Anchorvale CC TMC - 119th Chapter Meeting on 14th April 2018

It was another wonderful Saturday on 14^th April and we had our 119th Chapter Meeting at the Anchorvale CC.

Sergeant–At-Arms Rusman started meeting with the Ice Breaker Topic “A grateful event in our life”. Everyone shared their own grateful experiences or best aspirations towards a grateful life.

After the introduction by the toastmaster of the day Chee Sian, our president Salma gave her opening address and she shared on 3 topics.

1) District 80 SPARKS Annual Conference 2018 – 12^th & 13^th May 2018

A benefit of listening to two World Champions of Public Speaking

Tickets at $145 (after $50 subsidy by our club)

2) EXCO Committee 2018 – 2019

Available positions open for interested applicants

3) Chalet on 30 June 2018

Exciting programs and fun team-building activities

EXCO committee handover

Organizing committee positions open for interested applicants

Next, in the prepared speech section, the 1^st speaker Melvin Lee delivered his 1^st project – Ice Breaker by sharing his childhood stories and his motivations to join Toastmasters. His speech was truly sincere and touching.

2^nd speaker Francis Arroyo Illo also gave his 1^st project – Ice Breaker. His story started by recalling all his childhood dreams such as becoming a Priest, a Teacher and TV reporter. The reason for these positions is because they all required for him to speak, which he enjoyed. Unfortunately, all these dreams were rejected. His father thought he was not suitable and only wanted him to be an engineer.

Eventually he grew up and became a computer engineer, but he found out lately that he still holds the passion of public speaking. Hence with this motivation, he joined Toastmasters.

Francis’ excellent speech won him the best speaker.

The 3^rd speaker Sajith Kumar Dara delivered his 1^st project – Ice Breaker with the topic “I can still dream”. He shared with us that he started his career as IT engineer, and further continued his study in MBA. After graduation, he stayed in colleague to teach. All the important milestones in life made him believe that he can still dream and he chose to be a Toastmaster.

 The 4^th Speaker Narayana Rao Yadla gave his 3^rd project speech on the topic “Selfie”. Interestingly, he opened his speech by showing statistics: in the world, 68% people edit their selfie photos and majority is women. The average time spent per person on selfie edit is 5 hours / week.

After that, he continued to share the history of selfie and its rapid growth of 17000% from 2003 to 2012. 21^st June is the world selfie day and the side market is also booming due to the growth of selfie users.

More importantly, in his last part of the speech, he emphasized the importance of safety while taking selfies and highlighted that fatal accidents are increasing due to people becoming increasingly daring in their pursuit of taking the perfect selfie. His speech topic was very interesting and relevant with great content.

 

All the evaluators (Valli, Debbie, Valliappan, Zulhafni) gave in depth and detailed evaluations to the respective speaker.

The best evaluator of the day Zulhani used a great analogy to deliver his evaluation by treating the speech delivery as cooking. He treated the speech contents of Narayana as a great variety and good selection of food materials. He gave his suggestions on the better arrangement of speech contents by suggesting him to deliver a better food set up on the plate.

Finally, it is our table topics section and we had something special. Our table topic master Salma taught us to play the game “Powerpoint Karaoke”

The game had 3 sections:

Section 1: Conversations starts with only “But” or “And”

A team of 2 people to start a conversation about the organizing a birthday for Sarah. It will go like, “Let’s organize a birthday for Sarah.”

1^st time: used “But” in the beginning of every sentence, so in response to “Let’s organize a birthday party for Sarah,” each party will start their sentence with But.

2^nd time: used “And” in the beginning of every sentence. Same as the above, but the word “And” will start each sentence.

Take away: to start the sentence with “but” will result in negative and defensive atmosphere into discussions while to start the sentence with “and” will lead the conversation into the right direction positively.

Section 2: One word per person

A team of 3 – 5 people played the game by only using 1 word to make up a sentence with a random topic. Many times, the sentence ended up with surprises and laughter from the audience. Meaning when Salma asked a question like, why is the sky blue? The participants had to reply by only answering one word and work as a team spontaneously.

Take away: learn to react with any situation and make things possible with the information given on hand.

Section 3: Presentation on other people’s slides

Participants played this game by presenting a set of 5 slides per topic without any prior knowledge on the contents or control on the slide switch.

It was a great experience for participants to practice their impromptu speaking skills.

All participants did great and entertained the audiences well.

Take away: when you have control over nothing, learn to be calm on stage and have fun.

Congratulations to our award winners:

Best Evaluator: Zulhafni Zulkeflee

Best Prepared Speech: Francis Arroyo

It was another spectacular afternoon with Anchorvale CC Toastmasters. We hope you can join us for our next session on 28th April 2018.

Written By: Sam Wang

Pathways Workshop by Toa Payoh Central CC Toastmasters Club

On a breezy evening one Wednesday on 4th April 2018, eight (not so) young grasshoppers marched down to Toa Payoh Community Centre armed with notebooks and pens to learn more about the fabled Pathways. Fees for this workshop was fully sponsored by our club, Anchorvale CC Toastmasters Club, to encourage members' attendance.

There were 4 esteemed masters that day:

• Pathways Guide Alicia Chia Poh Lin
• Toa Payoh Central CC Advanced Toastmasters Club President Christophe Hamchin
• Past International Director, DTM Poh Kim Siong
• District 80 Program Quality Director, DTM Harikrishnan Muthusamy

After a brief intro by emcee Roger Sng and organizer Janet Haw, Sensei #1: Pathways Guide Alicia Chia spoke on (surprise surprise) pathways! She introduced Pathways as a flexible education system that’s customizable to achieve our unique professional and personal goals. With no time limit to the curriculum, there IS time to stop and smell the roses.

Pathways is a system built on 5 core competencies:

• Public Speaking
• Interpersonal Communication
• Strategic Leadership
• Management
• Confidence

And to help us develop these core competencies, there are 10 paths:

• Dynamic Leadership
• Effective Coaching
• Innovative Planning
•  Leadership Development
• Motivational Strategies
• Persuasive Influence
• Presentation Mastery
• Strategic Relationships
• Team Collaboration
• Visionary Communication

Every path has a total of 5 levels, and each level has projects for us to complete before clearing that level. The good thing is that the projects in level 1 are the same for all the 10 paths. It only starts differing from level 2 onwards, as level 2 focuses on helping us develop our personal style. Of course, some projects overlap for certain paths, so be sure to choose your projects wisely to give yourself some flexibility in your pathway selection.

After finishing all the projects in all 5 levels, you would have to do a reflection speech to reflect on your journey through that pathway.

Online basecamp is free for your first pathway, and US$20 for your subsequent pathways. If you want printed materials, it is US$25. While there are no refunds should you decide to quit that pathway, there is a 30-day path exchange deal for those with buyers’ remorse. Of course, all these is on top of your club membership fees.

For those who are undecided about which pathway to take, there is an online assessment with 20 questions to help you decide which path would best meet the goals you want to achieve. It takes about 12 – 18 months to complete a pathway if you are consistent in completing your projects.  

The next speaker, Sensei #2: Toa Payoh Central CC Advanced Toastmasters Club President Christophe Hamchin, very kindly showed us how to navigate through the confusing online system: Base Camp. He showed us how to view video tutorials, download project checklists, and access the vast amount of learning material available on the website. 

He even gave us a handy tip: if you find that you are unable to move on to the next level in the system, double check that you have answered all questions in the pre and post assessment of your projects. Failure to answer even 1 question will result in you not being able to move forward in the system.

He also showed us how we can ask for feedback/give unsolicited feedback ;) to members of the same toastmasters club. Through the ‘Feedback Submission’ feature on the website, we can indicate the type of feedback we would like to receive and select the specific club members we wish to receive the feedback from. 

Those club members would then receive an email, and we may choose to make their response open to all club members/just the exco/or only ourselves for viewing. The limitation is that we won’t be able to ask for or give feedback to guest speakers/external evaluators from other clubs.

After a short break with delicious homemade refreshments, Sensei #3: DTM Poh Kim Siong talked about how important it is for clubs to grow with Toastmasters International, and start on the Pathways instead of sticking to the traditional program. His speech can be summarized by analogies from the Wizard of Oz: 

• It takes commitment to achieve your goals—the Pathways journey is not easy and requires you to dedicate time and energy towards it. 
• Sometimes you need to lean on your friends – ask your fellow club members for help if you need guidance during this journey.
• Running away is not the answer – if you quit Toastmasters halfway you will not achieve the goals you set out to accomplish.
• Follow Your Own Yellow Brick Road – don’t compare your Toastmasters journey with other people’s. Everyone’s experience will be different, so do things at your own pace.
• No one else can do it for you—no matter how much help others extend to you, if you don’t put in the required effort on your own, you won’t improve. 

He also shared another nugget of wisdom with us: “A leader is a reader.” He recounted how he hit a roadblock with his 3^rd DTM application because of technicality in the rules, and used this to urge us to read up more on the pathways so that we can avoid similar hitches.

Poh Kim Siong also showed us some handy websites that summarized what pathways is about on a single page:

https://www.toastmasters.org/education/pathways

https://pathwaysexperience.blogspot.sg/

After that was Q&A with the 3 speakers as panel.

Qns 1: Can we do 2 pathways simultaneously? Yes.

Qns 2: Since the first level is the same for all the 10 pathways, when you start on your 2^nd path, do you have to repeat the projects in the 1^st level? Yes. Repetition is the mother of learning, so it will do us good to repeat the projects anyway.  

Finally, Sensei #4: DTM Harikrishnan gave a short speech on leadership and what it takes to be a leader. According to him, a true leader is one that helps others develop their leadership potential.

Overall, it was a highly informative and useful workshop and all the grasshoppers left wiser than they were before.

Thank you.

Written By:

Audrey Lim

Disclaimer: Photos in the blog are from Toa Payoh Central CC Toastmasters Club, reproduced with their permission.

118th Chapter Meeting - 10th March 2018

On this wonderful Saturday we had our 118th Chapter Meeting at Anchovale CC

Our Sergeant-at-Arms- Manonmani started the meeting by asking the opinions of toastmasters about organic food.

While there are some people who enjoy it, some of the toastmasters actually skeptical about the benefits of organic food.

After the introduction by the Toastmaster of the day, Badriprasad, our president Salma Begum shared how global warming affects women more than men. It is mainly because women need to travel further in hot countries in order to take care of the family and the fatality rate is higher for women in natural disasters because they are more likely to struggle physically compared to men.

In Marice Hung's speech, she talked about an online game- virtual world,developed by Linden Lab. It is a game dollar could be exchanged to US dollar. There are a lot of transaction among its 1 million users. She said that the difference between the game and other online game like world of warcraft is that it provides freedom which we can not get in real life. Linden Lab is creating another game with VR. Furthermore Marice said that VR became the focus of technology giants like Microsoft and Apple. It will be the next big thing.

Evaluation

Jeff said that Marice did the speech so well that she sounds like a TechCrunch.com’s reporter. He likes her confidence and proper eye contact with the audience. 

Suresh gave a speech about criticising. He said that criticising is not comforting  and most people do not think thoughtfully before speaking out. It creates negative emotion. However, listening to criticism is sometimes a good thing because other people might be more knowledgeable in a certain area. Thus, we all have to accept or give criticism that is constructive and can encourage people.

Evaluation

Hemant thought it was a relevant topic to us since we often encounter criticisms in our lives. He felt that Suresh has a good posture but not enough eye contact.

In his prepared speech, Vicky told us why procrastination is a fatal habit. It has a bad effect on students' grades and finances.

Reasons people choose to procrastinate are because of:

1. Perfectionism 

2.Fear of the unknown

3.Do it later 

4. Working on small tasks because they are easier

5. You experience a lack of motivation

6. You are unclear about how you started 

And we could overcome the problem by writing a daily review and be critical about ourselves and find your “why”.

Evaluation

Weite hilariously said that it is the first speech that is not about Vicky's wife. Wei Te likes his style of speaking. She labeled it “bro style” that can build rapport with audience. However, she feels Vicky could have made the advice more memorable.

To react or to respond. In his prepared speech, Norman said that in life we face problems but we have a choice of how we deal with them. We are empowered by our decision. He thinks that we have to accept certain situations that we cannot change and embrace them. It is our responses that govern the outcome.

Evaluation

Chee Sian thought it was a good speech but the message could be further reinforced.

Sathiya taught the “nontechnical audience” the process of rice cultivation. They are

1. Germination and seeding 

2. Transplanting

3. Watering 

4. Take out the weeds

5. Tillering stage

6. Pesticide

7. Heading

8. Ripening

9. Harvesting

Evaluation

Zulhafni thinks that Sathiya was able to capture attention, using beautiful comparison. It is a clear presentation with good clarity. However, he thinks Sathiya could put a timeline of the whole process of rice cultivation and to have a recap section.

 In her speech Valli demonstrate how to make a delicious tuna roll by using white bread, can tuna, mayonnaise, red peppers, spring onion.

Evaluation

Salma said Valli has a good choice of topic and give out sample of the food while sharing the different variety of the food. However, the structure of the demonstration could be better and there are many silent moments in her speech.

  

Our table topic master gave out famous quotes from some great people to the participants. They are mainly about how to conquer fear and cultivate hope. 

Lastly, we have double winner for both Best Speaker and Best Evaluator today:

Best speaker: Sathiyamoorthi and Norman

Best Evaluator: Weite and Zulhafni

Best Table Topic: Francis

Written By:

Vincent Wong Cing Shen