Kavita Dulai who had prepared the Club Officer Training welcomed us, promising us it would be a fun evening. Each member of the audience stood up and said their club name and their role.
Those attending were:
CORNERSTONES ADVANCED
Coralie Francis
HARROVIANS
Kavita Dulai
Sarda Hirani
Angela Lansbury
Kristof Lenga
Seema Menon
Sushil Shal
Indra Sikdar
Frank Van Der Stok
Amparo Vilamil
HOD
Martin Doe
Stay Kartara
Angela Lansbury
Dennis Newman
Ade Onigbanjo
Gill Ornstein
Indra Sikdar
TJ Expressions
Ramesh Hali
Simon Naylor-Smith
WATFORD SPEAKERS:
Pam Attfield
Matt Auld
Kavita Dulai
Sorel Cunningham
Liz C?
Yohan Fernando
Michael Harper
Jean Flower
Coralie Francis
Bernie Podmore
Sonal Somala
The team showed us slides of forthcoming dates such as competitions. I took photos of the slides, to have a handy record.
Seema explained organisational structure with charts.
PREPARING FOR CLUB OFFICER TRAINING
Club officer training is essential. It gains the club points. It prepares club committee members.
Without training, they may fail to fulfil the role. The club membership drops. Leaving everything to the President means they may become so overwhelmed that he or she resigns.
If the officers miss training, they might lose interest, drop out of the committee role or get overwhelmed and leave the club altogether. You want them to stay focused on their duties, to know where to get help. Good training helps them feel they belong, are vital, have a future, have new friends and a chance to network and find peers or seniors who can help. They are encouraged and confident so they do the job well.
Problem
How do you get people to attend the dull sounding Club Officer Training? Easy. At least Kavita made it look easy, by delegating. People had to turn up because she had involved them presenting.
Answer
Yes, Kavita's method was to give everybody a role as a trainer at the session. We were all involved with her, and each other.
***
Stories
You may be puzzled by the jargon the hierarchy of Toastmasters. What's the difference between a division and a district?
Seema and Kavita explained, using charts.
The Amusing Brainstorming Workshop
This was the most entertaining, creative and involving part of the evening and best for networking. Sushil, incoming President of Harrovians, told us were to brainstorm new ideas for clubs. Not alone but in groups. We all formed an entirely new, imaginary club, in a group with people we did not know. We had to think of two new ideas, and end with a name for our club.
International Languages and Exercise
My group's ideas were:
1 To meet at a different place every week,
ideally a restaurant or cafe with a different national food,
and have the national anthem, food, culture and language of that restaurant's theme and food as the theme of the evening;
2 To do exercise at the start and end of every meeting to offset the extra calories from eating out every time.
The name of our club was alliterative. The Fun and Frolics Club.
Ideas I took from other groups were:
1 To show the faces and roles of committee members on a large board so newcomers could identify everybody.
2 To have a board with the member's names in alphabetical order and columns for achievements, showing speeches done and showing ribbons won, like a children's school or family board which shows gold stars.
Quiz
Gill explained where we all fit in, with charts. At the end she ran a quiz. I wrote down the answers. I remembered that the numbers I needed to remember were 7 (the start, the big districts of the world), which are divided into divisions, which end with a one, two numbers ended in 1 either 9 or 6 which is an upside down 9. The easiest one was that I am in area L, which I remember as standing for London. I wish she had warned us at the start that we would be answering a quiz. I'd have taken more care to listen and make notes.
Mentoring Planning
It didn't all go as planned. Kavita heard me give a speech about mentoring at a club. She asked me to run a session on mentoring.
Format
The traditional presentation session from the USA is based on slides about the advantages of mentoring. But mentoring in previous years had been a challenge at several clubs. Two different solutions I had observed were:
At HOD:
In Singapore: Mentors were assigned and pairs were photographed together on stage.
Kavita spent an hour discussing with whether to break up into groups or pairs, or whether to involve the audience by asking questions and writing their answer on a flipchart.
The time did not allow for a lot of setting up for three different people to use flip charts or the audience to keep moving chairs, forming groups, and different groups all giving feedback.
Who?
After an hour or so of discussion, we decided that the session would be split between three people. The three presenters, each only doing five minutes of the 15 minutes session, would be me and my two mentoring pairing helpers at the mentoring committee at Harrovians, Ruth and Lorna.
Unfortunately, both of them were away on the date, Tuesday ... June 2017. I asked them both to send their comments which they did. After that I was away on holiday in Romania for a week with no phone contact.
I thought I could find somebody else merely to read out the comments on their behalf - involving little preparation, so anybody could do it.
I suggested that Indra, who had been my original mentor, and had done two presentations with me on mentoring, should be one of the other two people. Kavita was keen to involve a third person from an in-house club.
Indra and Kavita got together.
The final shape was
a Advantages of mentoring: slides made by the in house club.
b Challenges - Indra talking about four people who had done mentoring or been mentees with him.
c Solutions - my giving the HOD and Singapore solutions, ending with offering links to my blog posts and my email.
On the night, thanks to Kavita's foresight, overall plan and preparation with attention to the detail, all went well.
The evening's session ended with Coralie Francis DTM explaining the Pathways which will be the new personalised Toastmasters path for every Toastmasters, not all following the same first ten speeches and projects in the same order but choosing a more focused plan, leading towards a specific goal, for example of giving video presentations, or performing humorous speeches.
Any lessons learned?
One member went to the wrong venue. Maybe a reminder with the right venue - especially if it has changed.
Feedback forms showed that most people were very happy with the content, loved the workshops and were more confident. One person wanted a longer break for networking. Another wanted the meeting to end strictly to time, and/or to be spread over two evenings. Another wanted more explanation of roles, especially the VPE role.
I took photos, unofficially. I think it would have been good to have a group photo, in the interval because one or two people had to leave early and we finished slightly late so people did not want to delay further.
Apart from that, a great success.
Angela Lansbury, member of HOD and Harrovians in the UK and Braddell Heights Advanced Club in Singapore.
