In the August 2010 issue of Toastmaster, the article titled, “Speaking A Capella” has two paragraphs devoted to our VP-Education, Elan Chalford, DTM.
Elan Chalford, a violinist who lives near Tampa Bay, Florida, and a Toastmaster for nearly 12 years, views speaking and playing music as a dexterous mental leap. The two activities involve two different parts of the brain, he notes. When you’re in front of an audience talking and performing music, the key skill that’s needed “is to be able to move back and forth between those two parts of the brain,” Chalford says. “It’s a lot more difficult than people might think. When I started doing it, I could feel a resistance, a kind of wall I had to pass through. But the more you do it, the better you get at it.”
Chalford says Toastmasters has greatly improved the s peaking part of his presentation. “After I had been with Toastmasters for a while,” he says, “when I was with any band on stage and something needed to be said, I could easily step up to the microphone and say something, whether it was a question of filling time or introducing a tune.”
Credit goes to Lou Polur for spotting the quote in the magazine independently and letting me know by Facebook.
