On 13th October 2019, I was at
Chong Pang Toastmasters Club as Table Topics Master, my 87th club
visit on the 105th day of the Toastmaster year. Yuvraj Aher served as Sergeant-at-Arms. John Tan served as Language Evaluator.
Seven Methods, Delivered from Memory
Kok Yee Keong conducted a workshop on
Table Topics, working through seven methods for speaking off the cuff on any
topic, from memory. It was
enlightening. Delivering that content
without notes is a demonstration of the skill being taught, since a speaker who
can recall a structured framework under zero preparation time has proven the
method works, not merely described it.
The most widely taught of these frameworks, PREP, Point, Reason,
Example, Point, remains standard across impromptu speaking instruction
precisely because it gives a speaker a mental blueprint to lean on the moment
his mind threatens to go blank, buying thinking time while still sounding
organised. The related PPF structure,
Past, Present, Future, offers a second reliable scaffold for any topic built
around change over time. Whichever seven
techniques Kok walked the room through, teaching them without a
script was the strongest possible proof they hold up under the pressure they
were designed for.
Mentorship, from Parents to Career
Counsellors
Tony Tan spoke on the distinct aspects of
mentoring, arguing that our first mentors are our parents, from whom we take
our earliest values. He then moved into
the challenges of finding employment in Singapore after graduation, made harder
by the fact that he was not a Singaporean citizen at the time. His mentor through that period was his school
career counsellor, who guided him through a job market less forgiving to a
foreign graduate than to a local one. A
speech that traces mentorship from parental values through to a career
counsellor’s practical guidance covers the full arc of the concept, rather than
settling for the usual, single tidy definition most speeches on mentoring stop
at.
Six Steps to a Negotiated Agreement
Chang Soek Khim shared, on well-designed
slides, the art of negotiation, structured around six steps: preparation,
planning, and research; the opening, covering rapport, agenda, purpose, and
timing; active listening, probing, and persuasion; the proposal, covering
anchoring and framework; concession trading; and finally, agreement. This structure tracks closely with the
negotiation research of Roger Denio Fisher, JD, and Dr. William Langer
Ury, whose Harvard Negotiation Project work established that genuine
preparation, understanding one's own position and the counterpart’s likely
reservation point before a conversation even begins, produces measurably better
outcomes than negotiators who improvise their way through the opening and only
start strategising once resistance appears.
A six-step framework this clean is useful for anyone hoping to negotiate
better, because it forces preparation and concession trading into distinct,
deliberate stages rather than treating negotiation as one continuous, reactive
conversation.
The Evaluators and Results
John Sih, DTM, and Michael Yonathan,
DTM, served as Project Evaluators.
Best Table Topics Speakers went to Kok Yee Keong and a guest. There was no voting for Best Speaker or Best
Evaluator on this occasion. A meeting
spanning impromptu speaking technique, the full arc of mentorship, and a
structured negotiation framework gave the room three transferable skills in a
single evening, each one more useful outside the club than most guests arriving
that night would have expected.
Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
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