Is Toastmasters Good for Social Skills? Honest Comparison From a Coach

A couple of weeks ago I was on a sales call with a guy named Bill out in Minneapolis. Great guy. Sharp, a little nervous, had been trying to get better at conversation for most of his adult life. About fifteen minutes in I asked him the question I ask almost everyone on a discovery call: “have you ever practiced anything like Toastmasters or improv?”

He lit up. Turned out he’d done both. A short Toastmasters run a year before COVID. Some acting exercises at the Guthrie Theater in downtown Minneapolis. He’d done the work. He’d stood up in front of rooms. He’d given a best man speech he was actually proud of.

And he still felt stuck in one-on-one conversation.

That’s the thing that gets missed in almost every article asking whether Toastmasters is good for social skills. Toastmasters is a real organization with a real track record, and it does something real. The problem is that the thing it does well isn’t always the thing people are actually trying to fix. When someone says “I want to get better at social skills,” they usually don’t mean “I want to give better speeches.” They mean they want to talk to strangers without freezing up. They want to flirt. They want to make friends as an adult. They want to stop dreading the small talk before a meeting starts.

I’ve been coaching social skills full-time for over ten years now at Jaunty. Somewhere north of 10,000 students have gone through our programs. I’ve taught 217 of our live classes personally and been part of more than 40 sales calls in the last few months alone, which means I talk to people about this exact question (Toastmasters, improv, therapy, books, apps) constantly. So I want to give you the honest answer. Not a marketing answer. Not a hit piece on Toastmasters, which I have a lot of respect for. The actual, this-is-what-I-tell-my-students answer.

The 30-second answer

If your goal is public speaking, prepared speeches, or leadership presence, go do Toastmasters. It’s been around since 1924, it costs almost nothing, and the structured evaluator system works. That’s not up for debate.

If your goal is everyday conversation, making friends, dating, flirting, reading people, or getting your social anxiety down, Toastmasters isn’t built for that. You’ll get some indirect confidence benefit. But you won’t get the specific reps you actually need, and you’ll spend most of each meeting sitting and listening while other people practice.

Different tool. Different job. And the honest truth is that for most people who type “how do I improve my social skills” into Google at 11pm on a Tuesday, it’s the second job they’re trying to do, not the first.

What Toastmasters is actually good at

I want to be fair here because I think Toastmasters gets a bad rap in online advice threads, and it doesn’t deserve it. Let me steelman it.

Toastmasters International is a nonprofit that’s been running peer-coaching meetings for public speakers for over a hundred years. There are something like 14,000 clubs in over 140 countries. You can find a meeting almost anywhere. You show up, you get assigned roles, you deliver short prepared speeches, and you get evaluated by another member. Over time you work through a structured curriculum called Pathways that takes you from basic speeches to advanced communication.

Here’s what it’s actually great at:

Getting over the fear of speaking in front of a group. If you’re the person who freezes when you have to give a toast at a wedding, a quarterly update at work, or a best man speech, Toastmasters will absolutely help. The repeated exposure to standing up and delivering prepared content works. Bill, the guy I mentioned up top, gave a better best man speech than he ever thought he could because he’d done the reps.

Structured feedback on prepared content. The evaluator model is solid. You speak, someone in the room gives you a structured critique, and you adjust for next time. It’s one of the few places you can get feedback from peers without it feeling weird.

Leadership and meeting-running skills. Toastmasters rotates roles, things like timer, grammarian, Table Topics master, so you end up practicing a bunch of adjacent meeting-facilitation skills over time. If your career involves leading meetings or presentations, that muscle pays off in real life.

Low cost and community. Dues run roughly $60-$90 a year. You show up in person, you meet people in your city, you build a weekly rhythm. The community aspect matters. It’s one of the reasons it’s lasted a hundred years.

If those four things describe what you’re trying to fix, go sign up. I’m not kidding. You can find a local club at toastmasters.org in about two minutes, and it’ll cost you less per year than what most people spend on a single therapy session. I’ve had students who did both Jaunty and Toastmasters and got different things from each. That’s fine. Different tools.

Where Toastmasters runs out of gas for “social skills”

Here’s where I’ve watched smart, motivated people show up to Jaunty after a year or two of Toastmasters wondering why they still can’t sustain a conversation at a party.

The short version: Toastmasters trains the wrong muscle for the job most people are actually trying to do.

You spend most of a meeting sitting and listening

A typical Toastmasters meeting is an hour to ninety minutes. Three prepared speeches, a few short impromptu responses during Table Topics, evaluations, and some housekeeping. If you’re not one of the scheduled speakers, you might get up once, for 60 to 90 seconds, during Table Topics. That’s it. The rest of the time, you’re in a chair watching other people practice.

I pointed this out to a prospect named Louis on a call a few weeks ago. He’d done Toastmasters. He was considering our six-week cohort. And I told him, look, I love what Toastmasters does, but with them you have to sit around and listen to a lot of people. What we do is live-time practice with feedback. We break into small groups and run reps back-to-back like a karate dojo.

At Jaunty, a student in one of our live 30-minute classes is actively practicing, speaking, listening, responding, for something like 50% of the class. Not watching. Doing. That’s the first structural difference, and it matters a lot if your goal is conversational fluidity.

Prepared speeches are a different skill than real conversation

Think about how a prepared speech works. You plan it. You write it. You maybe rehearse it. You stand up and deliver it, mostly in one direction, to an audience that’s mostly quiet.

Now think about how a conversation at a dinner party works. Someone says something unexpected. You have about one second to decide how to respond. They interrupt you. You get sidetracked. Someone new joins in. The topic shifts. You need to read the room. You need to match energy. You need to know when to be funny and when to shut up. None of that is in a prepared speech.

It’s like, okay, here’s an analogy I use in class. Public speaking is like playing the same song every night for a year. Conversation is like being a jazz player who has to sit in with a band you’ve never met and riff in a key they just changed to. Both are music. But the second one is a completely different muscle.

Toastmasters trains the first. We specifically train the second.

The feedback model is post-speech, not real-time

In Toastmasters you speak, then someone evaluates you afterward. At Jaunty, when we’re running a conversational exercise in a breakout room, a coach is watching in real time and stepping in during the conversation to adjust what you’re doing. “Slow down.” “Try that again with eye contact.” “Good notice, now try it without the hedge word.” You get the note in the moment, you try again thirty seconds later, and the correction sticks.

There’s a reason we structure it this way. Conversational muscles don’t get built from remembering feedback ten minutes after the fact. They get built from making a micro-adjustment mid-conversation and feeling the difference immediately. It’s the same reason a tennis coach doesn’t wait until the end of a match to tell you your grip is off. They fix it on the next swing.

Dating, flirting, and making friends aren’t on the curriculum

This is the big one. Look at Toastmasters’ Pathways curriculum. It’s organized around public speaking competencies like persuasive speaking, storytelling, leadership, visionary communication. All great. None of it is about flirting, reading romantic interest, making a new friend at a dog park, threading a conversation with a stranger on a plane, or navigating a first date.

When we looked at 43,000+ responses from people who took our intake quiz, the top goals were: meeting people (66%), dating and romance (64%), approaching groups (52%), managing social anxiety (51%), flirting (50%). Flirting was the number one self-identified weakness, at 2.22 out of 5. Those are the things people actually want to get better at. And almost none of it overlaps with what Toastmasters teaches.

Social anxiety is handled as a side effect, not a design goal

Toastmasters can absolutely help reduce the fear of speaking in front of a group. But 72% of the people who come to Jaunty have moderate-to-high social anxiety scored on our intake. Nearly one in three has it “all the time.” For those people, the specific fears (will I say the wrong thing, will there be a silence, will they think I’m weird) aren’t about speaking to a group. They’re about the one-on-one stuff. The weekend plans question. The new coworker. The stranger on the bus.

Toastmasters helps with stage fright. It doesn’t directly address conversational anxiety, and in some cases the performance-in-front-of-a-group framing actually makes conversational anxiety worse, because people start to think of every interaction as a speech they’re about to flub.

Side-by-side: Toastmasters vs Jaunty

Since you’re probably going to skim this part either way, here’s the honest comparison laid out:

Notice I’m not saying one is universally better. I’m saying they train different things. If you picked up this article hoping I’d trash Toastmasters, sorry. I’m not going to. It’s a good organization that’s helped a lot of people with the thing it’s designed to help with.

When Toastmasters is actually the right call

I get asked this on sales calls all the time, so let me just be direct. These are the three situations where I’ll literally tell a prospect “don’t buy Jaunty, go do Toastmasters”:

1. You need to deliver a specific speech or presentation, soon. Wedding toast in two months. Quarterly earnings presentation. Keynote at a conference. The reps Toastmasters gives you for prepared delivery are better than anything we do, because we’re not focused on that.

2. Your career requires regular public speaking or meeting leadership. If you’re a sales leader, a manager running standups, a consultant pitching clients, the muscle Toastmasters builds is directly relevant to your job. That’s what it’s built for.

3. You want in-person community in your specific city on a low budget. Toastmasters is geographically distributed in a way almost nothing else is. If you value walking into a room full of real humans every week and you don’t want to spend real money, the value is hard to beat.

For any of those, Toastmasters is probably the right move. I mean it.

When Jaunty is the better fit

Here’s the other side. These are the scenarios where people come to me after trying Toastmasters (or books, or therapy, or Reddit) and it clicks for the first time:

1. You can handle a presentation but freeze in one-on-one conversation. This is the most common pattern I see. Marcus, a software engineer who came through our program, told me he could deliver a technical talk to fifty engineers but couldn’t get through small talk with a new coworker without his brain short-circuiting. He practiced live one-on-one rounds with us for six weeks and said the last week of class was the first time in his adult life where he wasn’t running a script in his head during real conversation.

2. Your goal is dating, flirting, or romance. Scott, one of our Wednesday flirt class regulars, joked after his program that he felt like an “eye contact Jedi Knight” from all the practice reps we did. He wasn’t practicing speeches. He was practicing the micro-skills of holding someone’s gaze, reading interest signals, and using playful push-pull tension in conversation. Those aren’t on a Toastmasters curriculum sheet.

3. You want to make real adult friendships. Adrian came through our program and described the shift as “conversational agility, body language, and touch.” What he was really talking about was the ability to connect with strangers in coffee shops and bookstores. Within a few weeks of finishing his cohort he was getting invited to parties by people he’d just met. That’s a different skill than standing at a podium.

4. You have moderate-to-high social anxiety and the idea of prepared speeches sounds worse, not better. Some people hear “Toastmasters” and their anxiety immediately spikes because the structure is “stand up and be evaluated.” For anxious folks, the Jaunty model (a 30-minute online class from your living room, small breakout rooms, no stage, no audience) is a gentler on-ramp. You’re not being watched by a room. You’re practicing with one other person while a coach gives notes.

5. You want to learn humor, empathy, storytelling, and threading. The full conversational toolkit. We teach humor as a specific skill. Same with empathy. Same with what we call “threading,” which is the art of picking up a thread the other person dropped and carrying it forward. These are concrete techniques with concrete drills. They don’t exist as a curriculum inside Toastmasters.

What we actually borrowed from Toastmasters (and improv)

Here’s the part most comparison articles miss, and I think it matters. We didn’t build Jaunty in opposition to Toastmasters. We built it by taking the things Toastmasters and improv both do well and repurposing them for conversational skill.

From Toastmasters we took: the idea of structured, repeatable practice in a community setting. The idea that feedback from peers is more useful than feedback from a book. The rotating-roles idea, which we adapted into breakout-room partner rotations. The belief that showing up weekly over months is how you actually change.

From improv we took: Yes-And as a baseline rule in conversational exercises. Status work, which is underrated. The idea of agreement and heightening. Stage presence, applied to a coffee-shop approach. The acting muscle of being fully present to another person, not just running your lines.

What we added: conversational-specific drills that neither discipline teaches. Threading. Push-pull. Body language as a trainable curriculum. Flirting mechanics. Humor across seven specific types. Empathy as a skill, not a trait. Live coaching during the roleplay rather than after. Small breakout rooms so every student speaks more than they listen.

If Toastmasters is a public-speaking gym, Jaunty is closer to (and I’ve used this analogy on probably a hundred sales calls) a karate dojo for conversation. You show up, you bow in, you run drills, someone adjusts your form mid-rep, you bow out, you come back next week.

The bigger problem both Toastmasters and Jaunty solve better than books

I want to zoom out for a second. Because the real enemy of getting better at social skills isn’t Toastmasters versus Jaunty. It’s the massive percentage of adults who buy a book on conversation, read it, and think they’ve done the work.

It’s like watching a tennis video and thinking you’ll get better at tennis. You won’t. You have to hit the ball.

There’s a reason passive learning doesn’t transfer to social skills. Social skills live in your nervous system, not your frontal lobe. You can read about active listening all day. You can memorize the four types of humor. You can underline every sentence in “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” And the moment someone actually asks you a curveball question at a dinner party, your body will do whatever your body has been trained to do. And if the training is “read books about it,” your body is going to freeze, because reading is not training.

Toastmasters gets this. Jaunty gets this. That’s why both of them beat books. The research on procedural skill acquisition is pretty consistent. You build skill through repetition with feedback, not through information intake. So if you’re trying to decide between Toastmasters and Jaunty and a self-help book, both Toastmasters and Jaunty are going to win that matchup. The question is which one matches the job you’re actually trying to do.

What about therapy or a social skills group?

A quick note because I get this question a lot. Therapy is excellent for understanding why you’re avoiding social situations. A good therapist can help you unpack a lot. But most therapists don’t train social skills directly. They’ll help you see the pattern. They won’t usually run you through thirty back-to-back roleplay reps. That’s not their job.

Social skills groups (like what Ellen Hendriksen or some ACT-focused therapists run) are closer to what we do, but they’re typically smaller, less structured, and focused more heavily on anxiety than on skill-building. If you can find one in your city, it might be a good complement. It’s not a replacement.

A common stack I see working: therapy for the emotional layer, plus Jaunty for the skill layer, plus a Toastmasters club if public speaking is also on the list. Those three stack well because they’re not doing the same job.

The common mistake: picking the tool before you know the job

Almost every time someone messages me about this, they’ve already picked a tool. “Should I do Toastmasters?” “Is improv good for social skills?” “Do I need a conversation class?” I get it. It’s human to want the answer to be “this one thing will fix it.”

The better question is: what specifically do you want to be different in six months? Be concrete. “I want to be able to flirt with a stranger at a bookstore.” “I want to get through a work happy hour without counting minutes.” “I want to actually enjoy dinner parties instead of hiding in the kitchen.” “I want to give a best man speech that doesn’t make me want to die.”

The last one is Toastmasters. The first three are Jaunty. Pick the tool that was designed for the job you’re actually trying to do, and you’ll make more progress in a month than you did in a year of reading about it.

Who Jaunty isn’t for

I should be honest about this part too, because I’ve been on enough sales calls to know when someone’s a fit and when they aren’t.

Don’t join Jaunty if your main goal is prepared public speaking. Go do Toastmasters, like I said earlier. We’re not going to teach you to deliver a keynote.

Don’t join Jaunty if you want a one-and-done weekend intensive. We’re built around weekly live reps over months, not a single seminar. If you want a crash course that promises to fix everything in a weekend, there are people who sell that. I’m not one of them.

Don’t join Jaunty if you can’t or won’t show up live. Passive video content isn’t how our programs work. The value is in the live practice with other students and a coach. If your schedule makes it hard to attend live classes consistently, you’ll get less out of it than you paid for.

Don’t join Jaunty if you’re in acute mental health crisis or dealing with trauma that hasn’t been worked on in therapy. Skill practice doesn’t replace therapy and can sometimes surface things that a therapist is better equipped to handle. Do that work first or alongside.

Frequently asked questions

Is Toastmasters good for social anxiety?

It’s good for public speaking anxiety. For conversational social anxiety, the kind that shows up at parties, on dates, or at work happy hours, it helps indirectly but isn’t designed for it. If your anxiety is mostly about speaking in front of groups, Toastmasters is a solid choice. If it’s about one-on-one conversation, small talk, or dating, a live online social skills program like Jaunty will match the problem more directly.

Can Toastmasters help you make friends?

Sometimes, as a side effect of showing up to the same local club every week. You’ll meet people. Whether the skill of adult friendship gets trained is a different question. The format is a meeting with scheduled roles, not a conversation that builds intimacy. Some people do make real friends at their clubs. Most of our students who tried Toastmasters told me they met acquaintances there but didn’t learn the underlying skill of turning new people into friends. That’s something we specifically teach (the progression from stranger to acquaintance to friend) in our curriculum.

What’s a good alternative to Toastmasters for introverts?

Live online social skills training like Jaunty tends to work better for introverts for three reasons. First, you’re practicing from your own home. No commute, no crowded room. Second, the 30-minute class format is shorter than a Toastmasters meeting, which tends to run 60-90 minutes. Third, you spend most of your class in small breakout rooms of two to four people, not in front of a crowd. Introverts typically do better in small groups where the stakes feel lower.

How much does Toastmasters cost compared to Jaunty?

Toastmasters is roughly $60-90 per year in dues, plus a one-time new member fee. Jaunty’s entry-level membership, the Jaunty Gym, is $39/month with a 7-day free trial. The All-Access tier with the flirting and dating track is $89/month. The six-week Live Cohort Masterclass is a one-time $1,596 investment (or four payments of $399). So Toastmasters is cheaper per year. The trade-off is what you’re getting per hour of active practice, which is structurally different.

Is Toastmasters good for dating or flirting?

No, and this isn’t a criticism. It’s just not what Toastmasters is designed for. The curriculum is public-speaking and leadership competencies. There’s no dating or flirting content. If dating and flirting are your goals, you’re better off with a program that specifically teaches those as skills. For that, look at our guide to flirting with confidence or our dedicated Jaunty Gym All-Access track, which includes weekly flirt practice.

Can you actually learn social skills online?

Yes, if the format is live and interactive. Passive video courses don’t work for social skills, because social skills require live reps with live partners. But a live online class with breakout rooms, real-time coaching, and a consistent cohort of practice partners works well for most people, and for some it works better than in-person because the smaller group format lowers the stakes. Almost 92% of our incoming students say they’re comfortable on Zoom. We’ve run this format for years with thousands of students and the results are consistent with in-person training.

What’s the best place to learn social skills as an adult?

It depends on which social skill you’re trying to learn. For public speaking: Toastmasters. For improv, timing, and thinking on your feet: a local improv class (UCB, Second City, and The Pit all have adult beginner tracks). For conversation, flirting, making friends, and social anxiety: a live social skills practice program like Jaunty. For understanding why you avoid social situations: a therapist who specializes in anxiety or ACT. For most adults who describe themselves as “wanting to get better socially,” the third option is the one that maps closest to what they actually mean.

How long until I see results?

Most of our students notice something different in the first two to three weeks. Not “my whole life is fixed,” more like, I went to a work event and didn’t panic, or I had a normal conversation with someone on the subway, or I approached someone at a coffee shop for the first time. The bigger shifts (feeling confident in groups, comfortable on dates, able to make new friends as an adult) usually show up between month two and month six, depending on how often you show up to practice. Same is true for Toastmasters. The people who get the most out of it are the ones who go every week for a year or more. Both tools reward consistency. Neither is a weekend fix.

The bottom line

Toastmasters is a great organization. It’s helped millions of people get more comfortable standing up in front of a room. If public speaking, prepared content, and leadership presence are what you actually want to get better at, go join a club this week. Don’t overthink it.

But if you’re like most people who search “how do I improve my social skills,” meaning you want to get better at conversation, flirting, making friends, reading rooms, or handling social anxiety in your everyday life, Toastmasters isn’t built for that job. You’ll get some indirect benefit and you’ll spend most of each meeting sitting down.

What you actually need is live practice with real people, real-time coaching, and a curriculum that treats conversation as the skill you’re actually trying to learn. That’s what Jaunty has been doing for the last ten-plus years. We’ve had over 10,000 students come through our programs. We run live classes every week, and our 6-week cohorts run every couple of months. Our first week is free. You can drop in, try a class, and see if it feels like the right fit.

Whatever you choose, Toastmasters, Jaunty, improv, therapy, some combination, the one thing I’d push back on is staying in the “reading about it” phase for another year. You’ve probably been there long enough. Pick something with live reps. The reps are what work.

About the author

Eric Waisman is the founder of Jaunty and has been coaching social skills full-time since 2008. Over 10,000 adults have come through Jaunty’s live online classes and 6-week cohort programs. You can read student success stories here or reach Eric directly at eric@jaunty.org.