Laser Sharp Speakers

[Thank you to Andrei for providing the following summary of our meeting this past Thursday.] Mirei did a great job as Toastmaster at our last meeting! That was her first Toastmaster duty in our club and she weaved through the agenda very gracefully. For Table Topics, Curt introduced a new version of Jeopardy-style questions. The topics were presented as "answers", and the responses were to be phrased in the form of a question. We are still learning how to do it right. It was ...really mind blowing, and required even more impromptu skills than regular Q/A style Table Topics. I think I need to watch the TV show to better understand the concept! I presented a Persuasive speech from Pathway Level 3 today. The speech "Everyone go bike!" was an attempt to share with fellow members my livelong affection with biking. Getting started is easier than it seems, once you take the first ride, you’ll be hooked by the sense of freedom, adventure, and joy so commonly felt on a bike. Are you sick and tired of spending your life in the traffic jams? Go bike! Looking for a way to burn extra calories? Go bike! Need a hobby that will relax and calm you? Go bike! Need more adrenaline in your bloodstream? Go bike! Don’t need anything in particular? Go bike! Travis who is a bike-lover himself, provided to me a lot of useful feedback during evaluation. Thank you, Travis. Rich was our second speaker today. In his speech, "Lincoln Played Baseball", he combined his two favorite topics - Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Casey at the Bat poem. All these inspired by Veterans day and the 2019 World Series. The evaluation given by Curt was as enjoyable as the speech itself. We had "two" special guests today. One was no other than Joe C. He is back in town and hopefully will stay here for sometime so that he can attend our meetings more regularly. He is currently a member but was traveling for work in recent weeks. The other (real) guest was Ileana. She is new in Toastmasters and is looking for a club. That was her second visit and I'm sure we made very positive impression on her. We hope to see her back and join our club.

This week, our meeting was held on Halloween day. Anne gave us an update on her Bone Yard Halloween project. Over the past couple of years, she treated us with updates on her plans and how they came to life. This year her creativity and dedication were noticed by a local TV station. They interviewed Anne at her home on Thursday morning. You can see the report here: https://abc7news.com//san-jose-family-creates-sca/5662730/ Our second speaker was Rich. His speech was a cont...inuation of his overview of how sport coaches apply different communication and leadership styles to bring their teams to the top. This week's episode was dedicated to two outstanding basketball coaches: Bobby Knight and Mike Krzyzewski, aka "Coach K". Bobby Knight prefers a negative coaching style, and "Coach K" a positive style. Both were very successful as basketball coaches. Steve Jobs had success applying the Bobby Knight style in the business world. Which leadership style is most effective for you? Join us at our next meeting on Thursday Nov 7 at noon to find out more! See more

Over the past few meetings, we heard the story from Daniel of an Underwater Astronaut (!) as well as from the downfall of humanity when using dating apps according to guest speaker Jack. This goes contrary to a previous speech from Daniel who lauded such app. Where do you stand on this topic? With the Fall Fusion behind us, we had a couple of representatives participating in the Speakers Showcase. One Laser Sharp Speaker finished second in the Semi-Finals. We are such a good club! This week, we will hear from Anne and her ever-growing boneyard. She creates an elaborate display of SJ Sharks skeletons that is updated each year. Come and join us to hear about it!

Our Open House was a success! We entertained several guests and wooed them to come back to visit us again. Come and see us in action: you will have as much fun as the people on these photos, all while becoming better speakers and leaders.

See you then! Our next meeting will be an Open House on Thursday, September 19th, starting at noon. Rightfully so: Bravo Curt. Curt gave a wonderfully entertaining evaluation of a speech he had not yet heard and won Best Evaluator. Both speakers cleverly fit their speech to match the evaluation they were given beforehand. During today’s meeting we had two great storytelling speeches from our Area Director Tim and member Rich. ... Confused by this post? So would I. Today’s meeting was a backwards meeting! We started by adjourning the meeting, awarding the ribbons, sharing the functionaries reports, listening to the speech evaluations, stating Table Topics answers that our Topics Masters tried to find the question to, and finally hearing two speeches. It was fun incorporating the feedback into our speaking opportunities today. It did take some time to prepare for this unusual meeting, but all our efforts were very well worth it. You could hear us laugh throughout the office floor. We did learned that the plural for octopus is octopuses, not octopi as many would think. This fun fact was shared by Dana who was with us for her last meeting this year. She is going back to school after completing her internship at Spectra-Physics. Not only did all the members in attendance enjoy this creative backwards meeting, but our guests, Lisa, Tim and Mirei had a good time as well. Lisa gave us a creative Ah Counter report at the beginning of our meeting, before many of us really had a chance to speak. Because we had such a good time today, we have a new member joining us, Mirei. We do hope you will join us for our open house in two weeks, September 19th, 12 noon. The image below is my take of what an octopi is (octo-pie). What are your thoughts?

Thanks Evelyn for the summary of last week's meeting. We had an AWESOME meeting today, thank you so much for your participation. Rich gave us an informative talk entitled, Use of Laser Light for Healing. Perhaps, Spectra-Physics can consider such products for a High Volume product line. To fulfill a Pathways project, Anne led us through a difficult yet fun and creative round of Table Topics. Our guest today, Dana, enjoyed her time at our meeting, and we hope she will return.

Thank you, Evelyn for a synopsis of all the fun had at last week's meeting - I really enjoy attending our Laser Sharp Speakers’ meetings and learning from fellow members. At our last meeting, our Word of the Day was, derisive, it was quite fun trying to use it in a sentence, but we did! We achieved 100% usage. Rich Boggy also, gave a talk on the Dunning-Kruger Effect which was very enlightening and entertaining. We were also schooled on, Dating through the lens of Millennials by our newest member, Daniel Hwung. Some of us Baby Boomers and Gen Xers learned new terminologySwipe Right or Swipe Left J I guess you had to have be there to know how much fun we truly have learning and growing together. See you next time!

Last week we had a visitor, Denise Singh, who is also our area director. She served as our general evaluator and provided this synopsis of the meeting: The meeting included a variety of speeches, one talking about fighting off foxes while camping. The other speech was a tribute to the speaker's favorite teacher. The Table Topics was thought-provoking. Effective evaluations were given for both speeches. There was a tie for Best Speaker. Sebastian won Best Table Topics Speaker and Andrei won Best Evaluator. Thanks for the visit Denise. We hope to see you again!

This week we had two 'prepared' speeches - one was Rich's icebreaker where we learned how lucky he was to be alive, and the other was a story about my life with dogs and why you should never get a dog just because it is 'free'. This is a picture of my current dog 'Atto' taken on a recent run. He is an Australian Cattle dog and needs tons of exercise. Come join us next week to hear more thought provoking speeches and captivating stories.

Last week we had our Evaluation and International Speech competitions. The test speech was fantastic and the evaluators had their jobs cut out for them. But, the contestants rallied with good insight, encouraging words and concrete suggestions for improvements. Anne won first place, but is unable to represent us at the next level, so that task will fall to Evelyn. Good luck Evelyn! Evelyn also won the International Speech competition so will be representing Laser Sharp spea...kers in that category as well. I personally had to miss the International Speech competition, but heard all three of the speeches were interesting and very well done. Thank you Rich and Travis for also competing. We had a great lunch and a beautiful and tasty cake at the event. The cake was to celebrate one of our key members, Francoise, as she is leaving the company to tackle new ventures. Francoise, thanks for your dedication, motivation and inspiration. You have truly been one of the reasons Laser Sharp Speakers has been such a great club to participate in We wish you well. No pics of Francoise and her cake just yet, but stay tuned - we'll try to round some up.