Saturday, 14 November 2020

2nd September 2020 - Johari Window, Wing Man and Childhood's End

 

The meeting was opened by Martin, the President. He welcomed everyone before handing the meeting over to our Toastmaster for the evening Declan.  He again welcomed people and explained the format of the meeting for members and guests. He introduced the officers for the evening who each explained their roles. The final officer introduced was Frances, the Topicsmaster. She asked members questions that they hadn’t a chance to prepare but the topics were straightforward enough that people could attempt to answer them. Some of the topics were:

1.       Ireland has a tradition of story telling do you think that is being preserved today?

2.       If you were promoting Ireland to a visitor what would you tell them?

3.       What is your favourite story in the past in Ireland?

Following the topics session we had our prepared speeches. Aisling was our first speaker. She spoke from the Innovative Planning pathway. It was a level 2 speech entitled “The Johari Window” She explained what the speech was about and was very knowledgeable about the subject matter. Her speech was about how well do you really know yourself. Do others know something about you, you don’t know?

The second speaker was Eoin who gave a “Best mans speech” as practice for the real speech he is due to give shortly. It was a Presentation Mastery pathway, Level 1 speech from the Evaluation and Feedback project. It was a very reflective speech bringing in thoughts, feelings and emotions. It was also very witty. As his best friend is getting married this speech delves into Eoin’s past and how he was always his friend's wing man.

Our final speaker was Pat who also gave a speech entitled “Childhood’s End Rebooted” from the Innovative Planning pathway. It was a level 1 speech from the Evaluation and  Feedback project. The speech was about his past life and the different jobs he held before he finally came to know what he was happiest doing.

During our break the evaluators spoke with the speakers to give them feedback on their speeches. After the break Martin evaluated Aisling's speech. He highlighted how she kept the audience engaged and used good hooks to keep them that way.

In evaluating Eoin’s speech Martin also highlighted how he also kept the audience engaged. He used humour, hand gestures and heartfelt expressions to create a wonderful speech.

The final evaluation was Aisling’s of Pat’s speech. She spoke of his use of a timeline sequence that moved through the parts of his past.

All of the evaluators made a recommendation for the speakers to work on in their future speeches.

After the evaluations the Ah Counter, Declan, gave his report. He highlighted the use of crutch words such as “ah” and “um” in people’s speeches. He also told us that neither Pat nor Jenny used any filler words when they spoke, Congratulations to them. We also heard about the use of our word of the day which was “Propitious”. It was used five times during the evening.

Our General Evaluator, Sarah who was visiting from the Loughrea club, then gave her feedback on our overall meeting. She highlighted how well the meeting ran to plan even though it was our first one back this year. After her report Eugene, our Vice President of Education, asked for volunteers for role at our next meeting and many of them were filled. He then handed back to our President, Martin to close the meeting.

He thanked everyone for attending and brought a very interesting and informative first meeting of the year to a close.

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