In Bloomsbury’s backup venue – upstairs at The Lamb in Lamb’s Conduit Street – club president Nazia Soon opened the meeting by discussing the value of good leadership and urging members to take advantage of the opportunities within Toastmasters to improve their leadership skills.
Toastmaster for the evening Henry Playfoot talked about the role of vocal support and applause from the audience and how it generated energy that helped speakers give their best performance.
In his role as timekeeper Glen Long emphasized the importance of being able to deliver a message within a given amount of time – reminding us that even the best speech in the world will lose its impact if only half-delivered!
Prepared speeches
Henry introduced the first speech of the evening – an icebreaker speech from brand new member Hari Kalymnios, entitled “History, Anecdotes, Reflections – Interested?”. In his impressively confident first speech at the club, Hari gave us a potted history of his life with its recurring themes of fitness and exotic travel, and gave us a glimpse into his future with his ideas for starting a new business.
In a poignant number four speech entitled “Ski to Surf”, Alex Goldsborough spoke about his home town of Christchurch, New Zealand, which had so very recently been hit by the tragic earthquake reported widely in the news. He movingly painted a picture of the Christchurch he remembered from his youth – one where you could ski in the morning and surf in the afternoon – and spoke of his optimism for the future and of the rebuilding of the town where he spent his childhood.
Next up was Raj Jain, who delivered an advanced humourous speech entitled “No bad decisions please”. Raj’s speech was driven by the idea that while it might take many good decisions to reach a point of success in one’s life, just one bad decision could doom us quickly to failure! With his trademark presence and confidence Raj led us through a number of humourous scenarios to illustrate his point, including examples from his own experience.
Finally, Femi Asaolu followed up his popular advanced speech from a previous meeting – about falling in and out of love with London Underground – with a second part expressing his frustrations with lost past glory of a once pioneering network and his personal explanation for the decline – and even a possible solution!
After a short break, evaluations of the four speeches were given by Kate Osborne, Nazia Soon, Adam Horne and Fabrizio Palmucci.
Table topics
Following the evaluations, came the popular table topics section, an opportunity for members to practice their impromptu speaking.
Inspired by the fact that February is LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) History month, Alex Donald ran a lively table topics session using quotes from famous people including Oscar Wilde, Freddie Mercury and Michael Stipe.
Members and guests alike gave short, off-the-cuff speeches reacting to numerous quotes including: “Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much” (Wilde) and “Normal is not something to aspire to, it’s something to get away from” (Jodie Foster).
After Alex wrapped up a very enjoyable session, new member (but Toastmasters veteran) Dave Longley then had the very tall order of evaluating all nine table topics speakers but was still able to give useful and insightful commendations and recommendations to each one.
Sony Solomon from Citi Criers gave a detailed and insightful evaluation of the club as a whole and of all those members who had not been evaluated by someone else. He commended Bloomsbury on various aspects of the meeting – even saying he would borrow some ideas for his own club! However, he also said he had missed the role of Grammarian (who would encourage speakers to use a chosen “word of the day” and give a report on use of language), which had not been filled that evening.
Awards
When it was finally time to give out the awards, first-time guest Anita won the prize for best table topic for her tackling of the quote “He who wishes to be rich in a day will be hanged in a year”. Best evaluator went to Fabrizio, for his evaluation of Femi’s speech, and rather fittingly Femi himself won the prize for best speech. The president’s discretionary award went to Henry for his commendable performance during his first time as Toastmaster.
Next meeting – contest!
The next meeting will be on Monday, 14th March 2011 and is in fact the club-level International Speech and Evaluation Contest. Club members will compete to deliver the best prepared speech and also the best evaluation of a secret speaker.
Forthcoming workshop
Also, on Monday, 4 April 2011 there will be a table topics workshop where attendees will get useful tips for tackling impromptu speaking and get the opportunity to give several speeches in the same evening. This is a rerun of the very successful workshop run towards the end of last year.
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