Do you come from a land down under?

We get many visitors at West Herts Speakers to sample our public speaking and it seems we're positioned in a good place of St Albans that seems to attract many people.  However we had a visitor this time all the way from Sydney, Australia who is actually a member of Toastmasters there and who has actually been one of the people who helped get Toastmasters going there.  So it was an honour to have him with us and he took the time to come and visit us as his mothher lives nearby so decided to vernture out to his local public speaking club.  Not only that but he also agreed to run our Table Topics session and came up with some splendid topics regarding bening stranded on an island.  We're not sure if Roger felt that way about being stuck on the little old island of Britain and he missed Australia which inspired him but it was a great session enjoyed by us all.

We also had another surprise with Steve Demianyk, who by the way had lived in Australia for a few years himself, decided on the day that he'd like to deliver his ice-breaker speech and it was all about Feeling the fear and doing it anyway.  Steve certainly showed us that he was someone who practices what he preaches and having successfully dodged all opporutnities of public speaking in his career so far he decided that he was no longer going to do this and this is why he's joined Toastmasters to develop these skills.  It was an impressive speech especially since he hadn't planned on giving it that day and we all thoroughly enjoyed it and learned a lot about not letting fear hold us back.  Well done Steve.

And that wasn't the end of the surprises because we had one of our past members pop in to see us, Adam Smith, which was a real pleasure because Adam always brings a lot of fun and energy along with him.  Adam got stuck right in and took on the role of Evaluator for Steve' speech.  Let's hope Adam now has the time to rejoin us as a member - we'd love to see him back.

You would think that this was going to be the end of the excitement but you'd be wrong.  We had a speech by none other than Stuart Lawson who delivered a speech from the Storytelling advanced manual and it was all about Tom Thumb. You could sit and listen to Stuart tell the story for hours with his mix of gentle story-telling, wit and the ad-libbing and just as he got to a crucial point in the story the red light came on and he had to stop.  They always say that when deliveriing speeches we should leave the audience wanting more and Stuart, or rather the timekeeper, certainly did that and we never got to hear the end of the story. Stuart assures us that he will tell us what happened another time.

The best table topics speaker of the evening was Liz Burnett pictured here with Stuart Lawson.

The elections for the incoming officers were held and these are our new officers and we welcome them and wish them the best of luck for the upcoming Toastmasters year:

President - Shola Ayemi
VP Education - Sanjit Joseph
VP Membership - Mandy Carlin
VP Public Relation - Ryan
Treasurer - Stuart Beattie
Seargant-at-arms - Colin Donald