Toastmasters is all about improving, rehearsing, practising.
We are all from different backgrounds, but we realise how important is public speaking, and that’s what we have in common.
Every six month we have a contest. It all starts with the club contest, with the winner trying their luck at the next level, area contest, then district contest.
2 weeks ago, 4th March, it was our contest night – and what a night it was! First of all thank you for all judges and functionaries whom travelled a long way to help during the night – every official contest has specific rules and regulations, and needs judges from other clubs around London come to help – we wouldn’t have been able to do it without them.
Ed Patmore was the contest chair of the night; his role was not only to act as the toastmasters of the evening, but he also needed to make sure that the rules are both explained and adhered to. Ed has a natural talent to making people feel relax and enjoy.
The first part of contest was the evaluation, to make it fair all contestant will evaluate the same speaker and are not allowed to watch each other compete. We welcomed Julia Kowale (from the Women in Banking and Finance Toastmaster club) who delivered a very inspirational speech called “Shattered Dreams”, teaching us how to learn and move on from hard moments in life and how she found Toastmasters. Julia has been a member of Toastnaster for 5 years and said “it was the best decision of her life”. We could feel her confidence and all the room was captivated by her story.
All contestant were then escorted to a quiet room for five minutes so that they can collect their thoughts and plan their evaluation. We took this opportunity to engage the audience with some table topics with theme “competition”
The evaluators came as follows:
Tom Hunt, Mahir Hamurcu, David Charles, Nikola Prevelic, GaLok Chung and finally Isaya Taingwa. The evaluations were interesting, excellent, and very we’ll delivered. Each of the contestants picked up on different aspects of Julias speech, and it was obviously going to be a tough job choosing a winner.
After all the evaluations were heard, we moved on to another mini set of table topics while the Chief Judge, David Longley went with our two counters to count votes. There were some great questions, and interesting answers which left us on a high and we headed for the break.
The second part of the meeting was inspirational speeches prepared by the toastmaster elite. To be able to participate you are required to have at least done 6 speeches from the CC manual to the caliber of both speakers and speeches were high.
We first of all heard Ga Lok, with his speech about raising expectation from people and providing better education to decrease violence, followed by Nikola who told us a Danish fairytale about dancing fox and finally Isaya who gave us some tips to fight against laziness.
It was a tight contest night but the judges made their decision and results were as follows:
Evaluation Contest
3rd place: Nikola Prevelic
2nd place: Isaya Taingwa
1st place: Ga Lok Chung
Speech Contest
3rd place: Nikola Prevelic
2nd place: Isaya Taingwa
1st place: Ga Lok Chung
Congrats to all the participants who had the courage to stand up and compete!
Ga Lok will take the baton for City of London Toastmasters on to the next stage as he has to get ready for the area contest taking place on 2nd April at our usual meeting place, St Botolphs Church
Make sure you come along and how your support for him!
Teresa Juliette valencia
