Meeting #392-Embrace the Mess

Today’s meeting was kick started by our Sergeant At Arms EK Yeo, CC, CL who called for the meeting to order at 7.15pm. He swiftly guided us through the house rules, Toastmasters’ Promise and invited me to give my presidential address. 

It’s been 3 months since I became the President of this club. In the last 3 months, I made some mistakes. But I am fortunate that with the guidance from the senior members, I managed to embrace the mess and from that, out came the theme for today’s meeting – Embrace The Mess.

After that, the Grammarian Mathew Philippose, CC, ALB introduced the word of the day which was “mettle”.

I invited the members & guests to introduce themselves to the meeting. They also recited what the theme meant to them and used the word of the day.

After a very upbeat session of passing the baton to allow each attendant to speak, I invited our Immediate Past President Ron Yeap, ACB, CL to give a Ron's-Style of humour as a Humour Master. Everyone enjoyed the session and laughed a lot.

After the humour session, the meeting was handed over to the first time Toastmaster of the Evening, Dato' Dr. Mary. Although it was her first time in this role, she came prepared and handled the situationsensibly. For the benefits of the first-time guests, she introduced the Toastmasters’ history and club's history with pride.

Then we moved on to the mysterious, mind-cracking and motivating Table Topics session with Srikant also taking the role as our Table Topics Master for the first time. He popped great questions on leadership to all those who attempted the session. Most of our guests showed the mettle to accept the challenge and the rest enjoyed their presentations.

Next, we were into another interesting part of the meeting-Assigned speech session. Our 1st speaker, Shain Anand was delivering his CC Project 3 with the title “Dealing with Suckers”. The story was about the blood sucking mosquitoes and his tips on dealing them with 4Bs -Banish, Bloom, Build and Bait. He was confident, with a calm voice and joyful facial expressions.

Our 2nd speaker was Joel, delivering CC Project 7. He started the speech entitled “Opportunity in the east" by asking questions and pulled the audience into his story. He is good in conversational style of speeches.

The 3rd speaker was Manish Jha, CC delivering Pathway Level 1, Project 2 and his speech title was “What I’ve”. Manish shared an instance from his personal life and gave a message that we should treasure what we have instead of looking forward to what we don’t have.

The final speech of the Assigned Speech Session was done by CP Lau, ACB, ALB delivering from The Advanced Communication Series, Project 4 and his speech title was“Standardize to Synchronize”.His speech was about a presentation being given in front of the Board Members of a company about upgrading their IT infrastructure. The speech had a Q&A session also.

A break of 10 full minutes was taken as we were on schedule.

Then the General Evaluator, Samuel Selvaraju, DTM took over the Evaluation session and put his team of evaluators into action.

Ben Hoe, CTM,CL was our Table Topics evaluator. As usual, he was very positive in his feedback to all the Table Topics speakers as well as supportive in sharing their areas of improvement.

After that we hadour Assigned Speech Evaluators Ken Chan DTM, KL Loh ATMG, Ron Yeap  ACB and Hj Hashim DTM, who gave such comprehensive and concise evaluations forour 4 Speakers. 

Congratulations to our winners:

Best Table Topic Speaker - Foo Fung Jiun CC 
Best Project Speech - Shain Anand 
Best Project Evaluator - Hj. Hashim DTM

Tonight’s theme taught us to embrace the mess. But in order to clear the mess, it takes courage and humility to correct the situation and to come out of the mess. That is the spirit to call for embracing the mess.

We had a total of 6 guests for our meeting tonight. Before the meeting ended, we invite our guests to provide their thoughts and feedback.

We look forward to meet everyone again in the next meeting, gracious! And of course, as usual, we had our group photo before the end of the meeting. Say cheese!

Blog writer: Wendy Sim CC