Gurney-Hydro Toastmasters Club

If you study any great leader, you will find they have many characteristics that contribute to their success.  Below are four that are the most fundamental.  Start with these first and build upon them. Leadership Characteristic #1: Compelling Desire When you take on a leadership role in any project or organization, you must have a goal, a vision of the end game that you want to achieve.  That goal must be driven by a compelling desire for it to happen.  Why do you want to achieve this?  For everyone, it’s the pain/pleasure factor – to get away from a pain or to gain pleasure.  Simple as that.  What is yours? For example, you take on a leadership role in your Toastmasters club because you want to see the club membership grow.  Why?  So that it will be easier to fill roles?  So that your club can achieve the DCP goals? Ask yourself the reason until it becomes so compelling that nothing will stop you from achieving it. Leadersh...

You read that right! Toastmasters is the place where it’s alright to fail.  In fact, it is the safest place for you to fail. As quoted by Robert Kiyosaki above, you don’t achieve success without failing first.  And you need to fail fast and hard as early as possible, learn from your mistakes and come back strong. Statistics have shown that only 8% of people achieve success on the first try without failing first.  And it is an even smaller percentage of these people who manage to retain their success. The reason is simple – if you don’t fail, you don’t learn anything.  The people who get lucky and achieve their goals on the first try will normally not be able to sustain that success for the long term.  It is the people who have failed time and again who are the ones who go all the way. Failure teaches us a number of things. It tells us where we went wrong, the areas that we need to improve upon to be better.  Thomas Edison failed to invent the...

Prost!   Lift up your mug and toast to life, food, friends and beer! Our members and guests got introduced to Oktoberfest during our meeting.   We decided to have some fun and celebrate the most famous beer festival with – what else – but beer and sausages courtesy of our Datin Joanne Tan. We also had girls in dirndls.   Hey, we’re not called the most happening club for nothing *wink* We only had one speaker for the night, our guests, Kitsh.   His ice breaker sang praises to his mother and all the people who have shone a light in his life.  He also encouraged his listeners to embrace their true self even though people may disagree with them. This was followed by a very informative sharing session by our VPE, Sheryl on Oktoberfest.   She delved into the history of the festival, the customs and traditions and how it went from a celebration of a royal wedding (bet you didn’t know that) into the world’s biggest beer festival. O...

Presentation skill is something that all great speakers have to master.   Done right, it shows the audience your ability to organize and convey your thoughts and ideas in a way that words alone can never do. However, if you don’t do it right, then it will show the world in glorious visual Technicolor your lack of preparation. Bear in mind the following and you will be able to sail through. 1) Don’t Put Your Entire Speech In The Presentation A presentation consisting of words alone is boring, although it is unavoidable at times.   However, don’t put your entire speech in your slides and read from them.   By doing that, you’re making yourself redundant.   You might as well give your audience a copy of your slides and they can read from there. 2) Use Keywords Continuing from Point #1 above, instead of putting your entire speech in your presentation, use keywords.   Important keywords pertaining to your topic will be helpful for your au...

"Nothing is certain in life except death and taxes," so says the quote. So what can you do to make sure you live your life in a way you would be proud of so that in the end, you can say you've really lived and not existed? One of the ways is a bucket list, a list of things that you want to do like travel to far off and exotic places, a skill that you've always wanted to learn or doing something so big that it seemed like an impossible feat to accomplish. Here are some of the things that are in our attendees' bucket list: Go to Disneyland Travel around the world Move to New York Go on an adventure once a year Go to a third world country to do charity work Own their first home These are all worthwhile dreams to aspire to and we really hope you guys achieve them. We had two speakers for the night. Speaker #1: Preezzilla Tan Finally, this very successful real estate agent did her speech on something that she is very passionate about - investin...

Is that person going up on stage to give a speech the same person as the one hanging out with your friends? Often times we create different personas or masks that we put on to suit each occasion as we see fit.   But how well do we carry each of that persona? Many people feel that if they are going to put themselves out there, be seen in public, getting all that attention focused on them for 7 minutes, then they need to become someone very different from the person who is just hanging out with friends eating roti canai at the local makak. There are people who feel they have to ramp up the drama to get attention.   Some feel they need to scale back a little of their personality so that people can take them seriously.   Others try to be a little silly or cute because they think it will make them more likeable. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, go for it!   Good speakers will bring out different sides of their personality ...

We held our club level of the Humorous Speech & Evaluation Contests on 29 August. Here are the winners. Winners of the Evaluation Contest Champion: Joanne Tan 1st Runner Up: Dennis De Vosse 2nd Runner Up: Hayley James Winners of the Humorous Speech Contest Champion: Dennis De Vosse 1st Runner Up: Joanne Tan 2nd Runner Up: Darren Saw Finally, we crowned a new champion in our club contest! A big thank you to our organizing team who worked really hard to put the contest together and our friends from Farlim Toastmasters Club for being our role players, not to mention our guests who came to support the contestants. Shout out to the very talented Miss Fish for the beautiful pictures!  Click here to see the rest. Group photo for the album that truly represents the fun we had that night