a spring in their steps

Written by aseem kapoor

Club President Croydon Communicators

Our meeting was kicked off by Zoom Master and SAA for the meeting Luqman who ran us through the house rules and Zoom functionality.

Afia our Toastmaster for the evening introduced 'new beginnings and spring time' as the theme for the meeting before inviting Timekeeper Troy to explain his role, and then Grammarian Aminat to reveal the word-of-the day 'collywobbles'!

Sandra ran our warm-up session challenging us to give a greeting or say a phrase in another language or dialect. The club responded with words in Spanish, Hungarian, Twi, Swazi, Creole, French, Yuraba, Swahili, and Jamaican!

Gina, Susan and Aseem were up to deliver prepared speeches based on projects from the Pathways educational programme.

​Gina's speech was a wonderful celebration of her father's 100th birthday and shared his wisdom 'nothing beats a failure but a try'!

Susan our second speaker told us of the importance of the power of listening, and talked about stress, crying and laughter.

Finally, our third speaker Aseem shared his experiences of being a protégé/mentee in his speech about mentoring.

To evaluate our speakers we had Sean Dean (visiting Toastmaster and Immediate Past President at Society Speakers), Norma, and Matt all providing insightful feedback for the benefit of the speakers and audience.

In the second half of the meeting Dan ran an innovative and fun Table Topics session asking us all to be news reporters, giving each speaker a 'story' and then prompting them with random keywords to try and incorporate into their story on the fly.

Grammarian Aminat reported on the language used throughout the meeting and especially the word of the day 'collywobbles' which many had managed to use, our Toastmaster Afia an impressive nine times!

Florence our VPPR recently delivered a motivational 75 minute seminar to 30 women and told us all about this amazing success story. Congratulations to Florence, such a wonderful testimonial of how Toastmasters has helped one of our members to go away and excel!

We received some lovely comments and feedback on the meeting from our wonderful guests Rupa and Sherelle, and from visiting Toastmasters Sean and Sara.

Finally onto the awards and club business. Norma was recognised for completing Level 2 of the Innovative Planning path.

Gina won both Best Table Topic and Best Speaker. Matt was voted best evaluator and Luqman picked up the President's Award for a flawless job as first time Zoom Master!