Hello Fellow Toastmaster!

When we’re listening to a great speech, it’s impossible to be obtuse because we’re fully engaged. This week, our members were definitely on their toes with two thought-provoking speeches.

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📣 GGTM Club Announcements

✨ Mindful role cancellations

If you cancel a role <48 hours before a meeting, please let the Toastmaster know and do your best to find a replacement. We understand that life happens, so doing this will allow the meetings to run more smoothly while also supporting your fellow members.

📅 New membership model starting soon

Tenured members will be on the subscription model starting September.

📆 Upcoming Events

Full list in GGTM Calendar!

Joint Meeting with Rhino Toastmasters

Sep 9(Tue) 5:45PM & Sep 10(Wed) 6:00PM

On September 9 and 10, we will be hosting two joint meetings with Rhino Toastmasters: GGTM at Rhino, and Rhino at GGTM. On Tuesday, we'll send a TME and 3 speakers over to the Rhino Meeting to run it GGTM style, and on Wednesday, they'll send over a TME and 3 speakers to run a GGTM Meeting.

The home clubs will provide the GE, evaluators, and functionaries. Instead of Table Topics, we'll have a 15–20 minute panel discussion and open Q&A with some of the away club members. The theme of the meetings will be: "How has Toastmasters changed your life and how can we change Toastmasters?"

Thank you everyone for signing up for all the roles!

📈 September 3rd Meeting Highlights

Kyle, our Toastmaster for the evening, led us through our shortened meeting that had some powerful speeches! Thank you to our other functionaries that helped make this meeting a success: Albert, Ian, Clement, Michelle and Jack.

• 🌱 Eugene’s speech, “Living Up To My Name,” was an insightful reflection on his journey of self-improvement, sharing how the pandemic inspired him to join Toastmasters to better articulate his thoughts (🏆 Double winner: Best prepared speech & Ice breaker🏆). 

• 🎙️ Tavisan offered a great reminder that our introductions should reveal who we are, not just what we do, in his speech “You Are…?”.

Amadeo led an engaging table topics session, challenging us to think on our feet around the theme of communication. Members and guests shared stories about the importance of listening as a speaker, what single emoji they’d use forever, and whether social media has helped us communicate better.

Alex Wu took us home as our General evaluator. We heard from our evaluators who gave us their thoughts on the prepared speeches:

• ✨ Michelle was really impressed with Eugene’s calm and intentional use of his hands, praising his smooth opening and the way he wove the meaning of his name into the story.

• 👏 Scott was a big fan of Tavisan’s thoughtful, funny and smart speech. Especially the role-playing hook and the parallel structure that helped Tavisan show us, not just tell us, his message (🏆 Best evaluation🏆).

📚 Evaluation Tidbits📚

1. 🎙️ Use your voice to your advantage - Consider your vocal variety and volume to ensure every person in the room can hear you clearly. By varying your pitch and tone, you can also bring characters and stories to life.

2. 🤝 Bring your audience in - The best speeches bring the audience along for the journey. Make sure your hook is concise, and you ground your audience in the story early on so they are with you when you deliver your main message.

3. 🎯 Define your speech’s purpose - Before you begin writing, ask yourself what the goal of your speech is. Does it aim to entertain, motivate or inspire? Having a clear purpose will help you craft a more impactful and memorable message.

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Want to write a future issue or have something that you want featured with the club? Send a message to the #newsletter channel in Discord or approach Omar and Sheila (here is how we look like 😛).