It was a rainy night for our Auckland Toastmasters club last night, but our members and guests decided to brave the rain and make it to our meeting. Good thing too, because it turned out to be an interesting and fun night. We had four fantastic speeches from Reuben, George, Yuan, and Pablo, three of which were from the new Pathways learning system. Damian ran our impromptu speaking section of the night by taking on the role of Table Topics master at the last minute, working with the excellent topics that Oliver thought up for us. Thanks Damian and Oliver for the fun table topics.

When you start a new path in pathways, you give an icebreaker speech. Even though George has been a member for ten years now, it was time again for him to give us an icebreaker speech. We learned a lot about George’s journey in the past ten years as he wrote a new speech, and didn’t reuse his first ice breaker (which this author would have considered doing!).

Toastmaster of the evening Derek ran a smooth meeting, which managed to finish a minutes early, great for those wanting to get home earlier on these dark winter evenings.

Grammarian for the evening Xiang chose a fantastic word of the day: Agog (adjective – very eager or curious to hear or see something), which was used quite a few times, even by one of our guests, and we are all agog to see what word she will choose next time she is the grammarian.

Our next meeting is just next week, as we decided as a club to have two in a row instead of skipping meetings due to Queens birthday. This will also be the last meeting of the Toastmaster’s year, which means the current committee members will get a well deserved rest.

We look forward to seeing you all at our next meeting on Monday 18th June, at 6:15pm at the Parnell community centre.