buckets of opportunities

written by aseem kapoor

Club President Croydon Communicators

Gina was the Toastmaster for our third meeting of the month and had set a theme of new opportunities.  Troy was busy behind the scenes as SAA and Zoom Master.

I was on Timekeeper duty, for the second time in two days having performed the role at neighbouring club Purley Speakers the previous evening!

Matt led the warm-up session by asking everyone to select two items from their 'bucket lists'. Matt revealed one of his was an ambition to do a TED talk, and another was to leave a £100 tip at a restaurant! 
Travelling was by far the most popular answer with almost every other person in the meeting having that as one of their two items.

Our first speaker of the evening was Stephen, delivering once again his mental health related speech "Is lockdown an introvert's paradise?" with the objective of incorporating some or all of the feedback he had received from his first presentation of this speech.

Our second speaker was Sandra with her speech "Fear-less" which was all about overcoming fear, where she explained how 'FEAR' could stand for False Evidence Appearing Real, and that for her 'LESS' was an acronym for Love, Encouragement, Sureness and Satisfaction.
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​With only two speakers this evening we moved on to speech evaluations, and two of the club's experienced members Florence and Afia took the stage to deliver some excellent feedback on Stephen's and Sandra's speeches respectively.

A session of impromptu speaking and impromptu evaluating followed the break as Table Topic Master Aminat posed some challenging questions/topics for our participants and then called for immediate feedback. It was great to see guest Fontaine take on a table topic, and then impress us all by agreeing to give an evaluation of Gina's table topic when called on by Aminat.

With club elections just around the corner, committee members Aminat, Florence, Afia, Troy, Sandra and I explained our club leadership roles, and encouraged members to think about serving.

Afia was voted best table topic speaker, and the President's award went to our guest Fontaine for her table topic speech and evaluation. A special mention for Troy who as Zoom Master was in the running for the President's award but for Fontaine's topic evaluation! 

There is the District 91 Conference to look forward to this weekend, and then our next meeting on 13th May where it's election night!