Thursday, October 25, 2018

Continental Manila Toastmasters Club 2nd Visit

The second club meeting after Continental's long vacation pushed through today. The first was held last month. Dolly and I were certainly glad that there were more attendees this time.

The photo below was taken at Continental's cafeteria. Dolly, President Jeffrey and I stood at the back for this photo-op before we had our lunch (thanks, Jeff!). We all forgot to take photos at the meeting venue.

(photo credits: Jeffrey Lim)

The theme of today's meeting was "FOMO", something I've never read or heard of. As it turned out, it meant "fear of missing out".

Interestingly, there were a couple of takeaways for me that I found valuable from this club meeting. I intend to use them in future "mentor moment" spiels in other clubs.


Participating in Club Meetings

President Jeffrey did quite well as Toastmaster of the Day, even giving some valuable insights in holding club meetings. One key takeaway for me was the sentence, "If you don't participate, you'll find the meeting boring."

It sounds simplistic, but it's true in ANY meeting. And I wanted to highlight this by telling the members that we won't learn anything or grow in Toastmasters simply by attending and listening. The Toastmasters continuing education program doesn't work that way.

In terms of membership building, I asked them, "If someone finds the meeting boring, do you think that person will come back in the next meeting? Most probably not." So, yes, there is the need to engage members and observers to make sure they participate.


The "Perfect" Speech

Another key takeaway for me came from one of the speakers, Rodelio. His speech topic was on fitness workouts. One of his lines resonated with me: "An imperfect workout is better than a delayed perfect workout."

This may be modified in speech delivery by saying "An imperfect speech is better than a delayed perfect speech." And this is something I've seen too often. Members defer delivering their speeches until it becomes "perfect".

The delays hurt their progress, as well as the club's. There's hardly a perfect speech because any speech may be improved.


Speaking without Notes

As the General Evaluator in today's meeting, I just had to comment on the use of notes. Notes are fine for Ice Breakers but beyond that, members need to train themselves to deliver speeches without notes.

So I asked them, "Do you memorize the speech?" I answered it myself, "Not necessarily." To this, I gave a tip: "Memorize the end, memorize the start. Whatever is in the middle, speak from the heart."


Here's a scanned copy of today's meeting program.


And that's... a warp!