Money Mastery-KL Toastmasters Club (#8141): #Meeting 423: Let it Go

The meeting on the 4^th of December 2018 saw some terrific speeches given by DTMs. The General Evaluator too was a DTM. This means that the meeting was, in itself, a confluence of DTMs. Truly, it was inspirational to be in a meeting with top speakers in it. The meeting saw CP Lau being congratulated for obtaining the office of Distinguished Toastmaster.

Our SAA, Abdul Rahman did a very good job in order to start the meeting. He made sure we are all set. He took us through recital of Toastmasters promises and passed the floor to club president Chitirra LD1.

Chitirra was brilliant in her opening address and asked the Grammarian Vijayakumar to tell us about the word of the day and some examples so that other members could later use it correctly throughout the meeting. She asked all members to introduce themselves, use the theme of the day “Let It Go” and WOD “Relinquish”. Later I observed the WOD “Relinquish” was very well used by everyone in the meeting and at least once. Everybody spoke about the theme “Let It Go”.

The Toastmaster of the Evening, the charismatic CP Lau, DTM kicked off the meeting with the history of Toastmasters with detailed statistics of the worldwide membership of the organization as of the 2^nd of December 2018, but on that day’s meeting he added something I have never heard before. He told us about how Toastmasters first came to this country’s shores. He told us who the first club president was and that gentlemen’s efforts in progressing Toastmasters in this country. This illumination was interesting to note. I know one person who was one of Malaysia’s first Toastmasters. She was an administrator at a local private hospital in KL. CP Lau went on to mention how our club was first setup.

As the Table Topics session arrived duly and CP Lau played the role of the Table Topics master he had written excellent speech titles to choose from the list. There were five speakers who participated in this Table Topics session and all of them did very good job. Our speakers were Chitirra, Srinivas K M, Julia, Rahman and Mike Chin. All the topics were very well based on theme of the day “Let It Go”.

The assigned speech session arrived. Chittra and DTM Srinivas, gave outstanding speeches. Chittra mentioned before giving her speech that she had never tried Table Topics much before and decided to do so on that day as a warm-up for the assigned speech she was to give at the meeting. Chittra’s speech was humorous. She spoke about her own tendency to procrastinate; it was indeed a funny speech.

DTM Srinivas’s speech encapsulated a joke with a serious message. It was a wonderfully woven speech as it started with a joke about a headmaster who was told by his mother that he would be late for school and projected that story, into what at first seemed like going off on a tangent, and delivered a poignant tale about a teacher who taught her young students not to say ‘I can’t.’ The point in the message was never say “I can’t.’ Inspirational.

Ron Yeap was the third speaker in the session. He spoke about a(fictional) account of how he had to decide to attend an ex-girlfriend’s wedding. It was done with much dramatic effort and vocal variety. KL Loh was the last speaker in the session and gave an account about making choices.

After the break, General Evaluator G. Sivalingam from D’Utama Toastmasters Club gave us his evaluation. He said to the evaluators that the evaluation of speakers should be about specific aspects of a speech, such as, body language, vocal variety, use of the floor space, engaging the audience. He said that evaluation of a speech is always to tell a speaker that they spoke well or if their speech was interesting or even if the speech needed specific improvements.

General Evaluator G. Sivalingam commented that he liked the President’s keynote address which had a very good a tone in it. He added about the President’s concern for time allocation. The General Evaluator remarked on how the Toastmaster of the Evening gave the history of the club. He executed the whole evaluation session very smartly. Gave specific recommendations for the club to improve and also highlighted the strength of the club meeting.

Thereafter it was time to appreciate our top performers:

Best Table Topics speech was by Srinivas K M.

Best Assigned Speech was by Ron Yeap.

A token of appreciation was given to our General Evaluator. Distinguished Toastmaster G. Sivalingam for his presence and constructive evaluation. Few announcements were made our club ISTT contests on 22.01.2019 and Dist.102 EXPO one day Workshop on 15.12.2018.