Dear all,

I hope you all had a wonderful bank holiday weekend. Apologies for the delay in sending this summary, it seems our last meeting is already a while ago as I have just returned from a wonderful holiday in the Alps, back in London just in time for our next meeting this week.

Marianna was our Toastmaster for the evening and picked dreams for this summer as the theme for the meeting. She was helped by our timer Yunkun and Zori as our grammarian. The word of the day was “furtherance”.

We had two fantastic speeches by Anastasia and Lynn and a twist to a usual speech by Carrie.

Anastasia delivered her icebreaker speech. A big moment! She used a fantastic metaphor of dating to explain how she first discovered Toastmasters enjoyed various dates with different clubs and swiped right until she recently became a member.

Lynn spoke about the increasing use of reviews for just about anything from mattresses to blueberries. Whilst reviews are useful, Lynn also argued that it stops us from getting unexpected surprises and we end up spending quite a lot of time reviewing reviews before making a decision.

Carrie didn’t actually deliver a speech herself but showed us the winning speech of the 2018 world championship by Ramona. Afterwards, we collectively challenged ourselves to find recommendations to further improve the speech.   Here you can watch the speech once more.

Anastasia and Lynn’s speeches were evaluated by Carrie and Ailsa.

Maria was our Tabletopics master and also used the theme of dreams… and nightmares. Participants spoke about nightmare jobs, dream countries, nightmare holidays, dream properties, nightmare birthday presents and dream celebrities they would like to meet. Debbie, Zori, Ailsa, Carrie, Isatu and myself shared our stories.

Carrie won the award for best evaluator and I won the award for best table topics speaker.

I look forward to seeing many of you this Wednesday.

Best wishes,

Esmé

President

15 May 2019 City Women Speakers 1/2
15 May 2019 City Women Speakers 2/2