I was listenting to an audiobook called "100 Ways to Motivate Yourself" recently. I could directly connect two thoughts about fear and imagination from there to the public speaking experience for the beginner.

Fear - a lot of people go to Toastmasters to overcome their fear of public speaking. And they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do - facing their fear. This is the only way to overcome it. But I wonder how many other people there are out there in the world whose fear is so great that it even prevents them from joining a club like Toastmasters? To them I will reword what I learned from the book:

Fear is worse than death. It kills us many times, slowly and painfully. Death, kills us only once and we usually don't even know it when it. So face your fear and eradicate it from your system.

Imagination - every human being has an amazing potential power of imagination. Our right brain hemisphere can do miracles when it comes to ideas and visions. When we were kids we were very creative and using our imagination on an every day basis. I am sure everone of us can think of what games were played and how we thought then when we didn't have problems. Exactly these problems that we as grownups make have put our imagination into deep sleep. All we use it for is imagine all kinds of situations that may or may not happen.

Most adults use their imagination in only one way - to worry.

To bring this to the light of Toastmasters - we can use our imagination to write our speech. We can use it to interact with people; we can use it so much, so that we don't leave it any time to create worries and finally unlearn to worry.