Fellow CCTMC members,
I would like to share some thoughts on how we react to evaluations.
One thing we all love about Toastmasters is that we get feedback for what we do, whether we just play a small role as ah-counter, or a major role as a prepared speaker.
Sometimes we get very useful and encouraging evaluation. Sometimes we don't.
Sometimes the evaluation is not very useful, or even too negative, critical, and we just don't agree to what the evaluator says. We feel embarrassed or even demotivated by such evaluations.
What should we do when we receive unhelpful and demotivating evaluation?
My advice is:
"Take it or Leave it."
"Take it" means that if you feel there are some good points in the evaluation, take the points. "Leave it" means that if you don't see any good points in the evaluation or disagree with the evaluator, ignore it and don't take it to your heart.
In our jobs or life we all get judged and commented by people. Not all the opinions and comments on us are fair, right or encouraging. Toastmasters is the same. This is the fact of life.
However, there is one thing we need to bear in mind about Toastmasters:
We should allow people to make mistakes.
Very often the evaluation is not very helpful because the evaluator:
1) either lacks the experience - he or she doesn't know how to voice their opinions positively or how to motivate people,
2) or speaks from a personal perspective - he or she has different work and life experience from your and has different perspective on things
I think most evaluators become negative not because they want to embarrass you, but because they lack the experience to do the job well or they speak from their own personal experience.
We also have to accept that some people tend to be more critical than others. Myself is an example. I sometimes deliver very negative evaluations, like the recent one I gave to Brian. In fact I later felt very bad about it and I wanted to kill myself. I think my evaluation was not fair to Brian and really wish I could have done it differently. I know many evaluators felt the same way like me after giving evaluations.
Fellow CCTMC members,
my point is that let's keep an open mind and heart to evaluations. CCTMC is a very diversified club and we have members from different age groups, occupations, and cultural background. We are bound to be different and not see eye to eye on everything. We all have room for improvement on our ability to give better evaluations.
So in the future, when we get evaluated, let's adopt the following open attitude:
"take it or leave it",
as there is no need to be bothered by unhelpful evaluation.
Thank you.
Nathan
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