Meeting Minutes – 09.03.2020

It was a big night at Silicon Speech last night. Not only was it Mystery Guest Night but we also celebrated the 5th anniversary of our club. 5 years! My how time flies!

Our Mystery Guest Speaker was none other than the recent winner of the 2020 Toastmasters International Speech Contest, Mike Carr. As you can imagine, Mike is very busy after winning the title so he actually joined us via the YouTube video of his winning speech which you can watch, as well, right here.

The fact that he wasn’t actually with us online gave the group free reign during the round-robin portion of the evaluation. We all got a chance to really dissect the elements of his presentation and, I think we learned a lot. Some takeaways would be that it was an excellent Toastmasters speech (obviously, he won the contest) and he modeled excellent technique and use of the Zoom platform. The consensus seemed to be, however, that at Silicon Speech, we are free to experiment with all different styles and approaches to public speaking in our efforts to achieve the ultimate goal of effective communication.

The round-robin evaluation was followed by Blake Samuelle in her first-ever appearance as Table Topics Master. The theme was “Books and Reading” which was apropos for a group of housebound, self-isolators during a pandemic. She did a great job asking the questions and the answers gave us all some insight into what you could find on the bookshelves (or Kindle or Audible app) of our members. It’s a wide assortment of titles from I-Ching to Anarchism to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. So much for the light, summer, beach read!

I would like to thank our Area 1 Director, Carla Taravella for dropping by and participating. It’s always great to be visited by District One officers.