The theme of the meeting was Road Trips and Dean, our Toastmaster, described members’ road trips throughout the session. This brought us all together with a common theme where everyone had a story to tell. It was an opportunity for a great deal of laughter with Dean’s dry delivery.
The session kicked off with Dan, our Sergeant At Arms, setting the tone with a nice bit of te reo and welcomed our guest Luke. He reminded us all that Dean is quite new to Boaters and congratulated him on stepping up so quickly to being Toastmaster.
Dean made us laugh by telling us his main memory of a road trip was from Christchurch to Invercargill – “boring”.
Hannah then joined the stage as our Grammarian. The choice of word for the day was “journey” in keeping with the road trip theme. She mentioned that there were physical journeys as well as journeys of development.
Rachel started her speech with a bag of Lego and proceeded to rather blandly describe physical attributes of the pieces of Lego and what you can do with it. This intrigued us and had us wondering what she was going to do / what point she was making. She put us out of our misery by explaining that it’s not the description of a product that sells it, but rather the perception of value. A good marketing project should connect to customers’ dreams, not the technical aspect of a product. It was a great lesson on how marketing works.
Lucy’s speech, entitled “I am in the Process of Becoming”, started with her explaining she could tell us about her job, or where she was from, but explained she wanted to talk about who she was becoming and that defining who she was is constantly changing. She told us how she used to let stuff happen to her until she moved to New Zealand at 22 and had an identity crisis. She found herself doing new things that realigned her life – which were not aligned with who she was. She realised that you need to unbecome everything you are not so you can become everything you are. It was a fantastic and inspiring speech which made us appreciate that you can become whoever you want and keep reinventing yourself.
Sabine took us through her journey to becoming a Distinguished Toastmaster. It was an excellent presentation and her key messages were embracing opportunities, doing things a little differently and remembering the basics like introducing yourself to guests.
Before the break, Ian, our President gave out the award certificates for those who were absent at the awards ceremony a few weeks ago.
Jacqui did an excellent job as Table Topics Master with some great topics about road trips: who and what you would take; would you follow bad advice from your GPS; where would you go if you won a campervan; disaster road trips; worst place stayed etc. These gave rise to lots of laughs and all the contestants answered with enthusiasm and even the two guests gave it a good go.
The evaluation stage continued with Shaun giving great feedback to Rachel, as well as Dan for Sabine. Roydon praised Lucy’s “animated” Icebreaker with “rich vocabulary” and told us to watch this space as he predicted a great public speaker. Aaron completed the evaluation section with excellent feedback to all presenters which was very helpful and personalized.
A very enjoyable session. Thanks to all who made it fun and inspiring.
Member blog by Tom Palmer