A Whatsapp frenzy, summer rain showers and flasks of hot water…it can only mean one thing – this weeks London Victorians Club meeting has started! This meeting marking almost the end of the summer …
Our stand in president Eleanor got us of to an inspiring start revealing a personal story on how Toastmasters has helped her with her career and smash that very important interview (Ministry of defense – in case your curious!). Before introducing our toastmaster of the evening Stephen Nice.
The toastmaster Stephen began with a general recap on the club and agenda the evening, before introducing his unique theme for the evening – Keep It Simple! Otherwise know as no theme, giving himself an extra challenge in coming up with content and letting the roles speak for themselves.
Functionaries
Next we had our functionaries for the evening: Cleo as timekeeper, Alexandria the grammarian, Charlotte the hark-master and lastly Ed our sergeant in arms. Two of our 4 functionaries used quotes in their speeches (Charlotte + Cleo), this helped reinforce the key messaging of their speeches.
Speakers
Jo delivered his first speech (the icebreaker) to the group, a natural on stage and seemingly no nerves he delivered a speech names ‘Not all those that wonder are lost’. A speech based on his travels, which I think inspired, the audience to pack up their bags too!
Next onto the stage we had Jasmine all the way from the USA! (international bunch we are). A guest-speaker she was an experience member but had decide to go back and revisited the icebreaker speech. Her speech was inspiring and asked us all the question – what would you do if you were not afraid?
Last prepared speech of the day was from a new member Mohammad. A recorder breaker for London Victorians he had done his first speech 1 week earlier! Now a mear 7 days later he was back and with a speech on education he called for us all to be part of an education revolution!
Evaluators
Now we moved onto one of the most valuable parts of the toastmaster experience, evaluations. Einstein once famously said ‘insanity; doing something the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. Evaluations provide value feedback to speakers on what they did well and recommendations to help improve speeches for next time.
We had Claudia, Fahad and Karen providing feedback from there respective speeches. Claudia provided the classic evaluation structure CRC (commendation recommendation commendation), whilst Fahad did not have a note in sight and Karen who commendation the mention of Tony Robbins in Mohammad’s speech
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