The line up for the West Seattle Earlybirds toastmasters Open House meeting at Arts West on Friday January 14, 2011 was:
  • Toastmaster: Bonnie
  • Table topics: Amber
  • General evaluator: Peter
  • Evaluator: Shawn
  • Speakers: Teresa, Lily, Larry
  • Timer: Peter
  • Wordmaster: Brian
  • Humorist: Amber
  • Inspiration: Jean
  It was a smashing success. We had fun, good food and strong coffee. Yet, more importantly, we had amazing speeches, and guests that rocked the house with their contribution to Amber’s table topic challenge. Peter our general evaluator summed it up by pointing out with a smiling face “We are a very competitive club, and you are way to talented and good to join us. Please don’t come back.” Of course, we hope to see all our guest to return next week to enrich our club with amazing speeches and your presence.
  Brian our President welcomed the club heartfelt before handing the meeting over to Bonnie. She led the assembly with confident and invited all the guests to participate, before calling upon Amber to present her table topic. She asked us, what our excuses mechanism are not to do something we hope to get done. It was amazing to see how we all manage to stay within our “life comfort level box” and how hard it can be to step outside the box, doing something new or different.
  Yes, the table topic was challenging and a bit personal but astonishingly it resonated with all of us and all including most all of the guests stepped onto the stage and spoke for 60 seconds about their excuses, the way they have overcome some of them, and how they stepped out of their comfort zone to move ahead in life. I felt very inspired and amazed how all of us have a tendency to procrastinate to change to the unknown, the new, the different.

We had three strong speakers, Teresa, Larry, and Lily. Teresa informed the club about sleep walking in a fun and well organized manual speech. Larry encouraged with his speech all guests to join toastmaster using his long time friend Cevil as an example of being afraid speaking up in public. Lilly gave her second speech and it was a bang. “Filling the blank page” was a story about her struggle as a write to find the focus. She told us that she gave herself constraints; one subject, 6 hours, 300 words. She created typetrigger an online sparing tool for all writers and its slogan is “Four times a day, we help you get the words out to write in any genre in 300 words or less“.

-Bernd