Another great night of public speaking, learning and friendship.

Debra, as Sargent at Arms, opened the meeting with a great reference to Spring and the standard housekeeping notices. Great to see her delivering a confident start to the meeting.

Dave, our President gave a good opening statement with a challenge to be a leader, as well as a great speaker at Toastmasters.

The night was then put in the capable hands Amanda who took control and leads us through the whole meeting smoothly and clearly. She introduced her team for the evening. Costa overcame the ‘disappearance’ of the timer lights with some good improvisation to keep us all on time. Gillian took the role of videographer and although all speeches and evaluations are private links online. She reminded us that you can have this switch to the public for more people to see if you allow us. Elizabeth took the role of Ballot Counter and explained what that entails.

Amanda introduced four great speakers for the evening. Two being their first speeches and one a guest from another Club. Well done to all of them for great speeches, but especially for Yusra and Kat for their confident Icebreakers. Thank you to Roz, for coming from another club to join us. These were followed by the four evaluators, including Debra doing her first Evaluation, and well done it was too.

Debra then introduced our five new guests for the evening, and I think we had three returning guests? And we stopped for our break.

Amanda passed over to Gary to run the table topics and he produced a bag of items which speakers were going to have to imagine the item they chose was a birthday present! – This was interesting if not worrying about what Gary at home!

Talking about an object is quite a challenge but all the speakers adapted and delivered well thought through and entertaining replies in their allotted 1-2mins. As a rare treat, Gillian videoed the table topics and I found time earlier to send the clips to the guests together with the topics evaluation.

Matthijs then delivered that Topics evaluation with feedback and ideas for all the speakers. Not only with great content but in good time too.

Penny was then invited to the stage to deliver the General Evaluation and to evaluate everyone who had taken part but not yet been evaluated. I will include a private link to this for members in my follow-up email and see how many watch it. 😉

Too soon, as time seems to fly by for me, our President, Dave has to give his closing remarks. However, he also had the privilege to hand out 2 icebreaker ribbons to Kat and Yusra, best Speaker to Roz, joint best evaluator between himself and me and best table topics to first-time guest Simon.

Notices:

We are all back again on 17th February, and those that want to take part in the Speech Competition on 3rd should contact Matt Tuff. If you need a Toastmaster fix in the meantime then there are plenty of other local clubs; Sutton, Surbiton, Reigate, Mole Valley, Purley, Croydon. Around 20% of our members are regular members at other clubs.