Feb 6

Written by: Blogmaster
Sun, 06 Feb 2011 23:57:24 GMT 

As always, Greg Ros opened our meeting with great energy and passion. Talking about trialing new ideas. As the true Toastmaster he is, he used the power of 3.

1. Introducing your CL project when you do a role. His example was when you stand up to do timekeeper you say " Hi I am Greg, and I am completing this time keeping role for my 4th Project which focuses on Time Management, Emma will be evaluating me. . . . ."
2. Committee met and came up with new ideas to implement which we will be working on.
3. Meeting feedback: On the 5th speaker slot on our feedback slips, we will now be using this to find out what we enjoyed in the meeting and what we can be doing better. To improve our club.

Emma Simpson was our energetic Toastmaster for the evening with vacation on her mind and on theme! She brought a lovely array of sunglasses to remind us that vacation is just a couple weeks or months away! Her two "lovely assistants" for the evening were Ayse Yazir as timekeeper and Ben Cockfield as grammarian! Ben Cockfield politely reminded us that it was Australia day and chose an appropriate word; 'Fair Dinkum'

Because of the epidemic of speakers flu our quick thinking president Greg Ros threw an impromptu MOT (Moment of Truth). This meeting works like a members MOT for the club. We look at how we are doing things now and how we can improve upon things. We got our worksheets and split into little groups.  We looked at: First Impressions, New Member Orientations, Program Planing and Meeting Organisation, Recognising Accomplishments, Fellowships Variety and Communication, Membership Strength.

We had a string of guests, existing and new members who came up with a slew of fantastic suggestions. The main one was to implement a buddy system to help new members to learn about how Toastmasters works.

Then onto a rousing session of Table Topics from 'the Travel  Agents of St. Paul's Speakers' selling country destinations. With our Table Topics Master Andrew Gillian who had a host of countries in his vacation bag! We were sold from the history of Malcolm's Egypt to Waseem's description of the "Home of the Free" (the USA).

Split evaluations given by Emma Hlll and Hillary Briggs made us feel good and gave us a lot of new suggestions to try out. Such as making sure we had good eye contact to watching the involuntary action of our limbs.

Finally, our GE Laura McKracken (Olympian and Cardinal member) gave us a positive, very concise and constructive feedback. Again as the true Toastmaster she is, we had 3 main take aways from her evaluation.

1. Work on introducing people
2. Don't wear sunglasses while speaking cause it cuts you off from the audience.
3. She especially liked that every member spoke during TT that doesn't have a speaking role. Laura is very passionate about this point!

We hope to see you at our next meeting!!