Are you upset that you seem to get white wash evaluations? When people fill out the comment slips, do they just write “Great Job” and then leave it at that? Does it bother you that you know you had flubs that no one called you on and worse, there are goof ups you didn’t catch that you’ll do again in your ignorance?

There’s an easy way to fix this. Ask for hard evaluations. I’m going to go so far as to tell my fellow club members to tear me apart for all my future speeches. I’m tempted to tell them I want to become a professional speaker and need their help - in the form of no holds barred feedback - to get to that level. I don’t want to be a professional speaker (not yet at least), but I’d like to have the rhetorical polish to be one someday if I wanted to. (Having something to say to justify being a pro is a much bigger problem for me!)

Whenever I tell people to go after me, they do. I’ve been told that if you give a speech and don’t get an evaluation, you might as well have given it to your car for all the good it’ll do you. I would change “an evaluation” to “a good evaluation,” since a bunch of “Great jobs” isn’t that helpful.

I don’t tell the audience at the beginning of my speech to throw hardballs at me, since that in some sense steps on the magic of the opening. I want my first words to hook the audience for the speech itself, not for the evaluation. So I ask the Toastmaster tell the club to give me a hard evaluation when I’m being introduced.

Incidentally if your club only gives white wash evaluations, it’s a good idea to push them in general to be more constructive.

Just be aware that if you have a delicate ego, you better get over it quickly if you want to know what people really think and improve. Toastmasters that just do the “Great Job” routine are not intellectual eunuchs, they’re being too nice.