Where are you from?

I was born in Pakistan.

Where do you live?

I live in Saudi Arabia.

What are your top 3 favorite activities?

My favorite activities are playing tennis, cricket and walking.

What brought you to Toastmasters?

I want to improve my public speaking skills.

Why Buddies?

I heard that Toastmasters club is the best place to improve public speaking skills. I googled online toastmasters club and selected Buddies because of its convenient timing. I found it better than my expectation because of professional meeting environment and nice and helpful buddies.

How much have you grown since your first Toastmaster meeting?

I have gain some confidence since I joined the club. I learned from the feedback about my weaknesses which I need to work on.

How is Toastmasters helping you in life?

It is a practice environment and people are from diverse backgrounds who are helping each other to improve and learn. This learning through teamwork is very helpful.

Who are your top 3 favorite speakers?

• Steve Jobs
• Martin Luther King
• Barack Obama

What’s your top 3 favorite speeches?

I like all speeches of Steve Jobs. I am listing four favourite speeches below.

What kind of communicator and leader do you want to become?

I want to learn all style. However persuasive style is my favorite.

Where do you think you can go with Toastmasters in 12 months ahead?

I think I will be significantly better speaker in 12 months time.

I’ve been wanting to create some good habits and ditch the bad ones as I looked back on the past year and realized how many of the bad ones I still struggled to detach from for years.

I just finished reading a great book on habits and am now thinking about how to build habits around improving as a speaker and leader. Although the book touches on a variety of examples around athletic training, specially olympians, whose lives are devoted to master very specific skills with the goal of reaching their peak performance. It wasn’t hard to imagine how to apply it on communication and leadership, something that I’ve been pursuing more purposefully for about 2 years now.

The book goes in much more detail about habits that I can ever share here in this tiny post, but the main one that stuck out to me the most is the four laws for building of breaking habits:

If the sound of that interests you, I recommend you check out the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, and dive deeper into it.

When it comes to communication and leadership, specially Toastmasters and the places we might be focusing on implementing it. It can be easy for some people to aim for harder to build habits because they sound really good, though it doesn’t take long to start missing a day or two, as life unfolds and other things get our attention.

If I were to align the laws of good habit creation with Toastmasters, I’d say online meetings are the most obvious way it can get when it comes to honing your public speaking and leadership skills. Attractiveness can be based on the kind of people who are part of the same club that you aspire to be. Where if you join those meetings, you’ll more likely keep learning from those great inspiring and amazing speakers. Then, even if sometimes you don’t have the “perfect” speech prepared, you can still and should make the act of joining just for the sake of speaking on easier situations, even if it’s taking a smaller role that maybe you think it’s not as hard to you anymore, say the Timer or volunteering to answer a quick Table Topics question. As for making it satisfying, try to have as much fun with yourself as you can. There’s no right or wrong, good or bad when you’re in such a supportive and friendly environment as Toastmasters. Maybe you can tell yourself that you’ll go for a nice meal right after the meeting is over, or pull someone to the side and chat more about your goals and their goals, so you can keep learning from each other and building a stronger connection with your buddies and so on 🙂

These are just some quick examples I explored while sitting down to write this post, though I’m sure there are countless ways you can make the habit of joining your next club meeting without dreading it, and yet, even if you do. As the book teaches, we should go for it anyways because when building good habits, it’s important to suck up the “bad” or “boring” days and do it anyways, because the moment you stop doing something, it’s no longer a habit.

Interviewer Note: Hasitha is a member full of will and makes sure to get a chance to speak whenever he joins our weekly meetings. It’s great to get to know him more and get a sense of where he’s at on his journey and later on look back to see how far he was able to grow as a communicator and leader. I’m grateful to see Hasitha supporting our club as a member and can’t wait to hear more from his next speeches.

Where are you from?

Sri Lanka

Where do you live?

Sri Lanka

What are your top 3 favorite activities?

Playing Cricket, Reading books, Traveling

What brought you to Toastmasters?

fear of speaking

Why Buddies?

Friendly and helpful members on the club

How much have you grown since your first Toastmaster meeting?

50%

How is Toastmasters helping you in life?

office meeting its very helpful

Who are your top 3 favorite speakers?

• Peter D’Almeida

• Dananjaya Hettiarachchi

• Jack Ma

What’s your top 3 favorite speeches?

• An Ounce of Consciousness Is Worth a Ton of Creativity

• Dananjaya Hettiarachchi World Champion of Public Speaking 2014 – Full Speech

• GREATEST SUCCESS STORY

What kind of communicator and leader do you want to become?

CEO of my current company

Where do you think you can go with Toastmasters in 12 months ahead?

yes