New way in Toastmasters - Pathways!
“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading”
~ Siddhārtha Gautama
At the beginning of this year, the new Toastmasters International (TMI) educational program, called Pathways, came to Romania. If you've read on my blog articles about the subject you already know that the old program has two distinct ways: a Leadership and another Communication. Depending on your interest, you could move forward with one or the other, or with both in parallel. There were distinctions after a certain number of projects, and when you completed all the projects on both paths, you became Distinguished Toastmasters, along with just 5% of the TMI-loving people in the world.
The new program, which is the subject of this article, provides you with 15 educational paths from which you get to choose. The paths are designed with specific projects that help you develop certain skills that are considered key to both TMI and many employers. The 5 key skills are Oratory, Interpersonal Communication, Strategic Leadership, Management and Confidence.
All the ways are designed to develop your Oratory and Confidence, and secondly, two other abilities. To be more specific: I chose Motivational Strategies, which means I will further develop Interpersonal Communication and Strategic Leadership. If I want to work in the Management area then at the next level I will have to choose a path that develops this skill.
Each path has a series of projects, and one of the ones I have in Dynamic Leadership urges me to write a compelling blog. Having one already ;) I said that this is an opportunity for me that will make write more often articles on different topics related to personal development.
I admit that for me it is a new perspective because every article I write about Toastmasters will have more than one evaluator — which means that besides readers of my blog, I will receive written feedback - mostly focused on the construction area with what I could do better. The second interesting thing for me is that I'm testing a Learning Management System (LMS) from a user's slippers and not as a designer of e-learnings / trainer as I do at work.
TMI uses CornerStone as part of the educational program, with the help of videos, documents and quizzes to ensure that you go through each project in order to complete the chosen path. It is not the most intuitive site to use, but after giving it a little time, you begin to find out what are the levers you can use to reach your goal. Practically, analytical and critical thinking intensely developed in the old educational program are now being learned when navigating and passing through the site provided by the TMI.
Following this article, I've decided to write about Active Listening and how writing and blogging help me in my work as a trainer. Do you have some topic of interest that you want me to develop?
