Self-awareness, Before Our Humble Beginnings, Part 2

I delivered a prepared speech to my fellow Toastmasters last night. It was unusual because the speech was a sequel to my previous speech, titled "Before Our Humble Beginnings". We had an interesting meeting theme and question which everyone could relate to: Self-awareness—What’s the one strength you’re proud of and the one weakness you’re working on?"

Revolving around "Self-awareness", the meeting proceeded in an interactive and inspirational manner. To the theme question, my answer is this: "I'm not sure if this is a strength, but it's something that I like myself the most: being honest to myself, or what they say "being authentic". As to my weakness, well, it may be associated with honesty, too. I can be direct and offend people, knowingly or unknowingly, though I try to avoid it."

It was another uplifting and meaningful Friday evening. Here's the script of my speech.

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Before our humble beginnings, Part 2

Are you interested in western civilization? 

Have you ever heard of the seven liberal arts?

Good evening everyone!

I'm honored to share with you my recent learning experience about our club, Toastmasters International, and something older, if not greater – the seven liberal arts, as I asked in my opening questions.

To start with, let me give you some background of my speech: to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Toastmasters International, which was on October 22nd last year, I decided to learn more about our club and the term Toastmaster in general. So, I did some research on my own and learned about some interesting stories and history. 

Two months ago, I delivered a speech about it, titled “Before Our Humble Beginnings”. I chose this speech title because although our club is arguably the largest speaking club in the world now, we did start humbly in 1924. In this speech,  I shared three stories which developed before the founding of our club.

The first story was about the term MC, which stands for master of ceremonies. MC is the official host of a ceremony, a conference, convention, a performance, or any similar event.  The term MC was first documented in the 5th century, or 1600 years ago in the Catholic Church.

The second story was about the term Toastmaster, which first appeared in the form of an MC. Later, the so-called Toastmaster's glass was introduced: it was specially made, with about the size of an ordinary drinking glass but only about one-quarter of its capacity. Using this special glass to introduce every toast, the toastmaster, or the MC, could remain sober enough to carry out his duty at the event. 

The third story was about the founding of our club on October 22nd, 1924, Before this date, Dr. Ralph C. Smedley, our club founder, had spent an unbelievable 19 years trying to sustain a speaking club without success.

So, with these stories my last speech was done. But later I came across other related stories, and felt compelled to share my new learning. So, here we go - Before our Humble Beginnings, Part 2!

In fact, my new learning is about something very old, dating back to at least 2,300 years ago. It’s about rhetoric, which is the art of persuasion. According to Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, the three principles of rhetoric are: logos, which means reasoning, ethos, meaning ethics, and pathos: meaning emotions. These principles are similar to what we follow here at Toastmasters to polish our speeches, day in, day out.

Moreover, rhetoric became one of the so-called seven liberal arts, which were the academic curriculum of western higher education, or university education as we call it today. The word “arts” here can be better understood as “skills”, instead of fine arts like paintings. Other than rhetoric, the remaining six liberal arts were grammar, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. 

So, rhetoric was one of the seven liberal arts, which were the backbone of western higher education, laying the foundation for western civilization. To date, the term liberal arts have been replaced by many names, and among them I prefer Humanities 人文學科.

To conclude, I explored back in time, and came across interesting stories about the terms MC, Toastmaster's Glass, Dr. Smedley and our humble beginnings, as well as the terms rhetoric, the seven liberal arts, and Humanities. I found them both fascinating and inspiring, and. I hope you find them interesting, too.

Toastmaster of the Evening!