On 25th July 2019, AIA
Toastmasters Club held its first NFNF meeting of the new term. Since it was the first meeting of the new Executive
Committee, we took the opportunity to gather feedback from members and
potential members on what they would like from the Toastmasters programme. Before this, as Vice-President, Education, I
reached out to every single member of the club and past members to understand
their needs, their expectations, and their challenges. The breakout was a culmination of this.
Joy Chow served as Timer. David Seragih served as Creative
Director. Stephen HoonJin served as Ah
Counter. Chermayne Tng served as
Sergeant-at-Arms. Ivan Lee, DTM, served
as Toastmaster of the Day.
The Opening
Address
Jack Sia, in his opening address,
emphasised the need for member retention and to build on all the club had
already achieved. He also spoke about
the Installation, and how we should strive for perfection and improvement. A club that treats retention as an
afterthought, chasing new members while losing existing ones out the back door,
is not actually growing. It is merely
replacing.
Three
Icebreakers
We had three icebreakers, as is our
practice for the NFNF. We use the NFNF
to give newer speakers a chance to improve themselves before they speak at the
chapter meeting, which is open to visiting Toastmasters and guests. We like to gently introduce them to public
speaking, rather than throwing them straight into a room full of strangers.
Soh Yi Kai gave his inaugural
speech, addressing loss. He spoke about
losing his mother when he was one year old, too young at the time to feel it
directly, though he watched its effects on his father for years afterwards, and
spent much of his own growing up trying to understand a grief he had inherited
rather than lived through firsthand. He
spoke of the ache of Mother’s Day as a young adult. He connected this directly to his work:
insurance, at its core, is an industry built around loss, death, disability,
illness, and he framed his role as a financial services consultant as a way of
helping others through the kind of absence his own family had already
carried. A speech built on this
foundation carries weight no rehearsed anecdote ever could.
Gordon Yeo gave his first speech,
titled “Looking for Trouble.” He gave a humorous
account of his childhood habit of seeking out mischief, driven by curiosity
rather than malice, a need to test, to try, and to face the consequences of his
own actions. Maturity eventually
redirected that same curiosity into finding his actual place, and by his own
account, that same restless instinct shaped his eventual career choice.
Eric Tan, DTM, gave his
icebreaker on his new Pathway, having already completed two, making him the
first Toastmaster in District 80 to reach that milestone. Toastmasters International’s Pathways
learning experience is not a quick certificate.
Each path typically requires years of consistent project work across
multiple levels, which makes completing two of them a genuine outlier
achievement rather than a modest one.
When a scheduled speaker withdrew due to work commitments, Eric Tan, DTM,
stepped in and delivered a rousing speech entirely off the cuff, opening with
his own introduction before pivoting into lessons the room could apply
directly. If he were not a financial
consultant, he could have been a natural preacher.
The Breakout
Session
After the evaluations, we ran the
planned breakout session. Attendees
formed groups to address three questions: why they joined AIA Toastmasters,
what they hoped to achieve this term, and how the club could help them achieve
it. Groups discussed among themselves
before nominating one member to speak for each question. The feedback was insightful, and we intend to
weigh it seriously as the new term advances, rather than filing it away as a
box-ticking exercise nobody revisits.
Results and
Closing
Best Speaker went to Soh Yi
Kai. The icebreaker speakers were Soh Yi
Kai, Gordon Yeo, and Chermayne Tng.
There was no Table Topics segment in this session. The meeting closed with a summary from
President Jack Sia, followed immediately by the After-Action Review of the
Installation, a discipline few clubs bother maintaining once the applause from
the main event has faded.
Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
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