Uncertain paths taken with great conviction
may lead to great discoveries which is how I discovered myself when I
discovered this path of Toastmasters. Today’s theme was The Road Not Taken
inspired by Robert Frost’s meaningful poem, quite obviously, The Road Not
Taken. Coincidentally, we had to take the road untaken by having this week’s
meeting in a new venue at the UMAC House. We are in the midst of trial and
error to find a good location for our meetings and along the path we have
indeed discovered not just literal things but valuable lessons as well as a
team.
The meeting as usual started at sharp
7.15pm with the help of our TME, CP Lau, ACB, ALB to stand in for Yap Ooi Yee,
CC the SAA. He led us through the Toastmasters promises and called our
President, Wendy Sim, CC on to the floor to deliver her opening address which
was well done and full of depth. Following, everyone present introduced
themselves, spoke of the theme and the word of the day. The word of the day
today was ‘paramount’ which means of supreme importance or power.
The invocation speaker Dato’ Dr. Mary de
Silva then came on stage to give her invocation which was in line with the
theme. After the entertaining
invocation, the floor was once again passed to our TME, CP Lau who was actually
doing his Project 5 in his Specialty Series of the Advanced Communication
Manual which was about introducing a speaker. Thus, he took up this role as it
was most apt for him to carry out his objectives. Upon leading us through a
brief history of Toastmasters, we moved on to the Table Topics Session.
Chitirra, led this session with a variety of interesting topics, some even that
sunk us into deep thoughts. Most rose up to the challenge including our General
Evaluator, Robert Ram, DTM.
After that, we began the main course that
was a variety platter of project speeches. Unfortunately, as one of our
speakers did not make it we only had 3 speeches. The first was Chitirra on her
Project 3 of her Level 1 Pathways in Leadership Development. It was a research
speech and thus she spoke on Insomnia, its cause, effects and simple remedies. Moving
on we had K T Chok, also doing the same project and his title was ‘Snowball’
basically describing the massive multiplying effects of compounding interests. Finally
we had Dato’ Dr. Mary de Silva, PM1 doing her first project in her Level 2 of
the Presentation Mastery Pathway. She spoke about an incident in her life as a
kleptomaniac. She drew the crowd’s attention only to eventually leave them
baffled in her prank as she revealed that she was no kleptomaniac after all.
Still with puzzled faces we broke for a
short break to enjoy our favourite Nasi Lemak and resumed the meeting in 10
minutes.
Beyond this point, our General Evaluator,
Robert Ram, DTM took over the session. First up, our Table Topics evaluator, EK
Yeo, CC, CL led us through a quick and simple evaluation of each Table Topic
speaker. Following, the respective evaluators shared their ideas and thoughts
to the respective speakers. We had an extra special evaluation for C P Lau,
ACB, ALB by Ron Yeap, ACB, CL for his advanced project as TME. An open
evaluation was given and great feedback were given out for all by all. Then,
the respective role players gave their respective reports. Ron Yeap, ACB, CL
was the Ah-Counter, Xavier Gomez was the Grammarian and Mandy Chan was the
timer. Lastly, we had our General Evaluator, Robert Ram, DTM give such a
detailed, honest and distinctive feedback for our club.
The road was coming to the end that night and
our President gave her closing address and gave out the awards to the
respective winners as below.
Best Speaker: None due to time
disqualification and insufficient speakers.
Best Evaluator: Hj. Hashim, DTM
Best Table Topics Speaker: Robert Ram, DTM
After the necessary announcements the
meeting was dismissed and everyone left with hopes that they too may step
forward to take that road not taken and discover themselves.
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