May the 4th be with you

What a great theme for our May the 4th Lewisham Speakers Toastmasters club meeting. In honour of International Star Wars Day, Jason, our Toastmaster for the evening, urged us to go boldly where we may not have been before, on an epic mission – past Catford, past Crystal Palace and possibly as far as Croydon. He was supported by a wonderful team. Christophe was our warm up leader who asked us “What would you do if you were given £10,000?”. Every person attending stood and gave their short answers, which ranged from getting some work done at home to amazing holidays and investing in the stock market.  Joyce was our Timekeeper and warned us that she was ‘going German’ after explaining some different perceptions of national attitudes towards timing. She made sure we all understood the time constraints we needed to work within and explained how the light system would let us know when we were getting close to our limit. At the end of the meeting she was effusive in her congratulations to us all for keeping well within our limits. Jason’s other team member for the evening was Pat, our Grammarian. She gave us ‘realise’ as the word of the day and was happy to note many uses of it during the evening.

John & Jenny have completed all 10
Competent Communicator's speeches

We had three speakers at this meeting – and Lewisham Speakers is proud that two of them were giving speech number 10, meaning that we have two more speakers who have completed the Competent Communicator Manual.

Anne was our first speaker, delivering her 6th speech in the Competent Communicator manual. She told us her public speaking story – how she knew she had a mountain to climb, when it came to overcoming her fear of public speaking but then as she learned and practiced at Lewisham Speakers, she realised that that mountain was just a hill – and she was over it – ‘Over the hill’.

With speech number 10 the task is to ‘Inspire your audience’. John spoke to us about ‘Creativity’, and told us about his hobby of writing short stories. He enlarged on that by telling us about the script he wrote for ‘New Tricks’ – just for his own pleasure. He used quotes, such as Picasso saying ‘Every child is born an artist’, and it said that ‘Education strangles creativity’.

Jenny encouraged us not to compromise as ‘You’ve only got one soul’. She told us of her career aspirations, seeking out the right opportunities and her experiences of disappointment and ultimate success. She entertained us with an anecdote about how she managed to negotiate awful traffic in order to get to one interview, which included good use of body language and humour.

Sharon was our Tabletopics Master for the evening. She came up with an imaginative set of questions for impromptu answers, maintaining the Star Wars theme. Mimicking Darth Vader, with ‘Luke- I am your Father’ and asking who he would like to discover he was related to? Paul gave a heart-warming short speech about why he finds Dr Dre so inspiring. If Molly were ‘captured by the Empire’, if all other attempts to persuade her capturers to release her failed, she would resort to crying. If George could use a ‘Force for good’, he would bring peace to the Middle East. And if Naomi had her ‘own android’ she would definitely instruct it to do the ironing.

Our general evaluator was Paul. He evaluated all of the speakers who hadn’t already been evaluated, such as our President, Flavia, who always greets us so warmly – members and guests, with her calm, evenly paced manner, using pauses and vocal variety to keep us engaged. He praised Jason’s choice of theme along with his energy and humour as he guided us through an exceptionally well run meeting.

When Flavia, our President, opened the meeting she welcomed our eight guests and at the end she asked them to report back about what they had enjoyed. We’re happy to hear that guests always find us a friendly and welcoming group; challenging, in that everyone ends up speaking a little, even on their first visit (unless they really don’t want to), but particularly safe and nurturing too. Other comments included being inspired by the speeches, learning tips from the evaluations and enjoying the humour. We’re happy that three guests are planning to take up membership to start on their journey towards confidence with public speaking.

Joyce stood up at the end to highlight how well our Lewisham Speakers had done in the recent International Speaking Competition. At Divisional level we had two speakers in the top three. Flavia coming second at Richard came third. They are both inspirational for all of us!!