Our 50th Regular Meeting!
We held our 50th regular meeting on December 20, 2022. Since we held 33 demonstration meetings before we received an official charter in January 2020, this was our 83rd meeting overall. Over the period of three years and two months since October 2019, we've improved our game. When we held our first demonstration meeting on October 8, 2019, Shin-Osaka Leaders was fragile. It consisted only of five members and we solicited helpers from our sponsor club of the Nishinomiya TGIF Toastmasters Club. At that meeting, we only had five members and we invited six helpers from Nishinomiya TGIF and welcomed two guests. The meeting was held as an in-person meeting. Today, we have 18 members. With some members missing for work and/or family reasons, we held this meeting with 12 members and four guests (No helpers needed anymore).
We do have some challenges. Our members are mostly young or mid-career professionals, meaning some of them are extremely busy and have to miss some meetings. In that sense, we are a bit low on members. We do have a lot of opportunities for you to learn a lot experiencing different roles honing different skills.
Ten Table Topics speakers!
We had an unusually long Table Topics session this time. The Topicsmaster, who facilitates the Table Topics Session (for practicing impromptu speeches), prepared a lot of topics for this 25-minute session themed around Christmas. Though the majority of the club members are not Christians, this time of year has some special meaning to everyone. One interesting topic was "What would you recommend if Santa Clause were looking for new clothse?"
Induction Ceremony
We conducted the induction ceremony for our newest member, Dashe, who took on his first role as the Ah-Counter and demonstrated a level of attention to details. We all hope that you make the best use of the opportunities available at Shin-Osaka Leaders and Toastmasters in general to hone your public speaking skills!
Hybrid meetings, our choice
This time, five members welcomed three guests at the venue, with seven other members and another guest attending online. We hold hybrid meetings whenever possible. This is what we decided back in August 2020.
With COVID-19, a lot of Toastmasters clubs including us turned online. After the first stage of shock, some clubs resumed their physical meetings, others started meeting alternatingly between online and in-person. We selected having our meetings hybrid. This is no easy. It requires more roles. We need to arrange who will bring which equipment (PCs, webcams, a microphone, a set of speakers, tripods, and cables), who will mute/unmute the venue audio, and who will switch the Zoom view between the Speaker and Gallery views for the benefit of the venue attendees.
Still, this is what we want to pursue. That is because we want to secure opportunities for members living far away to appreciate the value our meetings provide and at the same time provide members living close enough with opportunities to practice speaking in front of a live audience. Speaking in front of real people is totally different from speaking online and we want to provide opportunities to experience both for those who can take advantage of it.
In that sense, it was a blessing that Kimiaki, who is normally too busy to come to the venue, was able to make it this time. Similarly, we want to encourage any member and guest to consider traveling to the venue to experience "speaking in public" in the real sense of the phrase.
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