Broken knees, The Power of Conscience, Winning Proposals and The History of Tea

Another great meeting, our 7^th of the season and lots of new faces were in attendance. Our President, Pat, kicked off the meeting and explained how a meeting works for the guests in the audience, before he handed control of the meeting to the Toastmaster for the evening, Martin. He then went around the room to the various officers to explain their roles, with Brian our Grammarian introducing the word “Opportunity” as word of the day, which went on to be used an impressive 20 times over the night.

Ellen was in charge of an entertaining Table Topics session with questions that ranged from “how to celebrate a best friends milestone birthday?” to “favourite life mottos?” to “could a robot do your job?”.  There were queues of speakers waiting to do add-ons with at least ten getting the opportunity (Is the Grammarian still counting?). 

We then went onto the speeches with Tara telling us her inspiring story of breaking her knee to recently completing the Dublin City Marathon in a time of 3 hrs and 9 mins! That was followed by Sarah’s thought provoking speech on conscience, biases, and her positive experiences with the Galway Traveller Movement. Darragh then gave us a masterclass in goal-setting from the advanced manual Speaking to Persuade and Frank also gave us an educational speech from the advanced manual Speaking to Inform, telling us all about the history of tea, whilst giving us a tea making demonstration.

We then took the opportunity to talk about tea on our tea-break as we all mingled and chatted about the speeches.

After the break Jenny took over as General Evaluator and introduced the speech Evaluators for each of the speeches. Donal, Mike, Frances and Pat all gave great evaluations with encouraging feedback and useful recommendations. Then it was the officers turn to give their reports before Eamonn read a Charles Bukowski poem for the Creative Corner.

The meeting was ended by Pat who presented Frances with a pin for completing all of the manuals on the leadership track this week, an impressive feat and an example to us all. Well done Frances!!

Our next meeting is next week Wednesday 22^nd November. All are welcome.