How to change your life, from rags to riches, and use singing to enhance public speaking - HOD Meeting Thursday March 5th

President Tony Winyard

Toastmaster of the evening
Bijan

Grammarian Angela Lansbury with her props, a percussion instrument to get attention, plus a dictionary and a grammar book.

From the club cupboard Angela had found the pack of words of the day and selected recapitulate. Re-cap-it-u-late.

Visitors included General Evaluator Geoffrey Freedland, a former HOD Speakers' Club member who now lives in Glasgow and attends a Toastmasters club there. 

David fetched a display board from the second library. Angela wrote the word of the evening large and positioned the display board diagonally so it could be seen by both speakers on stage and the audience. She used a clipboard from the cupboard as a ruler to get the lettering straight.

 Geoffrey Freedland, who suggested she should write on the board a reminder of the meaning of the word so Angela wrote underneath the synonym Summarize, using the American spelling, which was on the card supplied by Toastmasters International which has its HQ in the USA where the organisation started. In any case, IPC converted to using Z in spellings two or three decades ago when Angela worked there as a sub-editor.

The first speech was an ice breaker or first introductory speech by Adam. His speech was full of humour about his life as a gambler. He described his grandmother as living until her nineties.  'She smoked, and drank - and was an inspiration to us all!'

The second speech was entitled Me, and was a rags to riches story. The speaker's turning point was reading the book: The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People by Steven Covey.

The third speech by Coral Dawkins was from the advanced Storytelling manual. She used confrontational conversation when she told us about her childhood drama standing her ground against her teacher and head master. Despite being good at maths she had been marked down, and refused to accept the paper. Her punchline was that she had been given the paper of a girl named Carol. She refused to accept the paper with the low mark. The moral of the story is that you should not accept others' underestimation of your abilities.

The fourth speech was by David Phelops on using singing scales and songs to improve speaking. He sang and used gestures. He successfully persuaded us to sign up for a singing event or course.

Peter Jacques was Topics Master and despite being pushed into the position on the day because somebody else was unable to attend, he came up with some challenging and amusing topics.

All the topics speakers were amusing and interesting. But the winner of the ribbon won despite being off topic because he was truly memorable and impressive. Nobody can remember what the topic was but we can all remember his response - a demonstration of asking everybody in the room to say their name - then remembering all the names.

The last photo shows Toastmaster of the evening, Bijan, presenting the ribbon for the best table topic.

Photos by Angela Lansbury, copyright Angela Lansbury. More photos of this event and others are available to members of Toastmasters.

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