#419 – International Stuttering Awareness Day

Bruce Willis, Elvis Presley, Tiger Woods….3 famous names. The first one showed us how not to die hard, another taught us to do something worth remembering and the third one exhibited how to find the right hole. Have you ever thought of what connects these celebs? Well, neither did I, until I was asked to write the blog about the meeting #419 which took place on 24th October 2018. The theme of the meeting was International Stuttering Awareness Day and the WOD being Recreate.

Now, back to my question on connecting the dots between Bruce, Elvis and Tiger. All of them were stutterers during their childhood. Bruce joined theater to conquer stuttering. Elvis started singing to get rid of stuttering. No, you guessed wrong. Tiger didn’t start playing with balls to get rid of stuttering, he worked hard on his speech therapy.

The theme was selected by our club President Chitirra to recreate awareness about stuttering. The meeting started on time at 7:15 PM with ASAA Shain Anand kicking off the meeting with a Toastmaster’s promise. Chitirra, then presided the meeting and conveyed her ideas towards awareness of stuttering. To mark the occasion, we had a guest Invocation Speaker, Distinguished Toastmaster Samuel Selvaraju from Shaklee Toastmaster’s club. He was the perfect Invocation Speaker because he was also a stutterer during his childhood and he inspired the audience by telling the story about how he got rid of stuttering. Manish Jha IP1 was the Toastmaster of the meeting. He started off by introducing the General Evaluator Lee Soo Ling, DTM; Ah-Counter Mike; Grammarian Vijaykumar, CC; Timer Olivia Chen, PM1.

Up next the session was handed over to Serena Kong ACB, CL for the table topics session. The session is all about impromptu speaking. We had a combination of club members and guests volunteering to do the Table Topics . All spoke exceptionally well.

Up next was the Assigned Speech Session. The first speaker was Ken Chan,  DTM who kick started his Pathways journey for the Presentation Mastery path with the Ice Breaker speech. His speech title was Ken, He Can.

The second speaker was Cetani Chen ACB, ALB who was doing her Project 3 from Level 1 of Effective Coaching path. Her topic was Research and Presenting and her speech title was Stand-up Comedy. In her speech, she spoke about different variations of stand-up comedy.

The third speaker was Dato’ Dr. Mary de Silva, PM3. She was doing her Level 4 Project 1 of Presentation Mastery - Managing a Difficult Audience. Her speech title was There is Hope. Her speech included a demonstration of how one can pack many clothes into a slim travelling bag. She skillfully rolled the clothes into sausage-like pieces and arranged about 15 items of clothes into a bag, similar to that of a brief case. With the title she meant that there is hope after all for travelers. Since it was about managing a difficult audience, there were a few members assigned to play different roles, such as the ‘interrupter’ and the ‘arguer’ who kept interrupting the speech, to which she managed to get them back on track with her presentation.  There was also a ‘silent’ member whom Dato’ Dr Mary encouraged to participate in the packing. 

After a break of 10 minutes, Lee Soo Ling, DTM started the evaluation session with the Table Topics Evaluation by KT Chok PM2. Next, the assigned speech evaluators EK Yeo CC, CL, Rony Yeap ACB, CL & CP Lau ACG, ALB gave evaluation for the 3 assigned speakers respectively. Following this was the Open Evaluation session and the reports by technical role players.

Best Assigned Speech: Ken Chan DTM

Best Table Topics Speaker: Samuel Selvaraju DTM

Best Evaluator: Ron Yeap ACB, CL

That was it for this meeting, and we wait together for the next meeting with yet another interesting theme “Halloween”.

Hasta la vista!!!

Thanks to blog writer Shain Anand, contributors, and reviewers.

Sincerely

Dato Dr Mary de Silva, PM3

Money Mastery –KL Toastmasters Club

VPPR (Vice President of Public Relation 2018/2019)