Brad – What got me to this point

Antony – The Exhibition match

Ana – My secret skill

Also Steve as our general evaluator for the evening shared with us some great feedback for the night but there is one particular piece of advice that stood out. He mentioned a great technique for avoiding the use of filler words such as um. Pick an object you see in front of you and describe it for 30s using short sentences.

John – Dancing makes you smarter

Rob – A breath of fresh air

Adam – What ever I want, whenever I want as long as I’m allowed

Thank you to all who attended and took on roles for making the meeting a good one.

As chair, I challenged everyone when taking on a new role, to research it, find out why they are doing it and even how they could be doing it better.

Tonight we had four speakers:

Jacinta gave a very, inclusive speech on selling your best asset. You are your best asset – make the most of it.

Peter finished his 10^th speech from his Competent Communicator manual – Congratulations! For this speech we were transported to a night of people watching on Courtney Place.

Victor reminded us about the upcoming referendum. Going through the history of the two questions we will be asked, their relevance and importance.

Alana’s speech was about the New Zealand Travel bug. We now know how many of us are travelling and were we are all going. She recommends everyone to register on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Safe Travel Website http://www.safetravel.govt.nz/ when going overseas so you can be found if anything goes wrong.

Thanks to all those who joined in the Who am I??? event

Chair Rachelle

Thanks Jacinta for these pictures!

Cheers Oliver

Last night was bring a plate night with members bring lots if tempting treats for our extended supper break. This was a very social time and followed on from our recent Restaurant meeting

So not surprisingly the theme was food/cuisine.

Table Topics was based around various food themes and the speakers really entertained us.

We had four prepared speeches two based on travel. Alana spoke of her travels around Europe and in particle the people that she travelled with. Sarah gave an account t of her visit to Turkey, especially Gallipoli and the military museum in Istanbul. This was an advanced manual speech and extremely well delivered.

The break was longer than usual so we could enjoy the food that people had brought. The atmosphere being very convivial.

After the break we had a second speech from Joey (CC-2), a very personal account of why she doesn’t like public speaking and therefore the benefits of speaking at Mt Vic Toastmasters.

We had an Icebreaker (CC-1) or first speech from Pia talking about her childhood and roots in Kawhia. Thank you Pia for introducing yourself to the club!

Two guests came along, one for the first time and one for the second, who wants to join.

The grammarian Nick came up with a challenging word of the night .Gustatory, which may not be a word at all!

Also of note were the very impressive evaluations, all of which were very helpful to the speakers and the audience.

So lots of fun and humour and a really good night at Mt Vic TM.

Cheers
Stevo, Chair for the night

Andrew P. ran the Table Topics this evening and brought some interesting hobby-props for the presenters to talk about. The top honors went to the frisbee that was covered in a floral design.

This was followed by four speeches by Mark E. “Why I like Big Day Out”, Mike W. , Mark B. “Waking a Sleeping Giant” and Nick W. “Sadako Saskaki”. All speeches were amazing and three speeches were from advanced TM manuals. This was a treat that we don’t often have in one evening. The fact that three speeches on the evening used the beamer, that was available, was unusual but fun too.

Jacinta ran us through the schedule for TM for the rest of the year and why it is important for us to partake in getting meetings sorted out early. One of the challenges of the night was the ever changing agenda, that would not come to rest. This is an issue as Jacinta pointed out and needs to get a bit better.

Matt H. then brought up the end of the meeting with poignant observations he made in his role as General Evaluator.

Thanks all for a great meet!
Oliver

Plans for the future are to include more information for budding TMs and people that want to inform themselves about the club. I also expect that we’ll have more input coming from TM-Chairs going forward, so that Toastmasters that couldn’t attend can catch up a little on what was in the meeting.

So I hope you all like the new site and let me know if there’s anything you want to contribute!

Oliver

Dear All

I wish to congratulate Stephen Preston on his win of the Table Topics contest. As I was the 7th speaker I didn’t have the priviledge to hear how he tackled the topic ” New Zealand is still a little country”. Congratulations to all the participants. Stephen was the only speaker for the Humourous Speech contest talking about his experience of camping and a stormy night by the Manawatu River September 1986 and using the metaphor of the Star Ward trilogy. “Glorious Stuff..” Funny how the brain remembers the next day as it was school holidays and in that storm we took our family to the Wairarapa. We watched the rain from the motel Matador in Carterton. Then to get out we drove in rain through Gladstone and Martinborough beside amazing flooded paddocks and rivers.

I thank Russell Martin calmly guide the two contests through all the rigmarole of the rules and speakers. The guest who I sat nexrt too was amazed at how many people were involved with the management of the contests when they went out to discuss their roles. So a big thank you to all those participants.
There is an idea out there that we shopuld cooperate with another club to run contests so that the judges can have less running around their areas.

And now for the theme of Volunteering. I thank Jacinta who organised the meeting table topics for the warm up. We heard such wonderful experiences of how there are different ways to volunteer, from within the family, to managing teenagers on a sporting trip to Christchurch, the school science fairs and helping in a retirement home. And the big one for us is our time and energy for Toastmasters. It was interesting evening of awareness of others.

So those who weren’t there and everyone else mark in your diary, the area contest for the humourous and table topics speeches is the alternate Wednesday 22 September 7.30-9.30pm. Please contact Sarah Bate if you are able to help her with judging other clubs contests? She has several options.

It was an interesting evening and well done all participants.

Kind regards
Sarah