"FAILURE TO VOTE IS NOT AN OPTION!"

Are you ‘Ready for an Emergency’, can opener too?

At Toastmaster meetings there are more roles on the agenda than just speaking.

In fact there is more to Toastmaster club meetings than just listening to a member speak.

Toastmasters is where many life benefits are learnt, for example, improving confidence, learning to listen and reply effectively. All these areas can be most useful in all parts of a member’s life and in particular in the workplace.

Pania Club meets for 50 minutes between 12 and 1pm each Thursday. Typically the main points are two speeches, two evaluations and a Table Topic session. The latter session is where the Table Topic Master has a theme, asks a related question and then nominates a member to give a spontaneous reply to that question. This is a brilliant way of learning to speak ‘off the cuff’ and can be a real asset when learnt to do properly.

Today Anna’s Table Topic theme was all about emergency kits.  She set the theme by having an emergency kit on hand and asked four questions. Linda, Marc, Noel and Ian all replied to their question in an enthusiastic manner. From this we discovered Linda can sleep through earthquakes, Marc can learn lessons from earthquakes, an earthquake makes Noel’s life incredibly busy and Ian’s has food cans for his earthquake but no can opener.

The Table Topic presenter and speakers were all evaluated by David. An evaluation is where a member is appointed to critique in a positive manner. Usually this is done by commending the best points and offering recommendations for improvement. An example of recommending is, “I suggest you move around less as it became distracting to me”. This is so much more positive and more easily accepted by the speaker than when words like, “you shouldn’t move around so much” are used.

David’s evaluation of Table Topics was hilarious. He praised everyone, gave wonderful examples of how miss matched he believed the questions and answers were. A most amusing end to the well presented session and he claimed Linda had the best reply simply because she answered, “no” to the question, “Do you have an emergency kit?” David believed everything else Linda had to say was irrelevant as she told us all about sleeping through an earthquake and tsunami warning.

Laurel was today’s first speaker and her speech was entitled, “Why should I?” This gave the audience both motivation and understanding of the importance of voting not just at general elections in our own country but to send the club's voting preferences to the Toastmaster’s worldwide convention being held in Vancouver at the end of this August. Laurel pointed out how Toastmasters may have begun in America but the rest of the world now had sufficient power to make change should they wish as the American Districts number 58 and the rest of the world number 56, making a TOTAL number of 114.

Two important websites since provided by Laurel are;

For proposals:    https://www.toastmasters.org/about/board-of-directors/proposals

To look at the maps:        https://www.toastmasters.org/resources/resource-library?t=Maps

Graeme was tasked with both introducing and evaluating Laurel. Graeme evaluated in much the same way one would give a speech. His evaluation had an opening, middle points and a summary plus he found both positive commendations and recommendations. This was most helpful to Laurel as she was presenting the speech for a second time later that day at another Club..

The second speaker was Patrick and he was speaking from project 10 of the ‘Competent Communication’ manual. This is the first manual a new member is presented with and each of the ten projects teach speaking and presentation skills. Patrick has grown over the past year into a very competent communicator and this certainly showed today. His speech was entitled, “Failure is Not an Option.” The meaning of this became apparent as he spoke because he intertwined both his and his wife’s sporting achievements into being a winner/ failure was not an option and then how his very bad motor cycle accident shattered his legs thus failure became an option but did it really? The goal setting Patrick made after his accident was very motivating, definitely to at least one coach potato in the room.

Craig evaluated Patrick and began by saying how Patrick had inspired him. All Craig’s comments had clear examples and he discussed what the title meant to him personally. Craig also gave a CRC evaluation and a very clear professional summary.

With two very motivational speeches, thorough evaluations and amusing table topic session, the following awards were made.

Best speaker; Patrick

Best evaluator; Craig

Best Table Topics; David

Today’s meeting was a great example of how fun and vibrant a meeting can be. Barbara as Toastmaster of the day (chairperson) kept the meeting flowing along very nicely and concluded on a very positive note. Well done Barbara! She was assisted by the Timekeeper, Stephanie who gave a very competent report and the meeting was summarised by the General Evaluator, Helen, who gave feedback to the Evaluators and the Toastmaster.

Area Director to visit next week.