We had a fabulous meeting with four fantastic speeches. Shola was our toastmaster for the night and ensured a very efficiently run meeting. She was helped by our timer Maria and grammarian Marieke who introduced ‘flabbergasted’ as the word of the day.
Our first speaker Lynn delivered her icebreaker and explained eloquently why she decided to join Toastmasters. She described the experience of painful conference calls and also introduced a flabbergasting statistic, women only talk for 8% of the time on US quarterly earnings calls.
Siobhán was our second speaker with a speech entitled ‘Inbox Zero’. She explained, with humour, how to no longer be disturbed by the avalanche of work emails. We also found out that we spend an astonishing 37000 hours in our lives on emails.
Aga delivered a thought provoking speech on why we should take being funny more seriously. Indeed, being funny brings many benefits including increased mental health, building better relationships and being more successful at work.
Sin delivered the fourth speech of the evening about her Disney Princess Dilemma. While she likes them she debated whether Cinderella, Belle and Mulan are the right role models for her younger niece.
For the second half of the contest, Marianna was our table topics master and Florian, David, Glynis, Anqi, Katie and Philippa took turns at they told us their “toy stories”.
Sin won the award for best speaker, Carrie won the award for best evaluator and David won the award for best table topics speaker.
It was great to see so many guests at the meeting, we hope you enjoyed it and would be delighted to welcome you again soon.
Club announcements:
We aim to organise our club Christmas party on 14 November, a bit earlier than usual, which should make it easier to organise a venue. We need people to help organise the party, please get in touch!
The division contest will take place on Saturday 13 October. You can register here if you would like to attend.
We will have a special meeting on 31 October, organising the club’s Moment of Truth session, giving everyone the opportunity to participate in how to ensure our club continues to thrive. More information on this soon.
London Victorians are looking for a GE on 30 October Please let me or Carrie know if you’d like to volunteer for this.
I look forward to seeing many of you at our next meeting on 17 October.
Best,
Esmé