Dear Fellow Toastmaster!

Braving the first rain of the season, we collectively felt the power of the spoken word as we heard tidbits about inspirational speeches from history and witnessed actual inspirational speeches from our fellow Toastmasters.

Let’s keep the momentum going until the end of the year by signing up for roles and confirming your attendance to the meetings. We have two more meetings before the end of the year - 11th and 18th December. There will be no meetings on the 27th Nov or 25th Dec. The first meeting back will be 8th January 2025!

🙋‍♀️ Sign up for roles on our next meeting on Dec 11 🙋‍♀️

🙋 Please reflect your meeting RSVP 🙋‍♀️

 📣 📆 🥳 Year-End Happenings

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

• Reminder that there is 🚨NO MEETING next week!🚨. Enjoy your Thanksgiving holidays and we’ll see you on December 4th for our holiday celebration. 

• 🎄🤶 🥂 🎁 December 4th - HOLIDAY PARTY

  Instead of our regular meeting we will be hosting our end-of-year Holiday Celebration! 🌟 EVERYONE IS INVITED 🌟 Join us as we celebrate all that we’ve done this year! We look forward to seeing you there with your Favorite UGLY SWEATER (other festive attire also acceptable!).
  
  Reach out to Helen Fream, Alex Wu, Gene Zhou, or Katka Sabo for questions!
  

  • WHEN: December 4, 2024 (Wed) 6:30-9PM

  • WHERE: Yes SF at 220 Montgomery St., San Francisco CA

  • HOW: RSVP on this Partiful Event ($15 requested contribution to reserve the event space) BEFORE December 1st

    

    RSVP by clicking on this image!

• ☑️ 🗳️ 📈 December 11th - CLUB ELECTIONS

  • Special shortened meeting and club elections. It’s that time of year again - the next Club Officer Elections! Interested in helping to run this awesome club? We will be electing officers for all roles - members you have an opportunity to vote!

  • We NEED A QUORUM of members to run the elections so please attend this IMPORTANT MEETING and help shape of club’s future.

  • To learn more about the roles you can reach out to any of the current officers or review the officer roles on the TMI website here.

 📚️🏫 Toastmastering Together

Every Toastmasters International Meeting has a recommended three-part format: Prepared Speeches, Table Topics and Evaluations. Every club can put their spin on it and these Tips for successful club meetings will help!

Today we highlight how a Club Meeting is run - Golden Gate Toastmaster style! Thank you for showing up and keeping our meetings dynamic!

1. The Sergeant-at-Arms opens the Meeting reminding us of the house rules. Everyone takes the time to check-in for the meeting

2. The President welcomes everyone, provides space for guests to introduce themselves, shares top of mind club business items and intros the Toastmaster for the Evening (TME)

3. The TME describes the meeting theme, format,

4. Prepared Speech section begins where speakers deliver speeches, the audience gives feedback and chooses the Best Speaker

5. After a short break, the Table Topics section begins lead by the Table Topics Master where members and guests get to practice impromptu speaking.

6. The Evaluation section commences where Evaluators delivering their speech feedback, Functionaries (Ah-Counter, Grammarian, Timer) give their reports on the specific area they observed and the General Evaluator gives overall meeting evaluation

7. A short pop-quiz is done to test everyone’s attention during the meeting.

8. Ribbons are awarded for most-voted speeches of the evening. Special awards - Maverick Award! - are also given for those who showed up last minute to fill the agenda up. Other awards if any will be given here too.

9. TME closes the meeting, passes it back to the President for closing remarks, gathering feedback from everyone and final club announcements

10. Everyone is invited to Happy Hour after the meeting!

 🍷💥 🏊🏻‍♀️ 👽 20th Nov Club Meeting Highlights

Last Wednesday, we were inspired by powerful stories of the Spoken Word demonstrating its influence to shape the world. Our Toastmaster for the Evening Karishma gave us snippets of these groundbreaking speeches inspiring us to utilize these and start an auspicious (word of the day!) journey for ourselves.

23 people people braved the rain and made it to the meeting!

Thank you for those who took on roles to run our meeting: Lauren, Karishma, Mike N, Ash, Nik, Gene, Helen, Sheila, Alexandra, Vipul and Alex W.

During our meeting we:

• 🗣️ Learned though Karishma’s introductions some of the word’s most powerful speeches and how despite differing lengths and word counts were all equally impactful

• 💗 Heard from Alexandra the three key things to live a full life: (1)Find someone to love; (2)Love what you do; (3)Have something to look forward to

• 🍷 Learned both about the wine-making process and the beautiful metaphors that it represents on our journeys of transformation (aka: fermentation 😄) thanks to Alex L!

• 🛑 Heard how Sheila’s quitting story becoming an unexpected beautiful thing which turned things around (🏆 Best Prepared Speech🏆)

• 💣 With amazing supporting visuals, discovered through Vipul that some impactful events in history took place because of random events and were challenged to choose whether to live our lives in bliss or to stick with our plans.

• 🤷‍♂️ 🏊️ Witnessed a shared (🏆Best Table Topic 🏆) win for Adam P and Michelle (returning guest!) as they shared their stories of inspirational speeches they heard and will make on important moments.

  • Thank you to those who stepped up to the challenge brought up by our Table Topic master Alexandra and gave effective impromptu speeches: Aditya, Ash, Shubham, Jashdeep (guest!) Jaime(guest!) Sami (guest!)

• 🥂 Heard Helen’s evaluation of Alex L’s transformational speech getting her (🏆Best Evaluator🏆) and we echo the ask for real wine next time! 😄 

  • Thank you to our other evaluators Alex W (evaluating Sheila) and Shubham (evaluating Vipul). Thank you Vipul for leading the Evaluation section with call outs on being mindful of time and strategic use of tech for presentations.

😎💡Member Spotlight

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

Let’s get to know our new member Ash (aka Aswani). During Happy Hour, she shared that her mother-in-law has her own YouTube cooking channel in her native language with a video on how to make Grape Wine. Seeing this format of content delivery and couple it with Alex L’s beautiful metaphors - hopefully we get inspired to be creative on our own public speaking fermentation processes! 🍇

🫵🗣️ 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!