Another fun-filled meeting!

Excalibur Meeting Report for 22nd August, 2018

The fourth Wednesday of the month brought us another excellent Excalibur meeting at the Fitzrovia Community Centre (2 Foley street, London W1W 6DN). A location selected for numerous reasons including the adjacent King and Queen public house, where (factoid alert) music legend Bob Dylan made his first European appearance.

Lukasz met and greeted our three guests: Tomasz, Paul and Aydin (who was GE for the evening) before Cat (recently awarded her DTM - so many congratulations to her!) called us to order.

With our club president Monika delivering a speech later that evening, the President's role was temporarily assigned to Robin, who inspired us with a (literally) delicious take on toast-making and how this skill is the (short)bread and butter of the accomplished speaker. Maybe you had to be there...

It was then time for Robin to hand over to Paul, our experienced Toastmaster for the evening, who brought experience and enthusiasm to the role.

Marcin then explained the Timekeeper role before the Toastmaster handed over to Ian, our Table Topics Master, who chose a thought-provoking back-to-school theme for the session. 

Participants included Cat, Lukasz, Tomasz, Robin, Chinkata and David who were evaluated by Lynne, Ben, Paul, Freddy, Marcin and Monika. 

It was then time for the prepared speeches. Monika began with a compelling speech titled "Project Atlas" (High Performance Leadership - 1 - Sharing Your Vision) which proposed a better way in which Toastmasters might display club distribution information. 

Eva then amused us with "Unexpected London" - a cultural examination of some of the major differences (of a largely liquid nature) between the UK and Taiwan (Humorously Speaking - 2 - Leave them with a Smile). Indeed Eva did leave us with a smile...as we bid her farewell as she returns to her native Taiwan. Investigations are underway to establish whether she will be travelling via her country's eponymous airline. 

Freddie then presented "How to Build Long Term Relationships through Sales" (The Professional Speaker - 3 - The Sales Training Speech). This twenty minute masterclass included an original insight that compared the sales methodology with the storyteller's hero's journey. 

The speeches were evaluated by Alfredo, Ben and Lynne which was followed by the Open Feedback session, facilitated by Chinkata. As an advanced Toastmasters club, Excalibur puts special emphasis on feedback, and this nine minute session allows members of the audience to add to what the previous speech evaluators have proposed, in the traditional commend-recommend-commend format. 

It was then time for the General Evaluator, Aydin to present his report on the club before we moved to the prize giving. Results were as follows:

Table Topics Winner: Robin

Best Evaluator(s): Lynne and Alfredo (Ben, who came dead last, will be attempting to employ the Freddy Daniells' evaluation technique next time. Details on request.)

Best Speech: Freddy

The next meeting will start at 7pm on Wednesday 12th September at the Fitzrovia Community Centre, W1W 6DN.