his email below for the details. I am sure it’s a great opportunity for you to spread your wings out!”

Surprised yet excited. That’s what I felt when I read email from Tidar, our facilitator in XL Future Leaders Surabaya Class Batch 3. I have never imagined before that me and 3 friends from Surabaya Class were invited to be guest speakers and represent XLFL in a well-known community like Toastmasters. FYI, Toastmasters is a non-profit educational organization that teaches public speaking and leadership skills through a worldwide network of clubs. So, if I get surprised and excited at the same time is absolutely normal, isn’t it?

I believe this will be a great milestone for me where I could apply what we have learnt in the first year of XL Future Leaders. With no doubt, I said YES to the challenge. This was my first experience to deliver a speech publicly, and of course I was challenged to give my best performance. Yudha and I even practiced the speech in our laboratory and asked the members to review our performance. At the same time, Gandhi and Erlia, also practiced together at Taman Alumni ITS. We realized back then on previous workshop, there were still many mistakes that we did. We fully understand the importance of preparation and we want to make everything nearly perfect.

Finally the big night has come. The four of us make agreed to meet at the campus and go together by using taxi (we prefer use taxi to our lovely bicycle for this special night). One hour before the meeting started, we have arrived in Garden Palace Hotel. We directly head to the meeting room and no one was there. We use that opportunity to explore the room and enjoy the atmosphere. It really boosted our confidence up. Several minutes before the meeting started, people were coming and our friends from Surabaya class also came to support us. Let’s start!

Toastmasters’ meeting is really structured with time line for every part of meeting. It showed how important the professionalism in every meeting. Basically there are three main activities. The first session was thematic talk with word “destination” as the topic. Wow, this thematic talk is similar with “temperature check” which is usually we do with Tidar in every workshop. We decide randomly or personally volunteer one person to speak up and he/she had to perform a 2-minute speech based on the chosen topic. The second activity was the core of meeting, performance session. In this session we got privilege as a guest speaker to present our TedTalks. Gandhi presented really calm with “Fight or Flight”, Yudha passionately talked about “Diaspora Impact”, I succeed to convince the men on “Men’s Role in Breastfeeding”, and Erlia performed beautifully with “Full Tilt or Leave It”.

At the end, we received feedback from David Pranata, senior toastmaster who is also a professional public speaking trainer. Mr David actually is the teacher of Anthony, so it’s really an honor to get insight from the expert. He gave us public speaking tips, how to make jokes, body gesture, and many more. Yeah, we have learnt a lot from this experience. But we believe there are so many things that we have to improve and to learn more, because human is designed to always develop. In the next year we will join the second year workshop of XL Future Leaders, it means we have to get ready and fasten the seat belt. And the most important thing is, keep it fun and enjoy the process.

Happy digging, pals!