The meeting was called to order by acting Sergeant at Arms
Chih and commenced at 7.30pm.
Notified Apologies were Elena and Julie.
Current Secretary Paul was elected interim Sergeant at Arms (until
full Board elections later this year). New Member Ramya was elected as Deputy
Sergeant at Arms to cover Paul’s forthcoming holiday absence.
The meeting welcomed visitors Andi, Harini, Peter E and
Nimesh. It was good to see the attendance also of Stephen.
Yours Truly (me that is) stumbled through the evening as
Toastmaster ….. a role I feel I definitely need more practice at!!
Theme of the night was COMPOST, a theme that had everyone
thinking deeply about. However it evoked some really well thought-out comment
during the Round Robin session.
Word of the Day was RECYCLE. The idea behind W.O.D is for
any person being asked to speak, in whatever capacity, to use the featured word. Again I was winner of the W.O.D by using it
10 times. Come-on people give me some competition at the next meeting !! LOL
I do recognise however that as Toastmaster I had a massive
and unfair advantage over anyone else.
Table Topics Master was Jacqueline B, one of our newer
Members. Jacqueline posed for questions which were not too difficult to speak
on, but each required some mental agility from the respondees …. this challenge
was well met by all four T.T. Speakers
Four Prepared Speech Speakers for the night, Ramya, Chih,
Daniel The Second a.k.a. Daniel and Peter making his Icebreaker.
Chih delivered his speech (his tenth, taking him to the
level of Competent Communicator) with a tale of personal challenges and achievements.
Daniel the Second treated us to aspects of N.L.P (Neural Linguistic
Programming) and made the point that in personal communication words account
for only 7% of our performance with Tonality and Language accounting for the remaining 93%Peter Knight
spoke with his usual confidence and his wearing Hawthorn scarf left us in no
doubt about his AFL allegiance.
Ramya’s steely nerves and confident delivery won her Speaker
of the Night award. Well done Ramya.
All four Speakers were evaluated by WTM’s longest serving
Members, Daniel I, Wendy P, May W and Bruce B. Each delivered pearls of
speaking wisdom, as we’ve become accustomed to.
Bruce almost never made it to the lectern because I totally
overlooked him (and that’s not easy to do).
Sorry Bruce, my grey hair sometimes provides moments of forgetfulness.
During the Evaluations I mentally calculated our Evaluators combined
years of Toastmaster service and arrived
at a conservative total of 101 years. WOW.!
Wendy was voted Best Evaluator, but I’d guess it would’ve
been a close finish.
Wendy also shared her win with her birthday, thankfully
no-one broke into singing Happy Birthday, but she did receive a warm round of
applause.
Another long standing Member of Werribee Toastmasters,
Shridhar, gave us a concise and masterful General Evaluation, on which the
meeting concluded, but about 20 minutes over our target time of 9.30 pm.
Finally, congratulations to our Guests for having the
‘intestinal fortitude’, (guts in everyday English), to overcome your nerves
when called upon to say a few words. It’s important that Guests realise that
ALL of us have experienced that nervous first step. But it is more important to
know that you will improve and that improvement will happen WITH regular
WTM meeting attendance.
Good luck and good speaking
Paul von Harder
“Werribee Toastmasters is not a destination, it is a journey
to be enjoyed”
