Global Communicators Joint Meeting
April 25, 2011

Michaela Zuber, cc/CL
A1 Club President

Wow! What a surprise.

To everybody who did not have a chance to attend this meeting: You missed an extraordinary event in A1 TMC's history! But I will try to capture the major points for you.

This meeting was planned as a joint meeting of A1 and Global Communicators (GC) for April 25 in A1's meeting room. We started slightly late because we had to start searching for chairs for all the attendants that kept streaming in the room. When we finally counted our number, we were all surprised.  There were 57 people in the room, members of A1, Global Communicators, and visitors from other clubs, first-time visitors, and repeat-visitors!

The format chosen for our meeting was also new. A1's only part in the meeting was contributing the speech evaluators (Mark Zhang and Cindy Zou), while all other roles would be filled by GC members. The idea was to experience a GC meeting in A1's meeting room. And we learned a lot! The meeting theme introduced by TM Sebrina turned out to be "Honeymoon with Mr. Toast". The TTM Monica surprised everybody with questions starting with "Imagine you are……", which put some Table Topic speakers in a precarious situation. Then we learned about the News master. David picked up a current event story. This is a typical GC role to give members a different kind of possibility to present on the stage. Another role, unknown to A1, was the Quizmaster. Jacky delivered a marvelous job. After practicing excellent listening skills, he confronted the audience with questions to find out how closely the members had paid attention to the different parts of the meeting.

We also had the pleasure to hear experienced speakers give their manual speeches.  We heard GC members Tristan give his #8 "Be aware of your paradigm", and Lili give her #10 "Toastmaster. A self-story." Finally we had the honor of listening to Yuming, a visitor from Canada; give an advanced speech on "The three key principles for public speech". This final speech might have presented a real challenge to the A1 speech evaluator, was it not that by a stroke of good luck, we had a DTM visiting the club. Karen Bishea from Pioneer Toastmasters Club in Cincinnati, Ohio, a 15 years TM member and DTM, spent several weeks in Beijing working for Procter and Gamble. Missing her regular TM meetings at home, she had chosen to visit A1 during her stay. Given her vast experience with Toastmasters, we invited her to be the evaluator.

Only at the end of the meeting did we realize that we had neglected to take pictures during the meeting. So we took several group pictures together. This concluded the official part of the meeting. But 20 A1 and GC members, and guests took up the opportunity to participate in the newly announced "after meeting hangout" of A1.  After a lot of talk and laughs we finally made our way home around 11pm.

Hope to see you there the next time!