At our last meeting on the 1st of October, our always elegant member Violetta served as Toastmaster of the Evening. When preparing for her role, she asked herself what she should wear and remembered her T-shirt with “Oh Yes” on it. This was her inspiration for the Theme of the Day: “Oh Yes”. She asked us a few questions: “Do you want to have a great meeting?” and “Are you looking forward to hearing the speeches?”. “Oh yes, we do! Oh yes, we are!” we answered. She was well prepared and set up a nice platform for all three speakers, introducing them wonderfully with background information. Beautifully done!
Prateek gave speech #2 from the CC Manual with the title “Joy in Abundance”. He posed the following hypothetical question: “What if, instead of money, you could pay for things with happiness?”. His answer was that in such a society one would start to appreciate every item bought more and would make sure that every purchase would bring more happiness at the end. In such a world, people would value happiness more and would show more compassion because the truest happiness always comes from the heart. And this led to the message of his speech: show more compassion to everyone, drop your ego and show empathy to the person next to you. Like this, both you and the another person would become happier and would make this world a utopia.
The second speaker Marina delivered speech #2 from the CC manual as well. She called it “The Wake-up Bottle ” and told us about an accident that changed her life. Some weeks ago, during a party she fainted in the arms of a friend and minutes later she woke up in hospital. In the same room, there was an old lady who complained about everything and was crying the entire time feeling entitled to do so. Marina asked herself why it was so hard for the lady to look at the positive side of life. Sharing her own experience, she understood that giving love to another person makes one feel better. Her message to us was that when things hit us hard and throw us out of our normal life, we should pull ourselves together, take only positive energy, stop self-pity, drop all the excuses and complaints and start doing what we love to do.
The third speaker Holger gave the last speech of this CC manual and thus achieved Competent Communicator level. He told us that he will move to Boulder, Colorado and thus a new chapter of his life will begin. Within his speech, he thanked all of us for our support. The feedback he received at Mercury helped him a lot, the little comments in our feedback form were much more valuable than one could imagine. He liked the energy in the room and the different nationalities. He told us that Toastmasters is not only about improving speaking, but also about learning to better express yourself and your thoughts, to discover where you are, what you are, your strengths and weakness and thus making the best of yourself.
The Table Topics section was professionally moderated by our new member Sunder. Every TT speaker was given a opening line from a novel and then had the option to use it as an opening line or during the speech:
“There was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife.” – from The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” – from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – from 1984 by George Orwell
“When the phone rang, Parker was in the garage, killing a man.” – from Firebreak by Richard Stark.
The best Table Topics speaker was Chad, whose starting line was “There was a hand in the darkness and it held a knife.” At the beginning he held us enthralled telling us that he tried to resist, to hold back. But afterwards he beautifully admitted that he couldn’t resist his darkest habit: he “wanted that steak”. His speech was a piece of art and his way of delivering fantastic.
Word of the day: pithy, which means very direct, short, to the point: Tom gave a pithy reply to John (i.e. he didn’t go on and on).
Joke of the day: What is the difference between capitalism and communism? Capitalism is about people abusing people. Under communism, it is the other way round.
Lesson learned: Write your feedback for the speaker on the small evaluation forms. They are indeed a “gold mine” for the speaker.
