Resilience

Our theme was resilience on 2 December. Flavia was our Toastmaster so she welcomed our guests, explaining Toastmasters and Lewisham Speakers then moved on to leading the meeting. Our timekeeper was Tricia, taking on her first meeting role with aplomb, supported by Philip. Paul, as Grammarian, gave us the word ‘challenge’ to slip into our speeches.

Our first speaker was David giving his 4^th speech ‘How to say it’, titled ‘Lessons from Niger’. He delivered his speech with gravitas as he told us how he had felt disconnected with the fieldwork of the NGO he works for but was grateful when the opportunity arose for him to go to Niger. The experience lead him to reflect on his life in the UK and feel grateful for his life and opportunities.  Paul, our grammarian for the evening, noted some words which David used to help deliver his message, such as: passionate, disconnected, dilapidated and reflect.

Our second speaker was John ‘Getting comfortable with visual aids’, the 8^th speech in the Competent Communicator’s Manual. John told us about ‘El Niño’,  using a flip chart to show us maps and a few lines of text.  John told us about the weather phenomenon and showed as where it occurs on the maps. By the end of his speech we had learned what El Niño is, the impacts, how the damaging effects of El Niño are increasing and what we can do to alleviate the problems. Paul also noted some great words used by John: strategy, desertification, vulnerabilities and hazardous consequences.

We had a visit from Robert, our Area 59 Director who told us what he likes about our group and highlighted that the up and coming Officer Training is not only open to current officers of the club – but anyone who aspires to being an officer.  The next round of training will be in January or February in Canary Wharf.

Lucinda was our Topics Master and challenged us with a great set of questions around resilience – and being challenged! The questions involved dealing with crisis, emotional problems, dealing with tough situations, ambiguity and turning misfortune to good luck. Also, how to make things work, lessons from a negative experience and to give an example of a self-confident person. During the answers we learned that one of our members finds their son inspirational for his positive attitude, one of our guests ‘sings it out’ if they have a problem to deal with, another speaker learns from negative events to turn them into positive experiences. Philip evaluated the table topics and praised some good strategies, such as: repeating the question, relating a personal experience, using humour, the use of gestures to illustrate a point and pausing or using a quiet voice to draw in the audience’s attention.

Richard was the general evaluator for the evening and made a particular point of thanking Paul, our Sergeant at Arms who does a fine job of preparing the room for our meetings before anyone arrives.

The meeting closed on time with a reminder that on the 16^th our meeting will have a different format as we get festive for our last meeting before Christmas.