I've been a member of Toastmasters International since 1974. A client of mine, Patrick Callahan, invited me to join in a rather unorthodox way.

Pat was a Lector at St. Peter's Catholic Church in Columbia, SC and was a member of the Knights of Columbus. I was his insurance agent and I proposed a rather sizable policy to him. He counter-offered by saying he'd buy it if I accompanied him to Toastmasters.

I had some incorrect notions about what Toastmasters was about. I thought it was a bunch of old geezers sitting around toasting one another. When I told Pat that I would rather not attend, he said "Well, I could shop my insurance around." My response was simple: "When and where do we meet?"

I showed up at the 7:00 a.m. Toastmasters Club in Cayce, SC for my first meeting and Pat was delivering something called an "Icebreaker." The "Icebreaker" speech is the very first in the Toastmasters manual. It's a 5-7 minute speech where the speaker tells the audience about himself.

I had no idea about the time frame of 5-7 minutes. So when Pat stood up and waxed eloquently for 29 minutes, the Evaluator blasted him. Well, I knew nothing about the role of the Evaluator either, so like the fool I am, I stood up and defended my friend and pointed out all the wonderful things he did right. The club was stunned… at both of us!

Fortunately they didn't kick either of us out that day. I went on to become very active in that club and even served as its President the year I went on to win the World Championship of Public Speaking for Toastmasters International.

I competed unsuccessfully for that honor in 1977. I made it all the way to the International Finals in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and had actually been told that I was winner of that contest, for all of about one minute. I learned that I had been disqualified because my speech went eight seconds over the allotted time limit. Oops!

How could that have happened? I had the speech timed perfectly. What I didn't plan on was a spontaneous eight second standing ovation that happened right in the middle of the speech. Not only was it the "longest" eight seconds of my life, it was the "wrongest" eight seconds of my life.

I could have handled them telling me I was only the ninth best speaker representing Toastmasters International speaking world, which consisted of over 150,000 speakers in some 65 countries at the time. What I couldn't handle was the fact that I beat myself.

So in 1978, I went back through the entire arduous process again, competing at the club contest, the city contest, the area contest, the district contest, the southeastern regional contest and eventually the world finals. When you compete at those levels, you have to provide all the copies of your prior speeches and you can not duplicate your previous presentations, in my case, from either year.

One thing was for sure, I was not going to go overtime again that year. Long story short… I won the World Championship of Public Speaking in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in 1978. What I learned from that process is that you have to go through Toronto to get to Vancouver. You must understand what defeat is about before you'll ever appreciate victory.

When I was competing in Vancouver in 1978, I took the time to visit the site of the Olympics where Jim Peters ran the greatest race of his life, a 26 ¼ mile marathon. When he came into the stadium, he had a 21 minute lead over is closest competitor.

The lactic acid in his muscles all but consumed him. He collapsed 16 different times on the track trying to complete the final lap. When he collapsed the 17^th time, he still refused to quit, crawling on his hands and knees in an agonizing show of guts… until he collapsed one final time across a white line that he thought was the finish line. He was 200 yards short of his goal.

Sometimes in life, you fail, not because of yourself but in spite of yourself. Toastmasters taught me to never give up!