Dear All, 

On Wednesday we had another great meeting, having looked back at the contest season and gone through other competition memories. I was our Toastmaster for the evening. Keeping with the spirit of the last month, competitions were the theme for the meeting. We heard about some impressive awards and competition experiences, including photography awards, sales competitions wins and tight relay races.

Our Timer Debbie and Grammarian Lynn helped me for the meeting and Lynn introduced Trounce as the word of the day.

Irina delivered her icebreaker speech; always one of my favourite moment. With humour, she introduced 3 key aspects of public speaking in Belarus where she’s from: no smiling, no body language and no eye contact. Irina joined Toastmasters to learn a different presentation style.

Sim delivered the second speech of the evening and spoke with passion about the importance of diversity. She welcomed the views of BlackRock’s CEO encouraging businesses to embrace diversity. She persuaded us that a diverse company is merely one adapting to the future and ensuring it is representative of the wider society in which they operate.

Maria delivered a technical speech to practice for a work presentation. She introduced us to the Institute of Risk Management’s Diploma on Enterprise Risk Management. She explained the different modules and why this Diploma is very useful for her career.

Best Evaluator – Anqi Guo

Carrie spoke about communication and gave us three useful lessons: Identify the purpose of your communication and focus on the one thing you want the audience to take away;  Who is your audience; And what is your audience’s communication message. Focussing on these three things should help deliver a concise message in a way that suits the audience and makes an impact. 

The speeches were evaluated by Anqi, Emma, Siobhan and Katie.

In the second half of the meeting, Aga ran an entertaining Tabletopics session. Maria, Emma, Irina, Zori, Vicky and Carrie told us some fun and personal anecdotes related to wrapping tape, sticky notes, a green highlighter, a key, chocolate and an envelope. The Tabletopics were then evaluated by Ailsa.

Awards:

The award for best speaker was won by Irina, the award for best evaluator was won by Anqi and Carrie and Irina co-won the best Tabletopics speech award.

Best Tabletopics speaker – Irina

Best Speaker – Irina

Club announcements:

  1. On Friday 12 April, the Division L contest will take place. You can register for free here.
  2. On 4-5 May the annual D91 Conference will take place. You can register here.
  3. The world public speaking champion of 2017 is hosting a Masterclass in London on 2 May at the University of Law, you can register here.

Please let us know if you are coming on 17 April, I look forward to seeing many of you there.

Best wishes,

Esmé, President