I’ve just started reading The Back of the Napkin which is apparently about Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, I’m interested in how this can improve my effectiveness so before I get too far with the book I thought it might be worth documenting what I have so far. Basically a personal short hand for taking notes. Not exactly a visual vocabulary for sure but it will be interesting to contrast this with where I end up after reading the book.

Like most people, this has evolved over time for taking notes in meetings, training, when reading, etc. I first noted this down when I covered it in some training I did on effective meetings a long time ago. The image below shows the key aspects of my key for note taking, mostly applicable to meetings. The key objective, of course, is to make sure I end up with a record of who, will do what, by when and also note informational items. All done in such a way that it’s easily extracted later (consistency being key here).

The key then looks like this…

An example of this in use might look like this…

This is my brief review of The 4-Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss, posted to the PMBA Forums.

4-Hour Work Week Cover

I chose to read The 4-Hour Work Week at this point for some specific reasons, beyond the mere fact that it is a PMBA text. I’d just quit my job, moved to a new country and was looking to start a fresh, not with my own business at this stage but with a new ‘corporate’ job. I was not disappointed by the choice to read this book, now.

The greatest value from the book for me was further proof behind the idea that there is another way, beyond the regular approach to corporate life, and that it’s achievable. I found that in this respect the book was inspiring and instructional.

There are some real gems in the book regarding personal productivity, Timothy Ferris has taken this to quite some extremes but there is a lot of food for thought in the book regarding virtual personal assistance, outsourcing, managing inputs, prioritisation of your life goals and more.

The book is organised such that if you want to follow the Timothy’s path fairly closely then it’s a step-by-step how-to, this was done with out detracting from it’s readability by someone taking another route.

I found that the specific ideas around what your business might do or how to go about achieving it (roughly the middle part of the book) not always relevant to my situation or likely projects. It steered dangerously close to ‘get rich quick schemes’ at times which left me a little cold. For me the passing references to ‘information products’ were closer to my likely projects and would have made for more pertinent examples that were, shall we say, for business ventures with more noble aims.

Again, the greatest value of the book was that he promotes an approach to life, and your happiness in it, which resonated with me in quite a profound way. Beyond that there was a lot of practical advice for managing your life and your business in such a way as to maximise your time, hopefully for more fun and happiness.

An enjoyable and useful read. The book is backed up by a great web site with extra material, surely a must nowadays.

So my Toastmasters Competent Communicator Certificate found its way to me here in Prague a couple of weeks ago.

My Toastmasters journey has been an interesting one. I’ve also got a lot more out of the experience than I originally expected.

First, quickly, for the uninitiated what is Toastmasters? Wikipedia describes Toastmasters…

Toastmasters International (TI) is a nonprofit educational organization that operates clubs worldwide for the purpose of helping members improve their communication, public speaking and leadership skills. Through its thousands of member clubs, Toastmasters International offers a program of communication and leadership projects designed to help men and women learn the arts of speaking, listening, and thinking.

The Toastmasters club mission statement reads…

The mission of a Toastmasters club is to provide a mutually supportive and positive learning environment in which every individual member has the opportunity to develop oral communication and leadership skills, which in turn foster self-confidence and personal growth.

I became aware of Toastmasters gradually as I heard recommendations in various places suggesting it was a good thing to do to improve your public speaking skills. I felt that my public speaking skills needed improving, so the idea stuck. A the time there were no Toastmasters clubs in Hangzhou. A colleague at work arrived at similar conclusion and it was an email from her that started the ball rolling.

A group of us visited a Shanghai club to learn the ropes and began setting up a corporate club at work. Toastmasters supports corporate clubs within work places and the more common, community clubs.

What then, is the value of Toastmasters?

At it’s core, Toastmasters is an education programme that develops public speaking skills. The initial qualification that members work towards is uninspiringly titled Competent Communicator. To attain this qualification a member must successfully make ten speeches to the club. The competent communicator manual provides guidelines for each speech giving the member specific skills to work on for each project that gradually build confidence and effectiveness at speaking.

The skills start with basic speaking confidence and build gradually project by project through skills like, speech organisation, vocal variety, using visual aids, etc. Each speech is evaluated by another member verbally during the meeting then in a written form within the manual afterwards. This process of learning through doing and constructive evaluations is the real core value.

I have to be honest, despite my enthusiasm for the idea I was a little sceptical at first. Like any organisation Toastmasters has it’s own language and tends to feel a little bit hokey if not cultish. It was also all a little bit self-consciously ’self help’ for me. I began working through the Competent Communicator manual seeing it more as a means-to-an-ends. The value of ’stage time’ and evaluation was obvious to me but the real logic behind the manual and the process didn’t become apparent until part way through.

Toastmasters meetings are structured such that there are also opportunities for improving imprompu speaking skills which is definitely an area of further work for me. It’s worth noting also that learning to provide other members with effective evaluations of their speeches is at times harder than giving speeches itself and is certainly a great learning experience both for effective evaluation and improving your own speaking skills.

Toastmasters also has a leadership education track which promotes leadership skills through taking roles in meetings and the running the club. I learned a lot through the process of creating and running our corporate club, as I have done with organising running clubs too, but I didn’t feel that I got a great deal from the Leadership Manual and it’s projects. It is likely though that this is very different for members who are nearer the beginning of their professional careers and that Toastmasters provides the same supportive and positive learning environment for developing leadership skills as it does for speaking skills.

I expected that, like many people, I would achieve my Competent Communicator certificate and feel that Toastmasters had runs it’s course for me. To my surprise, that’s not been the case.

While my public speaking skills are vastly improved (even if I do say so myself) the standards I apply to myself (and others!) have been raised sufficiently by the process that I’ve now decided I want to pursue the Advanced Speaking qualification.

Moving to a new city, as I have recently done, joining the local Toastmasters club has given me not just an opportunity to continue developing my skills but a great way to meet new, interesting, like-minded people in my new home.

I’ve been dwelling on blogging this for a while because I wanted to have something other than just good intentions to talk about and that is hopefully where I am now, sort of. I’m taking the personal MBA. What’s that you ask? Well, let me tell you.

The personal mba as described on it’s web site is “an experiment in educational entrepreneurism” or perhaps more helpfully “set aside some dedicated reading time, pick up a good book, learn as much as you can, and go out and make great things happen”. The idea is built around a list of 42 books that if read, studied, discussed, absorbed would allow you to “progressively develop a greater understanding of business” and, better yet, “increase your effectiveness”.

The manifesto that describes it is here http://personalmba.com/manifesto/.

So, my journey has begun. I’ve read my first book off the list – David Allen’s Getting Things Done and am another convert to GTD. I’ve been using MonkeyGTD for a while. I’m now reading Keith Ferrazzi’s never eat alone, which isn’t on the list but I did hear about through the pmba forums. Through the forums I also found How To Read which is an amazingly effective technique.

A few of us down at the Muppet Show have been talking about it and it seems to be quite a popular concept, I’m certainly excited about it. If nothing else it gives you a structure to your self-learning and keeps you focused. What would be nice is if it became more widely recognised in the future and almost becomes a one-liner on your cv that tells potential employers that you are serious about your own personal development.