A very hot meeting with our Parents and Friends

We had our 7th Parents and Friends TMC meeting on Sep. 6th (Sun). We welcomed several guests inside and outside Japan.

<Littlle Leaders Session>

In our club, we have a special session, called “Little Leaders Session”

In this session, we share our children’s craftworks, paintings, digital works or anything they would like to show and tell to the meeting participants.

After the Little Leaders Session, we have started our ordinal Toastmasters Program.

A Toastmasters meeting consists of three main sessions.

The 1st session is Prepared Speech session, and the 2nd session is Table Topics session and the 3rd session is Evaluation session.

<Prepared Speech session>

At the prepared speech session, we normally have 2 -3 prepared speaker from our club.

This time we had 2 prepared speakers.

The 1st speaker was TM I who is our new member. The speech title was “Meditation’s Effect”, and she explained how important it is to have a custom of meditation in the VUCA world. She also explained that she used writing as a meditation from 2019, and how it has helped her to rethink about her career.

The 2nd speaker was TM O. The speech title was “Short trip to Okutama”. He made a report of the short trip with our club members one week before the meeting. He shared many beautiful photos of Okutama and our members family.

<Table Topics Session>

After the Prepared Speech session, we had a Tablie Topics session.

One of the objectives of the Table Topics session is to improve our impromptu speech skill.

The Table Topics Master will nominate 4 -5 people from our member or guest and ask them questions. The nominated person have to give a 1- 2.5 minutes impromptu speech.

This time, the Table Topics Master was TM C. This time we had several questions about several issues such as "What would you do if you were given 24 hours of free time right now?". And we could enjoy practicing impromptu speech and sharing ideas about many issues.

<Evaluation Session>

Finally, we had our Evaluation session.

In this session, the selected valuator will give a feedback speech to the prepared speaker.

Since we had 2 prepared speakers, we had 2 evaluators.

The 1st Evaluator was TM A.

She gave an interesting advice to add more facial expression during the speech. For example, she gave an advice to add a smile whe the speaker explained the situation how she could experience the speaker’s change during her writing meditation. But anyway, she pointed out that the speech was full with the speakers experience, and was really interesting.

The 2nd Evaluator was TM H.

He focused on the visual aids as the feedback point. The speech was filed with many beautiful photos and we could feel how great the short trip was. However, he also highlighted about the balance of the slide and recommended to reduce the sentence in the slide to make the speech more attractive.

After the evaluation session, we had the award session.

The Best Table Topics speaker was TM I, the Best Evaluator TM A and the Best Speaker award was given to both speakers since they had tie votes!