Towns of York Toastmasters

Harvey Mackay

Best-selling Author of "How to Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive"

“I’ve never met anyone who didn’t think Toastmasters was super valuable to their career. We gain self-esteem, self-confidence, assertiveness. This makes us better salespeople, better managers, better leaders.

“I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for my dad pushing me over the threshold, pushing me to join Toastmasters. I had no idea whatsoever that some day I’d speak to Fortune 500 companies every week. Had I not been a good speaker, there isn’t one chance in a hundred that I would have ever written a book. So it started with Toastmasters.”

Peter H. Coors

Chairman of the board of the Molson Coors Brewing Company in Denver

“As my career grew with the company, I needed to develop my communication skills more and more…I’ve learned a great deal about speaking and listening and now realize the importance of the overall program. For me, it took getting into a formal organization – such as Toastmasters – to understand what total communication is all about.”

Captain James A. Lovell

Former United States Astronaut

""I found Toastmasters an excellent means of improving my speaking ability..... I feel my membership in Toastmasters International was very important in my later success....."

Debbi Fields Rose

Founder – Mrs. Fields Cookies

“I’d never thought of myself as a great communicator, and that’s one of the reasons I got involved in Toastmasters. The idea of getting in front of a group, not as Mrs. Fields but really as Debbi, made my knees shake and I’d get all dry-mouthed. But the Toastmasters group understood. Here’s a place where you can learn, grow, develop – and where other people are doing and feeling the same thing.”

Linda Lingle

Governor of Hawaii

“Toastmasters is the best and least expensive personal improvement class you can go to. Anybody who begins and sticks with it for any length of time ends up a better speaker. As a result, they build confidence, and are able to do their jobs better.”

Tom Peters

Co-author of "In Search of Excellence"
and
"A Passion for Excellence"

This is an excerpt from Tom Peters book "The Pursuit of WOW", © 1994.

"Join Toastmasters. Oral communication skills count. Enormously. A lot of managers aren't bad public speaking. But "aren't bad" ain't good enough, not if you're wise -- and especially these days, when jawing with the same old gang from year to year is becoming rare. Height and hair color may be in the genes. Public speaking isn't. It's a skill that can be studied, polished, more or less perfected. (Look at Bill Clinton, who went from putting the nation to sleep at the 1988 Democratic Convention to winning bipartisan kudos for his forceful 1993 inaugural address.) You can not only get good at it, you can get damn good at it. And it makes a heck of a difference.....

.....One (good) answer to the public speaking problem / opportunity is Toastmasters. They do a fabulous job of helping people shape up their communication skills. If you've got any questions about your speaking ability (and if you don't, you've probably got a problem), think about joining Toastmasters.

Please don't just take our word for it, come to a meeting as our guest!