Introductions
Club President Femi opened the first meeting of 2013 by speaking a little about Toastmasters and welcoming the many guests in attendance. He encouraged members to take full advantage of Toastmasters to meet their goals this year and gave advance warning of a forthcoming evaluation workshop on February 4th – a great way to prepare for the evaluation contest in the Spring.
Femi handed over to the Toastmaster for the evening – Hari – who gave an overview of the meeting agenda and introduced his theme for the evening – 80s movie heroes! (He’d just read Arnold Schwarzenegger’s autobiography).
Hari introduced his first “helper”, Chris, who gave an overview of his role as the Timekeeper and explained the “traffic light” system used to help speakers keep within their allotted times.
Grammarian Carrie (80s hero – Baby from Dirty Dancing) explained her role as having two main responsibilities: 1) Picking a word of the day and 2) Assessing the quality of language used throughout the meeting. A self-confessed psychology junkie, she introduced “gratitude” as her word of the day – hoping that it would subconsciously make us all more grateful for what we have!
Prepared speeches
The first speaker was Paula (80s hero Tom Selleck) with a No. 4 speech entitled “Promises, Promises, Promises”. She told us that the promise she’d made last year was to work more for herself. By reading around the subject and navigating a path between two schools of thought – the “love yourself first” and “set big goals” points of view – she did achieve her goal. However it turned out that she didn’t enjoy working for herself as much as she thought but learnt a useful lesson.
The next speaker was Ahmed (favourite 80s film Alien) with his No. 6 speech “New Year Resolutions”. He told us that New Year Resolutions don’t work due to the lack of an action plan and recommended setting New Year goals instead. The steps were: write down your goal; write down the benefits; identify any obstacles; determine what skills/knowledge you need; and identify the people, organisations and networks you need to help you.
The third speaker was experienced member Kate (80s hero – Kenneth Williams) with her first advanced speech taken from the Storytelling manual. Kate presented the classic tale of Dick Whittington and his cat. In a very engaging style she told the story of Dick’s ascent from farmhand to kitchen servant to cabin boy to merchant to Lord Mayor of London!
The fourth and final speech of the evening was from Punam (80s hero – Wonder Woman) with an Ice Breaker speech entitled “Origins of a Fear”. Starting with her first childhood crush, she told the story of how her fear of public speaking started – being put on the spot by her family when she was just 7 years old.
Evaluations
Damien (80s hero – MacGyver) evaluated Paula’s speech about promises. He felt that her speech was very strong in terms of body language and voice projection – and he particularly liked her “authoritative” hand gestures. He suggested that Paula could have been a little more succinct with her sentence structure.
Angela (90s hero – Macaulay Culkin) evaluated Ahmed’s speech about New Year Resolutions. She liked the way Ahmed energetically launched into his speech and the way he made a potentially negative subject ultimately positive. She liked the power of his voice but felt that there could have been more overall variety in volume and more pauses.
Joe (80s hero – John Rambo) evaluated Kate’s advanced storytelling speech. He liked the elegance and precision of Kate’s language and her use of metaphor which he felt lent the story a real sense of adventure. He also loved Kate’s transitions but recommended that she could have “ramped up” the theatricality of the various characters.
Finally, Renars (80s hero – The Terminator) evaluated Punam’s Ice Breaker. He said that he had really enjoyed the speech and felt it had managed to kill three birds with one stone (!) because it had an “amazing structure”, it managed to draw parallels between public speaking and attraction, and it was personal to her – which is ideal for an ice breaker. He recommended a greater use of the stage and more hand gestures.
Table Topics
Continuing the informal parallel theme of New Year Resolutions the Topicsmaster Steven asked a number of guests and members to give impromptu speeches based on the following suggested resolutions:
- Resolve to eat more healthy foods
- Resolve to not take up jogging
- Resolve to quit your job and join the circus!
- Resolve to ignore old friends and make new ones
- Resolve to have big parties instead of weddings
- Resolve not to have a baby but do babysitting instead
Topics Evaluator Glen (80s hero – John McClane from Die Hard) had praise and recommendations for everyone and particularly commended those guests who had been brave enough to put their names down to present a topic.
Returning with her report, the Grammarian Carrie commended all speakers on their language but singled out Kate for the particularly evocative language in her speech.
Awards
Closing the meeting, Femi handed out various awards:
- President’s award went to Hari for his great performance as Toastmaster
- An Ice Breaker certificate went to Punam for her first speech
- Best evaluator went to Joe for his evaluation of Kate’s advanced speech
- Best Topics Speaker went to Michael for his response to the “ditch your old friends” topic
- Best Speaker went to Paula for her “Promises, Promises, Promises” speech
Next meeting
Our next meeting is an extra meeting on Monday 21st January 2013, upstairs at The Clerk & Well, 156 Clerkenwell Road, London, EC1R 5DU.
