2015-11-20 MEETING RECAP

Dear Flock,

Another excellent meeting this week!

Filling in for meeting minutes was Chuck Furumori while Mykal was unavailable today.

Attendees included: Henry, Cause, Shari, Josh, Shawn, Mimi, Chuck, Aaron, Brian, Wendy, Norman, and Jean.

We started the meeting on time which is always a plus. The signup sheet was passed around and we are doing an excellent job getting all of the roles filled for upcoming meetings. In fact we are almost booked solid for the rest of the year, excellent work everyone!

Reminder we have no meeting next week due to Thanksgiving holiday however we will be returning the following Friday.

Shari was our Toastmaster today and rocked it. Brian gave our inspiration in the form of a moment of silence for the recent attacks in Paris France. The theme of the meeting was being thankful and thankfulness.

Normal is one our advanced speakers and gave a powerful 8-10 minute manual speech entitled “Happy to Be Here” where he reflected and gave us a glimpse of his challenging teenage years. Amazing speech I think everyone was pretty stunned at the depth and his willingness to share so openly painful past events. Another reason this club is so great, we are very respectful and supportive of one another.

Mimi gave a manual speech entitled “Listen to the Leaves” which took us on a little bit of a journey then tied us all back to a surprise ending. Great work Mimi!

Jean gave us our table topic which was a fun “Grab Bag” style. She literally had a grab bag of random objects and we had to come up with something to say on the spot. These are always challenging but often fun to see how wild and creative people get with their responses.

Greg gave us three funny jokes as humorist.

Cause served as the meeting evaluator and gave us some great tips to keep the club on track and adhering to the Toastmasters best practices. For example we need to own the stage. Whenever you are up there (Toastmaster or other) you wait until the next person comes up, shake their hand, before you transition off the stage. This is important and we have been somewhat sloppy in doing this but never to late to polish our style.

Grammarian Josh highlighted our favorite go-to words for today were: ok, so, um, and a new one oooooooh. A great tip, anytime you want to link sentences together, pause for half a second or so then start a new sentence. This will eliminate those transitional words.

Wendy was our timer for today, pretty much everyone was on target for time with only a few running slightly over.

Speech winner for today was Normal Bell.