MMKL Toastmasters had a memorable meeting on 12th February. It was just two days earlier from Valentine’s Day and all of us just came back from the Chinese New Year holidays fully fresh and super exited for the first meeting of the month. It was beyond doubt a special evening as we gathered under the umbrella of Toastmaster’s endless love.
Abdul Rahman, PM1 was the SAA for this meeting, It was a good practice for him to get him enrolled in multiple roles and strengthen a role player in club, as he recently joined the club. Before the meeting he made sure everything was in order. At 7:15pm meeting was kicked off. He reminded the guests and the MMKL members the house rules. Then he started to serenade with the first five promises of Toastmasters with his powerful voice and asked everyone to repeat line by line as he finished. He introduced the acting president KT Chok PM3 and invited him over to the stage. He is the man with magnificent words and good charisma on the stage. KT Chok started his speech with his shining smile greeting and welcoming the special guests and MMKL members. He expressed his appreciation and thanked the guests and our General evaluator for this evening Lucky, DTM.
Nevertheless, he mentioned the theme of the day which was “Valentine: Endless Love” and called upon grammarian to spread out the word of the day. The word which is always interchanged between two lovers and expressed their true feeling of love, the word was “Serenade”, the best you sing for your only love. In a while he encourage everyone to introduce themselves and to make use of the word and theme of the day where possible. As his opening address about to end, he invited over the Toastmaster of the evening Shain Anand to shine on the stage and run the show. Shain greeted and welcomed everyone and proudly he spoke thoroughly the history of the Toastmaster International. He introduced the role players of the meeting as follows, where everyone explained their roles to the audience:
1. Chester Liam (Ah-Counter)
2. Ng Yee Chia (Grammarian)
3. Serena Kong, ACB, CL (Timer)
4. Lucky, DTM (General Evaluator)
At 7:55pm, Shain announced the starting of the table topics session and he called upon Lim Ting, IP1 to brief and run the session. The topics were fascinating and related to occasion of love & valentine, Lim Ting did a great job arranging such innovative topics to the contests. Five participants managed to get onto the stage bravely to take the challenge and speak out. Those were Clarence, Srinivas, Ken Chan, Rahman & KT Chok. They all gave a good 1- 2 minutes speech to audience. They replied to the table topics with quick thinking and giving their best views & personal experience on each related topics. It was a great session indeed. After the session, the timer announced that all the participants were within the allowable time and there were no disqualification and everyone voted for the best Table Topic speech.
At 8:05pm, it was the time that everyone were waiting for, the assigned Project Speech session. Four speakers were ready & motivated to run this session and what a full moon coincidence to notice that all the speakers are doing their speeches from the same Presentation Mastery pathway, two were giving speech from level 1 and the other two were from level 3.
To start with 1st speaker Clarence Tessensohn, EC4 and PM1 with speech title of “Because I am …” his speech Project was taken from Level 1 Evaluation and Feedback. His confidence on the stage was noticed by attendees. Well he is actually a linguist, he spoke about his personal experiences and journey of being a teacher and how this impacts and have a good cause in his life. At end of his speech, you would really feel giving the respect and more appreciation for the teachers and their important role in society.
Abdulrahman was the 2nd speaker in this session, and his speech title was “The Golden Secrets of Hiking”. He was doing his last project speech in Presentation Mastery Level 1 Research & Presenting. Breathtakingly he revealed his research outcomes and findings on the importance, benefits and the secrets of why people should do more hiking. He got a good move to conclusion of his speech which was easy to capture the audience when he said the golden secrets of hiking are actually coming from the first letter of the word its self H ( Hope, Healing , Healthy, Happy & Harmony) and by the fifth word he summarized his overall speech. He was feeling motivated and inspired by the audience who acknowledged his wonderful speech.
The 3rd speaker was Srinivas KM, DTM. He was doing his Project 3 Introduction to
Toastmasters Mentoring with an attractive title of “Man in the Mirror”. He is a DTM and he got the charisma and the professional speaker criteria. He shared with audience his personal experience and stories about him and his mentor. His speech was kind of serious and humorous speech at the same time. The audience was ultimately engaged throughout his speech and it was impact speech to everyone.
Guess who the 4th speaker was. He is the champion of MMKL International Speech Contest 2018/2019, Ken Chan, DTM. This time he was doing his level 2, Project 3, Introduction to Toastmasters Mentoring with title “Protege with a Cause” from the Presentation Mastery path. Ken is well known charismatic personality to audience. He spoke about his journey in Toastmasters and how he was influenced by his Mentor Late Francis, DTM, how his mentor guided him to the way of success in Toastmasters. I personally felt touched listening to his speech, I saw the sadness in his eyes and sorrow tones talking about Late Francis, but Ken was smart enough to bring us out and put some humorous story in his speech.
After this session, it was the time for everyone to go for break and enjoy the variety of food, other than our usual local food of club Nasi Lemak, chicken and curry puffs. Our lovely fellow members who were celebrating Chinese New Year, brought some homemade cookies, fruits, and it was delicious & yummy food.
After the break, at 8:55pm, we resumed the meeting and it was the Evaluation & Reports Session. TME Shain called upon the General Evaluator Lakhmichand, DTM to come onto stage and run through this session, Lakhmichand, DTM always shows his sincere support & love to MMKL club through all past 16 years. We really appreciated his efforts and contribution to the club. He invited the Table Topic Evaluator JP, CC, CL, to give his constructive feedback to the participants of Table Topics. I like the way how he described each speaker focusing on the area of strength and the area of improvements. He also shows some expressions and vocal variety & gestures that speakers could help to make their speech better.
After JP finish his Table Topic evaluation, Lakhmichand, DTM gave his comments and was impressed from the way JP evaluated each personal in brief detail.
Lakhmichaned called upon the first evaluator Srinivas KM, DTM to evaluate the first assigned project speaker Clarence. Srinivas spotted all the strengths and weaknesses in Clarence’s speech. He is a veteran Toastmaster, he shared with audience the points about vocal variety, gestures and clarity in Clarence’s speech which was inspiring for speaker to listen to. On the other hand, Srinivas mentioned that Clarence should challenge himself and improved for his next speech.
The 2nd evaluator was Manish Jha, IP1, He was impressed with Rahman‘s improvement from his previous speeches. Manish shared with the audience the areas where Rahman has excelled in his speech and also how Rahman delivered an impactful speech about hiking. Eventually he shared with the audience the captured points where Rahman need to challenge himself and improve. It was constructive feedback Rahman‘s received.
The 3rd valuator was Clarence. He was going to evaluate Srinivas's, his evaluator’s, speech, that was something you can see common in toastmaster and it shows being a Toastmaster you are capable of wearing multiple caps at same time. He did an excellent evaluation on Srinivas and likewise he also didn’t make it easy for him.
The last but not the least, KT Chok, PM3 was evaluating Ken Chan, DTM, He mentioned to audience how Ken has excelled in his speech and he also repeated some good phrases said by Ken, DTM demonstrating to the audience the strength and how the professional speaker should be. It was hard for him to spot any areas where the speaker should improve. However KT suggested some minor points for Ken to be improved for his next speech.
It was the time for our Distinguished General Evaluator Lakhmichnad, DTM to give his feedback to the evaluators. He appreciated all evaluators and mentioned everyone delivered excellent constructive feedback. He also allowed for the audience for open evaluation and giving thoughts in the speaker’s performance. At 9:30pm He invited all the role players (Ah Counter, Grammarian and Timer) to share their reports with audience. Nevertheless Lakhmichan revealed his overall feedback on this evening’s meeting, He evaluated all the role players, evaluators and the whole club. He mentioned that MMKL club is one of his favorite club which he would never hesitate to come for any next meeting. We really appreciate his continuous efforts and his experience sharing to us.
Before the meeting ended, it was time to appreciate our best performers of the meeting. TME Invited the acting president KT Chok on stage to give the appreciation certificates and gifts. Everyone were exited to hear the result, Drum roll and keep guessing name for each category. For this evening the awards goes to
Best Table Topics Speaker: Clarence Tessensohn, EC4, PM1
Best Assigned Speech: Ken Chen, DTM
Best Assigned Speech Evaluation: Srinivas KM, DTM
At 9:45pm, it was the time to do the closing address by acting president and the meeting was adjourned with the always remarkable photo of the day ‘Group Picture’. After the session, we also celebrated the February baby’s Birthday. That was the events of the evening, hope you enjoy reading it and See you all in our next blog.
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