A-Team Toastmasters Club
959155
District 25, Division B, Area 22
Experienced professionals and beginning speakers alike can benefit from our practical, face-to-face learning program. Whether you're speaking to the board of directors, your customers, your co-workers or your kids, Toastmasters can help you do it better. You'll learn and practice in a friendly, comfortable environment with people who are there for the same reason you areto become better communicators. In doing that, we also become better leaders, too.
At Toastmasters, members learn by speaking to groups and working with others in a supportive environment. A typical Toastmasters club meets once a week for about an hour. Each meeting gives everyone an opportunity to practice conducting meetings; present planned speeches with specific skill-enhancing objectives; give short impromptu mini-speeches; and hone critical listening and critical thinking skills. We do this by participating in the Toastmasters self-directed program to help ourselves and, in doing so, we help and support our fellow members.
We are an open club and welcome everyone to attend a meeting
to see our club in action.
A-Team Toastmasters
12th Floor, The Summit
545 E John Carpenter Freeway (at Riverside Dr.)
Irving, TX 75062
For further information, please call our VP of Membership,
Will Hall at 972-871-5818.
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Club Meeting 12/22/11
Theme: Christmas Trivia
Toby served as Toastmaster and he adroitly capitalized on the pending holiday to have fun and get us in the mood. He had fashioned candy canes into a "herd of reindeer" with googly eyes that he presented to the first person who correctlyresponded to his Christmas trivia questions that he sprinkled throughout the meeting. But wait!...he added one little catch: the responder didn't shout out the answer, they had to shout out the word of the day (bauble) and then be recognized for the answer. What fun!!
Never let it be said that we need to have quantity to have QUALITY!! Yes, we had a number of our regular folks out for the holiday but that didn't stop us from have a terrific meeting....complete with an Advanced speech, great Table Topics...and we even had a guest!
Thanks to Toby's trivia we learned many things including the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" is the most broadcast holiday movie. Reindeer were being presented all across the room as people shouted "Bauble!" and then gave their answer.
Donna did her 2nd speech from the Interpersonal Communication series in an Advanced Manual. She gave us information about how to have a successful negotiation and then Tiffany volunteered to be her role-play partner as the two of them demonstrated the principles that Donna had just told us about. It was quite illuminating to understand the we engage in "negotiations" in ordinary ways every day and how we can be sure to turn them in to win/win situations.
Janet then led us in a jolly round of Table Topics. We learned from:
Mariam: that the best version of the song "I'll be home for Christmas" was done by Bing Crosby (even if he didn't sing it!).
Tom: that Blitzen is his favorite reindeer (and it has something to do with the "blitz" part of the reindeer's name)...although he does like Dansher, Dancer, Prancer, Juan and Julio, too.
Roy: believes that a more effective way for Santa to travel is to have a time machine and not have to worry about obsolete technology of a sleigh over-burdened with all those toys
Toby: buys new lights to decorate his house every year because he doesn't want to contend with trying to un-tangle last year's lights.
Donna: told us about the Winter Solstice being the shortest day of the year and even though it signaled the dead of winter, that deep below the snow and the earth, the budding of the next spring is beginning.
Tiffany: loves the Nutcracker because she she danced in it as a child and the wonderment of it signifies the magic of the holiday season to her.
It was a full meeting complete with fun, information, learning opportunities and cameraderie. Who could ask for anything more!
Congratulations to our Award Winner
For the FIRST time ever at our meeting, we had ONE winner for the two awards:
Big Three and Table Topics: Toby
Coming Attractions:
We will look forward to continuing our GREAT A-Team meetings in 2012 as we watch our members progress on their TM educational goals. Mariam just finished her 2nd Competant Communicator (CC); Donna is closing in on her final projects to achieve the highest TM award: Distinguished Toastmaster; several others are close to getting their CC; all of these taken together will help our club cross the finish line as a Distinguished Club. We welcome all visitors and hope they find here what we have found: the chance to make new friends, learn new skills and mentor others in a fun environment!
Happy New Year!
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Club Officers for the 2011-2012 year:
President - Donna Zimmerman
VP Education - Mariam Durrani
VP Membership - Will Hall
VP Public Relations - Allan Reese
Secretary - AnnMarie Rousseau
Treasurer - Connie Chan
Sgt of Arms - Tom Parsons
