What a magnificent evening! I would like to express my felicitation to the Toastmaster of the evening Carrie for giving us such an amazing two-hour session with the theme “Doing it Alone”.

We had 3 prepared speeches. The meeting started with Rochelle delivering her second speech in the Competent Communication (“CC”) manual “Season’s Greetings”. Xmas is coming, but Rochelle told us that a recent survey revelled only 46% of people can feel the festive joy, whilst 46% are stressed by the gift shopping and family dinner planning etc. She loves Xmas, and shared three tips with us to keep ourselves organised and enjoy the festive season. They are 1) create a To Do list that is manageable; 2) set deadlines; and 3) ask for assistance at work/outsource tasks.

The second speech was from Esmé with her speech #6 in the CC manual “How much is too much”. Esmé is extremely passionate about the “Executive pay” subject. Throughout the speech, she used numerous facts and real examples to tell us that the pay for executives (especially for plc) is out of touch and badly structured.

The last speech was given by JT with her 2nd speech from the advanced communication manual Speak to Inform. The title of the speech is “Improve your speaking voice”. JT delivered a mini workshop on enhancing the speaking voice, providing explanations of certain exercises and encouraging audience participation with everyone taking part in practising them. This included breathing exercises, relaxing the shoulders and face, awareness of the movement of your lips, teeth & tongue and strengthening your voice. She also shared a few more resources for us to practice our voice:

Thank you to Sim for leading us through a fun and creative table topics session (impromptu speaking) during the second half of the evening. She found all the real but peculiar job titles existing in the world and set the challenge for our speakers to use their imagination to describe the job.

Our evaluators were myself, Ailsa, Zhenzhen and Dani.Thank you all! Special thanks to our GE evaluator Emily McQuillen from London Bridge Speakers club.

Thank you also to our grammarian Marianna for providing the word of the day Felicitation (an expression of good wishes / congratulation) and to our timekeeper Maria who timed all the roles in the meeting, including Toastmaster and President! This was so much fun, and I would encourage all the future timekeepers to adopt the same practice.

The Best Speaker went to JT, Best Evaluator to myself (Anqi), and Best Table Topics speaker was awarded to Esmé.
As always, we had several guests including(Eunice Zhen & Emily McQuillen); we hope you enjoyed our club meeting and that we can welcome you again soon!