My Maiden Blog

Dear Friends…

Can’t believe, I am actually doing this. After planning for long time, I finally got courage and opportunity to write a blog- “The Blog” my Maiden Blog…. This is the fruit of joining Toastmasters. I would really like to thank one and all for all your support, encouragement, trust & confidence, and finally for providing me this platform & opportunity. This Blog is also the result of my speech in the last meeting (speech No. 6) titled “E for Efforts not Excuse” which self motivated me to stop giving excuses and finally write this blog as a part of my duty of being a VP Public Relations. So friends here I am with all my efforts and no Excuse (wink;)).

It was almost 2 months and I was due for my speech no. 6, I remember my last speech was delivered in the Humorous & Evaluation contest on 4th Sept organized by Hj. Naburi. And both myself and Paul Tan made MMKL TM club proud by meeting the expectations of all our supporters.
It was such a wonderful moment when they announced that both the champions are from Money Mastery KL toastmaster club and we would be representing the area G1 in the next contest…..

That was the last time I saw Hj Naburi that day, unfortunately I could not participate in that contest as I had my prior commitments and I was in my home country India for a long vacation with my friends and family

After I came back, it really broke my flow and I really got busy with work, I started giving all the excuses of not coming to the TM meetings but it was Victor’s dedication and persuasion that I finally planned to deliver my speech no. 6. It was not easy for me after this break and I was already planning all the excuses to avoid it. It was then when I remember this line which always helps me choosing the right path at the time of confusion. “E for efforts not excuse” and I realized there could not be better audience to present this topic. Well that was it; I was ready with my speech and reached the meeting room well in time.

It was really wonderful meeting all the Toastmasters after a long time, I was lucky, people still remembered me. There were few new members as well and couple of guest as usual. The session started well on time, thanks to our Time Keeper of the day Daniel. Throughout this blog, you will find lots of pictures clicked during the session on 9/11

After our president gave a motivating speech, it was time for the most awaited moment- Gean Lau- Our Gorgeous TME started the proceedings, Invocation session was handled very well by Victor which was followed by Table Topic Session conducted by Siew Yin and the topics were well connected with the theme of the day- Long Weekend (Deepawali), she got enough support from the volunteers. After Haji Hashim delivered his 2 minutes speech during this session, it really inspired me as well and I volunteered as the last table topic speaker of the day, the topic given to me was really close to my heart so I could get enough material to talk about, in my speech I also mentioned how Haji Hashim always inspire me and many like me.

I also cleared the doubt of Ginny who got to know from her aunt that in India you can’t choose your own spouse and after that she was happy to know that you are free to choose your own wife or husband to get married…. Well that was the end of very well conducted Table topic session which was followed by Humor Session. Haji Hashim volunteered to be the first one to start with a joke and from there onwards the flow went towards little dirty jokes (which was later pointed out by GE) but they sounded nice to us  Shiva Das and TM Chan Chee Keng also followed the suite.

Rest all sessions went very well too and the evaluation as usual was awesome, had real fun and we ended the meeting with celebrating the birthdays of November babies. In the end I made a comment which I would really like all of us to know. I was doing pretty good before my break and had completed my 5 project speeches and also one humorous contest speech but when I came back and delivered this speech no 6, I really felt I am back to square one, I felt the nervousness, I felt my voice was breaking,I felt I have moved down couple of steps back and have to put lot of extra efforts to come back to where I left last time, so I would advise all not to commit the same mistake I did, please be regular to the meetings don’t take a long break, keep practicing and there is lot to learn from our mentors there. This particular meeting boosted my confidence and I felt very energetic after the session. I am ready with my speech no. 7 for the next meeting. See you all there.



It was really wonderful writing my first blog, I really felt great and I m looking forward to write more and more blogs in near future, you all are also free to write your blogs and can post it here. If you guys really like this post then please post a comment.

Signing off….

Jitin Girdhar

Last night's Meeting..... (held on 24th Aug 2010)

Dear friends,

It's been a while (like 2-3 years!) since I last wrote a "last night's meeting..."

Last night's meeting was truly inspiring for me, to say the least. It also made me grateful for belonging to a club where the old and the new, the young and the old are in balance, like yin and yang. I knew more about our early days of independence last night.

KH Song was poised and organized as our TME, led us through the meeting nicely, kudos. Table topics session was fresh, the topics dished out by Victor Wan were general enough that the volunteers had ample room to share for 2mins.

Then, we had a ball with 3 wonderful speeches from Eunice Tan, Jitin and Julia Leong. You guys rocked, good sharing.
Eunice delivered her ice breaker, titled Hunger for Balance in Life. We got to know her a lot more. Hometown's Rawang, married, 3 kids, loves new age music and likes to travel. Her message, life's short, live it to the fullest.

Then, Jitin did his 5th project speech, An Idea can Change your Life. He never ceases to amaze me with his choice of things to speak about. An Idea is a fruit of our thinking. So, the next time an idea pops into your head, capture it, note it down. Do it everyday, you'll have 365 ideas by year end. And share it with people around you, fertilize them. You'll never know, you can be the next Bill Gates. *winks*

After that, Julia astounded us with her storytelling ability. She started her advanced storytelling manual with The Crystal Heart, a poignant Vietnamese folk tale. She had my attention the whole time, that's a thumbs up for you, Julia...it's been awhile since I listened attentively during our meetings.

Now, every GE who visits us always say nice things only. So, let me play the devil's advocate here...the meeting didn't start out well for me til we got to the speeches. The amount of grammatical errors I heard hurt my ears badly, no pun intended.

It's a really serious problem, guys. We really have to make a conscious effort to speak good English at club meetings, with good grammar, good enunciation. Not sure how many of you noticed, even our meeting agenda had an error... Malaysia celebrates its (there's no ' in its) independence.

So, perhaps for future improvement, here's some thoughts for future roleplayers:
1. President's speech can and should be uplifting, especially when we don't have invocation session.
2. Role players should prepare themselves, with a script, very necessary, especially if you speak beyond 2mins. It's annoying to hear grammatical errors in the simplest of things. eg, our young guest, Ian, corrected the table topics he was given tonight. I was truly embarrassed.
3. Future Grammarians, take note. It's recommended that we mention the person who gave us a good quote, phrase etc. Only the good stuff. No need to mention who said the bad stuff, be it grammatical error/ incorrect pronunciation (it's been mispronounced many times even after our dear friend, DTM Azmi graciously conducted a pronunciation/phonetics class with us, it's pronunciation, not pronounciation).
4. The word of the day should be related to the "Theme of day" and we should also try to use the positive and cheerful word to make the environment positive and cheerful.

Otherwise, kudos to our first time diligent ah counter, Daniel Schwartz (he counted ah in people who usually got none, cool) and timekeeper, Fui Lien (precise reporting).

Please save this date:
*Sat, 4th Sept. Area G1 Humorous Speech & Evaluation Contests. MCOBA Building, Penthouse on 4th Flr. Jln Syed Putra. You can see the building on Federal Highway, after Kuen Cheng school if you are coming from KL.

That's all my ramblings for now,
cheers,
huey yee

Money Mastery KL Toastmasters Club Quarterly Newsletter

As some of you have heard, our club has embarked on a journey to establish a club newsletter for Money Mastery KL Toastmasters Club. After months of hard work put in by the newsletter committee, along with the sweat and tears shed in the process, I'm proud to announce to you that our quarterly newsletter has been launched!

Our quarterly newsletter is dedicated to keeping members of Money Mastery-KL Toastmasters Club updated on latest happenings and events of the Club and the members. Inside you will find articles and personal stories contributed by our own members, updates on upcoming events, also the club's progress towards DCP goals.

To all of you who have not yet get and read our first issue of the
quarterly newsletter, you can download it in PDF format by going to the
website as below.

http://www.victorwan.com/248/money-mastery-kl-toastmasters-clubs-newsletter-issue-no-1/

You can also sign up for getting email alert when our next issue of
the newsletter published. Please follow the instructions given in the link
above.

We hope you would enjoy it! Please let us know if you have any comments or feedback - we promise we’ll listen carefully.



Yours truly,
Gean
VPPR 2009-2010

2009-2010 International Speech and Table Topics Contests

Yes, the contest season has started! It's a momentous event that some of us have been waiting for around the year. We, Money Mastery - KL Toastmasters Club, have had our 8th. International Speech and Table Topics Contests on 12th January 2010. It was an eventful and certainly an interesting night as the following contestants showcased their speeches in style.

International Speech Contest 2009-2010:

1st speaker Abu Bakar Ngah

2nd KL Loh

3rd MK Low

4th Paul Tan

Champion : MK Low

1st Runner Up : KL Loh

2nd Runner Up : Abu Bakar Ngah

Table Topics Contest 2009-2010:

1^st speaker Hj Hashim

2^nd SM Kok

3^rd Paul Tan

4^th Abd Aziz

5^th Abu Bakar Ngah

6^th Janice Ooi

7^th Abdulrahanman

8^th MK Low

9^th Hj Naburi

Champion: Abu Bakar Ngah
1st runner up: Abdulrahnaman
2nd runner up: Hj. Hashim


A big congratulations to MK Low, who won the International Speech Contest and Abu Bakar Ngah, who won the Table Topics Contest! The champions of these contests will represent our club to the Area W1 International Speech and Table Topics Contests scheduled on 25th March 2010.
Lets give our biggest support to our champions and all the best to both of them in the contests!

Merry Christmas!

On 22nd December, we had our last Toastmasters meeting of the year. To all of us who were present in the meeting, it was a jolly occasion as it was a meeting that was filled with both warm Christmas spirits as well as Chinese winter solstice festive mood. To go with both the festive occasions, most of our members dressed in either Red or Green. Some even had their Santa's hat on to add on to the Christmas mood. Thanks to EK Yeo, our dearest VPE, an ever so patient and helpful figure, we even had some balls of glutinous rice (or more commonly known as Tangyuan in Chinese) which symbolize reunion as desserts. Apart from the jovial mood and wonderful desserts, we also had a great company that night. It was none other than our old and dear friend- Azmi Shahrin, a famous DTM in both Division W as well as District 51, who acted as our General Evaluator that night. As usual, his utter sense of humour and aptitude for public speaking kept the audience entertained well all night.

Besides those, this meeting was also different in a way that we had all advanced project speeches for the night. Unlike our usual meetings which we have a mixture of both Competent Communication and Advanced Communication speakers, all 3 speakers of the tonight presented their project speeches from the Advanced Communication series. When it comes to the Advanced level, the speeches become more and more interesting because the presentation could vary from a role play, to a story telling, to a seminar, and many others.

The first speaker of the night was me :) I presented a speech titled 'Negotiating with Skill' from the Advanced Communication series- Interpersonal Communication. It was a 10-14 minute presentation that combined a speech, a role play and a discussion.

The second speaker was Abdul Aziz, CTM, who presented a 20-40 minute seminar titled 'Increase Profitability through Quality', that was from the Professional Speaker Project.


Last but not least, Victor Wan, CC, CL presented his speech 'Think for the Future' from Advanced Communication series- Speaking to Inform.

In Money Mastery KL Toastmasters Club, we always vote for the Best Project Speech and Best Evaluator of the night. It is a recognition as well as encouragement for our members for doing well in their speeches and evaluations. Here is a very big congratulations to Abdul Aziz and Francis Ng for winning the Best Project Speech and Best Evaluator of the night!


With that, our joyful meeting came to an end. That marked our last meeting of year 2009. Our next meeting will be in 12th January 2010. It is a meeting not to be missed because not only that it would be our first meeting in year 2010, it's also the night for our club International Speech and Table Topics contest! Yes, the contest season is on and we're very proud to be one of the first few clubs in our division to hold the contest for this season. It will be an interesting night, so ladies and gentlemen, make sure you come early to grab a seat yeah :)

Till then, I wish all of you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!



Yours truly,
Gean Lau
Vice President of Public Relations
2009-2010

Happy Go Lucky

With the meeting theme of Happy Go Lucky, everyone was in a mood for a positive and easy going meeting for tonight. We are happy to have Ng Lay Choo, ACB, CL as our Madam General Evaluator of the night. As per normal meeting, the night started off with president's address from our club president, Liew Siew Yin, CC, CL. In her address, she sent a message that a happy go lucky attitude will keep us up when we are down, and ensure that we are always in a positive perspective for things that happen around us.

KL Loh, ATM-G was in charge of the Invocation session tonight. He shared that we as leaders to people in companies, we must embody a set of values that will guide us in everything that we do Values like honesty, integrity and transparency serve as the moral guide to a company practices, therefore they are crucial to the success and growth of a company.

To go along with the theme of the night, the Table Topics Master, Hoo Sze Ling (who is also a guest from D' Utama Toastmasters Club) has kept the audience entertained with topics like 'Wealth or Happiness, which one is more important?', 'What is the happiest moment in your life?', amongst others. The speakers were great, as all of them had demonstrated their impromptu speaking skills and spoke right about their given topics.

For the project speech session, we had in total 4 speakers tonight. Ginny Leng, TM spoke about how she made certain decisions in her life, and Vince Kek, TM spoke about his romantic love story. Both projects were from the Competent Communication manual. For the more advanced speakers, Abdul Aziz Youp, CTM presented an entertaining speech on (mis) communication. In short, it was about how communication could go wrong and why. Last but not least, Victor Wan, CC, CL presented useful facts and tips for the audience tonight in the topic of will writing. He advised the audience get a will done up as soon as possible for the benefits of your loved ones. As Francis Ng, DTM has also put it, "Don't let your loved ones go through hell when you are in heaven". Interesting. As an audience and Grammarian tonight, I'd say all the speakers have given their best in their speeches, and all have received positive and enlightening feedback from their speech evaluators.

In the evaluation part, the club has received some very positive feedback from the guests as well as from Mdm. General Evaluator tonight. From the comments, they are pleased with the comfortable setting of the club (except for the occasional noise from renovation next door tonight), the warm welcome offered to guests, the properly drawn up agenda (thanks to our VPE, EK Yeo and President Liew Siew Yin for this), the persisting high turn up rate of members for club meeting (yay!), and last but not least, the VERY famous and delicious nasi lemak (big thanks to Paul Tan for this one)! Thanks to all for your helpful comments and suggestions, one thing for sure is that we will work hard to keep it up!


Announcements:
1. Division W Better Speaker Series will be held on 14th Nov 2009 in ING Performance Centre. Great value and tips on communication skills you can bring home with only RM28 per person.

2. 2nd Club Officer Training is scheduled on 12th Dec 2009. Club Officers, please mark this down on your calendar. Details of the venue and others will be published soon.

3. Lovely news: our club member- Vince Kek, TM, is set to tie the knot with his fiancee soon. Congratulations to Vince!!! The couple is having their wedding banquet on 26th Dec 2009, in Golden Palace Seafood restaurant (119, Jalan Pudu, 55100, KL). All members of Money Mastery KL Toastmasters Club are welcomed to join the couple for their wedding dinner. Halal, non-halal, and vegetarian food can be arranged.
Please RSVP with Vince Kek, latest by 24th Nov 2009.



Yours truly,
Gean Lau
Vice President of Public Relations
2009-2010

Opportunities for the ones who are ready

It's a meeting that is full of inspirations and energy. It was a meeting that motivates everyone in the room to BE YOUR BEST.
In the Toastmasters' movement, it is important to have this commitment to yourself, and to the club. When you put in effort in preparing your speeches, spend some time practicing your delivery, only then you will be able to produce a good speech to the audience. In that way, we can all contribute to bring ourselves up and improve the standard of the club collectively.

Acting president EK Yeo, CC, CL delivered his acting presidential address that night with a clear and concise message- all of us should strive to be our best in everything that we do, and along the way, we should motivate our peers to do the same.

There was an inspirational quote that I heard in the meeting that night, and it still lingers on my mind until this minute. "You get the best out of others when you give the best yourself". It's true, isn't it? In order to bring out the best in the people around you, you have to first bring out the best of yourself. This rule applies to all of us, and in all stages of life, whether you're a working adult, or a student. Imagine you're in a competition, when you give it your best in the game, you will motivate your competitors to outdo themselves too. In that way, all of you would live the spirit, and make a good game.

Thanks to Julia Leong, TM, our Table Topics master of the day, who had brought forward few uplifting and inspirational quotes for our Table Topics session that night. Vincent Soon, who is a guest on that night, took the trophy of Best Table Topics Speaker home with his befitting talk about how his bunch of friends always do their very own best during swimming exercise in order to motivate the rest of the group to do the same.

For the project speeches, we had in total four speakers that night. Ginny Leng, TM shared a tip with us that night that we should never display an inverted peace sign ("V" sign with your fingers with palm facing yourself) as it means a grave insult to the person that you're facing. (Hmm I should start screening my pictures to filter that...) Abdulrahaman, TM spoke about his opinion on The World Order that night; and Vince Kek, TM conveyed a strong message to all of us that we should all do something to save our Mother Earth who is in sick, after quietly enduring all the harms we have done to Her. Last but not least, Abdul Aziz, CTM delivered a keynote address 'Heal Thyself' that night. I believe the audience that night has learned a thing or two about pharmaceutical industry practice that night. We should always check and see whether we really need take the drugs that promised us youth and health on the label. Anyone are to join me for a jog at FRIM?

During the speech evaluation session, all evaluators provided good feedback to the speakers and I believe they all have received a tip or two from their evaluators. Henry Fu, ACB, CL, our General Evaluator for the night, also shared his opinion on the overall flow of the meeting and the meeting arrangements. Thanks for his comments and suggestions. As people always say- feedback is the breakfast for the champions. That's how we learn to better ourselves.

At the end of the meeting, EK Yeo, acting president of the night made some announcement on the next Club Officers training which is scheduled on 12 of December 2009. Club officers who're reading the blog, please mark it on your calendar. Also, our club is launching an exciting project- a club newsletter! Victor Wan, KH Song and I, will be the central persons coordinating the newsletter. All members of the club are welcomed to participate in this project. We need someone who can write, proof read, and take good pictures. Also, anyone in the club is welcomed to contribute any useful material for the newsletter from time to time.

With this, the club meeting adjourned and a fellowship begins.




Yours sincerely,
Gean Lau
Vice President of Public Relations
2009- 2010