On a beautiful sunny evening, the toastmasters’ club members and guests gathered in Menlo Park Hotel, Galway, to have anotherengaging and productive fortnightly meeting.
At the outset, our president Eugene joined us via zoom and opened the meeting.
Avril, as Toastmaster, ran the meeting and introduced the meeting role holders. Alison, Ah-counter, explained the role, and then, Cormac, Grammarian, introduced the word of the day: “bamboozle”, followed by introducing Timekeeper (Ivica), Creative Corner (Declan); Scribe (Niloufar); General evaluator (Pat).
Our Topics master (Maria), explained the Topics Session, and presented the topic. She presented interesting topics and made audience eager to participate. First topic was about holidays: “What are you looking for this summer?” Participants shared their plans and desires for this summer, such as relaxing on sunny days, visiting attractive places in Ireland including spectacular Irish natural beauty. Then Maria raised a generic question: “What do you bring for a barbeque on weekends, and why?” Participants referred to traditional lists for this purpose, such as burgers, hot dogs, ice cream, sweet things, etc. Among all interesting responses, Alison mentioned a very interesting point concerning the need to have sun cream and an umbrella at the same time, as the Irish weather is not reliable and it might rain even on a sunny day in summer. Eugene told us he will bring what is in his head such as jokes. The other two questions raised by our Madam Topics master were: “What is something you tried, but swore that you would never do it again?” and “How to convince a customer to buy your product in full price?” Both questions were eagerly answered by participants.
Our first Speaker was Luke. He talked beautifully about his purpose of being here, the visionary communication pathway. He had a deep philosophical argument concerning concepts such as darkness in the light, concept of death as a universal decision, contesting the norms, making vision by mission, and the purpose of improving communication skills.
The second speaker, Jenny Doyle, beautifully talked about dynamic leadership, ‘the oldest story in the world’ (Level 3). She shared with us traditional stories in the world about the pattern of stars in the sky. She made connection with the audience through storytelling. She also went beyond the European perspective and linked the discussion to aboriginal cultures. Jenny backed her argument with academic research conducted at Western Sydney University.
Speaker 3 was Frances. She had a very interesting talk about ‘Engaging Humour, Know your sense of humour (Level 2) with a very engaging story about St Francis Xavier. She perfectly used story telling technique to convey the message and beautifully narrated the story.
Following the break, the General evaluator, Pat, opened and chaired the second part of the meeting.
Our evaluators were Brian, Marie and Martin and they all gave excellent feedback. Positive points about the three speakers were: excellent eye contact with the audience, backed up information with scientific researches, no reliance on notes, using the speaking area to connect with the audience, etc.
Declan completed a very interesting creative corner and had a discussion concerning the importance of choices, and “you are the one who choose”.
At the end all officers provided their feedback based on their roles, and the meeting was wrapped up by Eugene.
The next meeting will take place on Wednesday the 8th of June at 8pm in the Menlo Park Hotel (Galway) and it will be available on Zoom as well.
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