"ZOOMING BACK TO REALITY!"

Today, Thursday 11th June, Pania Toastmasters held what we hope will be their last Zoom meeting. It was an excellent meeting well run by the Toastmaster of the day Marc
.

Since the end of March(due to Covid.19) we have been meeting most Thursdays on Zoom and while this was very different to face-to-face meeting we have, I believe, managed to have interesting and informative meetings, initially rather informal discussion type meeting but laterly we have had better structured meetings with prepared speeches ,evaluations and Table Topics. The great news is that NEXT WEEK 18th June WE WILL BE MEETING BACK AT THE BLIND FOUNDATION, in Thackeray Street 12.05pm until 1.00pm.

At today's meeting we had an extended Pathways assignment from Anna, who only has one further speech to complete before the end of this month to achieve her Advanced Toastmaster's Gold Award, a really tremendous achievement and we have had some excellent presentations along the way. In this particular assignment Anna was "To Handle Challenging Situations" while speaking and a number of the members were preprimed to be 'disruptive etc" while the assignment was in progress.(i.e. an interupter, an arguementive person, ,a silent person etc.) Anna chose the topic of "What as a Club can we do to Support our Members?"
This was particularly appropriate and some excellent discussion followed well led by Anna and participated in by the audience. Already some new information has been distributed to the members regarding comments made during the discussion which I believe they and new members will find very useful.(thanks Laurel for that information!) Well presented Anna and you handled the objections well.
Laurel gave a very well rounded Evaluation of this difficult assignment, which Anna will benefit from.
A brief Table Topics session followed with Sandy (Table Topics Master) choosing members to speak on living somewhere different, which they all handled well. e.g. Benita (In a Swamp), Peter (In the White House) and Graeme (On the Moon) (I vote to send Peter to the White House-but please come back again!). Pedro gave his Evaluation of Table Topics with plenty of well deserved commendations for the speakers.

Many thanks to all involved in the interesting meeting, I am getting quite comfortable with Zoom meetings, but they are nothing like the real thing and that happens NEXT WEEK!!!

See you all there.