On 2nd November 2019, I was at
Bukit Batok Toastmasters Club as Toastmaster of the Day, my 105th club
visit on the 125th day of the Toastmaster year. Julia Pan served as Sergeant-at-Arms. Annie Goh, DMT, served as Table Topics
Master. Sathiyavani Muthu served as
Timer. John Liew served as Workshop
Speaker.
A Journey Built from Words Alone
John Liew brought us on a magical journey using only words, drawing on excerpts of The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner to demonstrate the power of language to paint a picture
without a single visual aid. Samuel
Taylor Coleridge published the poem in 1798 as part of Lyrical Ballads,
co-authored with William Wordsworth, and its imagery – an albatross shot dead
for no reason, a ship becalmed under a copper sky, “water, water, everywhere,
nor any drop to drink” has survived over two centuries because the
language does the work a camera never could.
Liew’s choice of source material was not incidental. It was a demonstration that the oldest
technology for moving an audience remains the sentence itself.
An Existentialist Icebreaker
Lucy Koh gave her icebreaker speech,
stating she will not be defined by her titles or her relationships, an
existentialist monologue in substance, not merely in label. Jean-Paul Sartre’s own formulation, that
existence precedes essence, argues that a person is not born with a fixed
nature determined by role or relationship, but instead defines himself through
the choices he makes across a lifetime.
Delivering that philosophical position as a first speech, rather than
the standard “here is my job and my family” introduction most icebreakers
default to, is a bolder opening than most speakers attempt on their debut.
A Letter to a Younger Self
Mellita Angga read from a letter she wrote
to her younger self during a period of hardship, offering words of
comfort while detailing the loneliness, insecurity, and fear she experienced on
first arriving in Singapore. A foreigner
in a foreign land, she spoke of the slow work of adapting and rebuilding a
social network from nothing. It was an
uplifting story, carrying a great many lessons for everyone in the room,
because it refused to skip the difficult middle chapters on the way to the
happy ending.
Communication as a Living Process
Vanitha spoke on the process of
communication, defining it as a dynamic process that makes or breaks
relationships, and stressing that communication is never simply about the words
chosen, but how they are deployed. This
tracks closely with Dr. Claude Elwood Shannon and Dr. Warren Weaver’s
foundational 1948 model of communication, which framed the process as a
continuous exchange between sender, message, channel, and receiver, vulnerable
to distortion at every stage rather than a single clean transmission of
meaning. Vanitha’s own framing,
communication as something that actively makes or breaks a relationship rather
than a neutral exchange, updates that decades-old model with the emotional
stakes any working communicator must manage.
The Evaluators and Results
Tony Lim, DTM, Vincent An, Tony
Tan, Lim Chang Jing, DTM, and Martinn Ho served as Project
Evaluators. Best Speaker went to Mellita
Angga. Best Evaluator went to Vincent
Chua. Best Table Topics Speaker went to
Tan Sze Yong. A meeting running from an
eighteenth-century poem to Sartrean philosophy to the mechanics of evaluation
itself is not a modest range for one club to cover in a single evening, and
this one covered it without a single transition feeling forced.
Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters
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