Frequently Asked Questions – FAQ

An international non-profit educational organization focused on public speaking, communication, and leadership training. It was founded in 1924 and today operates in more than 140 countries with over 300,000 members. It is not a school or a course — it is a club where skills are built through practice: you perform, get feedback, improve, repeat. In Slovakia, you can find clubs in several cities and meetings take place regularly, usually every one to two weeks.

You can find an overview of Slovak clubs on this page in the Clubs section. Clubs operate in Bratislava, Nitra, Košice and other cities, some also online. The clubs publish upcoming meetings on their Facebook pages in events — choose a date and simply come.

The first visit is always free — you come, you look, you don't sign anything. Membership usually costs around €60–100 per half-year, depending on the club. For comparison: a weekend soft skills course usually costs €500–2,000 and lasts two days. Here you train for the whole half-year, every meeting, with individual feedback.

Anyone over 18. No matter your education, profession, or experience with performing. You'll find students, programmers, managers, entrepreneurs, and people who have just graduated from kindergarten. Most members came because they didn't know how to speak in front of people — that's exactly what the club exists for.

Yes, most Slovak clubs operate in Slovak. In addition, there are also English-speaking clubs and a German-speaking club — ideal if you want to practice speaking a foreign language in a safe environment. English is also often spoken in corporate clubs, as companies have international teams.

Most clubs meet once every one to two weeks and the meeting lasts approximately 90–120 minutes. There is no mandatory attendance — you go as much as you can. But there is a simple rule: consistency beats intensity. Those who go regularly grow noticeably faster.

If you have a role or are registered as a speaker, please let the evening's host know as soon as possible so that they can adjust the program. As a spectator, you don't need to report it — just come quietly so as not to disturb the speaker.

There's only one way to improve your communication: speak regularly in front of real people and get feedback after each performance on what you need to change. Books and videos will tell you how to do it, but you'll only learn to speak by speaking.

In Toastmasters, you will give a speech at every meeting: a prepared speech (5–7 minutes), an improvisation on a topic you are hearing for the first time (1–2 minutes), or in one of the roles. After your speech, an assigned evaluator evaluates you in front of the entire club, while the audience takes notes — you will take home 10 to 20 written observations from different people. You will try again in two weeks.

That repetition is the whole difference between "I know about communication" and "I know how to communicate.".

→ How exactly does the training work: the 4 pillars of Toastmasters

You can get rid of stage fright by repeatedly performing in front of a small, friendly audience. With each performance, your brain learns that nothing bad is happening. Breathing techniques will help in the moment, but only repetition will reduce stage fright in the long run.

Stage fright won't go away completely, and it doesn't have to. Today, it might stop you before you even get to perform. Later, you'll only feel it at the beginning — and you'll perform anyway.

With us, you take it one step at a time. You don’t have to say anything on your first visit if you don’t want to — you can just watch the whole evening, and most first-time guests do just that. The first active step is usually a short improvisation in front of ten to twenty people, most of whom have been through it themselves. Members commonly say they feel more confident after about eight meetings.

→ Find a club near you

You need three things: a real audience, regular practice, and concrete feedback. The course will give you one or two speeches per weekend and then you're done. In a speech club, you speak at every meeting, for months and years, in front of live people — and after each speech, you learn exactly what to improve: eye contact, structure, voice work, gestures. That's why Toastmasters has been around for over 100 years.

Four pillars: prepared speeches (structure, persuasiveness, message delivery), improvisations on an unknown topic (readiness and communication under pressure — training for unexpected questions in a meeting or interview), feedback (you will learn to receive and give it, which is a separate career skill) and leadership (moderating the evening, organization, club roles — leadership in practice, not in theory).

For many members, the community is the main reason they stay. In addition to meetings, there are club teambuildings, a joint Toastmasters weekend Drive, Czech-Slovak events, and speaking competitions. You meet people who are working on each other — and that brings them together. Friendships that last for years and sometimes even couples are formed here. You come to practice your speech, you stay for the people.

Yes, and very practically. The decisive moments of a career — presentation to management, interview, negotiation — depend on communication, not on technical knowledge. Often, the best specialist does not get a promotion, but the one who can convince that he is ready. In the club, you will train exactly this, plus you will gain real experience in managing people and organizing events — things that HR managers ask about. Members report new positions, promotions, and better salaries.

Yes. A large part of the members are introverts — and they are among the best speakers in the club because they know how to listen and think. It's not about being loud, it's about being clear and convincing. No one pressures you, you go at your own pace: the first few meetings you can just watch, then you try a short improvisation, and when you're ready, the first speech.

The course lasts one or two days, you get the theory, you speak once or twice and that's it — in a month you're back where you were. In Toastmasters, you train repeatedly: every meeting you speak in front of a real audience and receive specific, tailored feedback. Plus, leadership in practice, not on slides. And what about the price? Half a year of training costs a fraction of the price of a weekend course. The system, not a seminar.

Yes. Team performance often does not fall short of know-how, but rather of communication and leadership. That's why some companies have established an internal speaking and leadership club as a systematic soft skills training directly in the company. The result: better-run meetings, more effective employees, growth of internal leaders and more confident communication with clients. If this interests you for your company, get in touch — we'll show you what it would look like in concrete terms (scope, time commitment, costs).

Pathways is the official educational system of Toastmasters International. You choose a path based on what you want to develop — for example, presentation skills, dynamic leadership, strategic relationships, or motivational strategies. Each path has five levels, and in each, you complete specific projects: a speech with a clear goal (such as working with body language, visual aids, or humor), which you deliver in the club and are evaluated on. You progress at your own pace, the materials are available online, and your progress is documented — after completing the levels, you receive internationally recognized certifications.

You choose the topics yourself — travel experiences, an interesting book, a person who inspired you, an explanation of something you know well. Topics that you enjoy work best, because your enthusiasm is transmitted to the audience. It is better to avoid politics, religion, and sex — these are conflicting topics where you can easily offend someone instead of practicing your speech.

We recommend standard Slovak, but if the topic requires dialect or slang, feel free to use it. Omit vulgarities. There are no limits to style — humor to explain difficult theory, costume, props, movement, singing. The more daring you are to experiment, the more you will learn. The club is a safe laboratory for this.

Ask the moderator of the evening — he is responsible for the meeting program. Sometimes a speaker cancels and the spot becomes available. But keep in mind that every speaker also needs an evaluator, so you may be rejected. In any case, it is worth asking.

Talk to your mentor or a more experienced member first. Often, „I didn’t prepare“ is actually just stage fright — and your mentor will recommend that you speak anyway because that’s exactly what will get you moving. If you really didn’t prepare at all, cancel your appearance with the moderator as soon as possible before the meeting so they can adjust the agenda.

Yes, the club assigns new members a mentor — a more experienced member who will help you with your first speeches, advise you on Pathways, and answer questions. It's one of the most valuable things about membership: you have someone who has been through the same journey before.

Sure. Audiences are welcome — speakers need an audience, and you'll learn a lot by observing. You'll see different styles of speaking, different levels of speakers, and how feedback works. And you can try out a simple role whenever you want.

Speeches don't usually include discussion unless the speaker invites it. But you can talk to them during a break or after the meeting — most speakers appreciate honest feedback from the audience. You can also write it down on a piece of paper as feedback.

Clubs usually record their performances on video, which members have access to. If you're not a member and a speech interests you, ask the speaker directly for a recording — they'll usually be happy to oblige.

No. Just say your name during the introduction. Both improvisations and closing remarks are optional — if the moderator calls you out and you don't want to talk, just say so. No one will pressure you into anything. Most guests just watch and soak up the atmosphere at the first meeting.

Anyone over 18. No additional conditions, no fees, no obligation to become a member. You can come and see as many times as you like before you decide.

You arrive, we welcome you, and you briefly introduce yourself by name. Then you follow the program: prepared speeches, an improvisation block, and speaker evaluations. If you want, you can try improvising — but you don’t have to. After the meeting, the members are happy to talk and answer anything. The whole thing takes about two hours, and you leave with a clear idea of whether it’s for you.

Yes. Write or call the moderator of the next meeting and make arrangements. The ideal start is as a timekeeper — a simple role where you try to speak in front of people without pressure on the content.

Evening moderator (leads the entire meeting), improv moderator, speaker evaluators, summary evaluator (evaluates the entire meeting), timekeeper, language corrector, and humming computer. Each role trains a different skill — from leading the meeting to giving feedback to listening carefully and reading the audience.

These are small leadership trainings with real responsibility. Moderating an evening is leading a meeting in front of an audience. Evaluating a speaker is the art of giving feedback that helps and doesn't offend. Organizing a program is project management in miniature. It is precisely these experiences that you can then sell in an interview — not as theory from a course, but as practice that you can talk about.

Nothing happens. The summative evaluator gives you a tip on how to do it better next time, and you move on. We learn — if that includes making mistakes. Often, it's just your feeling; the audience perceives your performance more mildly than you think.

No. Anyone can try out for the role. The goal is not professional proofreading, but training in attentive listening — noticing the words, filler sounds, and linguistic pearls of the evening.

The fastest way to improve your speech is to have someone tell you what you don't see in yourself. Your own feelings about your performance are the least reliable source of information — you hear what you wanted to say, the audience hears what you said.

Three things almost always work:

• One main idea. If you can't summarize it in one sentence, the audience won't get anything out of it.
• Pause after the point. An idea needs silence to sink in. A pause that seems long to you is usually just right for the audience.
• Stage anchors. Speak on one topic from one spot on the stage, and another from another. This way the audience doesn't get lost.

Then you need feedback. With us, every prepared speech has an assigned evaluator who knows your training goal in advance and after the performance speaks for 2–3 minutes in front of the entire club. The audience writes notes along the way.

And it's different from what your colleague will tell you after a presentation. "Gesture less" is an opinion. "If your hands don't accompany your words, keep them close to your body" is a rule that you can keep in your head — and check in two weeks.

Self-confidence is not a character trait that a person is born with. It grows from one's own experience: you stepped up, you handled it, nothing bad happened. That's why it can't be studied, and that's why positive thinking itself doesn't work — the brain doesn't believe statements, it believes experience.

What works:

• Reduce the first step so that you can definitely handle it.
• Perform more often, not longer. Ten short performances will make more of a difference than one big one.
• Measure it specifically. „"I felt better" is useless, "twelve yesterday, um, four today" is evidence.

The way it's set up in the club is exactly like this. The audience is ten to twenty people, after a few meetings you get to know them and no one is sitting there to judge you as a person — they're sitting there because in two weeks they'll be standing in front. If you make a mistake, nothing happens — and you perform regularly, not once a year.

At work, it's the other way around: every performance counts, which is why you prefer to postpone it.

Verbal fluff — „um,“ „eee,“ „so,“ „just,“ „actually“ — is removed in two steps: first you have to be aware of it, then replace it with a pause. Without the first step, the second doesn’t work, because most speakers have no idea they have fluff, let alone how much.

Have someone count it. The exact number is the only thing that matters — „it happens to you sometimes“ won’t change anything, „twenty-one times in seven minutes“ will. Then replace it with silence: a pause that feels like an eternity to you is short to the audience and is perceived as confidence. It also helps to start a sentence with a strong word, a verb, or a noun — cotton wool tends to stick to the beginning of a sentence.

We have a separate role for this: the word-filler collector (sometimes we call him the humming computer). One member counts the filler words for each speaker throughout the evening and at the end says the numbers out loud, in front of everyone. The role rotates, so everyone gets a turn.

It's annoying exactly once.

Good feedback is specific, it allows you to change something and then check later to see if it has really changed. If any of this is missing, it's just politeness.

The wording is the most important thing. No one will use „it was good“. „there was a pause after the name, I didn’t have time to process it“ can be fixed tomorrow. And sometimes it’s more important to say whether a speech served its purpose than how it was delivered. For one of our speakers, the sentence „this was a motivational speech, not an inspiring one“ changed the entire speech more than twenty notes on gestures. He rewrote it from scratch.

Giving feedback is a separate skill for us, which a member learns gradually. At first, you just receive it. After a while, you become an evaluator and have 2–3 minutes to say something specific in front of the club — not an impression. The role rotates, so everyone gets it from time to time.

And one more thing: the ratings will contradict each other. The same speech in our country received both „super gestures“ and „exaggerated gestures.“ That’s not a mistake — it means that the gestures were on the verge: some people liked them, others had had enough.

→ What feedback looks like in Toastmasters: 6 speeches, evaluations verbatim

Improvisation is not a talent. It's a simple structure that you have in your head beforehand. Whoever has it doesn't freeze — they don't figure out how to compose an answer, they just fill it with content.

Three proven structures are enough:

• Statement – reason – example – statement. The most universal, suitable for almost every question.
• Past – present – future. How it was, how it is now, where it is heading.
• Problem – solution – challenge. When you want to convince someone of something.

Two habits for this: repeat the question out loud (you'll get a few seconds to think and it seems thoughtful) and stick to one thought instead of three.

We have a special block for this at every meeting. The improv moderator calls out your name, says a topic you're hearing for the first time, and you have one to two minutes. No preparation, one try, the whole room is watching. It's intentionally uncomfortable — this is exactly what an unexpected question at a meeting looks like, a question at an interview, and the moment when someone asks you in the elevator what you do.

It's uncomfortable the first time. After five times, you'll realize that two minutes is a lot of time.

Three things make a good meeting: a goal written down before the start, a time budget for each point, and one person who guards both.

It will practically help:

• An agenda with times, not topics. „"Budget — 10 minutes" works, "Budget" doesn't.
• At each point, say what should happen: to decide, inform, or gather opinions. Most meetings get stuck right here — half the room thinks they're making decisions, the other half thinks they're discussing.
• Minutes = decision, responsible person and deadline. Nobody will read anything else anyway.

This can be practiced, and we practice it in the role of moderator of the evening. You lead for 90 to 120 minutes according to a fixed agenda, with a timekeeper who guards the limit of each entry. At the end, a summary evaluator evaluates the entire meeting — including how you led it.

At work, no one tells you that you ran a meeting poorly. Here, they tell you out loud — and immediately tell you how to do it better next time.

→ Leadership training: learn to lead people

Persuasion is built on three pillars, and if any one is missing, it doesn't work: credibility (why should I believe you), argument (does it make sense), and emotion (why should I care). Most experts have the first two and consider the third to be manipulation — which is why people often don't listen to them.

What works in practice:

• One thought instead of three. He who convinces of three things will convince of none.
• Both the number and the story. The number itself will be forgotten, the story itself will be questioned.
• Direct speech instead of paraphrasing. „"He told me: that won't work" is stronger than "he expressed disagreement".
• An admitted counterargument. A speaker who names his own weakness gains confidence in everything else.

The catch is that you can't measure persuasiveness yourself. You know what you wanted to say; only the audience knows whether it came across.

That's why training only makes sense when someone tells you something like "I disconnected halfway through" after a performance. You'll get that kind of response here. It's not pleasant, but it's the only information you can work with.

The only way to learn to perform is by performing. It sounds obvious, but that's where most attempts fail — people read books, watch TED talks, and just keep preparing instead of performing regularly.

It works in a cycle that has four steps:

1. Preparation with one specific goal. Not "be better", but "this time I'm working with breaks".
2. Performing in front of a real audience. Neither a mirror nor a camera can replace it.
3. Feedback immediately after the performance, while you still remember what you were doing.
4. Working on the next performance. Without this step, you're just repeating the same mistakes.

It's how often you perform, not how big a performance is, that matters. One performance a month for a year is twelve repetitions; a weekend course is two performances and that's it.

In Toastmasters, this cycle takes place regularly and you don't have to organize it yourself:

• meeting once every one to two weeks,
• a speech of 5–7 minutes,
• training goal according to the project from the Pathways educational system,
• an evaluator who knows your goal in advance.

We have clubs in Bratislava, Trnava, Nitra, Trenčín, Žilina and Košice. Most meet in Slovak, but there is also an English-speaking club in Bratislava and an online German-speaking club. The first visit is free and you don't have to say anything if you don't want to.

→ How a speaker grows in Toastmasters

The first thirty seconds decide whether people will listen to you. Then you keep their attention by varying your voice, pace, and where you stand. A monotone delivery is the most common reason people stop listening—and one of the most common comments speakers receive.

What helps:

• Open with a scene, question, or number. „Hello, today I’m going to tell you about…“ is a wasted start.
• Vary the tempo and volume. Muting works better than amplifying.
• Use direct speech. instead of retelling.
• Move intentionally. New topic, new place on stage.
• Take breaks. Otherwise, the audience won't have time to process the idea and will stop trying.

The problem is, you won't get feedback on your attention anywhere else. At work, no one will tell you at what minute of the presentation they started looking at their phone.

We have a role for this: the attention guard. During the evening, the audience is asked what was said in the speeches — and the speaker hears with his own ears what people really remembered and what was lost. And from the notes from the audience, you will learn where someone stopped following you.

→ How a speaker grows in Toastmasters

You can reduce your fear of speaking by speaking more often—not by preparing more. Most people do the opposite: the more afraid they are, the more they prepare, which only reinforces the idea that something dangerous is happening.

The sequence works: first an environment where nothing will happen if you make a mistake, then a short performance, then a longer one. If you jump straight into a challenging situation, the fear usually gets worse. It also helps to know that stage fright is usually strongest right before the start and in the first few moments of the performance — then it usually subsides. Most people never find out because they prefer not to go out in front of people at all.

That's why we keep the first step as low-key as possible: as a guest, you don't have to say anything if you don't want to. You can just sit and watch the whole evening — and if someone calls you to improvise, just say you're just watching today. This is exactly how most guests soak up the atmosphere on their first meeting.

If the fear is so strong that it prevents you from functioning normally, it belongs to a professional. The club is training, not therapy — and it's fair to say that up front.

→ Find a club near you

You don't learn to listen by trying to listen more. You learn to listen by being given a task that requires you to process what you've heard and then talk about it. While you don't have to do anything with the content, your brain listens at half capacity and spends the other half preparing its own response.

It will help immediately:

• Listen with the aim of summarizing, not answering. It will change what you pay attention to.
• Leave two seconds of silence., when the other person finishes speaking. People often say the most important thing only then.
• Paraphrase. „"So you're talking about the deadline, not the scope?"“

In the club, listening is built into the roles. The evaluator has to listen so attentively for five to seven minutes of a speech that he can then talk for two to three minutes about specific moments — which sentence, which gesture, in which part. Impression is not enough. The language corrector monitors the language throughout the evening. And the attention guard asks the audience what was said in the speeches — so even if you don't have a role right now, you listen differently because you know that a question might come to you.

The roles rotate, so you'll regularly be in a role where you just listen — and that's exactly what you don't voluntarily choose in real life.

You improve your expression by saying the same thing in fewer words—not by learning rarer words. People who express themselves well usually do not use more complex words but shorter, clearer sentences.

Four shifts are in effect from day one:

• One thought in one sentence. The listener gets lost in the sentences.
• A verb instead of a description. „"We decided" instead of "a decision was made on our part.".
• No more fillers of the type "actually, as if, essentially".
• Beware of Anglicisms. They sound natural in a professional environment, but people outside of it often don't understand them.

The latter is a frequent comment here. One evaluator once wrote about Anglicisms in a speech that it "disturbed him as an evaluator.".

That's why we have the role of a language proofreader. He watches the language all evening — nice phrases as well as mistakes and unwritten expressions — and evaluates it at the end. You don't need a linguistics degree for that. You just need to pay attention.

A better speaker is not the one who knows more about public speaking. It's the one who has given more speeches and has really incorporated feedback. Books and theory are just preparation — practice makes you a speaker.

Four things matter:

• Frequency. If more than a month passes between performances, you start over every time.
• One goal per performance. He who trains everything at once trains nothing.
• Feedback from real audiences. Your own sense of performance is unreliable.
• Control from a distance. At your next performance, check to see if the reminder from last time has really improved.

And one thing that is fair to say up front: some things take years to fix. One of our members was repeatedly reprimanded for restless legs over the course of eight months. That doesn't mean nothing has changed — the wording has shifted from "nervous walking" to "rocking" to "stepping over." It's still the same bad habit, just getting smaller. Anyone expecting a quick jump will give up after the third speech.

That's why we've broken it down into steps. Pathways is a learning system with six paths, each with five levels. You choose a path based on what you want to develop, and in each project you work on one specific goal — body language, voice work, humor, structure. You go through the levels in order, so you don't skip the basics.

→ How exactly does the training work: the 4 pillars of Toastmasters