“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”― Ernest Hemingway
Dear friends,
we had another exciting evening. Here are some cornerstones of the meeting:
We had 14 participants.
• We again welcomed a new member: Kala. Kala, so glad to have you as a part of our Toastmaster family!
• We had 7 guests: first time guests Ayumi (new to Toastmasters), Ela (who is a member of a club in Poland), Ksenjia (an experienced Toastmaster who just moved to Mannheim), and Faiz, an experienced Toastmaster from India and a guest speaker for tonight. Harriet and Andreas were with us for the second time. We were also glad to welcome Christiane back as a guest who we are always glad to see.
• I was Toastmaster of the Evening and General Evaluator.
• Oliver was our Presiding Officer and did a great job as Table Topics Master.
• Joke Master was Martin, and Ksenjia jumped in spontaneously to help out as our Timer.
• Craig did his usual great job as Grammarian and Ah-Counter.
For the Table Topics Oliver brought in some wise quotes from some very wise people; e.g., Einstein and Gandhi. Here are the questions and the participants who dared to give their thoughts regarding some challenging questions:
• Kala spoke about humility in a situation where somebody helped her.
• Ela talked about the difference between humility and modesty.
• Christiane expanded on the role of humility in realizing you might be wrong about something.
• Harriet dealt with humility as a source of guidance.
• And Andreas spoke about the experience of becoming better through losing.
Congratulations to Harriet, who was awarded the Best TT Speaker for tonight.
We had two prepared speeches.
Jan-Philipp’s (J.P.) project was Presentation Mastery #2-1 – Effective Body Language. The title of his speech says it all: Deep Dark Holes, a truly funny tale of his fascination with digging deep at the beach as a child. Sriram did a wonder job as his Evaluator, giving specific examples of what made J.P.’s humor work, and how his body language added to the effect.
The second speech was from our guest speaker Faiz, who was working on Level 2, Intro to TM Mentoring. His speech title was: Coach – today and tomorrow. Faiz shared with us his excitement about being a mentor, and gave a number of examples of Toastmasters he has guided in their development. Martin was the Evaluator for Faiz, and also shined with concrete examples of what worked in the speech, but also found specific suggestions for improvement on how to make this speech even more effective.
We had two really great evaluations, and Martin was chosen as the Best Evaluator for the evening.
I want to close with one more quote on humility:
“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
Our next meeting is on the 12th of October, we would love to have you join us!
Best wishes to you all, Jeff
Here is a snapshot of the evening: