Crutch words, anecdotes and interviews

First meeting of Nenagh Toastmasters in 2023

Happy New Year to everyone from Nenagh Toastmasters.

And 2023 is well underway. Last Tuesday, January 17, we had our second meeting of the year.

This meeting was chaired by one of our very recent new members, Rowena Bisschoff, who with her husband David moved last year from South Africa to set up home near Nenagh. David is also in Toastmasters and was our Grammarian for the night. His job is to watch out for our crutch words and sounds, such as 'ahs' and 'ahms', etc, and tell us at the end how we performed.

It is all done in a light-hearted way but we all become more aware of what we say. We should really just pause for a moment, and not fill the space with sounds or words that mean nothing. When we become aware of this, we all try to improve.

The first half of the meeting is delivering prepared speeches: The first speaker was Stephen Cullinan, who spoke about dogs and their amazing senses. Did you know that dogs' sense of smell is between 10,000 and 100,000 times better than humans'?! Stephen had a wide variety of interesting information about our canine friends.

The second speech was by Tony Spain, who is doing a series on story-telling and Tony is full of anecdotes, each with great humour.

In recent times, we have had long-standing members being interviewed for about ten minutes to allow the newer members get to know them better. In this meeting, yours truly, Jim McGuire, was interviewed by Willie Grace. It is an interesting format and unprepared.

The two speeches were evaluated by Donnacha Shanahan and Danny Doyle.

After an enjoyable tea break we were back in action. This part of the meeting was managed by Eileen Dight, who had a list of topics that she challenged members to talk about for two minutes. That seems to be a short time but it can be very slow if you can't think of something to say.

Of course, we all fail to make the two minutes on occasion but we all try our best and it is great practice. Eileen had a wide range of topics for us and this was a very enjoyable session.

Our President Tony Spain made everyone very welcome.

Our next meeting is on January 31 (Tuesday) at 8.15pm in the Abbey Court Hotel. Why not drop in and see what happens.