When Philip suggested to have a meeting where our members would just turn up, pick a role out of a hat and perform a role that they pulled out of a hat, I thought he was playing an April Fools Joke in March, but little did I know what he had in store for us on April 1st.
First, Philip kicked off the meeting with a thorough explanation of what was to happen, then there was a period of organized chaos as we picked our roles, and prepared ourselves for the evening.
Anne Barrett, got us off to a great start as our Sergeant at Arms, welcoming us all to the meeting, ensuring that we all had our mobiles on silent, and that we knew where the fire exits were. Job well done.
Paul Mclean stepped into my shoes as President for the day, grasped the task with real enthusiasm. He warmly welcomed us all to the meeting, explained to us why he joined toastmasters, and invited our guests to introduce themselves to the club. A future president maybe...
Flavia had picked the role as Toastmaster, which meant that we could all have a sigh of relief!! She did a fantastic job and putting us all at ease, explained the agenda and the purpose of the evaluation sheets to our guests, and steered us through the evening.
Verna, enthusiastically took up the role of Warm Up leader, asking for our thought on having a "Positive Mental Attitude". An excellent topic for the audience, and this meeting in particular!
David, our timekeeper - reminded us about the importance of keeping time, and to keep an eye on the lights, while he was keeping his eyes on the clock!
Ali was our grammarian, and presented us the word of the day "Mischievous" with a cheeky glint in his eye. He encouraged us all to cause a bit of mischief and used the word during the course of the evening. It was a great choice of word for the evening!
The only people that had a chance the prepare for their roles were Paul and Philip who were making prepared speeches for the evening.
Paul made a confident icebreaker speech, where he introduced us to his world at Transport For London, and his day to day challenges around printing, scanning and photocopying. For those of us who thought that TFL was only about buses and tubes, it gave us a tiny insight to what is going on behind the scenes.
It was a great start, and I look forward to seeing Paul grow in confidence and as a speaker as he progresses through the competent communicator manual.
Philip, provided us with a speech from the Storytelling Manual - "Choppy Waters" full of action and adventure, running through time, running through the audience, linking being at the helm of a boat, to being at the helm of our club. The message that I took away from his speech was, Whatever direction the wind blows, we are all in the same boat together!
Our speech evaluators Max and Richard, provided some valuable feedback to our speakers, in their own unique way - Max calm, measured and incisive contrasted well with Richard's humorous and animated approach - both working to encourage the speakers to continue to improve.
Our Table Topics Master, David took a break from his job as timekeeper to run our Table Topic's session. The topics for the evening stuck to the theme as Ann, Richard, Verna and our guests Lorraine, Kiki, and Ola gave us their thoughts on pranksters and other aspects of April Foolery! Once again it was one of our guests, Lorraine who stole the show and the prize for best Table Topic!
To round off the meeting Katy our Divisional Governor, had picked up the role as GE, to give her evaluation of those who had not been evaluated, and the evening as a whole. The main takeaway was that, we could have made better use of the time a the start of the meeting to allocate the roles, to allow for more preparation - however overall, it was a great idea and good to see everyone get involved.
From my point of view, it was great to see us working together and adopting a positive mental attitude to making the "GrabBag" meeting a success. We have some outstanding leaders in our club, and I am sure that meetings like this have a part to play in building our team spirit and keeping the club moving full steam ahead!!
