Boring - No Way!

Around 10 members turned up on a cold wet winter's night for our meeting on 11th July. While the numbers in attendance were small the quality of the meeting certainly made up for the lack of numbers!

Toastmaster of the evening was Jan and we knew that with her efficiency and skill that we were going to have an enjoyable evening. Jan had an excellent program organised, which had to stand some last minute changes, but you would not have known, with things running smoothly right through until the meeting closed a few minutes early.

Craig introduced the Toastmaster with a tremendous build up and we moved right into the first prepared speech of the night, presented by Denise and introduced by Ros. The title of the speech was 'The Massacre at Te Pakake' and followed on from Denise's last speech. Denise used this presentation as it is in line with her employment and that is a bonus of Toastmasters, in that you can practice 'work' presentations and get feedback from a knowledgeable audience. A very interesting piece of Hawkes Bay history was well related to us by Denise and she is showing excellent improvement with each speech, this being only her third speech to the Club.

Next up was an interesting assignment from Tony, introduced by Greg. Tony who has progressed to Level Four of his selected Pathway was required to present a speech "under fire". In other words, learn how to handle interjections and 'so called bored audience members' during a speech. Tony told us the speech would probably be boring, but it was far from it, so much so that we found it difficult to interrupt him. The speech was so interesting, presented in excellent fashion by Tony and with great detail and research obviously carried out. He also handled the interjections and audience extremely well, the objective of the speech.

Next up was the impromptu speaking section of the night, this is called Table Topics and was run by Andy, who it must be said had a very interesting twist to this session in that members were given a negative situation and requested to turn it into a positive, i.e. Denise had left the taps running upstairs and flooded the downstairs that then needed redecorating, new carpet etc, what was the positive? well they were ready to redecorate anyway and this way, Insurance paid for it!!!  All members had a negative to respond to and all achieved their goal extremely well.

After the break a quick Business session was held and confirmation of our 50th Anniversary celebrations were confirmed, 15th August at East Pier, all welcome. Invitation are in the mail (so to speak).

The evaluation part of the evening followed and both  the speech Evaluators, Ros and Greg made a great fist of their respective evaluations with many commendations and some suggestions for improvement for their respective speakers.

Joyleen evaluated all the 10 Table Topic speakers (a mammoth task) and again was able to have many commendations for the speakers and the Table Topics Master (Andy). Joyleen does everything with enthusiasm, humour and movement, which makes her presentations always interesting.

The General Evaluator, Craig, then wound up the evening with comments for the Toastmaster (Jan- what a great job she did in keeping the program running smoothly with excellent segways between each item) and the Evaluators, assisted by the Timekeeper, Song, who showed her research of the role with a trademark explanation of the times initially and a summary at the end, which had the times recorded to the second. This young lady is coming along in leaps and bounds!

The evening finished of with the Awards;

General Evaluator Craig gave Best Speaker to Tony and Best Evaluator to Greg, 

while Joyleen presented Best Table Topic to Ros. 

The Toastmaster awarded Best Contribution to Craig, who stood in for our Sgt-at-Arms who was unfortunately absent (and missed!)

Next meeting (our 4th Monday) 25th July, when the Toastmaster is due to be Tony, come along and enjoy 2 hours of learning and entertainment.