Tonight, Timm filled the role of Toastmaster. He challenged everyone who would get up to speak to have a particular look at hand gestures – which is one of the objectives of CC project 5: “To be most effective, gestures should be made above your elbow and away from your body, and they should be vigorous and definite to show conviction and enthusiasm.” In fact, tonight’s speakers generally demonstrated excellent use of body language.
Dylan, who has just joined the club, gave his Ice Breaker entitled “Wall Street Wolf”. This did not refer to himself though, but to stock broker Jordan Belfort and the motion picture based on his life. Like in previous meetings, Dylan impressed the audience with outstanding humour and already highly developed speaking skills. Tonight’s grammarian Graeme also commended him on his great use of language.
The second speaker of the night was Greg. During his demonstration talk “Real Magic” from the “Speaking to Inform” manual, our audience witnessed a live presentation of healing prayers for our guest Megan as well as Henry, Cherry and Timm. Megan reported immediate improvement of her back pain. It is very likely that this was the first time such a demonstration was given at any Toastmasters club worldwide.
For mentoring, Dwayne presented the beginning of a video screening of the recent Toastmasters convention, where Kingi Biddle from Rotorua placed second in the world finals!
Shay came up with five Table Topics, where he read out the first paragraph of a mysterious story, which the speakers had to complete. Ross developed a gripping story of a wondrous skeleton that he discovered in a bucket, Cherry used rich verbal images to take us into a dark cellar that was filled with mysterious odour and Paul provided great entertainment when he performed as a dancing robot. For this Table Topic, our General Evaluator Fran awarded the Rubber Chicken to him. Megan spontaneously created a thrilling story around a hidden room in a house, where its past inhabitants where displayed in a mysterious vortex of images. Dwayne presented a story with a very surprising punchline about a cat and a sleepy teenager. Our guest Amy introduced herself to us and gave a professional and well-organised summary of her PhD research at the College of Education.
On the 16th of September, we will support Rory who will represent our club in the Table Topics and humorous speech contests at area level. There will be no club meeting on the night, but four drivers have already volunteered to bring us to the contests at Belfast.
We are also organising a social event. Please email any suggestions and ideas to the Exec, univcantab@toastmasters.org.nz.
U-CAN-SPEAK 