Winning, life purpose, big battles and making the happy choice

why wait until you're ready?

Dear Fellow Toastmaster!

What a powerful theme we had this week! Another inspirational Wednesday evening at the Chamber of Commerce with GGTM.

First time Toastmaster Elena awards our Best Speaker Karishma for her Ice Breaker!

 🥳🥇 Awards and Celebrations

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

  • Our new members ran the show tonight! Great job ladies! 🏅🥳 🙌 

    • Elena for being our first-time Toastmaster

    • Karishma for having her Ice Breaker get the Best Speech

    • Divya for getting Best Evaluator

  • We had another successful run of our modified outdoor meeting at Embarcadero Bricks on 09/18! Thank you Gene, Katka, Mark and Alex L. and for spreading the GGTM energy through this stage!

  • 7 new members in the past month!🤯 Our club is growing faassssttt!! 🏃📈 

 📣 📆 What’s up

  • September 30 - Membership renewals are due this Monday! Reach out to Scott for any questions.

  • On on 09/22 5PM Gene Zhou announced that our GGTM Discord server is live! Check his email for details on how to activate. See you there! 💻️ 💬 

  • October 2 (Wed) - Is our next Monthly Pathways Completion Awards. Log your Pathways speeches so we can celebrate you! The next one is on November 6. 🏅✅ 

All GGTM’s upcoming events automatically showing up in your calendar? Yes, please! Clink on the button and subscribe to our club’s Google Calendar.

 📚️🏫 Toastmastering Together

You might’ve previously rocked it as a Ballot Counter or Note Taker or Toastmaster for the Evening - great job! Like our speaking journey, our role guides are continuously evolving.

Let us optimize new tools and resources we discover to improve a role. Take time to read the updated role guides when signing up, and utilize them to try a role you have not done before! Welcome to recommendations too to make a role better.

The latest and very detailed role guides are here:

  • 🔗 GGTM Meeting Roles (bit.ly/GGTM-roles) is our one-pager to meeting roles with links to each of the updated guides

  • 💼 In the Agenda, a link to detailed guide for the role is also available

Thank you for all you do for us to better run our meetings! 🙏💫 

Our Madam Toastmaster Elena set the inspirational vibe for the night

Alex I. shares how to make our meetings better as General Evaluator

🤝 ♣️ Sep 25 Club Meeting Highlights 👀 by Gene

Way to go Elena for your debut Toastmaster for the Evening role! You did not freeze at all. 😉 

The the theme of the night “Don’t wait until you’re ready” totally resonated with all of us! 🙏 ⏳️ Our word of the day was venture which we could use exploring more - in speaking and in real life.

Great job to our functionaries who ran the meeting: Lauren, Ping, Divya, Tavisan, Gene and Sheila.

Thank you to our 8 guests who joined us this evening. Looking forward to spending more Wednesday evenings with you! 🙌 

🙋‍♀️ Why wait? Sign up for roles and help run our next meeting! 🙋

This Wednesday evening, we:

  • 🎤 Heard Monika describe the experience of her seeing her favorite band Green Day live. Let’s wake her up when September ends!

  • 🏅 Learned the five ways to always win with Sheila accounting her The Moth adventures.

  • 💓 Were with Alex L. as she recounts her journey of finding purpose despite fear leading her to her forever love of hospitality

  • 🎮️ Received Gene’s beautiful storytelling one more time updated with more gestures recounting the great battle in EVE-Online to defeat The Imperium - which never happened because the servers crashed

  •  🙂 Got to know Karishma via her captivating speech encouraging us to take the happy choice to lead us to places where our matter has the highest vibration (🏆 Best Prepared Speech 🏆) (🧊 Ice Breaker 🧊)

  • 🥳 Heard Divya’s first time and (🏆 Best Evaluator 🏆) win giving feedback to Gene’s amazing storytelling and challenged him to up the emotion and vocal variety more

    • Thank you to our other evaluators: Elena (evaluating Sheila), Katka (evaluating Alex L), Alex W. (evaluating Karishma). Thank you Alex I. for leading the section as General Evaluator.

  • 🫡 “Don’t get ready, stay ready!” is what Nick strongly advised us so we never have to stress about things we can’t control. (🏆 Best Table Topic 🏆)

    • Good work to our other table topic speakers: Alex W., JJ, Alex I. Thank you Alex L. for leading table topics!

Divya got Best Evaluator for her first evaluation!

😎💡Member Spotlight

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

  • We heard Sheila talk about The Moth - which is an open mic storytelling event. Let’s drop our names on the hat together! The next one is on October 29 and the theme is Goosebumps. Our friends at Toastbusters club might hang out with us too! Let Sheila or Gene know if you’re interested. https://themoth.org/events/goosebumps-sf-2024

  • Let’s get to know Divya who recently joined GGTM and won the Best Evaluator ribbon this week!

Welcome to the club, Divya!

  • Joined TM to: …continue improving my communication skills in general—not just public speaking, but also thinking on my feet through impromptu speeches, enhancing my listening skills through functionary roles, and delivering effective evaluations. In my opinion, being an evaluator is a distinct skill that many people overlook. It involves listening attentively, choosing the right words to provide constructive feedback, and speaking in front of an audience. Much of what I’ve learned in Toastmasters has come from listening to evaluators during meetings.

  • Fun-fact: I speak four different languages; English, Malay, Tamil, Hindi. Three out of the four languages, I just naturally know through immersion. I picked up Hindi because I loved watching Bollywood movies growing up. 

  • Upcoming speech title/topic: My icebreaker speech is called "Moving Forward With A Purpose"

🫵🗣️ 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!

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