After I’d been practising Daygame for six months, I joined a Toastmasters club and participated in their programme once a week until I left Nottingham for the bright lights of London. For those of you who don’t know about Toastmasters, it is an international public speaking group.
I think any beginner to pick-up will benefit vastly from joining and regularly participating in a Toastmaster group.
The way you get better at game is to approach many girls and get the skill-set down. An interaction grows like a tree from the approach to the number close, with each decision made a branch or a twig in your tree. But the approach is the root of your game tree and if you get that right, it makes the rest of your interaction easier.
As I mentioned in my posts Back to Basics, Notes for Beginners and The Importance of Posture, there are a few basic things that you need to be doing rather than saying on your approach which are absolutely essential to get the root of your interactions to be solid.
The Root of Your Game
I’ve covered posture and I’ve covered eye contact, but what about vocal tonality, projection, timing, storytelling and composure?
All of these are skills taught in Toastmasters.
It has been often quoted that for most people; public speaking is a scarier proposition than dying. In actual fact, the feeling that public speaking gave me when I first started was the closest I’ve come to approximating the feeling I got when I started cold approaching women. And it’s for the same reason. Your Ego is scared of being hurt.
When you approach a woman or when you talk in front of a group of people, you are scared that they will scorn and reject you.
This is where Toastmasters can improve your public speaking and get rid of approach anxiety. Every time you stand up to speak at a meeting, you are given full attention and after you sit down, everybody applauds warmly. Soon, you look for more and more opportunities to do a speech because facing your fear and being rewarded for it become addictive. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Toastmasters is more than just a forum for encouraging its members to speak, it is a structured programme. You’re given two books; the “Competent Speaker” and the “Competent Leader”.
Structured Learning and Improvement
The Competent Speaker book has ten speeches for you to do.
They start you off by simply speaking about your background for a couple of minutes. Subsequent speeches emphasise preparation, timing, vocal projection, eye contact, storytelling and all of the skills you need to be able to seduce an audience and a woman.
The Competent Leader book gives the meeting’s non-speakers evaluation and leadership roles to accomplish.
Every meeting there is a Toastmaster who chairs the meeting. Think of this role like a chat-show host. You stand up and open the meeting and then introduce each speaker during the evening. Many people are daunted by this role, but it used to be my favourite, because of the amount of times during a night that I had to push through my fear.
There are other roles such as Grammarian (evaluating use of grammar), Timekeeper (ensuring that speeches don’t over-run) and Ah-counter (counting “um”s and “ah”s used as filler-words).
Then there is the Evaluator role where you have to take notes on a speech, talk about what the Speaker did well and what they could improve on. This helps the Speaker improve their speeches and gives them the ability to take constructive criticism and it also helps the Evaluator to think critically and give balanced praise and criticism.
One other section of every meeting is what Toastmasters call Table-Topics, which is impromptu speaking.
Half a dozen speakers are chosen at random to speak for a minute on a completely unrehearsed topic. This is massively nerve-wracking, but has a fantastic effect on your ability to speak off the top of your head.
You can see how this would benefit your interactions with women, as for example, during the Assumption Story stage of the Daygame Blueprint, you are thrown a subject to talk about and you have to quickly recall or create an amusing or interesting story to enable you to get into rapport with the girl.
Call to Action
All of these roles provide skills which are enormously helpful in your career and social-life, as well as in the seduction of women. If you’ve not been to a Toastmasters meeting before, I recommend that you go.
You can attend for free as a guest for as long as you like before committing to join and even then, the subscription costs are ridiculously low. There are
clubs in almost every country in the world and the UK and the US have hundreds of clubs.
If you’re still suffering from social anxiety and you’ve done lots of approaches but don’t feel like you’re improving, try Toastmasters.