Typical Agenda

 Our meetings are broken into two halves and to keep it interesting each meeting has a theme. It can be any from history, music, to summer holidays. Don’t be surprised if you walk into a meeting room and to see it totally decorated for the occasion. Sometimes members do dress up and bring paraphernalia from home coherent with the theme. For example, every year we always have a football theme where people dress up in their favourite team’s jersey. We have some very loyal Parramatta Ells fans so you have been warned!.

The first half starts when the sergeant at arms calls everyone to order and cedes control to the president who formally opens up the evening. The meeting is then passed to the chairman who makes sure that the meeting transitions smoothly from one event to the next. During the first half we hold a toast and then a series of short 2-minue assignments. These can be on any topic such as ‘I remember when’, ‘what if’, and a ‘book review’.

We then dive into what is called our ‘table topics’ session. This is whereby a member is asked to prepare a series of questions based on the theme prior to the meeting. These questions are not shared with everyone else but instead participants are randomly selected to answer them in front of the room. The responses only need to be 1-minute long but test your ability to think on your feet. It mimics real life scenarios whereby you might be asked to do an impromptu talk which no preparation.

In Toastmasters if you are not speaking you are evaluating others. We have a series of evaluators who evaluate how they thought the ‘table topics’ contestants performed and gives them advice on how they can improve. There are also two general evaluators who evaluate everyone in the both halves who has not been evaluated (confused yet? You will get the hang of it).

We then break for a tea break for 30 minutes then resume with the second half. The second part of the meeting is where members deliver speeches from their speaking manuals. We normally have 3-4 speakers who speak for 5-7 minutes.  They are followed by evaluators who provide feedback on what they think the speaker did well and points of improvement.  Although you might not be a speaker during the evening the feedback is still very useful for when it is your turn in subsequent meetings.

At the end of each evening we vote who we think performed the best during the evening based on various categories. These votes are tallied together and each winner is presented with a ribbon. We also have a timers report to make sure each of the people on the agenda stuck to their allocated time. This is very important as we what to make sure that a meeting does not run overtime. The President then provides some closing comments, makes any general club announcements, and closes the meeting for evening.

As I said in the beginning, to one new to Toastmasters the agenda might seem like something out of this world. But after you attend the first meeting you will understand what we run our meetings the way we do. Every-time you attend a meeting you will grow from the experience. Come along and see for yourself.