Dear Fellow Toastmaster!

The theme of this week’s meeting was ‘impomptu’, most roles were filled on the day, including the TME! We’d like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that meetings don’t run themselves. There is a lot of effort that goes into the running of the club behind the scenes (thank you Officer Team!) and we rely on our members to keep our meetings running smoothly. Please use the agenda site to sign up for roles and to let us know if you will be attending a meeting or not.

 🥳🥇 Awards and Celebrations

• Guests Sergei and Aditya stole the show with a joint win of ‘Best Table Topic’

• Mike D won ‘Best Speech’ with his stories of Pivotal Moments, including how a pivotal moment in the history of the band The Police led to them creating the song ‘Roxanne’ and rocketing to fame!

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

 📣 📆 Coming Up

Never want to miss out on GGTM social events, workshops and meetings? Clink on the button and subscribe to our club’s Google Calendar.

• 🎄🎅🏼🥂🎁 December 4th - instead of our regular meeting we will be hosting our end-of-year Holiday Celebration! You’re invited!!

  - When: 6:30-9pm, December 4, 2024

  - Where: Yes SF, 220 Montgomery St., San Francisco

  - Why: To celebrate the approaching end of the year with friends, new and old, on the journey to better public speaking!

  - How: RSVP here ($15 requested contribution to reserve the event space)

  Any questions? Reach out to Helen Fream, Alex Wu, Gene Zhou or Katka Sabo. We look forward to seeing you there with your favorite Ugly Sweater (other festive attire also acceptable!).

• We have 3 more meetings before the end of the year! 20th Nov, 11th and 18th Dec. There will be no meetings on the 27th Nov or 25th Dec. The first meeting back will be 8th January 2025!

• GGTM Talk Tank - Monday 18th November 6-7pm. Drop in and ask Sheila and Helen any burning TM questions you might have. Check out the GGTM Calendar or use this link to join.

 📚️🏫 Toastmastering Together

In October 2024, TMI revamped the educational platform for Pathways. There was an outage for a couple of weeks, but it is now back online and has a new and improved User Interface. Designed to support you in a seamless experience accessing Pathways education content, explore this system by selecting the “Go to Base Camp” card on My Home. When you log in, you’ll find:

• More intuitive navigation to launch paths and complete projects.

• Optimized mobile access from a browser on your mobile device.

• Automatic submission of path and level completions for recognition on Club Central.

• Increased accessibility for members who are visually impaired.

• The option to share your accomplishments directly on social media.

As we approach speech contest season this is a great opportunity to login to Pathways and track all of the amazing speeches you have been doing.Visit the Education Program FAQ page and view a few videos to help you get familiar with the system.

🤝🥛🏋🏻‍♀️🎤 13th Nov Club Meeting Highlights 👀 by Sheila

🙋‍♀️ Sign up for the available roles for our joint meeting with Sierra Speakers next week ! 🙋

Last Wednesday, we witnessed a successful almost ‘Impromptu’ meeting, but everyone showed up with truly engaging stories throughout. All of the 16 attendees (4 guests) had a chance to speak during the meeting, most of them ad-hoc (word of the day!)  in Table Topics .

Thank you to those who signed-up to run our meeting: Shubham, Ash, Helen, Adam, Natalie, Nik, Sheila, Alex W.

During our meeting we:

• 🧍🏽‍♀️ Learned from Karishma the 3 concrete steps for instant confidence: (1) Sit upright; (2) Breath slowly and deeply; (3) Choose invincibility

• 👔 Heard from Alexandra that the Dress Code Policy she’ll have her students follow is the one which will make them happy and safe.

•  🎤 Learned from Divya how to succeed with an “unprepared” speech so we don’t drop a speech slot: (1)Choose an easy topic; (2)Re-deliver a previous speech; (3) Use the meeting as a practice run

• 🎸 Discovered remarkable Pivotal Moments from history and his life courtesy of Michael Dart, encouraging us to lay the groundwork to be closer to those moments for us (🏆 Best Prepared Speech🏆)

• 🏋🏻‍♀️ Witnessed a shared (🏆Best Table Topic 🏆) win for Aditya (guest!) and Sergei (guest!) truly embracing the essence of impromptu speaking by letting their personalities shine through in their stories

• 🏃🏾‍♂️Thank you Alex W. for leading a successful Table Topic Relay! With an extended TT slot, everyone got a chance to speak! Thank you for your stories Derek, Natalie, Aditya, Mia, Adam, Helen, Ash, Julia, Mike N, Nik, Shubham, Divya

•  🎤 Saw Sheila use a tidbit she learned from a work training to evaluate Divya’s speech on Content + Delivery + State and recommended her to be mindful of her “you knows” to make an already warm, relatable and approachable speech even better  (🏆Best Evaluator🏆)

• 🙏🏼 Thank you to the other evaluators of our three amazing speeches - Shubham (evaluating Alexandra) and Mike N (evaluating Mike D). Thank you Helen for stepping in as General Evaluator with a final reminder that our meetings don’t run themselves and require everyone’s participation!

😎💡Member Spotlight

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

🫵🗣️ 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!