Member blog by Alannah Vickery.

Theme Rain: Toastmaster Roydon Gibbs tested the Boater audience with questions regarding Rain throughout the meeting.

Morgane the Grammarian’s word of the day was “nonchalant” which all of our three speakers this morning did their best to show… they were very relaxed!!

Dynamic Leadership, Level 1, Project 3, Evaluation and Feedback Part 2 was the challenge for Aaron Gale, our first speaker. Aaron shared an ongoing story of his experiences living in London as a professional cricket player with his speech, “ Pub Life – It Aint all Beer and Pickled Eggs…” The story was the second speech in the Evaluation and Feedback project, where Aaron used the advice given from his last speech to improve his skills with stories of living in a pub with his then girlfriend, now wife.

Persuasive Influence, Level 3, Project 14, Understand Vocal Variety was the next speech, with “Where the Wild Things Are” by Dee Bigelow. Dee shared with us that her best memories growing up were having books read to her as a child, and then passing on storytelling on to her children.  Dee brought back memories of the Sunday morning radio program that read stories to the young early risers in the house. Dee did very well using different tones of voice to change between storytelling and real life experiences.

Visionary Communication Level 3, Project 6, Creating Effective Visual Aids. Louise Green entertained us all with “The Shapes of a Story”, which was actually about the 7 shapes of a story. The visual aid that Louise used to draw a graph the explained how the 7 shapes are told in books was a white board. Simple and effective. I was so interested I went home to look at Kurt Vonnegut website.

Toastie Award Winner of the Day was Jacqui Anderson who did a brilliant evaluation of Dee Bigelow’s speech, with lots of encouragement and affirmation. Jacqui was able to use the 3rd person to recommend what we could all do to improve our skills.