The second Zoom meeting at the Seattle Sunrise Club, Lara opened the meeting as president and Toastmaster of the day, greeting the thirteen enthusiastic regular members. As a smaller group, we started a bit late at 2 minutes past the hour and yet ended on time. The zoom meetings are one hour short, slightly different than our extended longer agenda for the in-person meetings.
The Table Topics Session was fantastic and creatively different. Imagined and facilitated by Scott, using the theme of “1 Million Subscribers”, as an international news broadcast anchor, he setup the scenario and chose a pairing of Interviewer-Interviewee. Bill interviewed Jason, who was on cruise to the Caribbean that had a confirmed infected Coronavirus case. Steven interviewed Paula, the first Vatican female Catholic Pope. Aleli interviewed Vivienne, the CEO of the largest toilet paper manufacturer. Lara interviewed Jimmy, who was responding as Jay Inslee, the WA-State governor that called forth the first state emergency response due to Covid-19. Jovica interviewed funny man Oleg, as the President of the United States. Oh the voices, the acting skills, and comic relief was a fantastic way to start the morning.
Isabella was the primary and only prepared speaker, who spoke on the elevator pitch for a job interview. Paula was the speaker evaluator, giving advice on the delivery, presentation, attire, and giving tips for interview techniques, especially the decoupling and bundling topics. Paula open up the round-round evaluations, something new to our Club. We are introducing the round-robin toastmaster evaluations, to allow more speaking and audience engagement opportunities. The volunteers that raised their hands were Petar, Lara, Bill, Jimmy, Jovica, and Aleli.
General Evaluator, Steven, gave a critique of the entire meeting, from the early greeting banter, which felt like a regular in-person meeting, as the members waited for the club president to start. He suggested showing or sharing the agenda, praise Jovica’s ability to share the word-of-the-day “Perspective” as his virtual background screen, and lastly, Steven ended with his recommendation to use the group chat to say hello to members as they join zoom or other encouraging comments.
Who has the best interview or elevator pitch advice? Who had the best table topics scenario in today’s table topics interaction pairing? Who made us laugh the most for our early morning meeting? Well, you just had to be there.
