What an Auspicious Day!

Craig lead today’s meeting and did a wonderful job of mixing the contents of speeches and other comments into his role. He really showed us how to do it right.

Guests Joe and Sonia came back for a second look. Glad we didn’t scare them away,

Our speakers today were:

Gene: “Quadrant Two Management” and his thoughts on Steven Covey’s Time Management concept.

Barbara: “Whoa, Nellie” (humorously mispronounced by Mike) introduced us to the life of Nellie Bly,

Rick: “Tough Day at the Office” gave us a look at the life of a Triathelete.

Pete lead the Table Topics with a diverse group of topics that gave us a bit of fun.

Bill S lead the evaluations given by Roger, Mike, and Andrew.

Awards today: Table Topics: Bill S.; Evaluator: Mike; Speaker: Gene.

Chuck reminded everyone that the Humorous Speech and Tall Tales contests will be held on August 5th during the normal meeting time.

Andrew adjorned the meeting on-time, but a group of us stayed a while talking. Of course that’s the club name so you have to expect it.

Don’t Dily-Daly while Swimming through the Summer

Marvin was our Toastmaster on Tuesday the 15th. He announced our theme as Swimming and proceeded to tell about the time he was knocked out while swimming. We’re glad your buddy was there to save you Marvin.

Guests, I’ll say we had guests: Joe and Sonia found us on the web and really like our 7:00 am start time. Carol brought along her own cheer leaders: Harry and Jennifer.

Sheryl brought us the word of the day: Dily-Daly.

Speeches this week:

Morry’s Icebreaker: “Who is this Morry guy anyway” was a great intorduction to an interesting life.

Carol spoke on “An Act of Kindness I will Never Forget” and we certainly won’t forget it either. Anyone want a basket?

Paul gave us some examples of “How Quickly the Memory Goes” as he described a conversation with his 4-year-old where she remembered more than he did.

Stephen J. lead our Table Topics by starting a sentence and letting Mary, Andrew and Steve B. finish the thought.

Chuck lead the evaluation team consisting of Roger, Sheryl and Mike.

Awards this week went to: Table Topics: Andrew; Evaluator: Mike; and Speaker: Carol.

Chuck ended the meeting by showing everyone how to get to the Plano Talkers web site and Blog.

Next week Steve B. is Toastmaster.

Club Officer’s Training – Summer 2008

While most of our Officers attended training on June 28th, I attended on July 12th. So I didn’t get to share notes with everyone. However, I took some notes on the ideas presented and felt these were ones that should be shared with membership.

1. President’s Distinguished Club: This is a great program for ensuring that the club is being responsive to Toastmaster’s International and their mission for the organization. But as club officers it’s our job to ensure that we keep an eye on the mission and goals of the individual members. To maintain a vibrant club where our members are achieving their goals needs to be very high on the list of club priorities.

2. We are approaching our Fall speech contests (Tall Tales and Humor). We should be looking for ways to publicize this event to draw attention and possibly new members. We can also make manual completions and other events into news articles for local publication.

3. Membership contest idea: The District will have four membership contests this year (see the District50Toastmaster.org site for more details). We might divide the membership into teams of four to six people and have a competition within the club, with suitable rewards for “most” or “quota achievement”.

4. Another way to get more members is to make each meeting so much fun that all the members go to work and talk about it. Others may get the good idea to visit us.

5. Our club meeting need to be seen as a safe place to practice presentations we make as a part of our working life. Even if you use only the opening of your presentation as a Toastmaster speech, you get to practice and get feedback (evaluation).

6. Remember that Evaluation includes both “I liked ….” and “I thought you could have done _____ better.”

7. Invite someone “interesting” to the club to make a speech and then publicize it to draw prospective members.

8. Ours is not a company-sponsored club but that doesn’t mean that you can’t invite people from your company. Try saying,” Hi Joe, I’m making a speech about ____ and I know you have an interest in that. Will you join me at Toastmasters?” Another idea is to invite your boss to come and see you when you make a speech that completes a manual.

I encourage any member who wants more ideas on Toastmasters to attend any of the District Officer Trainings. They have sessions for Officers, of course. But they also have other sessions, such as: “Advanced Officers (working as a Team for club success); “A Holistic Approach to Effective TM Meetings”; “The Long and SHort of Tall Tales”; “Masterful Contest Master Training”; and “Using Stories for Influential Speeches.”

Fun on the 8th!

Wow, it was COOOOOOL! Sorry if you missed it.

17 Members and 1 Guest (Steve B’s wife).

Three good speeches:

“How to Survive Table Topics” By Steve B. He gave us the words to memorize to cover the first 15 seconds.

“Time for a Better Life” by Pete. Well organized 2nd speech on time management. I admit these were new ideas to me.

“Do You Know One of These?” by Bill B. Hints on giving appreciation and meaning it. Good speech with only 10 minutes notice.

Evaluations by Gene, Craig and Paul.

Table Topics by Bill S was a real mixed bag; four topics from Commuter Lanes on Central to JFK’s Assassination.

Awards today: TT: Chuck; Evaluation: Craig; Speech: Pete.

Reminder of upcoming Speech Contest: Tall Tales and Humor (2 contests); Club level on August 5th during the regular club meeting time. Area level contest on September 5th.

No detractors today and the bagels were wonderful! See you next week.

Calling All Officers -July 3rd

The first meeting of the new term for club officers was held on Thursday July 3rd, 2008 at the Original House of Pancakes (Central at Park, NW corner).

Attendees: Andrew, Marvin, Gene, Paul, Stephen J and me (Chuck).

We currently have 26 active members in the club and we all agreed that we need to be continually recruiting new members because of the natural turnover that occurs.

The club was recently awarded the President’s Distinguished Club award. The officers all agreed that continuing to work toward that goal will help keep the club fun and interesting because members will meet their goals too.

As President, Andrew would like to focus on new members this term. He said that the last 4 new members came to us because of the web site. There was some general discussion about improvements to the website that might make a difference. Ideas included: this blog, photos, a sign-up page (squeeze page in Internet Marketing lingo) and a ‘How to Join” page.

Andrew further wants to be sure we officers are all responding to email from Toastmasters HQ and the Area/District. We just need to be sure we are including them in our activities and responding to their requirements in a timely manner.

Gene, VP of Public Relations, reviewed his chart of “Detractors”. These are the items he has been tracking each week to help the club understand how well organized we are. The detractors include: having an agenda for each meeting, including speech titles on the agenda, having three speehes each meeting, and starting and ending on-time. During the 5 weeks of zero detractors in a row we gained four new members.

Gene would also like to get everyone to update their biography on the web.

Paul, VP Membership, is working on ideas for a new visitor’s packet, a membership drive (contest?), using the Toastmasters Magazine, and using post cards and other mailings to all guests and attending members after each meeting. We need to keep active members happy too.

Stephen, Treasurer, reported that the treasury is approximately the same size as it was 6 months ago (a normal cycle for us).  When our previous secretary left there were a couple receipts not found but the amounts are very small and we decided not to worry about them.

Stephen proposed that we replace the Successful Club Series ($45.00) since the one we currently have is outdated and pretty-well worn out. This expense was approved.

Marvin, VP Education, has updated the Club Scheduler so that the on-line schedule for each meeting is up to date until August 5th. There was a discussion about someone giving a speech explaining the club website and the changes we are enacting. Marvin will work on scheduling such a speech.

As VP of Education, Marvin wants to put more emphasis on the CL Manual (Leadership) and Member retention. There followed a discussion of the Fall Speech Contest. This contest has two elements Tall Tales (4 to 6 minutes) and Humor (5 to 7 minutes). We decided to hold the Club contest on August 5th at the normal meeting time and place.

We ended the meeting with a discussion of setting up this Blog. The Blog is controlled by the Club Secretary. Comments on Blog posts may be made by any active member by logging in. All comments will be monitored by the secretary.

We ended on-time. Zero Detractors.