Toastmasters’ most prestigious award is the Golden Gavel. It has been presented annually since 1959 to an individual distinguished in the fields of communication and leadership. There is a press release on February 20, 2025 titled Toastmasters International announces Matt Abrahams as its 2025 Golden Gavel recipient. He will accept the award and speak at the 2025 International Convention in Philadelphia on August 22nd. Matt is a lecturer in organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Matt has authored two books. One from 2012 is Speaking Up without Freaking Out – 50 techniques for confident * calm * competent presenting. There was a second edition in 2014 and third edition in 2016. The other from 2023 is titled Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to speak successfully when you’re put on the spot.
There are five articles by Matt in Toastmaster magazine that can be read on their web site. One from August 2016 on pages 14 and 15 is titled Be Confident When Called On. A second from January 2019 on page 19 is titled Consider Questions: A Speaker’s Best Tool. A third from September 2019 on page 14 is titled What Broccoli Taught Me About Influencing Others. A fourth from September 2023 on pages 24 and 25 is titled Improve Your Impromptu Speaking. A fifth from August 2024 on pages 12 and 13 is titled An Introduction to Masterful Introductions.
There also is a 16-minute TEDx talk from Spring 2015 titled Think Fast. Talk Smart | Matt Abrahams | TEDxMontaVistaHighSchool. Another 14-minuteTEDx talk from June 7, 2018 is titled Speaking Up Without Freaking Out | Matt Abrahams | TEDxPaloAlto. And a 45-minute lecture at Stanford Alumni on November 15, 2023 is titled Think Faster, Talk Smarter with Matt Abrahams.
Matt has a web site titled Think Fast Talk Smart. But you cannot take everything he says as true. For example, page 2 in my second edition of Speaking Up without Freaking Out incorrectly claims (as does the home page for his web site):
“Presenting in public, even when a speaker is prepared and practiced, can lead to dramatic and traumatic outcomes. For this reason, The Book of Lists has repeatedly reported that the fear of speaking in public is the most frequent answer to the question, ‘What scares you most?’ “
Fear of speaking only appeared once, in the 1977 edition of The Book of Lists.
Also, on September 29, 2020 I blogged about A quantified version of a discredited Mark Twain quotation about fear of public speaking. And on March 21, 2024 I blogged about how The BBC radio program More or Less fumbled in answering whether public speaking really is our greatest fear (for the U.S. it is not)
The golden gavel cartoon came from Wikimedia Commons.
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