Toastmasters International is 90!

Lots of guests joined us again for our Wednesday meeting on the 21^st October, the second for this month. Paul, our Sargent at Arms opened the meeting on time and Flavia, our President welcomed the guests and told them a bit about Toastmasters, introducing us to our theme – Toastmasters International is 90 years old!

Philip was our Toastmaster for the evening and lead us through with his usual flare and enthusiasm. He was also the warm up leader, asking us how we responded to being challenged. Mostly, we face up to challenges head on!

James was the timekeeper for this meeting. He explained the importance of the role as we always need to be able to keep our speeches within the time allotted to us. He explained how the green, amber and red lights work to communicate to speakers how much of their time they have used up. We had a couple of overruns during the evening but our Toastmaster was able to bring us back on track to finish on time. Sharon was our grammarian and gave us the word ‘Longevity’ to use whenever we could during the meeting and to fit with the longevity theme of our meeting – 90 years of Toastmasters. She explained her role and the meaning of her chosen work well and a few remembered to fit it into their talks.

Robert was our first speaker and did a wonderful job with his 4^th speech in the Competent Communication Manual – How to Say it – telling us of his love for the ‘Sport of Kings’ – tennis. He told us of the sports stars who had influenced his admiration and how he had to persevere to develop his own skills.

Paul stepped in at the last minute due to a postponed speech and told us of ‘My Journey Since Toastmasters’.  It was his 5^th speech – Your Body Speaks. He took us through the three stages of his journey: how he used to be – lacking in confidence when required to speak up; how he changed – evolving and changing; and how he is now - grown in confidence, having acquiring new skills. He used gestures and facial expressions to illustrate his points and moved across the stage to show the different time phases of his speech.

Jason, our outgoing President, then christened our brand new projector, showing us slides to support his speech about the statistics around membership retention at Toastmasters. ‘Thirty is the Magic Number’ he told us as part of his ‘Speaking to Inform – A Fact Finding Report’. He explained that the statistics show, a club of around about thirty members seemed to be just right for keeping going. Membership gains and losses seem to tick over nicely with the magic membership size of thirty – and that’s reassuring for Lewisham Speakers as that’s our norm from year to year.

Jason was also our Table Topics Master and used old issues of the Toastmaster magazine to generate his questions. We learned from our guests and some members that: Rueben is the boss in his kitchen, a new guest Temitayo has aspirations to be our Lewisham Speakers President and that Ade thinks he should be paid much more than £5,000 as his speaker fee!

Our evaluators of speeches and the table topics were Flavia, Anne, Lukas and Richard, who praised the good practices of the speakers and offered a few tips for what could be done better. Our general evaluator, Peter, visiting us from west London, highlighted what he had enjoyed about our Lewisham Speakers style.

All in all, an enjoyable meeting with progress made by all participants. The meeting came together nicely, thanks to the efforts of Philip, as unavoidable postponement of a couple of the planned speeches meant last minute changes. And thanks go to Paul and Jason for stepping in at the last minute.