For those of you who don’t know, the beginning of July represents the beginning of the Toastmasters year. The Chinese refer to 2013 as the year of the Snake. People born in the Year of the Snake are reputed to be thoughtful and wise, and the year itself is meant to signify ‘steady progress’. So what? I hear you ask.
Well I think this is
rather apt because for each and every toastmaster- no matter what your level,
each week we come to Toastmasters, we make steady progress. Even if we only take
part in the warm up and don’t utter a single word publicly for the rest of the
night, we are talking small steps to becoming world class public speakers. I
stress this point because I really believe it. Case in point, on Wednesday 3rd
July, one of our guests-Larissa made
massive progress. She did her first table topic telling us confidently how
Lewisham toastmasters feels like ‘her family’ She even lasted the full 2
minutes which was amazing!
We were honoured to host several guests on Wednesday
night who also gave many other ‘First’ anecdotes. Including the first day at school
(Didier), the first time on holiday (Afam),
and the first time in the sea (Royston
of Bromley Toastmasters). Karlios,
who took on the table topic evaluator role for the first time, managed to give positive
feedback to every single table topic speaker. I look forward to witnessing their
steady progress in the weeks to come.
There were lots of other
noteworthy ‘first’ times. For example, Wednesday night was the first time Manoj attended a meeting as our club
President and had a speech prepared. The first time Jason took on the Toastmaster role which he did extremely well. The
first time our newest member Jacqui gave
her speech to us – her new family which was about her family. We all hope to
meet your sister one day!
We had a wonderful speech
from Zhanna, who gave us a plotted
history of Tea and even showed us how to make it! It’s the first time, I’ve
seen tea drunk as part of a toastmasters speech and definitely the first time
anyone has ever told me to pour tea into milk, not milk into tea. Clearly I’ve
been going wrong all these years!
The 3rd
prepared speech of the evening came from me, where I lamented on the quality of
our decisions. That speech that won speech of the night, with Richard providing the winning evaluation
for evaluating Jacqui’s speech. The table topic award went to our lovely
American Toastmasters veteran guest- BiBi.
In her week-long stay in the UK, Toastmasters Lewisham was the first club she
attended. Her 16 years of progress was obvious as she skilfully avoided the ‘Kiss-and-tell’
question and instead told us to:
“Never evaluate yourself as others will do it
for you”
We all need to take these wise
and thoughtful words on board – for if we don’t, we will only stifle our own
steady progress. Umm… I wonder if our new American friend was born in the year
of the snake!
Should you choose to make
the wise decision to continue your steady progress, I will see you Wednesday 17th
July. In the meantime,
Happy New (Toastmasters) Year!
