By Kwon Mee-yoo
Staff reporter
Communication and leadership skills are becoming more and more important and there are people who voluntarily gather to hone these at the Toastmasters Club.
Some 220 Toastmasters across the nation joined the national conference and speech contest at the Dragon Hill Lodge in Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, Saturday.
Toastmasters International is an educational organization to develop communication and leadership skills. Each club has meetings once a week and members follow a manual to address table-topics and make prepared speeches, and see them evaluated.
Twelve contestants vied for the best speaker among Toastmasters in Korea. Themes varied from use of books to the speaker's experience.
Bae Keun-ho, 27, winner of the competition, prepared his speech for about two months. He gave a speech on the "worst" moment of his life and how he overcame it. "I focused on how to inspire other people from my experience, the worst one," he said.
Bae is a doctoral student and has been a member of Toastmasters for more than three years. He was first interested in improving his English, but soon he got more into communication, leadership and fun.
"I really enjoy Toastmasters' meetings. I learn speech and evaluation techniques, but also I meet many people from different backgrounds and socialize with them," Bae said.
The Korean Toastmasters aim to expand themselves this year to share their experience and improvement, and have formed a national committee. "We need 20 clubs to establish a territorial charter, but we only have 16 now," Kim Sung-il, a Korean Toastmaster, said.
Keith Ostergard, international director of Toastmasters International, who played a key role in expanding the clubs in China, made a visit to Korea to attend the national conference.
Ostergard proposed making networks of corporate clubs in Korea. Among 16 clubs in Korea, only one is a corporate club ― run by Microsoft Korea. Other clubs are regionally based.
"Toastmasters is a low-cost program affordable for everyone, and effective in boosting self-esteem," he said. The companies can provide venues for its employees' Toastmasters' meetings and expect much improvement in their communication skills and leadership.
As the person who witnessed the growth of the Toastmasters Club in China, from 19 clubs in 2005 to more than 80 now, Ostergard was affirmative on its development in Korea, too. "I see the potential of 200 to 400 clubs in Korea in the next 10 years," he said.