Hello Fellow Toastmaster!

This week, improv became the catalyst for improv-ing our public speaking in unexpected ways.

🚨 Never miss an update!

📣 GGTM Club Announcements

📅 New membership model starting soon

Tenured members will be on the subscription model starting September.

🚦 Goodbye cards, hello traffic light!

We introduced our new timekeeping tool for our meetings!

🎥 New Videographer Station

With Yoodli sunsetting, we will now be using OBS Studio to record speeches. This is setup on a dedicated laptop that Scott donated to the club! Being a Videographer is still as easy as just clicking a button!

📆 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?"

Please reach out to [email protected] if you'd like to sign up for a role!

GGTM Open House

Date: TBD

Open House are special meetings designed to boost club membership. Last year, we ran it with Sierra Speakers Toastmasters and it was a great meeting with both in-person and online options! This year, GGTM will host another Open House and we hope to see you there so you get to know our club more!

The Moth: GUMPTION

Date: August 26

Looking for more stages to speak? The Moth StorySLAM is an open-mic storytelling competition in which anyone can share a true, personal, 5-minute story on the theme: GUMPTION. Sign up for a chance to tell a story or sit back and enjoy the show.

📈 Aug 20 Meeting Highlights

With Sheila to the rescue as our Toastmaster for the evening, she introduce our theme for the evening, Improv. She kicked off the meeting with a classic improv warm-up called "Name and Action." As each of us introduced ourselves with a unique gesture, we passed the energy around the room.

With a full agenda we’re ready to take the meeting on, which was successfully run along with our other functionaries: Omar, Nithila, Amadeo, Michelle, Sheila (again) and Karishma.

After Michelle's special 2-minute "What makes you happy", the stage was set for not one, but three fantastic icebreaker speeches. This section was then capped off with a captivating speech from Helen.

• 🔮 Tanya shared her journey through a professional crisis and an unfulfilling career. Inspired by an esoteric book store, she described how she connected with her intuition, imagination, and her grandfather to start a business of storytelling and healing (🧊 Ice breaker speech 🧊).

• 🇯🇵 Anna drew inspiration from a piece of Japanese literature to reflect on a period of forced re-evaluation in her life. She described how she went from being on autopilot to entering an extraordinary relationship with herself through self-reflection and growth (🧊 Ice breaker and best prepared speech 🏆).

• 🥃 Angela reflected on her relationship with her two brothers, and how they’ve evolved over the years. She compared their bond to aged whiskey, with its rich and complex flavor enhanced by life's challenges (🧊 Ice breaker speech 🧊).

• ❤️‍🩹 Helen spoke about her history of avoiding conflict and running away from problems. She shared how a boss inspired her to face her fears and use a non-violent communication framework (OFNR) to separate facts from feelings and view her emotions as a superpower.

Alexandra Williams led Table Topics with the improv theme: Make goals, set expectations! Katie got the (🏆 Best Table Topic 🏆) sharing the date she doesn’t can’t remember - her second father’s marriage.

Thank you to our members and guests who spoke impromptu about their sweet imaginations: Clement, Yuri, Derick, Amadeo and Amber.

Clement led the evaluation section and Karishma got (🏆 Best Evaluator 🏆) for her review of Angela’s speech. Thank you to our other evaluators this evening - Helen, Alexandra and Alex W.!

📚 Evaluation Tidbits📚

1. Go beyond the obvious

   Don't just state facts about yourself. Use your speech to give us a fun, relatable portal into your life.

2. Turn up the volume

   Your words have power, so make sure your voice does too. Vocal variety and strong projection can transform your speech from a simple message into a captivating story.

3. Tell a story with a twist!

   A great analogy can be a powerful tool for a memorable speech.

👁️ Through the eyes of the TME 👁️

Hear directly from Sheila on how the experience was for her as TME:

Being Toastmaster for the Evening is, no kidding, my favorite meeting role. I mean - excel sheets, checklists, working with people to make something happen - what’s not to love?! Whenever I sign-up to be one, I prepare galore! I (over)think what’s a theme that would land. I send multiple high-energy emails to make sure everyone is onboard. I (over)practice my TME spiel and the in-between banters. I get to CoC early and I plan to "productively panic" before the meeting and show up on top of my game. I always get what I put in - this results in a well-run meeting with optimal engagement.

This week, I did not plan on signing up as I don’t have bandwidth for it. But when no one signed-up with a day to go, the desire to get something done outweighed the reality that I can't prepare enough for it. So out of spite - I chose the theme of IMPROV. I’m gonna wing it to prove a point that this is what happens when we're not prepared! I did the bare minimum - created the agenda, sent a couple of creatively snarky emails for role sign-up and followed up only once to remind speakers/functionaries of their participation.

Then something interesting happened. I woke up and all titles and intros are ready. All the roles were filled by 10AM Wednesday. Someone signed up for a role which opened up without me asking. Everyone embraced being silly during the intro, the speeches were amazing peeks to the souls of our fellow Toastmasters, Table Topics was 100% improvised and 100% engaging, and it was great energy all around! I still got the same results despite my minimal input - a well-run meeting with optimal engagement.

Tonight, I was reminded of my biggest learning this year from improv class. The best that you can do is not always to plan but to make the best of what you have at the moment. Take the energy of those around you to make something wonderful together. Something does not have to be perfect to be beautiful.

🏝️ GGTM Beyond the Board Room 🏝️

Get to know our Golden Gate Toastmasters outside of our weekly Wednesday club meetings at the Chamber of Commerce Board Room. Subscribe to the GGTM Calendar to learn more about our club events and beyond!

📸 Member Spotlight

🤫 City Lights and Secrets

In case you missed it, we hosted a highly successful storytelling event with Hotel Nikko on August 1. Our VPPR Nik has posted info about it on our socials:

🔗 LinkedIn: Golden Gate Toastmasters
📸 Instagram: @goldengatetoastmasters

If you want to read how it all went down, or for those who were there, relive the moment, checkout our special newsletter for it. See you all at a future event!

🎉 Be part of the GGTM Newsletter! 🎉

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 let Omar or Sheila know!