Tolerance was the theme of the evening – regular meeting September 10th

Thank you Zuribergers for another fun evening and thank you Fereshteh, our Toastmaster of the evening, for taking on the challenge for the first time and organizing a flawless evening!

Speakers

We had three speakers this evening: Vanessa, Roland and Vadim. Vanessa gave us her “Hiking 102” speech for the second time, complete with backpack, hiking poles, and other equipment. It was an excellent use of props to support her message. We learned some tips on how to pare down the weight of our hiking packs, while leaving room for non-essential essentials : in Vanessa’s case – a small bottle of Greek olive oil 🙂 Roland began his speech by apologizing for choosing a boring topic “Patient Directives as a form of digital self-determination in e-Health”. His project involved a speech followed by 13 minutes of Q&A, which we could easily have extended to half an hour, because it turns out his topic was not boring at all. We had endless questions about a topic that is relevant to us all – how do we best legally express our medical care wishes in the case that we become incapacitated. Vadim delivered the last speech of the evening “Are you taking the stairs?” a mentoring speech that was well-delivered and earned him his very first Best Speaker ribbon!

Insightful evaluations and challenging table topics

The evaluations were also high quality, with Tatyana even relying on the new FREEE technique we learned during our improv workshop in August to evaluate Vanessa. It reminded us that evaluators can focus on many different aspects of a speech, including breathing technique.

Thank you Suavek for the challenging and “extremely complicated” (to quote Joran, our General Evaluator for the evening) table topics of the evening. We will miss you and hope you come back soon.

Congratulations Vadim on winning Best Speaker, Joran for winning best Table Topics, and Tatyana for winning best evaluator!

Announcement: novice speech competition

As I mentioned in the meeting and on WhatsApp, there is a novice speech competition taking place on October 26th (online) and November 23rd (in-person finals). This is a Switzerland-wide speech competition open to everyone who hasn’t yet completed Level 2 of a path. It is an excellent opportunity to get some competition practice in and get to know some Toastmasters outside of our club. If you would like to participate, please let me know asap.

Wishing you a lovely Saturday evening!
Please click here for details of our next club meeting

Anna Franzen