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