Table Topics Ideas #4: Touch, Taste, Hear and Smell

We recently had a meeting with the theme of  “Awaking the Senses – Touch, Taste, Sound and Smell” which explored the four non-visual senses. The meeting had moments of pure darkness and ghost stories told by candlelight so the table topics needed to be equally special. The Table-Topic Master blindfolded the table topic speaker and [...]

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How to Win a Humorous Speech Contest, Part 2 – Know Your Audience

For some people when they write a speech, it’s all about them – it’s their ideas, it’s their creativity, it’s their words! But they’re wrong! It is their ideas, it is their creativity, it is their words but it’s not about them. It’s about the audience, you are writing for them, you are speaking to [...]

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Being Competent

I have always taken great exception to the terms “competent communicator” and “competent leader”. It’s the word “competent” that I have a problem with. It’s like being told that your work is satisfactory. It’s not bad enough to be terrible but not good enough to be excellent, you’re doing the minimum amount of work required [...]

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Christmas Crackers

It’s that time of year again, the time to try and find new ways to inject that Christmas spirit into your toastmasters’ meetings. Here are some ideas: A Cracking Christmas At home when we’ve finished the Christmas dinner, we reach for the Christmas crackers that have been tantalising and tempting you during the meal, grab [...]

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Powerpoint Karaoke

I’m currently working on a speech about “adding spice and jazz” to toastmaster meetings. The idea is to find new formats and styles of meetings and see if having a different type of meeting can help our members to learn and improve in an alternative way. After all, our founder, Ralph Smedley, said that we [...]

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