Dear Fellow Toastmaster!

Gene, our TME for the night, led the group for a jam-packed journey!

 🥳🥇 Awards and Celebrations

Don’t be shy, share your life wins and let’s celebrate together!

• Ice Breakers: Katherine McCann and Alexandra Williams!

• Best Evaluator: Helen gave a great evaluation on Nick T’s speech, “Does Money Buy Happiness?”

• Best Speech: Katherine McCann who for her impactful speech on preparing for death, offering practical tips for your funeral

• Best Table Topics: Juan, who talked about a black picture that holds significant value, and Jack showing off a pink JBL speaker that’s surprisingly worth over $10k 📣 📆 Coming Up

• October 9th - 24th: Pathways Outage!!!

  • Refer to the Toastmastering Together section below and to the individual emails that your VPEs will send about this topic.

• October 30th - 🎃👻Join us for a Halloween-Themed Toastmasters Meeting filled with spooky speeches, eerie Table Topics, and a costume contest. Get ready for a night of ghoulish fun and festive fright! Sign up for a spooky role! 🎃👻 

📚️🏫 Toastmastering Together

This week we are sharing a Hot Tip from Alex W about how he managed to become a GGTM for free :): 

“My company has an annual professional budget for each employee, which can be used to reimburse stuff like technical and soft skill books, online courses, and conferences. I had been paying for Toastmasters out of pocket for a year (which is totally worth it already), but people suggested that some employers can reimburse the membership fee so I gave it a try. 

I submitted the GGTM receipt to my company reimbursement portal with the business purpose of ‘Career development in Toastmasters.’ 

It got approved! 

Now I get the $90 membership for free.”

Anecdotally we have heard about similar reimbursement successes from other members as well, so don’t hesitate and give it a try! 

If your employer offers a similar budget and/or you’d like to take up the reimbursement discussion with your boss, please reach out to Scott ([email protected] ) and ask him to send you the official receipt. 

And please report back to us with the outcome. Thank you! :)Let’s get better by learning from each other and sharing resources - also on the footer of every newsletter from now on! If you want to add info or share a Public Speaking Tidbit, let us know!

Some references:

• Golden Gate Toastmaster Resources 

• Toastmaster Meeting Roles One-Pager

🤝 Oct 9th Club Meeting Highlights

We had a wide variety of speakers talk during our meeting.

Congrats to Katherine M and Alexandra W for completing their Ice Breakers🙏 

Great job to our speakers and evaluators for stepping up to the plate: Alex W, Nick T, Alexandra W, Katherine M, Helen F, Grace, Jordan, Karishma

🙋‍♀️ Help run the Oct 16th meeting by signing up for roles! 🙋

This Wednesday, we:

• Learned from Alex Wu about how his speech-writing evolved from a rigid memorized structure to a more flexible "Banana Farm Sandwich" approach. (🏆 Two Minute Special 🏆)

• Grace Lee excelled as Table Topics Master by creatively using props to guide a fun session.

• Shoutout to Katherine McCann for her impactful speech on preparing for death, offering practical tips for your funeral (🏆 Best Speech 🏆).

😎💡Member News

Doing anything fun? Share your adventures that we can highlight!

• Check out Alex W’s YouTube channel/website, and his recent massive hit video that has over 250k views! We are so proud of you Alex!

  • https://alexonscience.com/

  • The Mathematics of Banana Farms (Bloons TD 6): https://youtu.be/DsH0NZQsRbU

🫵🗣️ Your turn

We would like to hear YOUR stories, information and feedback to make this newsletter, our club and our Toastmastering better. Share it with us!