Finding Thursday Meetings And Clubs Meeting Specific Days

Which clubs meet on a Thursday?
You can look at notifications from Meetup to find which clubs are meeting in your local area trough the week.

In London, HOD meets on two or three Thursdays each month, usually the first and third Thursdays.

Toastmasters International Find a Club
If you go to the Toastmasters International Find a Club page, you can select your area, the distance you are willing to travel, and find all the clubs meeting on that day.

If you visit a new country on holiday or business, and you cannot see a club meeting on your preferred day, write to the President or VPE of the biggest and busiest club in the area and ask if there are any meetings.

You might find that they have changed their day or meeting and venue but not yet updated the website. Meetings might have moved temporarily because of a national holiday.

When I go on holiday, whether for a weekend away, or a week, or two months, I check the local speaking clubs. I note the dates in my diary, write offering to speak or evaluate or be grammarian, to take over a role at the last minute if somebody drops out. I ask for directions.

If the club meeting is immovable, I can move my family arrangements, such as dinner out, to fit around important events such as a club Christmas party, a club inviting me to speak, or a seasonl celebration or a contest at which I am a judge.

AuthorAngela Lansbury, CL, ACG, member of HOD in London, England.

What I learned from Thermo Fisher Toastmasters International Speakers Club

Problems
I spent a lot of time organising which club to visit on the day. I was invited to be the General Evaluator of the club on the day of the meeting.

I shall deal with:
Finding the meeting day;
changing roles at meetings;
photo directions from station to venue; food; General Evaluator evaluating evaluators.

 Time Spent Choosing Which Club to Visit
I had spent a lot of time calling other clubs such as a management university club which was supposed to have a meeting according the to national club directory and the Toastmasters International site. I wish that the site ran an update on which clubs are meeting today, like Meetup. An easily updated site.

 I have found that it's no use relying on being told about a meeting a week or even a day in advance. You arrive at a huge building, the concierge knows nothing about the group. Or five different Toastmasters clubs meet there on different days. The contest moves to another day or building because two key speakers are away that day or the room is too large, too small, or booked by another group.

On the day you find that the air conditioning does not work (this happened at Senja Cashew) so they have moved rooms. You need the name of somebody who will be at the meeting, and is travelling towards it or already in it, to direct you to the right location.

 The more meetings you go to, the easier it gets to find the location. You spot another member who is going there twenty minutes early in the street in front of the building, the downstairs corridor, near the lift, walking the other way upstairs looking for the room. If you don't recognise them, sometimes they recognise you. Especially after you stop them to ask the way, they look at you close-up, you look at them close-up, you recognise each other.

 Phoning For Information
I phoned about six people whose numbers weren't answering. I have learned not to pick and chose. I had tried ringing only people whose names I could pronounce, simple familiar names, John Smith as opposed to four syllable Indian first names and surnames and three syllable Chinese names.

 I also learned to start with the words 'Toastmasters Club' instead of 'calling about today's meeting'. If I tried to ring a President at the top of the list, then go to the bottom of the list the VPE (education and paperwork organiser), or SAA (room set up, key and chair organiser), half an hour later I had lost track of who I had phoned.

So now my method is to phone down the list until I get an answer. At least three of the six people did not know and said they would call somebody else. They probably had the same problem as me - the person they rang did not answer, and as they were at work or engaged in other tasks they had no time to follow it up, just left a message and hoped somebody would call them back.

 Eventually I found that a club I had noted in my diary as having a contest was not having a contest and was not even having a club meeting. The university and management training clubs often do not meet in their holidays, only in term time, and not before exams and mock exams.

 Answers Regarding Meeting Venues
I received a message asking me to be Project Evaluator. However, after a couple of hours, when I eventually went through the searching for the organiser process, I started hunting for the directions. But the mailing address is not necessarily the meeting address. The meeting address could be different from last year when the directory was printed.

 Photo Directions
The committee member helpfully sent both the agenda, with my name added as General Evaluator, plus a series of photos of the directions from the station to the building. She had photographed a bicycle rack.

Unfortunately, exit B and so on are not clearly marked at the station. At Woodlands, you come to a T junction with a shopping mall or main roads in both directions. Eventually I spotted the bicycle rack.

However, by now I had walked all around the building. When I asked at the ticket office they told me to catch a bus. (The ticket office job is to direct enquiries to catch the correct bus, not to give directions to walkers.)

I kept walking from the MRT station down a path across a lawned park. I was now lost, approaching the venue from the wrong direction. The club was meeting somewhere inside a huge building in a complex of two or three blocks, with multiple entrances. So I phoned again.

Luckily my contact came downstairs, promising to meet me on the first floor. I puzzled over whether she meant ground floor, or one up.  I knew this was American and meant what we in Britain call Ground Floor.

Woodlands
The best part was that the walk from the Woodlands MRT (mass transit railway) through an avenue of palm trees as the sun sinks was a beautiful photo opportunity. The palm trees were uplifting spiritually, a reward. Woodlands is the name of the area. It is more like a garden city. Skyscrapers but surrounded by parks of palm trees.

 Everything is high security. You have to pass the downstairs guards. You need passes to operate the lift and enter the floor of the office. You also need a pass to get out to the Ladies toilet and back again.

The Club Meeting
 Everybody smiled and waved as I walked in, rose and came over smiling to shake my hand. In my evaluation I said that their was such a party atmosphere, yet not a drink (alcohol) in sight. (Heckler - we drank earlier!) Continuous giggles and banter from the audience sitting in a horse shoe chair plan.

The members are a team from one department. I discovered this when one person kindly gave me a lift home by car. They have as many as about 46 members, whose fees are paid by the company.

Company Club Attendance
You would think that attendance would be high, since the venue is no distance. However, the committee worry that outside their department, members are 'too busy' to attend meetings or plan speeches, and attend only when their boss calls at the meeting, twice a year.

GE's Ideas
As GE I started with praise. The Toastmaster of the evening was very jolly and smiling.

Then I moved on to helpful suggestions to make the club even more welcoming to outsiders. My suggestions were that newcomers would be reminded to switch off phones and be told the location and procedure for finding toilets.

 The food was excellent, a mixture of sweet and savoury, egg sandwiches, small pieces of oval chicken on the bone in BBQ sauce, fish balls which I did not dare eat because I have an allergy to shellfish, and small portions of blueberry cheesecake, plus assorted drinks. We began with the food, and finished it off at break time.

 Topics
The topics session was most amusing. The Topics master correctly explained and adhered to the system of using topics to allow a chance to speak impromptu to visitors who were not speaking not he rest of the programme. 

The table topics speakers were asked to sell the objects pulled from a bog. The appointment holders had desktop markers for President, Evaluator, timer and so on. I suggested that everybody should be given name tags. This would help visitors to recognise the regulars, and help the regulars to address the visitors by name.

 I loved the little pictures of the faces of the appointment holders down the side of the programme. I suggested that the pictures could be made bigger.

 Listing Evaluation of Meeting Set-Up
I knew that I would easily remember to speak about the three main points, the pre-meeting preparation (photos of directions) the programme sheet (photos of committee).

I did not mention timer - I should have said she can have a slot describing the importance of time.

A Speech About Time, East and West style
At this in-house club their office day starts at 8 am. (One of the speeches was about how the first of the speaker's two bosses had expected her to arrive by 8 am. The second boss was Western and interested in the quality of the work, not the time. However, the Asian boss stood at the door welcoming everybody on arrival and if they were even three minutes late he was on the phone to them asking where they were and what was the problem.)

 A second speech was about how the speaker's grandfather had been a scholar but their small village in China had no use for a scholar and valued practical work. Her parents were illiterate. However, they made sure she went to one of the best schools in Singapore. She struggled with maths and was told to change to art. After six months, the art teacher said that art required talent, and she should switch back to maths. (I'm sure this can be adapted by the speaker to an entirely humorous speech. The meeting room was the central refreshment area of an upstairs open plan office.

I have fond memories of the meeting. If you are in Singapore, allow extra time and visit this club.
It is a corporate club, so you need to phone first to check when they are meeting and ensure that you will be welcome and expected so you can be on the list and get past security.

Author
Angela Lansbury, CL , ACG, member of two clubs in London: Harrovians and HOD; member of one club in Singapore, Braddell Heights Advanced.

Speeches On Coaching And Keep Safe

Audience in semi-circle at Harrovian Speakers' Club, August 2017.

Thank you to Ruth Vishnick who drove me to the meeting. We arrived smiling, in hysterics after driving over the gigantic potholes in the car park which had a switchback effect, jolting us up and down.

The audience sat arranged in a semicircle in Harovian Speakers Club's spacious hall. The venue is often delightfully decorated with colourful bunting or seasonal adornments.

President Sushil opened the meeting with his usual calm and efficiency. He conveyed the impression that all was well organised, despite delays because we did not have the projector for a speech, and were missing a speaker and an evaluator.

He replaced the evaluator by me, Angela Lansbury. I had put myself down as backup speaker and backup any role.

Suchil's most remarkable achievement was his novel way of replacing the missing printed agenda by writing the names of speakers on large oblong coloured pieces of paper, stuck onto the black back of the wheeled whiteboard. The black felt tip pen proved the most easy to read colour at a distance.

The President and his agenda board. Sushil, President of Harrovians Speakers' Club, wrote the speakers' names on paper coloured cheering, eye-catching yellow, orange and pink.

Jayanthini was Timer and explained the lights in a cheerful and positive fashion, saying, "It's my honour to be your timer." She admitted she had not been timer for many months, adding amusingly, "It's time for me to be timer!"

She described how an Advanced club claps when a speaker has spoken too long. We adopted that system for the meeting.

We started with table topics - impromptu speeches which in the early days of Toastmasters in the USA in the last century involved the speakers picking topics from cards which were on the table. I presume having topics hidden, face down, creates excitement and a random and surprise effect. But face up the topics would have offered choice to nervous speakers.

Indra Sikdar presenting table topics as Table Topics Master.

The programme stated that that Indra would evaluate odd numbered topics and another person would evaluate even numbered topics. However, Amparo was appointed topics evaluator. Ruth instead introduced the first three topics as Topic Master and Indra introduced the next three topics. Sharing the Topics Master role is a good system to give practise to more people and be more inclusive. The audience also gets to hear and to know more people.

Table Topics speaker.

Photos by Angela Lansbury. Copyright. (More photos of this event are available from Angela Lansbury to members of Toastmasters International.)

Grammarian Biju introduced the word of the day, Sanguine.

Seema spoke on Keep Safe. she described how the police had changed their way of communicating danger quickly to the public by tweeting.

She gave us a list of ten things we could do to keep safe. These included having a phone which can act as a torch (and knowing how to turn on the torch) so that in an emergency we can find our way around in the dark. (A torch can also be used to signal.) A mobile phone should also be kept charged in case you need it.

Most people thought that these precautions were easy to achieve and remember. However, carrying a door wedge to stop others breaking in through a door was not so easy. (But it's a matter of putting your mind to it. Door wedges are inexpensive and you can buy them in DIY shops or order them online.)

Oqbonnayei gave her icebreaker or first speech to introduce herself to the members. She spoke about fulfilling her dream of going to live and work in Atlanta, Georgia, in the USA.

Lorna spoke on Coaching.

Lorna gave a speech from the Advanced manual on Coaching, project 4 of the Communication manual. 

I usually make notes whilst listening to the speech. At the end of the meeting I copy the notes, briefly, into the manual. This delays the person giving me a lift home.

This time I wrote a detailed analysis in her manual. Afterwards I simply photographed the page with my mobile phone so that I had a record. (If she ever lost her manual, I would be able to give her the dates when she did her speech.) I also have a photo record of what I said, plus a video of myself on my mobile phone, if I need to get the record of my giving an evaluation in my leadership manual.

Jesus giving the General Evaluation of the evaluators and the whole meeting.

Jesus, GE, offered useful tips on the advantages of pausing instead of saying um and filler words. Pausing enables the speaker to gather thoughts, planning what to say next. The audience has time to reflect for a moment. You, as a speaker, sound less rushed, calmer. 

Members of the audience.

Members of the audience.

Jayanthini operating the lights.

Where's my ribbon?

President Sushil presented the winners with awards for the achievements of the evening. Winners of the ribbons were (left to right):
Rhea for Best Table Topic;
Oqbonnayei for delivering her Icebreaker speech;
President Sushil Shah (centre) presenting prize ribbons;
Seema Menon, best speech on the subject of Keep Safe;
Angela Lansbury, best evaluator, for her evaluation of Lorna's speech project on Coaching.

Author
Angela Lansbury, CL, ACG. Member of Harrovian Speakers and HOD in London, UK, and Braddell Hieghts Advanced Club in Singapore.

Harrovians Meeting Learning about Workers' Welfare, Writing Your Family History and Improving Meetings

Speech by Indra

Speech by Angela Lansbury On Writing Your Family History
I spoke about being a writer of several books including one on Weddings and Toasts which was why when I met Indra at a Harrow Writers Circle meeting, Indra invited me to join Toastmasters.and recommended writing your family history. I said that I was previously a travel writer and had to check all phone numbers before going to press because one reader because of a typo had her number given out as for a restaurant, part of a hotel, and had dozens of photos from people wanting to book meals.

I thought that writing about the past would be easier. I wrote about my late father's grandfather who came from Ukraine to London, starting with 1880 and I soon became an expert on the period 1880-1890.

I had him working in the post office. I finished my first chapter all about him working in the post office. Then I discovered that hew as the wrong nationality and religion and would not have been allowed to work in the post office. I had to rewrite the chapter, making others suspect him, and him being chased.

Next I had my hero getting on an old-fashioned train, a steam train. Then I looked for a picture of a train in Ukraine and discovered they had horse drawn trains on rails.

Following that, I had my book's hero landing in New York and seeing the Statue of Liberty. I thought, let's check how long after it was built he arrived. I found it had not yet been built, although he was would have known the poem written as a fund-raiser.

Writers' Holiday
Researching a novel does wonders for your history and is a constant entertainment. I am going on a writing holiday shortly, there's another in February. I suggest you come with me, and learn to write novels, poetry or your family history.

You would think that moving my novel's hero back to London, would make life easy for an English writer. My mother told me her grandfather was the first person in the street to have electric lights. That sounded like an idle boast. Until I realised that he had a store selling building supplies and fittings. So he sold electric lights. Also having electric lights would advertise his shop. What about electric lights in streets? The internet was no use. All the searches told me about the first electric lights in Chicago or New York. Most English speaking readers and writers on the internet are in America. My source would be the library of London's East End.

Best evaluator ribbon won by Grammarian by Steve Ferguson, a visitor. He had been a member of a Toastmasters group a long time ago when he did a best man's speech for a wedding in Wales.

Table Topics and Christmas In Communist Countries
His friend, Denise, revealed in table topics that she is from Albania and that in a Communist country they did not celebrate Christmas but New Year.

Table topics ribbon was won by Lorna.

Indra won best speaker, telling us he worked for the home office and when the system was that people were risking their jobs at the annual review, they worked less well than later. The system changed to one of rewards instead of punishments. Nowadays they also tried to make positive moves to keep workers happy and have team spirit. He was part of a committee finding new ideas and had suggested a monthly lunch together, and a breakfast together.

Jayanthini conducted a very useful workshop brain storming on how we could improve club meetings. (We were down to about nine members but that is usual in August when many members are on holiday.)

I gave a talk on why you should write your life story and go to a writing course.

Author
Angela Lansbury, author of Quick Quotation for Writers and Speakers. You can buy it through Lulu.com and Amazon.com