“People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”― Dale Carnegie We were happy to welcome two guests to our meeting, Pio and Elisa, who joined the last online meeting already. Jeff focused on the theme fun when he led through the evening as TM. Magnus Carlson, the world best chess player, said "without the element of fun it is not worth trying to excel to anything." Gabi introduced the word of the day: "light-hearted", which fit perfectly well to the theme and was vividly used by the participants of the club meeting. Gabi gave us a full spectrum of synonyms of the word which helped to increase our vocab. Uli's joke was short and crisp and easy to remember: What do you get when you cross a parrot to a pigeon = voicemail. Nadine presented the Thought of the Evening. She shared with us an incident when she threw stone in water and watched the circular waves enjoying it. Her question: When was the last time when you did something only for the purpose of fun? Oliver chose some fun world records for table topics and asked the member how they would managed to out-do these records. 1. Shruti explained how she manage to place coke cans in her face and how she made people feel light-hearted. 2. Pio's record was to eat the hottest chilli in 8.2 seconds. He very convincingly explained that he practiced that with pizza funghi. 3. Uli had to break the record walking on a tight rope with high heels. She very lively performed the scene and described the record with excellent body language. 4. Elisa's record was to sort letters in a soup. She vividly described the process of sorting the letters faster and faster and eating liters of this soup. We had two prepared speeches. In her speech "Leaping off the edge", Gabi shared with us how bungee jumping came into her life and how she became a member of the A.J. Hackett Team and worked for the first bungee operator in the world. Oliver evaluated her speech and underlined her vocal variety and body language. The speech was very convincing, well structured and entertaining. He advised her to work on a stronger ending in her next speech. Alexya delivered her speech she gave at the contest "Adversity - Take charge or run away". She shared her experiences with adverse situations to encourage us not to give up and face challenging situations. Alexya benefited from an evaluation round and received feedback from each participant of the evening. She did an excellent job and spoke like a professional speaker. Jeff's advice was to use the stage more to strengthen her message. Sybille rounded off the meeting as General Evaluator. She gave feedback to all TT speakers and praised Oliver's idea for the Table Topic questions. They were well received and enjoyable, and, yes, fun. Uli gave her report as grammarian and pointed out a few grammar issues. Shruti gave a very detailed feedback on the filler words used by the speakers. The best Table Topic award was given to Uli. Alexya was the best speaker of the evening. All in all a successful evening with lots of fun elements. "Never ever underestimate the element of fun." Randy Pausch (Thanks to our President Sybille for this great recap!) Best wishes, Jeff Gordon, Mannheim International Toastmasters. Next meeting is online: 11th of April, 19:14. ……………………………………………………………………. Here is a photo of the meeting: