Fingers Crossed
The inaugural meeting of Speak Easy @ Martlesham was a hugh success! Over 24 people attended from as far away as Brandon and as close as Martlesham. The objective of the evening was to give a demonstration of how a speakers’ club operates and to explain how easily you can improve your skills and communicate more effectively – ‘Learning by doing’.
The evening was kicked off by the Toastmaster of the evening, Teresa Dukes, who greeted everyone with a smile and her impression of learning to speak based on the three levels of learning to dance – Basics, Improvers, Advanced – this is only the beginning! Followed by Jeff Bartrop who explained the Toastmasters’ Educational Programme through an analogy of cooking – Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook vs Can’t Speak, Won’t Speak, I’m not getting up there!
Getting down to business, the first half of the evening was dedicated to Table Topics which is a session used to enable us to practice our impromptu speaking. You never know when you are going to be asked for your opinion on a subject and Glyn Jones, our Topics Master, gave us a terrific challenge with his theme on transportation. Everyone who participated, three of which were complete newcomers, really enjoyed having the opportunity to give this a go and to use noises in their topic. The stories included horses, bicycles, sailing and even jet skis!
We were then treated in the second half to a couple of brilliant speeches. The first one by a new member of Ipswich Electrifiers, Ric Hayman, who gave us his Icebreaker speech and enlightened us with his journey through life and how at the end of the day it is good to be the wearer of many hats. Ric was followed by Jeff Short who engaged us with his entertaining speech of the Sutton & Bignor football team. We are never short of giggles when Jeff delivers his stories!
As part of the Toastmaster programme everything is evaluated which enables the speakers to receive immediate feedback on how well they did and then take away a piece of advice that will help them make their future speeches even better. Our evaluators for the evening were experienced members of Ipswich Electrifiers: Kate Thomson, Frances Crane and Chris Dudman.
The evening ended with a Q&A session which opened the floor to everyone. In true Toastmasters style our seasoned members all seemed to have something to say which gave our newcomers an insight to the experiences and successes that could be gained by becoming a member. We obviously hit the right buttons because 5 of our guests signed up to become the first members of this new club and will be amongst those who can say years down the line – ‘I was there at the very beginning!’
Many thanks to everyone at Ipswich Electrifiers for helping make this first meeting a true success. See you all on 4th November!
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