I am a member of Toastmasters, I admit it.  www.toastmasters.org.  When I lived in “the big city” I don’t know if it would have appealed to me: a small group of people meeting regularly to help each other with public speaking and leadership skills.  I imagine to my younger self, it might have seemed a little corny: nervous middle-aged people giving their first speech; older people practicing gestures and making eye contact; a dozen people in a room coaching a local teenage pageant contestant on how to answer questions.  I was perhaps a little cynical in those days; I didn’t take the time to find out what Toastmasters was about.

Now that I’m older, I appreciate Toastmasters.  I’m glad that, in 11,000 clubs in 89 countries, people gather to help other people overcome the fear of public speaking and learn to speak better.  I enjoy it and it has helped me a lot.

But I’m not writing today just about Toastmasters; I want to talk about the appreciation of people in small organizations all over the world.  There’s a level of applause and gratitude I’ve seen at Toastmasters and I believe it exists for all those other organizations where people gather in communities, places like Kiwanis, Rotary, Lions, Elks, Soroptomists, Shriners and so many others.  By ‘appreciation’ I mean “Recognition of the quality, value, significance, or magnitude of people and things” as www.dictionary.com defines it.  It’s that moment at gatherings of clubs where they thank the volunteers and acknowledge the people who make a difference.

If you’ve never been to one of these clubs, you won’t know what I mean, so let me explain.  When my Toastmasters club meets, there are about 15-20 people in the room.  For two hours a week, people receive acknowledgment and applause.  I don’t mean all at once, of course, but frequently.  Each time a person stands to speak, there’s applause.  When someone explains what their purpose is at the meeting, such as timing other people’s speeches, there’s applause.  There’s applause when someone gets up to give a 5-7 minute speech, and more applause when they finish.  It’s a love-fest of acknowledgment.

Then, too, when Toastmasters clubs meet in groups, such as our district meeting or annual convention, there’s more applause and acknowledgement.  There’s a gathering where people bring the banner for their club or district and everyone applauds each one.  At the big Saturday night dinner, people are announced as they come in to much applause.  The volunteer leaders are often applauded.  Maybe “applause-fest” is a better way to put it than “love-fest.”

All of this sounds unbearably corny, I know.  Yet, wouldn’t you like to be applauded?  Wouldn’t you like your efforts to be acknowledged?  Wouldn’t you like to know, for a small moment, that what you do matters?

This is what I think is missing from life, and it’s what these organizations supply: a little bit of thanks for the work we do.  After all, in real life, you generally don’t get applause at your job.  Your family isn’t going to applaud you for cooking dinner, and you might go decades without your children ever telling you that you did a good job in raising them.  The husband who is having a tough time in his marriage doesn’t get applause for taking the same exit off the freeway every night and continuing to come home.  It’s seldom that anyone tells you that you’re doing well or that they appreciate your making the effort.

Too much of life is a cynical, sarcastic skepticism of accomplishments and motives.  You can just watch half an hour of the nightly news to notice this: the criticism of the quarterback whose team competed hard but lost the game, the snarky laughter when a movie star goes into rehab for an addiction, even the hardbitten comments to the weather forecaster when the weather takes a bad turn (as if it’s the forecaster’s fault).  Why not have places where people are kind and appreciative even for small things?

So that’s what these organizations do: they give people a place to succeed and then thank them for their efforts.  We all need some of that, it’s a nice feeling.  The successes may be small, but they’re important to the people who accomplish them.  Now if only we had some way of incorporating this applause into the rest of our lives.

That’s the Thought for the Day from The Dubmeister.

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