Congratulations to everyone who attended Wednesday meeting, for Zain pronounced that you all deserve to be the Toastmaster of the day for being so awesome.
I would like to add a further Toastmaster of the meeting to Grace, for demonstrating a special ability in speaking that I don’t recall being displayed before. The particular skill that shines supernova in a starry sky is accelerated learning. As Toastmasters, we hear and enjoy speeches regular, but thinking back, how many do you remember? How many speakers made their points stick like the Crux cross in the sky at night?
To make Graces speech and her points stick she:
i) reduce our filter’s against learning new material
ii) engage our minds actively
iii) appeal to our multiple intelligence.
iv) repeat and reinforce
Grace began with an audacious outline, to teach us Toastmasters in the meeting five Chinese words, and to be able to write them in the culturally correct order, and that this would also help our wellbeing! She started by checking in with us just how much Chinese we collectively knew – effectively diddly squat – and confirmed to us we were, therefore, a most suitable audience, which gave us comfort (i). But still what did you think her chance of success? Ordinarily it would not be high.
If you missed her speech and are wondering what the Chinese words/character were, here they are:
Word/Character Meaning
一 One
二 Two
三 Three
十 Ten
米 Rice
With regards to writing them, Grace used the vivid image of water flowing from top to bottom (ii), and then our western familiar pattern of writing left to right (i).
All the characters were simple an easy (i), bar the star like character; 米 rice. It was this character that Grace put all her effort into. After explaining the strokes first, and then the innovative part, she had us moving our heads in the stoke order which stretched our necks, engaged our motor neuron memory (iii), so rarely reached during a TM speech. She then repeated, the process, but for the second time with our eyes (iii, iv) reinforcing our learning, and also meeting her last goal of improving our wellbeing.
It is not going to be every speech that suits the audience participating in such an interactive way, but Grace demonstrated that if a speech can, then the results are likely to lead to indelible memories.