4th Dimension Toastmasters

Our meeting started off with bang as usual. Our theme for the evening was “The day of my life”. We had quite a few visitors and it was rather exciting to welcome them into the Toastmasters world and give them a taste of why we dedicate our time and ourselves to this great organisation. I’m not quite sure whether it was because we had just come from a much needed long weekend but there were almost more visitors than members at the meeting. Hopefully that was the reason and we will see a lot more of you at the AGM on the 21 May.

We spend quite a lot of time stressing about life, work, family, love and everything else that we dedicate very little time to appreciating the amazing and life changing days of our lives. As part of our introduction, we shared what those days were.

We then proceeded to the introduction of our role players for the evening.

Well done to
· Danie Roux, our stand-in Sergeant at Arms for setting up the room and assisting in keeping the meeting on schedule,
· Christa Roux who played the role of timekeeper for doing a fantastic job of keeping track of and presenting the times taken, very clearly and concisely and
· Tayengwa, our grammarian, challenged us to use the word of the day “Indelible” during the meeting. The word means something that is impossible to remove or unforgettable.

Richard Riche was our toastmaster and in his usual manner carried off the role as if it were no effort at all!

I delivered a much deserved toast to our mothers, who sacrifice, love and care for us throughout their lives and do not get as much credit as they deserve (seeing as mother’s day is coming up really soon).

Karen Geyser delivered a very interesting CC2 speech entitled “Home sweet home”. She posed questions such as why do we feel comfortable in some people’s homes and not others. She then proceeded to inform us that it had everything to do with how that particular home was organised to allow for good karma and flow of energy.

Danie Roux had an intriguing speech on “Paying Attention” – CC6. Danie gave us insight on the abundance of information there is and how we usually end up not focusing on the things we should be due to this overload. He left us with the following thought to ponder: Identify the moment you’re in, decide what information you need and pay all your attention on it.

Alan Powell told us a love story with his CC5 entitled “Life Chances”. It was about two people who had been separated for a long time and were reunited after 2000 years by chance! The moral of the story was that certain chances that come our way can present life changing possibilities.

Richard Riche presented us with a very well delivered, fun and lighthearted ACB-2 speech “Not kissing frogs”. Weird topic for a guy hey ;-)? I know… He described how persistence and hanging on leads to great results eventually…He recalled going on a two disastrous dates (leading to being stalked) and the third one being the best. Not sure if he did kiss those frogs or not…He denies it but I guess he doesn’t kiss and tell!!

Last but not least, Marius delivered an absolutely brilliant ACB-6 speech entitled “What is humour?”. In true Marius style, he shared jokes and kept the mood in the room light while conveying the advantages of humour in our lives. He also left us with a challenge: We need to look at people in other cars in traffic and see just how grumpy they look and then resolve to laugh at least 300 times a day!

Carla Sargo as the Chief Evaluator led the evaluation session and well done to her for pulling it off so smoothly. The other evaluators for the evening were Danie Roux, Zibu Mntambo, Andrew Timberlake and Alan Powell, heads up to you all for the way in which you approached the evaluations.

We concluded with a reminder about voting for the New 4th Dimension Committee! Nominations need to be forwarded to Graham Nicholls before our AGM on the 21 May. Please make every effort to attend this meeting so that you can also vote in your new committee. The roles that need to be filled are President, Vice President Education, Vice President Membership, Vice President Public Relations, Treasurer, Secretary and the Sergeant-at-Arms. See http://www.toastmasters.org/clubofficers.aspx for more information!

Zibu Mntambo

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