An evening of entertainment at Sheraton Towers Hotel

I was at the Toastmasters Club as a guest tonight, and it was pretty interesting and exciting. For an entrance fee of $15, guests can participate in speaking, have some dinner (noodles and mee siam, apple crumbles, coffee/tea and water), mingle with other guests and toastmasters.

In tonight's session, Sean Loke, Competent Communicator (CC), defined the word sublime, and urged speakers to use/inject the word into their speech. For example, "Joining Toastmasters has been a sublime experience for me".

The table topics discussed were:

• Does it matter which school you send your child to? How would you want your child to be educated? Results oriented or ... ?
  
• What are the necessary ingredients to be an entrepreneur?
• Have you found your purpose in life? What are the three most important things in life for you?
• How do I respond to different phases in life?
• Will raising the value of yuan help balance the imbalance in global trade?

Both members and guests can speak their mind when discussing table topics. On each topic, there were two persons speaking sequentially, each person being given about 2 minutes of time. I was quite interested to speak up on most of the topics a few times, but fear held me back, as my heart pounded very fast, and my body released adrenaline, giving me the fight or flight urge. In the end, I chickened out, and didn't speak up on any topic.

I found the speeches of a few people very funny and entertaining, especially that of Elizabeth Bennett, on her prepared speech of "How not to travel to Manila from KL". Elizabeth talked about an umbrella forbidden by the customs at the manila airport. The umbrella wasn't an ordinary umbrella, but one that can fit within her bag, and can cover her whole body at the same time. She then talked about how she had to leave the airplane, collect her luggage, go through customs, and check-in, all within 20 minutes. Then, there was Ying Hao on his weird hobby of collecting barf (he called it vomit) bags.

Also, there was Cher Khim giving wise cracks at the end of every speech, as he concluded each speaker's speech.

There were quite a few persons I would like to be my mentor: Cher Khim, Ernest, Sean, Ying Hao and Elizabeth.

All in all, an entertaining evening, and I learnt a new word, anaphora.

The Toastmasters meeting was from 7pm - 10pm. When it ended, I bought a ticket to the Toastmasters Contests at my alma mater, to be held on 24th Apr 2010 @ 1.30pm.

I haven't signed up as a member yet, as I am pondering my options of a company-wide presentation in September. If I go ahead and sign up on this, I would also want to commit to the company-wide presentation in September. This presentation would give me the chance to go to Maryland, in the US, for 5 days!

There were a total of 10 projects, and with 2 fortnights in a month for presentation, it would take me 5 months to finish 10 projects, assuming I can even finish all of it. I would also have to learn driving at the same time, so that when I'm in the US, I would be able to drive around, instead of relying on being chauffeured around, hence giving me options to see more of US.