Bukit Timah Toastmasters Club: Rhetoric, Names, & the Five-Second Decision

On 17^th September 2019, I was at Bukit Timah Toastmasters Club as a workshop speaker, my 63^rd club visit on the 79^th day of the Toastmaster year.  Max Chan served as Toastmaster of the Day.  Jerome Lee served as Timer.  Elizaveta Nikolaeva served as Ah Counter.  Avreal Teng served as Table Topics Master.

Impetuosity, Honesty, and a Five-Second Rule

Ambrose Chan spoke on the challenges he faced before starting his recruitment business, honest about his own shortcomings in his earlier years, born of inexperience and the impetuosity of youth.  He then addressed the five-second rule for making decisions.  The concept traces to Melanie Gail Robbins, who introduced it in her 2011 TEDx talk, “How to Stop Screwing Yourself Over,” drawing on neuroscientist Dr. António Rosa Damásio’s research in Descartes’ Error, which found that up to 95% of human decisions are driven by emotion rather than objective fact, leading Dr. Damasio to describe people as “feeling machines that think” rather than “thinking machines that feel.”  The rule itself, counting down from five before acting on an instinct, has drawn criticism from researchers such as Dr. Timothy A. Pychyl for lacking direct peer-reviewed validation, even where the underlying psychology it draws on is genuinely well-established.  Chan's own account of overcoming youthful impetuosity through decisive, rather than hesitant, action gave the theory a lived counterpoint no citation could offer on its own.

What We Inherit versus What We Achieve

Ranjith Kumar mentioned he is a published author of a children’s book introducing shipbuilding to young readers.  He opened by arguing that we should take no pride in what we have inherited, only in what we have achieved, a distinction with genuine philosophical weight behind it: inheritance reflects circumstance, achievement reflects choice, and only one of the two says anything true about the person holding it.  He added that our body reacts to what we feel, making it essential to guard our thoughts carefully, a claim consistent with the well-documented physiological link between sustained negative emotion and measurable stress response in the body.

A Name Chosen for Practicality, Not Preference

Johnny Xu gave an insightful account of why he goes by “Johnny,” despite being of full Chinese heritage from mainland China.  The reason was simple: English speakers consistently struggle to pronounce his given name, a difficulty he has navigated since arriving in Singapore in 1992.  Adopting an Anglicised name for ease of communication is a widely documented pattern among immigrants navigating English-dominant environments, and Xu’s own candour about the practical, unsentimental reason behind his choice made for a considerably more honest account than the usual glossed-over explanation most speakers offer for the same decision.

Rhetoric and the Psychology of the Crowd

I gave a forty-minute presentation on rhetoric and the use of rhetorical devices in speech, alongside the psychology of the crowd, and how the skills built inside Toastmasters translate directly into the world outside it.  A speech is never persuasive purely on the strength of its content.  It succeeds or fails on how precisely its structure accounts for the psychology of the people receiving it, a principle every speaker in that room had already been applying, whether they had the vocabulary for it or not.

The Evaluators and Results

Jonathan Yeo, Livio Deltin, and Loh Ne Kyean served as Project Evaluators.  Best Speaker went to Ranjith Kumar.  Best Evaluator went to Loh Ne Kyean.  Best Table Topics Speaker went to me.  A meeting covering decision science, inherited versus earned pride, the practical politics of a personal name, and the mechanics of rhetoric itself gave this room considerably more to take home than the average Tuesday evening delivers.

---

Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters