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.

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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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