Life in Kyiv, Ukraine

A classic guide to the opposite sex

So that a finish of big epoche in Toastmasters, 10th project is a last one in Competent Communicator manual. I liked the comparison  of my evaluator, he said" first speech is like first sex and 10th speech is like a mature sex". I remember the passion and my trembling arms when first came to the stage in September 2006. It took me 18 months to finish this path...

And this last speech I really enjoyed my audience and myself with the deepest tiny pieces of my soul. This speech was very special and personal, I did gave it my own feeling straight from my heart...

So here is video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2XYr2iyT1s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fJYdnhTxQE

Here is the original text of the speech

Download project_10_by_doctor_mark_gray.docx

Here is wonderful anger management technique - every time you are angry with your partner try writing her a Love Letter

Project 9 Global Warming

The goal of Toastmasters Project 9 is "Persuade with power". After Al Gore's movie "Inconvenient Truth" i become concerned about global warming so I dedicated my speech to it. It was a first time I have used Powerpoint presentation in th speech
Here is presentation
Download where_will_you_children_live.ppt

Here is video of speech
Part 1
Part 2

I am very serious about th problem and I did changed all the light bulbs in my apartment. Here are th e proofs:

Here is the article about enviromental  laws in Ukraine
Download sweeping_carbon_in_ukraine.doc

SWOT on TopTalkers meeting

Do you know what is SWOT analyse ? If yes, skip next sentence and continue reading. If no problem, look at wikipedia

SWOT analyses of TopTalkers meeting on 23/10/2007

Strengthens
-    fun moments, which make people laugh
-    positive emotions we come for to Toastmasters
-    about 30 people what creates an audience
-    unusual and creative attitude to Table Topic session (thank you Vitaliy!)
-   

Weaknesses
-    the location of chairs in the room was not the best in terms of interacting between the speaker and the audience
-    The meeting lasted much longer then 1 hour

Opportunities
-    we may encourage people to present simple evaluation roles in more productive way
-    at least one  speech by an experienced speaker per meeting

Threats
-    if even more people come there will be no space in the room
-    a lot of people had no chance to speak

Two other thins:
1. The creative way, Vitaliy Karpets, used for organizing Table Topics raised a lot of controversy. Passionate discussions are always good for the club.

2. Second: I won best Table Topics award and feel glad to own nice gift now !!!

Toastmasters. project 8

idea is synopsis for the speech. I had an idea to make a speech about heroes of animated movies and that was it two days ago. Monday I went to "Budynok Igrashok" in purpose to buy Shrek or donkey from Shrek, but instead I saw him. Love from the first look. Scrat. "The most goal oriented squirrel in the world" as I called him in my speech.

The speech itself went smoothly. I feel I has improved on vocal variety a lot. Plus I spoke in a positive way and made people laugh a couple of times. Maybe someday I will able to deliver good humorous speech. It will be unbelievable achievement if compare to my original but very serious first projects in Toastmasters
Anyway, the meeting was inspiring as always. And a social club of friends  almost all of us went to pizza and drinks afterwards.

See speech at Youtube

My fifth speech: Living in the dark

The idea of the speech is based on the true story and I believe it was a creative one.
So I decided to share it. You may see it here

Toastmasters go to Dnipropetrovsk'

Target of visit:
To help in opening first Toastmaster club in Dnipropetrovs’k. We wanted to demonstrate the usual Toastmasters meeting
Additional personal target: If feels good to be a volunteer. And I do like meeting new interesting people.

Impressions about city:
Dnipropetrovs’k is becoming my favorite destination. Two trips as elections observer, 4 audit trips and now volunteer. Since my audit trips more modern buildings arose. The American – style architecture neighbors 10 kop soda machine, rich and poor, like it always felt in this city.

                                    

            

This trip I discovered the Dnipro river is really beautiful here, perhaps even better than Kyiv.

Impressions about Toastmasters club opening: we met dedicated to self-development members of large software company. We had  marvelous speakers who demonstrated direction to grow. We all were enthusiastic about starting something new.
However, in my opinion, club our opening crew lacked “client tailored approach”. In my consulting job it would be disaster to take formal model and introduce it to a client as perfect solution.  Any good model needs to be tailored to client needs. In other words jokes and stories about software-developers and computers, I think we missed that.  But hopefully those people will be fine, now it all depends solely on their commitment to personal growth.

Basically that is about trip. Still,  do you know the best thing about being a volunteer ? You act among like-minded people and met new ones.

Video of my 7th speech

I finally felt somewhat satisfied with my performance. Of course there is a space to grow, but it feels good for at the moment.
Full 7:45 min video of my speech is here:

My seventh speech: Web 2.0

Imagine  that all of you are venture capitalists, who has invested money in internet companies.  If fall year 2000 were out of the window you would find yourself in a deep trouble, because you have just witnessed mass death of internet businesses and  astounding collapse of high technology markets. At the end of DOT COM era you might be crying for the money lost. If at that moment I would show this number 2, what would happen ? You would not care, consider me an idiot.  But with start of new internet era in 2004 – 2005  0 will be added to tis nice number 2. Being an investor in 2007, you might be smiling while seeing 2.0.

Now Forget about  investors  – and who you really are, potentially addicted to  internet users. Today,  let me  enhance your knowledge about Web 2.0 phenomenon, which I am sure most of you  already enjoy.

Traditionally, we have to start with a definition. Web 2.0 is … Ups. The definition doesn’t exist. Nobody can clearly specify clear logical  requirements to classify the web-sites : this site is web 1 and this is web 2.0.  But everybody knows  icons of Web 2.0 and let me introduce them!
The intellect of Web 2.0  - free online encyclop(a)edia, created and edited, attention !, by internet users. Wikipedia was started in 2001: everybody was able to give defition of a term, and what is mote important everybody was able to edit what the first gut posted. Collective mind of internet produced 1 920 000 articles just  in English as of Monday, July 30th  the day I wrote this article.  The major advantage of Wikipedia traditional encyclop(a)edias:
- It is modern. its updates in real time. Somebody wins Eurovision, in a half an hours you may find article about winning artist
- it has some unique information, like list of famous cats and definition of Scottish apple pie.

Next to Wikipedia is ever most popular social network MySpace. It started like a teenager network to post a photo of new jeans or favorite cat and developed into  most popular web-site in Unitied States. According to Wikipedia at the start of 2007 it had for than 100 million users, and everyday about 230 000 new users join it. My Space allows users to stay in touch with your friends, meet new people, chat your budiies, maintain online diaries, exhcnage music and videos and join communities by interest and so on. There is wide-known “six handshakes” theory that  states there is any person in the world is separated from another  just  by  6 acquaintances, 6 handshakes. If this rule will ever be proved by practical tests, it will definitely happen in the Myspace community.

Now a  question ? What is  the fastest growing web-site at the web ? Enourmous storehouse for user-generated video, it has about 30 mln of videorolics and everyday is 35 000 thousands more. Most of the time  the last minute video from the last George Michael concert or flood in Britain can be found at YouTube first, and later on BBC. 

The role of YouTube for videos is taken by Flickr for photos. Fliccr is called “New eyes of the planet” What makes Flickr really special is tagging system, which allows  photos to be categorized. For example you have downloaded your picture of London Eye to Flickr  and assigned it a tag “London Eye”. By searching a tag “London eye” you will find numerous pictures  of London eye taken by other users. Important to mention that  you can rate or comment their pictures. 

If Flickr is “eyes of the planet, than Last.fm is planet’s ears. It an online radio, but what differentiates it from other radios, it is very smart one. Add Last Fm software  to your Windows media player or Winamp, it will analyse songs you like to listen, than it will suggest you new songs based on choice of the listeners with similar taste. No better way to discover new or uknown somgs of your taste has  been invented by humanity yet.

To end highlighting the most prominent web-sites of Web 2.0 we need to mention blogs. Blog is an online diary, where you post your views, pictures and video. Most of the people blog for fun , but there are experts that basically become web journalists by maintaining own blog.  The good example of blog is Livejournal which has more than 50 000 thousand users in Ukraine.

Here let me give one advise about blogging. If you ever are visiting Izrael and searhing the web, here you see this flashy excitiong blog of Iran president  Махмуд Ахмадинеджад and feel you would like to explore it. DON’t. While doing research I found out that Ахмадинеджад’s uses special software, which defines the country of your computer, and if you are from Izrael – it will load virus into your system.

In summary after I have described major representatives of Web 2.0 we may be able to define a couple of features, common for Web 2.0
First and best of it - it’s absolutely free ! Nice.
Second –if website  is extremely popular and maintained mostly by volunteers   – it probably  web 2.0
Third – the only source of content is a user. Till 2010 70% of the WEB content – text, audio, video will be generated by users. 
I thought to finished my speech by giving you print-outs with all web 2.0 listed, but I have changed my mind. There is no paper in the world 2.0,  to see the list just go to my personal blog  - www.lyubomyr.net

List of web-sties mentioned in the speech:

Wikipedia

MySpace

Youtube

Flickr

Last.fm

Livejournal

Seeing the best

Impressions from Top Talkers and AmCham jointed Toastmasters meeting on July, 25,2007
All of the Toastmasters meetings have positive atmosphere. Most of the Toastmasters are interesting in terms of speakers and topics. More than a half of Toastmasters are really inspiring and add energy after hard working day. The last meeting on July 25, 2007 had really unique and rare feature, only a few meetings possess. It was great speakers and evaluators performance !

Most of the time we learn by doing or reading ! That was the case when club members were granted the  opportunity to learn by seeing and listening ! What happens if you see somebody better than you ! Correct. You want be like the best ones. Not “want”. You desire. Desire to improve own skills. That’s why after meeting end I immediately signed up for the speech at August 1.

Always to remember  -  the major reason for being a Toastmaster is personal development and growth. Feels so good, when you receive inspiration for this continuous process.

What Toastmasters are about

First of all I am going to tell you about Toastmasters global and our club, use links if you want to know more.

This post to answer "How do I feel about participating in  Toastmasters"

I started Toastmasters in September 2006 with the goal to improve my presentation skills. At the moment I have completed 6 speech projects and I feel much more confident about speaking in public. No temptation  like during the first speech, increased awareness of eye contact, vocal variety and body language.

But coming back to my very first visit to the Toptalkers Toastmasters, when I stood up to introduce myself, I said that time “I came to your club to improve my presentation skills and meet new people”. The second part of the statement was just one ordinary thing we usually say when we need to say at least two words. I did mean a wish to meet new people, but September 2006 I was not aware how important it could be.

Almost a year over that first visit, the number of good friends increased. The informal motto of our club may be “TopTalkers Toastmasters : It not solely about communication skills, it’s about meeting interesting people and having fun”.

Finally, on the favorable day it’s fantastic amount of FUN. The positive energy that flies out of prepared speeches. The smiles during impromptu ones. Gravity of evaluation reports. Postwork fatigue hides away for hour of public speaking performance. We come to Toastmasters for self-development and new friends. The reason we stay because we love every single moment of it

My speeches at Toastmasters :

Download imagine_yourself.doc

Download making_decisions.doc

Download toptalkers_toastmasters_in_search_of_success.doc

Download to_sell_or_not_to_sell.doc

Download trust.A matter of what.doc

Download speech_for_debates_gossip.doc

Download happy_in_the_dark.doc

Download feel_what_you_listen. Listen what you feel.doc