19 people attended our Toastmasters meeting last week filled with novel ideas 🌟. We started the meeting with a tip from Melanie about the mentor program “Odyssey” 🚀, a joke from Anne-Kathrin 😄 and the word of the evening presented from our Sarah M. We dove into an evening revolving around “Human Library” 📚, an NPO headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark. Here in Cologne, we refer to them as the “Living Library” 🏰. There are libraries where you can „borrow“ a narrator and listen to their life story for 30 minutes. The conversation might just open your mind, emphasizing the phrase „you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover“ 🤔.
We proceeded with Peter-Christoph’s prepared speech “Why you should teach your children fairy tales” followed by Christian K. explaining why we should be outside more 🌳, enhancing our communication skills 💬 and public speaking 🎤 abilities. One of the highlights of the evening was the living library KSB style. In this context, people being “books” is meant figuratively, fostering tolerance, personal development 🌱 and overcoming the fear of speaking 😨➡️😊.
We had 5-minute exchanges with a fellow KSBler about a subject that may or may not be visible at first glance and can widen your knowledge as listeners, improving our presentation skills 📊 and confidence 💪.
Keeping with the theme open-minded, Christian B. asked three members to hold spontaneous table-topic speeches revolving around candor and civility, a practice essential for leadership 👨💼 and career growth 📈. Toastmaster Tim, two of our guests took on the challenge, speaking successively on stage. Oliver, an honored prior member, had the opportunity to present a short speech he will be holding soon at his new job, showcasing his rhetorical skills 🗣️. The well-observed evaluations were plentiful. The evaluations had, in my opinion, a fine balance of praise and new ideas to try out next time and you can see for yourself with the videos that have already been sent 🎥.
The audience was then asked to ponder over quiz question from Norvisi 🤓 and Roger reminded us how many filler words we used. Gratitude goes out also to Christian B., for his role as grammarian 📝 and Kristof for his general evaluation and to everyone that attended 👏. In conclusion, the awards went to Christian K. for the best prepared Speech 🏆, a valued guest for the best table topic speech, Melanie for the best evaluation, and Thomas for best usage of the word “Pretty”, the word of the evening 🌟.
Thank you for the entertaining evening and wishing you all a good start in the new week 🚀.