Meeting Recap: “We Don’t Grow Flower” by Rano Iskandar, 11th Aug 2020

Meeting Recap – 11th Aug 2020

Highlight:

What better way to connect with each other than to meet up after our regular meeting for supper, and having conversations about anything and everything!

And that’s what we did on Tuesday, 11th August 2020. Fellow members and guests met up at the nearby McDonald’s and we had a thoroughly fun time just chilling.

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Our weekly meeting started on time at 7:30pm, and our Sergeant-at-arms (SAA), Wilson Kong VC1* took the floor and started with the introduction of toastmasters, mission statement, pathways introduction, and finally guests introduction before passing the control over to our Toastmaster of the Evening (TME), Rano Iskandar ACG ALB*.

 

Rano led his meeting by getting his team of role players to introduce themselves.

 

Our list of role players who introduced themselves were:

Table Topics Master (TTM), by Supatra Lee CC, ALB*, who shared her theme for the night’s table topics being ‘Digitilization’. Table topics are short 1-2 minutes impromptu speeches that will test the quick thinking off the cuffs by randomly selected audience members.

 

Table Topics Evaluator (TTE), by Wilson Kong. A TTE role is to provide evaluation feedback to the speakers who partake in the table topic sessions.

 

Grammarian, Syatrah Roslan SR3*, explaining her role as a grammarian which were to keep track of good and improper usages of the English language, as well her introduction of the word of the day “axiomatic”.

 

 

Ah Counter & Who-Said-What by Wong Hui Ting EC2*, who explained her role as keeping track of crutch and filler words such as erm, arr, ya, you know, that will inhibit the effectiveness of a speaker, as well as explaining her other task as quizzing the audience on their listening skills of what was said throughout the evening.

 

Timer & Tip by TM* Aditia Salalu, who explained the timing allocated to the different speakers and evaluators and showing how the timing device worked. Adi also shared his tip of the day to be calm.

 

General Evaluator (GE), Aziman Nasir DL5*, took the floor to explain his role as a GE is to observe and give an overall evaluation of the whole meeting proceedings, as well as providing his feedback on the different evaluators.

 

Before the end of the first session of the meeting, Rano our TME shared his thought of the day, which was a quote extracted from a presentation during the Toastmaster Leadership Institute training conducted a couple of days earlier.

“We don’t grow flowers” by Uncle Mike, a 30 years veteran toastmaster from Kuching who shared this message that in toastmaster we don’t grow flowers, we provided the bed and the environment that allows each and everyone of its members to bloom into their own unique self.

A very beautiful thought of the day, as this is exactly what Toastmasters and Brunei Speakers’ Club embraces.

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The second part of the meeting started with the table topic sessions led by Supatra, and there were 3 selected speakers:

First speaker, TM Lawrence Pow, who’s topic was “Online learning is better than traditional classroom training. What do you think?”

Second speaker by a guest, Farhan, who’s topic was “Online Meet-up helps to enhance our relationship better than physical meeting. What do you think?”

Third and last speaker, TM Lim Chee Rong, who’s topic was “One day, machines will be the ones performing surgery on us. What do you think?”

 

 

 

 

The next session was the prepared speeches session, and the first speech was by Megat Arif EC2*, who’s speech was titled “My Day of Many Conversations”

Before Megat presented, we heard from his speech evaluator, Syahnur Nizam PI4*, on the objective and evaluation criteria of the speech.

 

 

The second speech for the night was by Ted Jee PM4*, who did his 22 minutes keynote speech for his level 5 project. His speech title was “[Step one] The Art of Your Dream”.

Before the speech, we heard from Ted’s speech evaluator, Reuben Chin ACG, ALB*, on the speech objective and what criteria Reuben will be using to evaluate this keynote speech.

 

 

With the completion of the speeches, we break for 5 minutes.

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The third part of the meeting led by our GE, Aziman Nasir, started with the evaluation of table topic sessions by TTE Wilson.

 

 

Next up was the announcement of the best table topic speakers, and the winner was …….

*** drumroll ***

We had a tie, hence 2 winners for the night, Lawrence and Chee Rong both won the best table topic speakers ribbon.

 

The next evaluation was by Syahnur Nizam who presented his evaluation for Megat’s speech.

 

Next was the evaluation by Reuben Chin who evaluated on Ted’s speech.

 

Up next we had our grammarian report by Syatrah Roslan.

 

Ah Counter report was next by Wong Hui Ting.

 

Last report was by Timer Aditia Salalu.

 

With the completion of the evaluation session, Rano then took over the floor once again as his role of the President of the club to provide his closing remarks, and also present the best evaluator ribbon which went to Reuben Chin.

 

 

With the conclusion of the whole meeting, we then had a group photo before everyone made their way to the nearby McDonald’s for supper and hang out with each other. We have not done this in a while and it was a rewarding time for everyone involved to bond and connect with each other.

Definitely a night to remember for everyone present.

 

 

*
VC1 = Visionary Communicator Level 1
ACG ALB = Advanced Communicator Gold, Advanced Leader Bronze
CC, ALB = Competent Communicator, Advanced Leader Bronze
SR3 = Strategic Relations Level 3
EC2 = Effective Coaching Level 2
DL5 = Dynamic Leadership Proficient
TM = Toastmaster
PI4 = Persuasive Influence Level 4
PM4 = Presentation Mastery Level 4

Contributed by:
Writer: Ted Jee
Photographer/Videographer: Wilson Kong
Photographer: Lim Chee Rong