Wow what a great first meeting of the Toastmasters year!
Bromley Speakers welcomed three guests, Vicky, Jane and Arun. It’s always a pleasure to welcome guests at the meeting and it was interesting to hear how different an English meeting was to that of one in Dubai, where one of our guests has recently returned from.
The evening started with our Presiding Officer telling us of her success story. Susan Rayner has worked her way up the ranks to become the Vice President Public Relations of District 91, which encompasses the UK South. It’s a fantastic achievement, especially considering that Susan has only been a member of Toastmasters for five years.
Success stories are an initiative started by our Past President, David Henson AKA The Slide Presentation Man. It’s definitely a positive and upbeat way to start the meeting and we intend to keep them coming!
David Henson was our Toastmaster for the evening and ensured that the meeting ran smoothly.
Simon Maggs, our timekeeper was as humorous as always, and Rajesh Deshmukh kept us on track by counting our ums and ahs. It’s his first time as ‘Ah counter’ and he did a fantastic job.
The hot tip for the meeting was given to us by Ross Taggart: ‘Give Yourself Permission to Fail’. It’s an important message of course, and there will be a blog about that soon, so watch this space!
We all warmed up our vocal cords with Ben Lopez by telling the meeting what our biggest achievement or proudest moment of 2019 was so far and it’s a great way to get to know more about our fellow members and guests.
The Speeches
We had three interesting and informative prepared speeches to kick off the first meeting of the Toastmasters year. The first was delivered by James Kirkby who took us on a bumpy ride entitled ‘The Hell of The North’. It was James’ first speech, known as The Icebreaker, which is usually quite challenging for newcomers, as you can imagine. James rose to the challenge wonderfully and managed to stay in the saddle to the finish line!
Luca Fortuna then entertained us with his tales of ‘The Fancy Rats of the Sky’. I’m not sure many of us knew that he was going to talk about pigeon-keeping but we flew with him on the journey of the history of pigeons which finished with a humorous conclusion. Which reminds me, I must wash my car soon.
The third speech was entitled #deletefacebook and was John Vickers’ seventh speech of the Competent Communicator Manual. The speech was full of fascinating facts about Facebook and social media and it’s amazing (but maybe not too surprising) to find out that a quarter of all people in the world have a Facebook account.
Well done to all the speakers, what an entertaining first half of the meeting.
After tea break we had the Table Topics, led by Jenny Taggart. The general topic this week was ‘Happiness’ and I think it’s fair to say that we discovered that happiness comes from within.
So on that happy note, we went to the pub to put some happiness inside us. Cheers everyone!
Bromley Speakers meets on the first, third and fifth Thursdays of the month at Ripley Arts Centre