A Surprise! Meeting

Meeting Commentary

Surprise!

How do you add spice and zest to your club meetings?

One way to do it is to turn the meeting upside down. Toastmasters meetings are usually known for their structure and preparedness, and… usually fun included as well.

This time Bali Toastmasters Club decided to have a Surprise! meeting.

Members were left in the dark as to what their role was going to be.

Shortly before the meeting started each member was asked to draw a lottery, a rolled piece of paper with a leadership role written in it. Then together members opened their piece of paper and discovered what their role for the evening was.

Imagine when members read their roles; Surprise! Pandemonium broke, “Oh no… I can’t do this, can someone change role with me?”... “I’ve never done this role before”…

President Amran reminded us of one of the pillars of Toastmasters was: “Toastmasters is the safest place to make mistakes” and gently prod the members to try anyway. In all fairness, being equally unprepared put everyone more or less in the same boat. Everyone is bound to make some mistakes.

From the draw the roles were as follow:

Toastmaster: Ellen (most senior member, but always requested for easy role)

General Evaluator: Debra (very new member, never did evaluator role before)

Table Topic Master: Amran (got the easiest role)

Grammarian: Miranda (normally wouldn’t choose to do the role if she could help it)

Ah Counter: Tim (visiting Toastmaster)

Timer: Firman (guest)

Ballot Counter: Anas (guest)

Evaluators: Jenny and Izul (both never had been evaluators before)

Miranda gave a short educational talk on ‘How to Evaluate’ to help the debuting evaluators get their feet wet.

Table Topic Session

President Amran as the Table Topic Master led this opening session.

The table topic speakers were determined by another draw. The lucky ones were Jenny (new member), Anas and Firman (both guests) and Tim visiting Toastmaster). All took to the questions with laudable calm and confidence. Jenny spoke the virtue of jogging. Anas could barely contained his enthusiasm airing his views on meditation and jogging that he exceeded the time allotment. Firman spoke about being a teacher. Time was asked to share why he loves Toastmasters.

Tim was voted Best Table Topic Speaker.

Prepared Speech and Evaluation Sessions

The prepared speakers were the only ones who prepared their speeches… well, at least they had advance notice that they would be giving a speech. As to whether it was a prepared speech or not, that would be best left to one’s perception sometimes.

Izul opened the session with his speech from Basic Manual project 4 – whose objectives are to focus on what to say to make a speech more vivid and descriptive. The title of his speech was “Children and Television”, which spoke about the danger of watching too much television, yet despite scientific study that confirmed the debilitating effects of prolonged exposure to television, general population seems unable and unwilling to rid themselves of this insidious addiction.

Izul was evaluated by Jenny

Miranda delivered a speech project from the Interpersonal Communication Advanced Manual: project 1: Conversing with Ease. Partnering up with Tim in a roleplay, she demonstrated the utilization of four levels of communication in striking up a conversation with a stranger. She used the open question techniques to quickly build rapport and generate a meaningful conversation.

Miranda was evaluated by Izul.

Miranda was voted Best Speaker. Izul and Jenny tied as Best Evaluators.

Debra did an amazing job giving a general evaluation of the meeting. She was direct and spontaneous in giving a fairly thorough evaluation of the meeting. She felt that the lack of preparation lent to the lack of focus of the meeting, although it was amply compensated with fun and high spirit. She suggested that members refrain from crossing the room or speaking while there’s a person speaking on stage.

The laughter and the fun seemed to come to an end too soon. A lot of mistakes were made. Miranda completely forgot that she was grammarian and only managed to evaluate one speaker.

All the new guests commented that they’ve enjoyed the meeting immensely and felt that the club was exactly what they’d been looking for. Anas, Firman and Putu decided to join the club.

Coming up Next:

BTC Club Speech Contest – March 31, 6.30-9 p.m. Jl. Batur Sari 22B, Sanur

For more information contact: Amran 081 2376 2000

Come check it out!

See you at the club soon,

Toast!

Miranda Suryadjaja ACS ALB