Two nights ago was our annual Summer Awards Banquet for Toastmasters. Somebody I know made a comment about it being on a Friday night, as if it seemed stupid because people must have better things to do on a Friday night. In my opinion, this is far from the truth. I’m in a place now where I truly enjoy Toastmasters and public speaking - and the environment with the club is so warm and supportive. I look forward to our club meetings every week and it seems like craziness to miss a regular meeting nevermind the Summer Banquet. Plus, the cheesecake was amazing!

Photos from this year’s banquet can be found on the Burrard Toastmasters website.

Love Me:

This week’s Toastmaster’s meeting was quite possibly the funnest one I’ve ever been to. This week I was the Table Topics Master and so I wanted to do something different and get people involved and working together as well as make it humorous. And it worked. Everybody had an amazing night and the meeting went so well.

“Today’s table topics session is a lesson in how your body language speaks and to help you see how both speaking effectively and using your body effectively works together to make you an even better public speaker.“

The exercise included two people per scenario as one person will only be speaking, and the other will only be doing the actions to go with their partner’s speaking. This helped give a more apparent demonstration of how the body speaks and how both speaking and moving have to work together in order to make a speech truly effective. Extreme hilarity ensued with the following scenarios:

• 1. You are working on street repair and discover an indecipherable item.
• 2. You are at a local dance and meet a strange, interesting character. What happens?
• 3. You are wrestling a bear at the state fair. What is the outcome?
• 4. You are rock climbing in the middle of a hot day and are suddenly swarmed by a large number of birds.
• 5. You are demonstrating Tupperware (or some other product of your choice) and describing the strange things it is useful for (not just food).

Needless to say it was difficult for some people to not use their body while speaking (using hand gestures, etc.) and for others it was difficult to not speak or make too many noises. At the end of it all my eyes were watering from laughing so hard. Definitely a great exercise that I would do again some time.

- - Rebekah

P.S. Nam (our Past President, a super cool dude) introduced me as the Table Topics Master and used hockey references to Wayne Gretzky and Sidney Crosby. NICE. I love it. You can put me up there with great achievers any day!

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I do solemnly swear that I will truly and faithfully, and to the best of my skill and knowledge, execute the powers and trusts reposed in me as BURRARD TOASTMASTERS CLUB PRESIDENT!!!!

That’s right. Club elections took place, and I will be the new Club President for Burrard Toastmasters. Because that’s just how I roll, and because I’m freakin’ awesome. I actually don’t officially become Club President until July as we go through a transitional period and a training session. The point is I’m progressing in my usual pace again, yay! That’s all I have to say about Toastmasters today.

This week’s handy links:

• • 10 useful tools for choosing the right color palette
• • 5 must know web design polishing techniques
• • 50 ways to become a better designer
• • 10 Wordpress plugins guaranteed to save you time
• • 22 CSS Button Styling Tutorials and Techniques
• • Designers predict web design trends for 2010

–Rebekah

Love Me:

Toastmasters tonight was, I’m not gonna lie, a little sad. Mostly because there were very few members there. I swear more than half the club couldn’t make it to the meeting this week. Oh well, I guess this means the beginning of the summer! I did my second speech tonight, titled “Reasons to Exercise” and I’ve posted it on my speeches page for your reading pleasure. It went fairly well, actually, and the only things I wish I could have done were make it a little longer and to have memorized it rather than using notes. All in all, I’m definitely improving - yay! Next week is the club executive elections when I’ll be running for club president. Strangely enough, I’m not worried about it one bit. I’m confident I was a born leader (and I say that as modestly as possible).

– Rebekah

Love Me:

This week Jess let me chair the meeting again at Toastmasters. It’s good practice for sure and I’ve made up my mind that I’m definitely running for president in the club executive elections on May 27th. On my way to Toastmasters I even thought of a good argument for why they should vote for me. I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you (or bring down your website). I’m saving it for the actual election speech. I’m actually really excited about it and I feel myself opening up more and becoming a lot more comfortable with Toastmasters, speaking, and being myself around strangers in general.

I finished the flash book Leigh had ordered for me, and the satisfying part of it is that I knew about 98% of what it taught. My first project is going to be a Netgenetix social photo gallery which Leigh wants me to treat as a real project with a project brief, a timeline, and deliverables. That should be interesting in terms of the timeline/deliverables, only because I’ll be working on it in my free time, not on a daily basis like a client project. Who knows what client work may fill up my time in the coming weeks?

I’ve come across some awesome design/development articles and pages in the past week that I’d like to share. Take a gander, I’m sure you’ll find at least one of them useful or inspiring!

• • Create an Image Rotator with CSS/jQuery
• • 40 Tutorials for Creating Highly Detailed Icons
• • 26 Horizontal Websites for Inspiration
• • 20+ Brilliant List Styling Techniques
• • Meagan Fisher - An Inspiring Designer
• • The World’s Largest Free Textures Site
• • Run Several Versions of IE on your PC

… and you can see more of my cool website discoveries by following me on Delicious.

Love Me:

This week Jess had to go to an event for one of our clients so she couldn’t make it to Toastmasters. So, since she was unable to attend she put out the call for someone to chair the meeting. At first I debated it with myself and was unsure, but then I thought that if I didn’t just sign up right away someone else would take it and I would be disappointed.

It was actually fun and not hard at all - there’s a leader in me somewhere! I also did my first table topic tonight, which is the part of the meeting I’m always most worried about - so the fact that I nailed that was pretty awesome. I had several people at the meeting today say that I’m a natural and I should run for Club President. Could be a good idea for sure… I’m gonna talk to Jess about it and see what she thinks.  Plus, it would be cool to have her as the Past President to help me out.

Love Me: