To our joy the Nürnberger Nachrichten printed a nice article about Morag and her new capacity.
here at least the picture in higher resolution. I will try to get the whole article in higher resolution as well.
Don’t our members Morag and David look fantastic on this picture?
It is our pleasure to announce that our club member Morag Mathieson got elected as “President Elect” of Toastmasters International. That means she will succeed International President Matt Kinsey next year.
At the Annual Business Meeting during the International Convention in Nashville, TN, the member clubs voted for the new president: Morag Mathieson. We stand over here in Germany and can only applaud!
Dear Morag, we wish you all the best for the upcomming year as President elect and of course even more so for your presidency starting with the International Convention in August 2023. Thank you for serving this great organization far beyond our club.
Morag can be reached on social media via:
https://www.facebook.com/morag.mathieson.71
https://linkedin.com/in/morag-mathieson-0898467/
In our toastmasters meeting on July 20th we practiced our skills in having hybrid toastmasters meetings.
Matthias described himself in the role as entertainer as pretty extrovert. This is why he enjoys being VP Public Relations repeatedly. He said is so extrovert that at times the following sentence is true for him:
How can I know what I am thinking
before I hear, what I am saying
At first this sonds funny – and it is. At second glance this is of course also a curse. As an extrovert he at times says things, where he would love to eat his words afterwards. That is sometimes not possible – which he finds an unfair bias against extroverts. You can always speak up after the fact – you can not stay quiet after the fact.
In order to at least reduce his handicap a bit he keeps the following drawing on the wall of his desk. He found it somewhere in the internet (probably on linkedIn) and hopes it is ok to post it here as well:
In the prepared speeches section we had the following prepared speeches:
Julien D presented a speech with the title: “On the same wavelength“
The speech was from the manual motivational strategies – Understanding Your Communication Style. The alloted time was 5:00-7:00 min. The objective of his speech was: “Share a communication style and its impact on professional and personal relationships; avoid reporting on the content of this project”.
Anatoly P. presented a speech with the title: “A Frame of Reference“
The speech was from the manual Persuasive Influence – Understanding Conflict Resolution. The alloted time was 5:00-7:00 min. The objective of his speech was: Discuss in a speech how the speaker manages conflict, how to develop a stronger strategy and the speakers best attributes in a conflict situation; optionally, share the impact of the video activity; note that the speech is NOT a report the project content.
The first club officer meeting was scheduled and held on July 18th.
VPEd (Membership Accomplishments/ Mentors) Anatoly
VPM (Membership Changes/ Guests) Jake
VPPR (Notable Outreach # & locations) Matthias
Tre$ (Financials/ Dues Deadlines) David
Sec. (Correspondence, TMI Submissions) Alexander
S@A (Zoom & Room updates) Julien
Pres (TMI, District, Area News) Deeksha
This is the place, where we have all the necessary organisational stuff available for the club officers.
Review Feedback
Collaboration Round:
We had an intersting discussion on “how much fun should be in a officers meeting”.
We realized that there is a certain tendency to rush through and bang, bang, bang hash it out –
which we would like to replace with a more relaxed way and planned fun as part of the agenda.
You see above Anatoly making his point on how we can achieve a certain closeness amoung the leadership team.
Low Tires (need a little air)
Flat Tires (broken) Conduct Table Topics Session
New Tires (current club culture needs something new)
The outgoing president Jake Tushinski made it point to welcome all the new officers. It was a bit formal and with a little a bit of pathos – but not too much – just righlty balanced.
The new officers are:
President: Deeksha Gupta
VP Education: Anatoly Polkovnikov
VP Membership: Jake Tuschinski
VP Public Relations: Matthias Senn
Secretary: Alexander Katzmann
Treasurer: David Mathieson
Sergeant at Arms: Julien Dumond – appointed later 😉
IT Support: Morag Mathieson
Immediate Past President: Jake Tuschinski
While the word of the day was “bore” – there was neither a wild boar nor anything else boring in the meeting.
Our new president Deeksha Gupta made sure that the standard is set: No lower than we ever did: The best we possibly can. We are not willing to live with “so-so”. This sounds to our club lilke “mediocre”. We are of course aiming for fun and have no intention to stress out our members. We try to make sure everybody get the right amount of value out of our club. Such that the “give” and the “take” stay in balance.
The meeting was run by our toastmaster of the evening Olga Kutsche. As you can already see from the pictures and read by the names: inclusion and diversity plays a major role in our club.
Our member Rama choose as title for his speech: “Save soil”. Where he would explain the riches of earthworms, bacteria and fungi that can be found in soil. In total a quarter of the world species find their home in “soil”. In addition it stores millions of cubic meters of water and is the source for most of food that feeds people and animals alike. Definitely a topic to learn about more. Thank you very much Rama for this beautiful speech.
The second speaker of the evening was Mayank Patwari. He focused on “Seven habits of highly ineffective people”. He referred of course to the famous book of Steven Covey. In looking into our real world he realizes that the majority of people are not following the book that was written almost 40 years ago. In the style like the Villach born author Paul Watzlawick, Mayank used a lot of fun, smile and a little bit of irony to make clear – how not to do it.
And here his advice for you *not* to note down:
In case you got interested – why don’t you just check us out. It is fun. It is a bit addictive – and: it is definitely worth it.
The theme of our next team meeting is „ Wellness“. Come and join us online.
All dressed up.
Everybody fancies a super cool background.
The zoom master is fully concentrated.
Tt must be the spring speech contest!
and it was – what a contest. Words can not describe it.
So let me go straight to the results and have contestants and audience comment.
The date already is showing it, that it was a meeting with lots of fun. We saw many familiar faces as well as quite a few guests tonight.
Our program was full with three speeches. and we had an interesting variation of table topics. Instead of the table topics master asking questions and to participants thinking about the answer we turned it around. One speaker – Morag in this case – had to answer “augmented” questions from the audience.
You may wonder about the term “augmented“. That was our word of the day. If you wanted to ask a question you had to use this word in your question.
As a result we at the end gave ribbons not only for best beach and best evaluator, but also for “best augmented question”.
It was really a lot of fun! Thanks to everybody participating
