I don’t play Bingo or do the lottery (well not often), but over the last few meetings we have had some winning numbers enhance our club night. We couldn’t make such strides of achievement if we galumphed through an evening it just wouldn’t be right. It’s great when an evening evolves with a theme almost by osmosis and we’ve certainly had a ripple of winning numbers recently.
Big Winning
The 4 V’s, Matt our president started a meeting with ‘Big Data’ telling us about the evaluation of 100,000 presentations and what had been identified as making them effective. They were:
Verbal – The words that you choose, appropriate and in context.
Vocal – Volume, rate, cadence, make sure you engage the listener.
Visual – Body language, does it match what you are saying? Use gestures make eye contact with your audience.
Vitals – Are you authentic? Do you exude passion and warmth?
More Winners
We welcomed 5 guests to the meeting and 1 became a new member Jessie having dipped her toe in and tested us out found us to be warm and inviting and decided to join us. Welcome Jessie we hope you will get out everything you want from the group and I’ve no doubt we will learn from Jessie as she has already demonstrated an excellent ability at impromptu speaking.
Triple Winners
3 Amazing and varied speeches 2 ice breaker speeches and an advanced speaker speech. Our youngest member Ben took his first step up the toastmaster ladder with a well-planned ice breaker “allow me to introduce myself “he took us on his journey to join Toastmasters and his aspirations for the future. Abdul told us in his ice breaker of his experience of his first teaching job in a tough London school and his thought process for how to tackle it.
Matt as the 3rd and final speaker delivered his 5th speech from the Entertaining speaker book entitled “The 8-million-dollar decision” which was delivered as an after dinner speech and had the whole audience engaged in the story about the problem at the factory and how it was solved. Complete with props of conveyor belt, box, chair and fan!
Club Winner
9 Distinguished Club Programme (DCP) points. This means as a Club we have earned the title Presidents Distinguished Club. Points are earned for attaining various goals throughout the Toastmaster year including offering training opportunities to club committee officers, growing the club, but overall reflects the work put into proactively encouraging new members to join and achieve their personal goals through speaking. We are very pleased to achieve this goal and will most certainly be celebrating our achievement of this winning number soon.
Gold Winner
And last but not least Sam Warner achieved her Toastmaster Advanced Communicator Gold the culmination of over 50 speeches over 6 years. Well done Sam we’re very proud the first Advanced Communicator Gold achiever in Shropshire Speakers.
Toastmasters International – Shropshire Speakers – A winning combination – see you soon.