Summary of May 16 2011 Meeting

According to Wikipedia, truthiness is a "truth" that a person claims to know intuitively "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. If our club had a prize for the best Word of the Day from a Grammarian, then it would be awarded to Nat for introducing us to this word at the meeting. It was after all the Word of the Year in 2005. It went down very well with attendees and it was used again and again during the evening.

For the first time this year, our club hosted a joint meeting in our home venue with the HKUST MBA Alumni Toastmasters Club. We had a rather packed room, what with the usual large number of curious visitors wanting to find out more about Toastmasters, the members from HKUST, Talis Wong, DTM, our General Evaluator for the meeting, and Irene Chen, DTM, who gave a presentation on the Toastmaster roadmap.

Irene talked about the Toastmaster journey, from the time a person attends a meeting as a guest to attainment of the DTM award. She explained to us that Toastmasters presents us with a number of wonderful opportunities for self improvement in addition to public speaking. I was particularly interested in her discussion of the many types of quotients i.e. IQ, EQ, SQ, FQ, HQ, PQ one can benefit by doing the many subjects provided by the Advanced Manual series.

Donald reminded us that we should do everything with a big P, for Passion. Clement gave us some tips on landing our dream job, which included signing off with a needle with 2 points and biting off a chunk of a thick dictionary. King from HKUST MBA Alumni TMC demonstrated really well how we should act out our feelings so that we do not bottle up our emotions until they explode.

The theme of the evening was on Office Politics and everyone was looking forward to learn something that they could then apply back in their office. Someone pointed out that as long as there are human beings, there is going to be politics. I learnt that if you are an IT person, office politics is not usually an issue, but if it was, it would be addressed with a diagram identifying the power players so that one could better align themselves with them. I heard that even for a young political science student, new to the workforce, there was nothing learned in school that prepared her for the harsh reality the betrayal and back-stabbing of office politics.

Bobby returned to us after leaving for Shanghai for a few months. It was good to have him back.

The night ended with the presentation of the awards to the best performers. And here are the results:

Best Prepared Speech Speaker : King Lee

Best Table Topic Speaker : San Kong

Best Evaluator : Andrew Yeung

I also announced that we will be conducting our club’s new President election in our next meeting on 30th May. We need nominations of candidates for the 2011/12 president’s election for the club.

Best regards,

Ong Ai Ai

President 2010/11

HKTMC