Toastmasters Club
On October 27th, Isarspeak is hosting a “theme meeting” on the topic of Entrepreneurship. This will be an on-line meeting. Special Table Topics on Entrepreneurship will help you polish your pitching skills. Guests are welcome to participate.
Please register in advance if you want to attend by sending an email to isarspeak@gmail.com
On 10 August 2021, our club had a trial run of a “Hybrid Meeting” for the first time in our club’s history.
– Why hybrid meeting?
After the first lock-down due to the Corona pandemic, just like many other people and businesses, Isar-Speak could only organise our regular Toastmasters meetings online via Zoom. In this online mode, we could also luckily gain more club members who are not directly living in Munich.Now that the situation in Germany has become much better than in year 2020, our club can organise a face-to-face meeting again, even though some hygienic rules still have to be respected. In order to enable the online participation of our remote members, we decided to check the possibility of having a “Hybrid Meeting”
.- How does the set-up of a Hybrid Meeting look like? We needed the following items…
1) One webcam – for the speaker to be set up in front of the speaker on stage
2) One projector – for the view of Zoom Meeting for the audience in the room
3) One speakerphone – to be placed near the speaker so that remote participants can follow the speeches on stage and the audience in the room can hear remote speakers properly.
4) Two computers – one to be connected with the gadgets mentioned above, the other to log in to the Zoom meeting as an online participant to show the audience in the room to remote participants – Is the set-up difficult? According to our first experience, the set-up needs around 30 minutes. This means that the officers, especially the sergeant at arms, should arrive at the meeting venue at least 30 minutes before the meeting starts. The longer the better for unexpected issues.
– How was the impression?
For us personally, it was a great combination of online and face-to-face experiences. We really missed the sound of applauds as we normally used to have in a regular meeting, and we were extremely happy that our online participants had a great impression of the meeting. And now… the photos here can surely give you some impressions of how our hybrid meeting on 10 August looked like. Enjoy, and hope to welcome you in our future club meetings
Have you ever felt that you’re not born creative?
Have you ever wondered why many people in the world could be so creative as they are?
Have you ever heard that creativity is a skill that all of us can acquire and improve?
If one or more of your answers to any of the questions mentioned above are “yes”, our Educational Workshop “Friday – How to boost your creativity” will certainly be something for you.
In this workshop, Ike Fast, an exceptional professional speaking coach and management trainer from Northern Germany with over 25 years of international experiences, will deliver an inspiring speech. This uplifting speech will employ hands-on examples and audience interaction to show …
The Workshop will take place during our Isar-Speak regular club meeting on Wednesday 26 May 2021, from 07:00 to 09:00 pm (CEST – local time in Germany), online via Zoom.
The meeting ID on Zoom is 367 318 722, please dial-in 10 minutes before the club meeting starts. Feel free to come and join us (free admission), and let’s have a creative evening together at Isar-Speak!
About Ike Fast: His father and grandfather were both speakers – which makes him being such one himself in the third generation already. After finishing his studies of music in Los Angeles and journalism in Leipzig Ike worked abroad for several years. For the last 25 years, he appeared on numerous tv-shows as on stages throughout Europe. Currently, Ike is passing on his speaking skills as a speaking coach and management trainer.
Your Isar-Speak Officers Team
It’s the 2nd meeting of the year 2021, where the lock-down situation was still valid in Germany. This time we were a group of 16 people, 10 of which were our club members and 6 were guests not only from Munich, but also from Stuttgart, California, Florida and even Singapore!
With her opening speech, Jasmin gave our guests a very warm and motivating welcome before she handed the stage over to Stephanie, our Toastmaster of the evening, who kindly and thoroughly explained the meeting agenda to ensure that our guests could effectively follow our meeting. She then invited Markus, our Grammarian, to explain the word of the day “Specificity”, the word that many German people struggle to pronounce (and we could really see it throughout the meeting), which means “the quality of being specific”.
The next person on the stage was Iryna, our Table Topics Master of the evening, who brought several different impromptu questions for our brave participants as follows. The creative part of this Table Topics session was that the speaker has a chance to choose one out of many categories. The questions used were as follows.
Q1) What annoys you more than it should?
Q2) If magic was real, which magic would you like to learn first?
Q3) What job would you be terrible at?
Further on, we were inspired by the following prepared speeches.
1) When we want, we can”, delivered by Golf, let us know more about a powerful French sentence “Quand on veut, on peut”, which means “When we want, we can” for a direct translation into English. He told us two stories from his life experiences which were very good examples for this empowering French sentence.
The first story was about how he strongly wanted to pass the entrance exam into a very famous secondary school in Bangkok and tried to find a way to practice more and study hard during the last year of his primary school. The success in the entrance exam into this school was the first life experience of “When we want, we can”.
The second story was related to how he accidentally started a Tiktok channel to teach Thai people how to speak German. Building the audience was the biggest challenge he had along the way, but by sticking himself to the passion, willpower and willingness to share his knowledge with the world, the Tiktok learning channel has now become a chance for his side business offering German courses to Thai people. Once again he emphasised that “When we want, we can”
2) “I am free!”, delivered by Fabio, showed us some lessons about how he lives a meaningful life. Inspired by the mantra “in the morning, prepare for WAR (Why-Action-Reward) and in the evening, enjoy PEACE (Productivity- Energies- Alignment-Clarity-Experience)”, Fabio delivered his inspiring icebreaker speech.
“Why” is about how we can inspire ourselves by validating our why, which is our northern star. “Action” is about how we can take a consistent action through a progressive realisation of a plan. “Reward” is how we can celebrate rewarding ourselves.
How can we then know if we are still on track? The easy answer is to ask ourselves what the acronym PEACE is before going to bed. Did we feel “Productive” compared to our “Energy” level? Were we “Aligned” with our values and did we have “Clarity” on our day? Did we have a great “Experience”? If the answers of all these questions are “Yes”, we are on the right track.
After the break, the stage was handed over to Katharina, our special guest from Stuttgart Toastmasters Downtown Club, who volunteered to be our General Evaluator. During the subjective evaluation session, we received helpful feedback from Louise and Marco, our speech evaluators, especially that injecting more pauses can also improve the effectiveness of our speeches.
The Grammarian report from Markus was informative, impressive and educative at the same time. The filler words were reported by Jasmin, our Ah-counter, who did a great job as always. Our timer report was accurately presented by Mikhail, who pointed out that most of us used the time within the ranges allowed. The overall General Evaluation from Katharina, our General Evaluator of the evening, was also very helpful due to the fact that it was feedback from another experienced Toastmaster from another club, for which we are all very thankful.
In summary, it was an exuberant evening with tons of positive energy and growth mindset, thanks to all enthusiastic participants, especially to our members and some friendly guests who dedicated themselves by taking their roles in the meeting. We have proved it again together, that “having fun”, “learning” and “growing” can all be combined in our Toastmasters meeting.
We are proud of our champion – Benjamin Schweikl who won the Evaluation contest in Gothenburg.