Meeting Report – Discovery

It was a great evening at Three Kings Fickling Centre.  Hazel, the Sergeant in Arms opened the meeting, and Lisa, our lovely chairwoman, set the scene of the meeting with the theme, ” Discovery”.  Guests were heartily welcomed, and new members specially mentioned:

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Hazel, our SOA and Lisa, our Chairman welcomes and introduces the evening.

“We will witness discovery as speakers speak for the first time at our club”

Paurnima introduces the word of the night, very fitting to the theme of the evening,  EXPLORE.  The word was very well utilised by speakers throughout the night.

To add a touch of humour to the night, Liz, our smile story telling, made us do a double take, as she had purposely tricked us listeners into thinking that she said a rude word, when it turned out it was us who had a dirty mind!

img_0755 img_0761 img_0764Some of our role holders for the night – Ivo as the grammarian, Liz – the smile story teller, and Zainab, our time keeper.

Supriya hosted the prepared speeches part of the evening, and she handled it masterfully.

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Our toastmaster – Supriya

We enjoyed an empowering anecdote from Chris.  Chris, being an incredible incredible storyteller, used his upbeat body language and friendly eye contact to share with us how good it felt for him to break protocol for the benefit of someone else’s happiness, even it was a total stranger.

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Sam opened up to the audience and shared with us how a book that teaches the art of diffusion was able to change his life for the better.  

Husband and Wife Clement and Gretel both delivered their ice breaker speeches with perfection.  Gretel shared her three memories in a basket with us, and Clement told us about their decisions behind embarking on a journey and adventure to New Zealand.

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Phil used his personal experience to warn us about money predators.

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Vikram enlightened us with a  real life story about Joy and George Adamson, and Elsa the Lioness, the real characters and lion that inspired the movie classic Born Free.  I am sure we all fell in love with lions after his speech.

Our evaluators Hazel, Lis, Kevin, Steve, Anji did a brilliant job evaluating our speakers tonight. 

Mandy, our table topics master, managed the impromptu part of the evening, linking the topics to the theme of the night – discovery.  Our lucky speakers Chris, Ted, Michael, Faquir and Min all responded to their topics with imagination and creativity, all finding different ways to respond to their topics.  Ted evaluated his own speech with bias, claiming that he delivered it very well, perhaps it wasn’t that far off..

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Ted and Aurora – our table topics evaluators.

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Also a big mention to Vikram for receiving an award for the night!

Overall it was a great night with a lot of laughs, making another enjoyable Thursday night at Fickling Centre as usual.  Looking forward to being at future meetings.

 

The purpose of a speech

Why do we speak to an audience at all? A question asked by many people who have sat through a less than inspring presentation.

We speak to either: Inpsire – Persuade – Entertain or Inform. Most of all though we speak to make the audience richer for having heard us speak.

Ralph Smedly the founder of Toasmtasters said “We learn better in moments of enjoyment”. For the audience to enjoy your speech/presentation you need to connect with them through their mind  and to touch their emotions.

David Brookes the 1990 World Champion of Public Speaking said “Don’t just tell us -Take us” he was saying tell a story to make your point. In doing that we need to have a good structure and stories that are relevant to your message.

The audience must know where you are going with your speech otherwise they will get lost and lose interest.

Another way to connect with your audience is to use props to support what you are saying and these act as bullet points for you, taking you from one segment to the next.

Also you need to use pause, vocal variation, pitch, projection and power in your voice.

I often see speakers talk to the front row when this is not enough, we need to reach everyone in the room to connect with them all.

Most importantly as a speaker we need to have something relevant to say.

Think about what you want to share and start writing.