It was a scintillating
Saturday afternoon where the members of Anchorvale CC Toastmasters Club headed
to RC after a long time for our 123rd Chapter Meeting. This meeting
marked the beginning of another exhilarating year of freshly talented and
enthusiastic team of EXCO of Anchorvale CC Toastmasters Club.
Our SAA Audrey kick
started the meeting with her icebreaker question: which the most memorable trip
in your life was was ever and why did it turn out to be so. All our members
shared their own experiences.
Our Toastmaster of the
Day Valliappan with his very natural and smooth flow of delivery introduced all
the appointment holders and highlighted the changes in the agenda. He then went
on to invite Wee Chee Sian our vibrant and energetic new president to deliver
his first opening address as President.
As soon as he was
invited Chee Sian showed us a bag of clips which he collected from his HDB. I
was wondering what he was waiting to tell us. He meant that all of us must
create our own goals in our Toastmaster’s journey and work towards achieving
it.
Then, Chee Sian came
up with the idea of having Humorous Speech and Tall Tales contest within our
club, as District is not going to have any contest in the first half of this
year. All our members instantly approved his idea with a BIG YES!
Chee Sian further mentioned
that this Tall Tales Contest was most popular in the U.S. As he read out the
contest rules, it said the speech must be of a highly exaggerated, improbable
nature and have a theme or a plot. Humor and props may be used to illustrate
the speech.
Next, we began with
the prepared speeches session. Our first speaker Lucas spoke about Archive. Dinesh
Aggarwal shared a story of how three person who escaped from Andaman jail
suffered and died from starvation. He further supported his speech with some
statistics. In the end he concluded his speech with an alarming question where
does the food that we all waste go into? He made a humble request to us not to
waste any food. Rusman started his speech titled “Career Booster” with three
questions back to back engaging the audience completely. He shared with us his
own experience of waiting for his job for more than a year. We can imagine the
amount of frustration he must have faced. Finally he concluded that his
decision to join Anchorvale CC Toastmasters Club was indeed a very good one for
him. He persuaded each one of us to join Anchorvale CC Toastmasters Club. Jeff
Lin shared with us his learning about leadership. He shared with us three
qualities a leader should have
·
Democratic
·
Supportive
·
Trust
Helena Lim started off
her speech with a small song of how every move you make matters a lot. She
further enacted the correct postures, gestures, body movements expressions and
eye contact one must have in his/her speech in a vivid manner. Tan Wei Xiang a
visitor from NTU Toastmasters Club represented himself as a student union
member contesting for election. He explained to us what are the good deeds he
would do if he is voted for and elected as a student union representative. Last,
but definitely not the least, we have our winner of prepared speeches session
Thomas Lee who likes to play with politics at home and at work place. He
explained to us his traumatic experience between his wife and mom as to who
will he save when they are swimming? His wife kept on bombarding him with
questions giving situations and asking who he would save between the two.
We moved on to the project evaluations which
turned out to be a POWER PACKED ONE! Firstly Narayana evaluated Lucas, where in he felt since it was an ice breaker speech
it would have been better for the audience if Lucas introduced himself to all
of us. Sathiamoorthy evaluated Dinesh’s speech. In his evaluation, he advised
Dinesh that his opening could have been more catchy! Roger Yap, who emerged as
the winner amongst evaluators evaluated Rusman’s speech. He advised Rusman to
have more energy and power in his voice while giving his speech.
Raymond Zhang also a visiting
TM from NTU Toastmaster’s Club evaluated Jeff’s speech. He suggested that Jeff
could have demonstrated us to how a good leader shouldn’t be commanding his
teammates to do work all the time. Instead he himself should support his team
by extending a helping hand. Muthu Ganesh evaluated Helena’s speech whereby he
advised her to have more open hand gestures, which tells the audience that she
appears confident rather than limiting herself with limited hand gestures which
may have a negative impact on audience. Chee Sian evaluated Wee Xiang, where in
he put forth the point that he didn’t ask for vote from the audience.Benjamin
Leow evaluated Thomas Lee.
Our Table Topics
Master Rusman was kind enough to give us choices between a set of motivational
quotes and funny quotes. It was surprising to see most of our speakers chose
only motivational quotes. Benjamin Leow emerged to be the winner of Table
Topics Session. His quote was “DREAM BIG! NEVER DARE TO FAIL!”. He asked the
audience “Is there anyone who has never failed? Cannot be!” He said every
failure is a stepping stone for success.
The session was a
indeed a blend of fun and learning.
-penned by Valli Kasinathan, CC
