Monday 4th September saw another fun packed and lively evening at Epsom Speakers. It was so good to see so many guests at the meeting and led to an energy filled evening. It is so enlivening to walk into the room at Epsom Speakers club and here the buzz of the crowd assembling before the event. It was also good to see many of the more experienced Toastmasters all looking after the guests. We even had our Area Director mucking in and helping the guests find our Sergeant at Arms.
The evening started well with Paul D setting up the room and then introducing the President, who then went onto speak about the mind and how we must overcome the negativity it can project onto us, and stop us achieving our goals. It is a good way of understanding the mind to think of it as a sixth sense, and something that we shouldn’t over stimulate and keep under control. The mind is a very powerful tool when we use it correctly. I have put a link about it at the end if you are interested.
Costa was the Toastmaster for the evening. Costa showed us how to be a Toastmaster in his usual laid back style. Costa kept the meeting going well with his little anecdotes and phrases in between each segment of the meeting, keeping the flow and energy going and also being respectful of what had just happened in the speeches. Costa also kept the laughter flowing and the energy high. Costa introduced Timur as the warm up artist who asked us to speak about a memorable moment. where everyone was able to participate. A good job by Timur and I believe that was his first time at the role. So well done.
We then had three speeches, which were passionate, informative and funny all at the same time. Katy Minson deservedly won the best speech contest with her emotional speech about her Grand Father, I spoke about the safety committee on Non Ionising radiation not being what it should be, and how this technology is proving to be detrimental to our health, and Patrick went onto speak about numbers. They were all great speeches and touched us, informed us and made us laugh.
We then went onto the evaluations. David Goodman, Gillian Prior and Doris Sew Hoy went onto evaluate the three speeches. They are all experienced evaluators and were a great help to the speakers and hopefully the audience in general on how important evaluations are on all of our learning curves. I do agree with the general evaluator though that there was too much emphasis on content rather than speaking skills. I feel this is something we all should think about. Amanda did talk about this at her evaluation workshop last meeting. Doris went on to win the best evaluation award.
After the break we had David Lane run the topics session. This was a fun packed part of the agenda and it was great to see so many of the guests participating. We had Ian, Robert, Rob, Julia, Chrissy, Drew, Dan and Sanjay all participate in the session. There were many funny monuments during the topics session and the winner was one of our guests Dan, who was very funny indeed. David showed much improvement in the way that he delivered this session, but like Timur on the warm up, he didn’t close the session very well. When you do this, it makes it confusing to the audience what is happening next. We always stress strong openings and endings to our speeches. We should also keep this in mind when doing a particular role.
Amanda went onto evaluate the Topics session and what a wonderful job. Topics is one of the hardest jobs on the Toastmaster agenda and Amanda managed to find a commendation and recommendation for everyone. That is quite an achievement in such a time constraining role. We again can learn much from Amanda’s evaluations.
Charlie W went onto to give us a general evaluation and managed to find recommendations for everyone except Amanda. Charlie showed us how to look at the whole meeting and went on to tell us how much he enjoyed it, and how the meeting could have been better. Charlie is a very experienced Toastmaster and he really shined for us during this general evaluation. One word of advice for Charlie when doing the General evaluation, don’t upset the President as he or she always has the last word, and also gets to write down a further attack after the meeting. Joking aside, Charlie made some excellent points for all of us, by keeping it real, keeping it for the good of the whole and keeping on moving forward. All of this without any notes. Amazing.
So keep on keeping on and keep shining like the stars you are. I still find it a great privilege and honour to be presiding over such a talented bunch of people. I hope you are enjoying the journey as much as I am.
Kind regards,
Peter. 🙂
El Presidente
A speech on controlling the mind