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.

Fun At Club Officer Training 27 Jun 2017

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.