The Unexpected Mentor

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And it generally involves waking up early in the morning.

Sometime around July or August last year, we had a plantation activity from Amdocs Blossom. I reached 5 mins late than the scheduled time of 7 am. I couldn't see anyone else in or near Tower 2. So I called up Amol and asked if everyone had left without me? He started laughing. Guess what, no one had even arrived. He must've been impressed, with my enthusiasm or stupidity that he added me to Blossom Community Leaders from that day. And from that day, I lost countless number of Saturday morning sleep.

Few months later we had a Blossom offsite event, where I spoke about my experience. I told this same story and Amol, once again for my enthusiasm or stupidity, decided that I needed to be a part of Toastmasters. And from that day, I lost my Friday afternoons as well.

Until I joined Toastmaster, I was very confident. I had full faith that my public speaking was better than average and I won't be nervous in front of a crowd. then I attended my first club meeting and heard my first speech and all that confidence was shattered to a million pieces.

Until I joined Toastmasters, I thought 5 mins was a very small time and speaking for 5 mins would be a no brainer. Then I realized how painfully long these 300 seconds could be to make a fool out of yourself, when you haven't prepared your speech.

Thanks to the captivating stories of our two flagship couples Akshay-Heena and Amol-Bhairavee, I thought Toastmasters would be a good place to meet your future life partner. But soon I realized every girl in Toastmaster was a great speakers, writers, thinkers and so far above and out of my league.

I am always amazed by Amandeep's extraordinary social skills. One of his most important advice has been to excel at networking. When I joined Toastmaster, I thought networking meant talking to people. After attending a few conferences and roaming around in the hall with a cup of tea in my hand trying to strike up conversations with strangers, I realized most people are already part of their own friend circle. In networking terminology, I like to call that VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). They had their networking ports already blocked and setting up new network connections from my side felt pretty much impossible.

All of these incidents are from my initial days at Toastmaster. It was the 260th meeting that I attended in October and today is 290th. The catch about Toastmaster is that it doesn't make you a better person overnight, but is so gradual that we often don't notice. Today when I look back, I find so many things have changed. I am still not the best speaker in my club, or maybe not even in top 5. But earlier my heart used to reach 130 bpm when I came on stage, today it's only touching 90. Hey, I am not bluffing. I literally wear a watch that measures heart beats.

I have heard grim people giving humorous speeches. I have seen introvert people giving animated speeches. I have also witnessed people preaching values that they never follow themselves. again and again I have noticed, the topic for humorous speeches are always the speaker's husband or wife. In case of standard speech contest, the topic would be some heroic story about the speaker himself or herself. What I have learnt is not to judge people for that 7 mins. The journey of one week or even months that leads to the speech impacts us a lot more than those few minutes on the stage.

I may not have met my dream girl yet, but I have met some amazing friends whom I didn't even dream about. And I don't have a captivating story, I have captivating stories regarding each one of you.

I have realized I am not good at setting up long distance networking, but I do have a 5G connection with my club members. Short range, but with a huge bandwidth.

For all these enlightenment, I wanted to thank my mentor. We usually have a notion that a mentor would be a single person who would be guiding and teaching me. But over the last 9 months, Toastmaster as a whole has been the mentor I never expected. Each and every meeting, conference, speech, role player, guests and every member has taught me something new. And I am pretty sure one single mentor would not have been able to fill in all these shoes. This has just been the first mile of the thousand miles journey and I am looking forward for the remaining nine hundred ninety nine miles with this silent mentor.