 In this video, I'm going to do a deep dive into the Toastmasters Pathways Education Program. If you are new to Toastmasters or unsure about pathways, then this video is for you. Let's get started. First, a quick word on Toastmasters. Toastmasters is a non-profit organization started by Dr. Ralph Smedley more than 90 years ago. The core mission of Toastmasters is to build communication and leadership skills. You do this by joining a club currently available in more than 145 countries. You can find detailed information of Toastmasters and clubs around your area at www.toastmasters.org. To achieve its mission, Toastmasters uses an education program called Pathways. Joining a path requires a member to demonstrate good communication and leadership skills, such as taking up a leadership role in the organization or completing a task that requires teamwork and leadership skills. Let's assume you have just joined Toastmasters and the question on your mind is what next? Let me explain. To make it easy to navigate this video, I have created timestamps for each chapter. Feel free to jump to a specific chapter that is of interest to you. Once you join a club and your membership is confirmed, you will receive a welcome message from Toastmasters International welcoming you to the organization. The first thing you need to do is to create your Toastmasters profile and you do that by clicking on the login button. Since this is your first time, there is no password set for your account. So click on the Forgot Password link. I know you have not really forgotten your password since you have not created it in the first place but that's the way the website operates for first time profile creation. Enter the email that you give while registering as a member and click the submit button. Next, head over to your email inbox and you will have an email from Toastmasters International for password reset. Click on it and click the link to reset your password. Give your new password. You'll have to confirm the password to make sure it is correct and hit the submit button. You are now a member of Toastmasters International and you can commence your pathways journey. Now that we have created a Toastmaster profile, let's make sure it is correct. Click on your name and this will take you to your profile page. You may want to start by setting up a profile picture so that your club members get to know who you are. To do that, click on the camera icon and choose a file from your computer. Once you have selected the photo that you like, click set as profile photo and your profile photo is set. You can also check your contact information and privacy settings by clicking on this button. If there are any mistakes in your address or your contact information, you can correct it here. You can also check your privacy settings by clicking on the privacy settings and consent and review the various settings that are available for you. For example, if you do not want to be contacted by phone, you can click on no and save the privacy settings. When you're done, click the close button. The next step is to select a path. If we click on pathways and select learn more and click on paths and projects, we can see that as of now, Toastmasters offers 11 distinct paths and you can choose a path based on your personal objectives. Everyone joins Toastmasters for different reasons and you can select a path that aligns with your goals. If you click on the path, for example, dynamic leadership, it will give you an overview of what that path will accomplish for you. There are two ways you can select the path that is right for you. One is to talk to your club members, especially your vice president education, who can assess your needs and tell you what might be the right path for you. The second is to take the assessment offered by Toastmasters International where you answer a series of questions and based on your responses, Toastmasters International will recommend what it thinks might be the right path for you. If you want to take the assessment and I highly recommend that you do it, click on pathways and click choose a path. Next click on the continue to path selection. Don't worry about the $20. If you are a new member, your first path is free. After you complete your first path and you want to pursue additional paths, that's where you have to pay the $20. For now, let's click on path selection. Next choose your language. Pathways is offered in multiple languages and you can choose the right language from the drop down list and your language selection will depend upon your club and the country that you live in. For now, let's go with English. Next choose whether you want to access pathways digitally by selecting digital resources or if you want manuals to be mailed to you. This tutorial is focused on the digital version of pathways because that offers the most flexibility in terms of accessing your pathways material. Next click on the take assessment button and click the continue button and start your assessment. Choose the language for your assessment and click the start button. You will be asked a series of questions. Try to answer them as honestly as possible. For example, select three topics that you are interested in. You might be interested in public speaking, motivating others, leadership. If these are your three choices, click next. From the three choices, you will be asked which is the most important to you. Let's say leadership is the most important to me. Click next and continue answering all the questions as honestly as possible. So let me speed it up. Based on the answers that you gave, you will be given three recommended parts. But you can of course choose any of the 11 parts that are available to you. The top recommendation is innovative planning. And if I want to go ahead with it, I will select innovative planning and scroll down and click continue. Select continue once more to confirm your choice. If you are a new member, you don't have to pay anything. But if you are selecting an additional path, then of course you have to pay the $20. All you have to do now is complete the checkout process and the path will be assigned to your profile. Now that you have selected the path that is right for you, the next step is to start working on your projects. There are two ways you can access your curriculum. The first is to go from your profile. And in this section where it says go to base camp, click the go button. The second way is to click on the pathways link and click go to base camp. Both achieve the same objective. From here, we will click on go to base camp. This is your dashboard for pathways. From here, you can access your paths that you have selected. You can also download evaluation forms and we'll get back to that. And there are lots of tutorials and resources that I highly recommend that you go through, including videos. On the right hand side, you can see all the feedback that you have given to others and the feedback others have given to you. You also receive badges when you complete levels within pathways. Also badges can be given to you by other club members. And finally, you have a section called my documents. This allows you to store all your pathways related documents in one place in base camp. Think of it as a Google Drive for pathways. We have seen the features available in a pathways dashboard. It's now time to start working on our projects and to do that, click on paths and learning. This will take us to our educational transcript and it will list all the paths that are assigned to you. In your case, you should see only one path that you have selected in the previous step. And what you need to do is click on the open curriculum button. Each path is made up of five levels and the levels increase in complexity as you move from level one to level five. As a new member, you will start with level one and level one is made up of three projects. Icebreaker, Evaluation and feedback and research and presentation. Invariably, you will start with an icebreaker project. To learn the details of the icebreaker project, what you need to do is click on the activate button and this will activate the project in your base camp. Once the project is activated, the button changes from activate to launch. Now we can launch the project. This will open up the online resource for the icebreaker project. To navigate through the resource, you start by clicking on the begin button. This page explains to you how to navigate through this project. The left and right arrows allow you to move from one page to the next. For example, if I want to go to the next page, I can click this arrow. Once you complete reading the page, go to the next page and so on. Your project usually includes a checklist. And to access the checklist, you can click on the hyperlink here. And this will open a checklist for you to review, to plan and prepare your project. For example, for the icebreaker project, you need to deliver a speech that is four to six minutes in length. To achieve that, you first need to schedule a speech with your vice president education. Once your speech is scheduled, you need to write your speech. You need to rehearse your speech and finally deliver the speech in front of your club members. Once you have delivered your speech, you will come to base camp and you will mark the project as completed. As you progress through this resource, you will be asked to do a self assessment before delivering your speech. To complete the assessment, you will rate yourself between one to five, where one indicates you are just starting out and five indicates you are an expert. For example, the question here is, how do I assess myself and I'm speaking in front of groups? Let's say I'm good, but not exemplary. So I will rate myself as three. Make sure you don't click the forward arrow because that will take you to the next page. What you need to do is you need to click on the next button to answer the next question. Rate yourself on your understanding of a structure of a basic speech. For example, if I understand that a speech has opening, body and closing, let's say I rate myself four. Continue answering all the questions and when you reach the end, you will see the submit button. When you click the submit button, you have done your assessment before delivering your project. Move to the next page. Some pages might contain videos, additional worksheets for you to plan and deliver your speech, tips and techniques to deliver an effective speech. And finally, you will reach the section called your evaluation. This is where you will stop. You have now understood your speech objective. You have scheduled a speech with your club. And finally, you will download this evaluation resource. You will send this evaluation form to your evaluator who will be assigned by the club to review your speech and to give you feedback to improve your speech. Now it's up to you to write your speech, to polish it, practice it and finally deliver it in front of your club members. Make sure you deliver your speech within the time allotted for you. For example, for the icebreaker, the minimum time is four minutes and the maximum time is six minutes. If you face any difficulties in preparing or delivering your speech, reach out to mentors. Mentors are senior members who can guide and support you. Your vice president education should assign a mentor to you when you join the club. Make sure that you constantly keep in touch with your mentor during this preparation and delivery of your speech. All the best in delivering an excellent speech in front of your club members. You can now log out of Basecamp and focus on your speech. When you reach this page, assess your skills after. Do not complete this section until and unless you have delivered your speech in front of the club members. You can close the page. You will revisit icebreaker after your speech delivery. Great. You have just delivered your icebreaker in front of the club members and you receive this evaluation form from your evaluator. What's the next step? The next step is to go back to your Basecamp, go to icebreaker and you will be taken straight to the point where you had last left this project, which was assess your skills after. Now that you have delivered your speech, you can do a self assessment of where you stand based on the evaluation that you received from your evaluator and also from the club members. Let's say I am now more confident while speaking in front of the group. So I will assign a rating of four. Please understand that whatever ratings you give here are your own assessment. It does not impact whether you give one or five. You have still completed your project. In Toastmasters, there are no exams. It's not a pass or fail program. It is what you believe you have achieved out of this program. Click the next button and assess your next competency, basic structure of the speech. Let's say I will give myself a four here and so forth. It is at this point if you click on the submit button that this project will be marked as completed. That's all there is to it. Once you click the submit button, you can see your assessment before giving the speech and after giving the speech. This self assessment is helpful for you to understand how you are progressing in Toastmasters. Once you click on the X button and you move forward, you have completed the project. Every project goes through the same process. You go to base camp, you read on the project, you take the evaluation resource and you go to your club and deliver the project. You come back to base camp and you complete the assessment and mark the project as completed. In your base camp, we can now see that we have completed five percent of the path. It's now time to tackle the next project. One optional step that you may like to do is to save your evaluation forms that you received from your evaluator in base camp. It's not mandatory, but it's always a good idea to save them in base camp for future reference. One thing to note is that any documents that you save in base camp are accessible only to you and to nobody else. To save the evaluation in your base camp, go to documents and you have this predefined folders level one to level five and another additional folder called my documents. Let's say I'm going to save my icebreaker evaluation, which is level one, click level one. I already have some documents saved to add a new document, click on add file. Select the file from your computer and click add and the evaluation form is now saved in base camp for future reference. Once you complete the rest of the projects in level one, you will get an option to mark the level as completed. Currently not available. It will go to your vice president education for verification. Once the VP education marks the level as completed, you will earn an education award in Toastmasters. You can then progress to level two, level three, level four and finally level five to complete your path. The projects that you will do depend on the path that you have selected. Some of the projects like the icebreaker require you to give a speech in front of club members while other projects might require you to do a task such as taking up a role or doing some other activity that involves teamwork, leadership, conflict resolution, etc. All of the projects are carefully chosen to achieve the objective of the path that you have selected and ultimately to build your communication skills and most importantly your leadership skills. All the best in your Toastmaster journey. One final item I want to cover is the speech evaluations. Part of your Toastmaster journey is not only to receive feedback to improve yourself, but to provide feedback to others so that they too can improve and enhance their Toastmaster journey. Once you have completed a few projects, you will be asked to volunteer to become a speech evaluator for other speakers. Ideally, the speaker should send the evaluation form to you. But in case he or she forgets, you can always access all the evaluation forms of the entire Pathways program by clicking on the speech evaluation section. Scroll down and identify the project that the speaker is delivering. For example, let's say a member is delivering a speech on effective body language and asked you to provide the evaluation. You can click on this link. Next, click on the request button and click the launch button and this will open up the evaluation form for body language. You can fill this form electronically and once completed, send it to the speaker via email or any other messaging platform. And that is an overview of the Toastmasters Pathways program. I hope you enjoy the program and I wish you all the best in your communication and leadership journey in Toastmasters.