Posts tagged with “Boaters Toastmasters” - Boaters Toastmasters

How did I get here?

admin_ — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 05:23:07 +0000

Imagination flowed through this meeting led by Dee with some extremely interesting speeches.

Louise had a six minute speech talking about neurodiversity and the autism spectrum.
Just like there is vast diversity in the way humans look, there is also vast diversity in human minds. I think this is great! Life would be boring if we all thought the same way.
Conditions such as Autism have a spectrum, many people go through their whole life without even realising they have autism. It can appear as minor as just thinking and communicating in a slightly different way. Louise made this informative and extremely interesting.
The message I took away was “don’t be too quick to judge someone for being too direct or for communicating in a different way because it could just be the way they think”

“How did I get here?” was the second speech this morning by Georgia. I found this extremely entertaining! She talked about moments in her life where she has caught herself in a moment and thought, “How did I get here?”
One of her stories was about when she ended up in a mansion in Brazil. This then turned into a walk into the jungle to a building on top of a waterfall where she witnessed a tribal ritual of people using frog poison to hallucinate. I found this fascinating because of how foreign it seems coming from New Zealand.

Apart from coming to meetings to get better at public speaking, I also come for the stories!

By Henry Thomson

Sabine’s Distinguished Award

admin_ — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 09:50:02 +0000

Outstanding!

This meeting was a celebration of Sabine, a member of the boaters club who has recently been awarded the distinguished Toastmasters award (DTM).

The DTM is something that very few people ever achieve. It took Sabine 7 years to achieve it (which is an impressively short amount of time).

It has involved her completing over 70 speeches, being a club president, successfully coaching a struggling club and many more feats.

Louise was the MC for the day and did a superb job of keeping the morning running smoothly while also keeping us laughing. We had many great tributes to Sabine and her efforts. Notably, we had two well-known toastmasters and Sabine’s friends David Templeman and Rob Woolly give speeches.

Following the lovely tributes, we had some delicious food and some breakfast bubbles.

Conversation flowed well and we moved into some impromptu speaking just to keep everyone on their toes. Guests and toastmasters were welcomed to the stage to either speak for a minute about a random topic or speak for a minute about Sabine. These were fun and fast-paced, leading to some interesting tales.

From there Sabine gave a motivating and inspiring speech explaining what it was like on her journey to DTM and how it felt being at the destination with her award.

Congratulations Sabine!

So much winning

louise — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 23:38:03 +0000

Member blog: by David Pottinger. The theme for this week’s meeting, which included an educational by Laura Bruce, winner of the 2020 D72 Toastmasters Humorous Speech Contest, was Winning.

Jacqui Anderson opened the meeting as Sgt at Arms and welcomed us in, introducing our Toastmaster for the morning, David Clarkson. David explained the difference between good and bad winning. And today was definitely about good winning!

Steve Kennelly, our grammarian encouraged us to add a rhyme into our speech – as he said, rhyme’s nice on the ears and helps us remember. He even wrote his own captivating rhyming poem just before stepping up to the lecturn, which left our Toastmaster speechless when taking back the stage.

Natalie introduced our first speaker Cam Parsonson who opened our eyes to the black pacu and the trials and tribulations of introducing a fish species into New Zealand!

Louise Landess then introduced our guest speaker Laura Bruce, a member of the Christchurch Women’s Club and current holder of the D72 Toastmasters Humorous Speech winner’s title. Laura started off by explaining “why compete?”, sharing how Bob Ferguson encourages her, with his philosophy that competition leads to excellence. On the theme of winning, Laura’s belief is to have a desire to win out of respect to the others in the competition.

Breaking her speech into two parts, she gave us the following tips on tech and technique

Create an experience that is as close to real life as possible.
Aim for a crystal image and clear audio. For minimum interference it’s best to use a computer (rather than a phone or tablet) and a wired internet connection if possible to get the best signal.
Make sure your laptop is fully charged and use an external microphone/camera if possible – Logitech for $50-60.
Camera at eye level! As close to real life as possible.
Things often go wrong, but if you can arrive early you can minimise those things that go wrong.
Stand out from your background and set up a pleasant visual experience. Laura moved the dining table so she had white double doors behind, and wore a navy blue top with a pop of colour to create a contrasting presence
Write an engaging speech, check the judging criteria and include all the elements.
If you can get a laugh early in then that sends a good message to the audience and shows that you are there to have fun.
With laughs, record the speech when presented in front of an audience and note when they laugh. And then when presenting on zoom, make sure to pause (count 1-2-3) and allow for that laugh. Really important to allow audience to laugh, to enjoy the speech, don’t want to step on the laugh.

And finally, practice, practice, practice.

It was fantastic of Laura to come along and share insights to help us learn, plus motivate us to compete. As she said, it’s the best way to improve your presentations and motivation to be the best for your audience.

Esmail was our Table Topics Master and made sure to ask up our – experienced – guests who’d taken the opportunity to come for a visit and listen to Laura. Both are members of Sunrise Toastmasters, another morning club and fellow D1 Toasties.

Sean Joyce took us back 100 years to the village he grew up in and then revealed his main reason for attending today was espionage!!
Gemma Woods then told us about her home and what home means to her, and how she needs a bit of a nudge from her husband to help her leave home bright and early for Toastmasters!

Stephen McConnachie entertained us with a great example of an impromptu speech and all with a fluffy brain that was in need of coffee!Gerald evaluated Cam’s speech, giving lots of pointers that we could all learn from when it comes to slide presentations.

Roydon evaluated Laura’s speech, thanking her for coming and reminding us of what a great presentation it was. He did manage to provide a couple of useful recommendations too, before acknowledging how much we learned from her presentation.

Alannah then evaluated the table topics speeches and Louise Green then evaluated everyone else who hadn’t already been evaluated! With energy and enthusiasm they gave us all some great pointers in how to present a more polished speech next time.