Ron, our president, opened the meeting by greeting so many guests (7 present on site and 1 online) in our club’s history since Corona!Â
The meeting’s moderation was then handed over to Armin, the Toastmaster of the evening. He emphasised that Toastmasters offers supportive and positive learning environments to all members and this is how we all can grow by learning from one another. He didn’t forget to mention that Pluto, Jasmin’s dog, was also our special guest this evening.
Ashwini was then invited onto the stage to introduce our Word of the Day “evocative”, which means “making you remember or imagine something pleasant”.
Veniece brought some interesting evocative thoughts about ChatGPT to the meeting right away during her Joke of the Day: why Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not destroy humanity.
Afterwards, Mikaela, the Table Topics Master, brought us some questions from the past Table Topics Contests to be tried out. Mohit, Golf, Omar and Ryan were the lucky participants who delivered their thoughts towards “the round earth”, “importance of deadlines”, “elbow society”, and “the meaning of red colour”.
Ranjith then delivered his prepared speech with the title “Motivate to shine”. He started the speech saying that shoes need love and motivation to be able to shine brightly. In the same way, his life in our Toastmasters world has always been motivated to shine by several members and club officers. He also stated his official appreciation towards all members of the Officer’s Team 2022, who kept the club business running very smoothly during the course of the year.
The second prepared speech with the title “Becoming a leader” was delivered by Divij. He told us some personal stories about his own leadership style. “One can not lead others, if he can not lead himself.” was an evocative idea he quoted at the end of his speech.
Tobias then took over the stage for the third prepared speech of the evening with the title “It’s just me: Me, myself and AI.” He played with the famous phrase from Latin “Cogito, ergo sum.”, which means “I think, therefore I am.” in English. The speech used the structure of “Past-Present-Future”, with which Tobias explained the ways people thought, think and will possibly think about themselves in the past, present and future respectively. The closing message was memorable and evocative, because he stated that our society would become a better place, if we human beings think more about other people and less about ourselves.
The evaluation session was moderated by Mikaela, our General Evaluator of the evening. She started the session by mentioning that “We don’t learn from experiences, but from reflecting on those.”
All three speech evaluators – Christopher, Therese and Dharani – gave their subjective feedback to all three prepared speakers as breakfast for champions.
Ashwini then gave his grammarian report by starting with mentioning people who used the word of the day, then repeating some nice sentences picked up during the meeting, and giving some suggestions to improve the language accuracy.
Jasmin, our Ah-Counter, gave a brief report about our filler-word performance during the meeting. It just turned out to be quite tolerable in terms of filler words.
Kumar, our Timer, also gave a short report on our time performance. He structured his speech using the three colours “Green-Yellow-Red” to categorise the speakers.
At the end of this meeting, Mikaela handed the stage back to Armin (as if it was a family business) so that he could moderate the Club Officer’s Election for the 2023-2024 term.
All the club members then approved of the nomination of the new Club Officer’s Team, more details can be seen in this article.
This meeting was indeed, as Armin mentioned at the beginning, an evocative demonstration of a “supportive and positive” learning environment according to the Toastmasters way.
By Sirichai Bannasarn
