Speech

5-2 Leading in Your Volunteer Organization

This project focuses on the skills required to lead in a volunteer organization and the importance of recognition and reward in motivating volunteers.

Purpose: The purpose of this project is to apply the skills needed to successfully lead in a volunteer organization.

Overview: Serve in a leadership role in Toastmasters or another volunteer organization for at least six months. You may complete this project based on your employment, but a volunteer organization is preferable. Ask members of the organization to complete a 360° evaluation of your leadership skills. Create a succession plan to aid in the transition after you leave your position of leadership. After your six-month term, deliver a 5- to 7-minute speech at a club meeting to reflect on your personal experience.

Speech timings: 5:00, 6:00, 7:00

Script

270 kilograms. That’s the most amount of weight any person has ever lifted from the ground to overhead. 270kg is more than 3 times my own bodyweight. It is the equivalent of 5 years of supply of kartoffel for the average German. 270kg of MDMA is enough to keep the whole of Berlin high for a few years, NON-STOP. Needless to say, it is a lot of weight! This weight was lifted in a movement called the Clean & Jerk, where you pull a barbell from the floor to your shoulders, then in a second movement, you push it overhead. Lasha Talakhadze, is a Georgian super-heavyweight, he is a mix between an oversized teddy bear and a modern, liver-eating caveman. He wrote himself in Olympic weightlifting folklore when he made this 270kg Clean & Jerk.

This magnificent athlete can achieve these incredible feats of strength because he is able to perfectly combine speed, strength, mobility and grit for just a single second, on the competition floor, when the stakes are the highest, when the pressure is at its pinnacle. It takes these athletes years of arduous technical and strength training to perfect these complex lifts, at these unimaginable weights, pushing their bodies and minds to their limit.

This is why I fell in love with this sport that is called Olympic weightlifting. It has been the main strength sports in the Olympic Games since the modern Olympics were invented. When I first saw videos of these athletes, throwing around hundreds of kilos over their head, in such a powerful and athletic way, I was hooked.

I started weightlifting in my local university club, called the Barbell Club. I started as a complete newbie, I couldn’t even lift an empty bar. Slowly and painfully I progressed, adding kilos to the bar, making my lifts look nicer and nicer. I started competing in local competitions. The reward of seeing, first-hand, your progress, day by day, week by week, was incredibly motivating and brought me so much joy. So much more joy than my studies! I was probably spending an unhealthy amount of time watching grainy old videos of Bulgarian training sessions, reading old soviet strength manuals and illegally live streaming the world championships at 2 in the morning.

I was simply and purely in love with this sport. It wasn’t giving me any money, it wasn’t improving my grades at university, it wasn’t improving my job opportunities and it definitely wasn’t making me more popular with girls as I was just spending all my evenings in the gym. However, it did create a community for me. Our weightlifting club, the Barbell club, was tight-knit, passionate and ambitious, united around one goal: lifting a kilogram more than before, simple as that.

This club was what made my university experience joyful. It was not my studies, not the parties, not my professors, but my friends and I, throwing barbells around, having fun, and improving ourselves. And this is exactly the reason why, during my last two years of university I took the opportunity to become a coach at the club, and then the President.

Our club was larger than you’d expect, for a niche sport like this. We had around 130 members the year I joined. When I ended my presidency, we had doubled our membership base. My friends and I represented our university at the national championships, a lot of us, including me, medaled and we became the second-best university weightlifting club in the UK. We got our coaching badges, referee certifications and even found a sponsorship deal for the first time in the history of the club.

I view all these achievements as big successes. We left the club better equipped, more popular, and more inclusive, than we found it. However, believe it or not, no part of this experience made me find a job after university. I was in a completely different field, requiring a completely different skillset. Hiring managers looking for machine learning experience and backend programming would have laughed if I put, as my top skill, “can teach people to lift heavy things over their head”.

So why did I do it? Why did I volunteer my time and my energy to something that did not give me an obvious, productive, tangible benefit? Simply, because I was passionate. That’s what I learned about volunteering: you should never do it to expect something in return. Volunteering is just like giving a gift, you shouldn’t expect a gift back. It should be generous, selfless, and disinterested. The goal is to “give”, not “give and then receive”.

I believe that it’s with this mindset that you will view any volunteering opportunity you embark on as a success. When you spend time and energy on something that might not clearly, directly, benefit you personally, it can be hard to convince yourself to do it. It might seem like a thankless burden. Why should you prioritize that next to your work, your studies, your family or just your relaxation time? On top of that, people usually don’t realize how much effort you put in, they aren’t as grateful as you’d expect them to be and your colleagues might not be as diligent as you are.

In these situations, it is easy to lose motivation. That is why, to persist in those difficult times, your intrinsic WHY should be strong. Your WHY should be the thing that keeps you going. And what stronger WHY can you have than true passion.

With this mindset of generosity, selflessness and passion, any kind of volunteering opportunity will be a personal success. You will treat the wins of your community as your own personal wins, you will feel part of something bigger and, in the end, you will feel fulfilled and proud. You will look back at amazing memories, that YOU helped create. These are some of the best feelings one can have, just behind the feeling of lifting 270kg from the ground to overhead, a record I am still chasing to this day!