From the Desk of Catherine Lai (VP Membership):

On 11th March 2016, we were back to I.E. Singapore for our chapter meeting. The theme we had last year was the Singles’ Night. The theme was chosen to capitalise on being single mindedness in effective communication and leadership. This year back at the same place, our theme was Leap Of Faith. This theme was chosen to captivate members and visitors with stories of faith, hope and love. I felt the love the moment I stepped in the meeting place. Our VPE, Bei’ An, was drenched in perspiration and when asked, he showed us the delicious food for the evening, the famous beancurd tarts from Le Cafe, fried vegetarian Bee Hoon (vermicelli), and Chwee Kueh (Steam rice cakes with salted turnips topping) from the hawker centre beside Kwan In temple. He took the efforts to walk under the hot Singapore climate to buy all of us good food that we would remember for a long time. Before the meeting started, the food was almost gone. As the host, we made the decision to order pizzas to feed our members and guests for tea break. Again, the food (pizza) was gone before table topics started. Here at Money Mastery TMC, we know the importance of feeding the body that in turn will feed our soul.

The evening started with our two witty Toastmasters of the evening, Chandran Kanapathey and Candrika Adri Tjo. They have not only entertained us with their thoughts about everyone onstage but on the audience too. There were only laughter and smiles on everyone’s faces.

Our Club president, Chai Peishan, gave an opening speech about how she became a toastmasters member in our club while she was working in I.E.Singapore. She has come a long way from her first project and now the Club president and award winning speaker in many contests, seminars and conferences. She is definitely an admirable leader in the Toastmasters scenario. She shared with us the benefits of joining a Toastmasters club and how that had helped her ignite and achieve her passion throughout the journey. She has the fairy tale swan story that has turned into an inspirational real life story. Many of us are captivated by her journey in toastmasters and there is no deny that her leadership has paved way to a greater height for our club too.

Our speakers for the night, Maureen Suryani, Janty Widjaja, Arva Rangwala and Bei’ An Chye (in order of speeches), had prepared speeches that were not only educational but had also shown us the importance of love that spiraled us forward and onward in life. Our witty Maureen shared with us the importance of loving oneself before we can love others. In addition, by taking good care of ourselves first, we do not let our loved ones worry about us.

Motherly Janty continued to share with us the secret of happiness. She shared with us the research from Harvard Psychiatrist Robert Waldinger the three key lessons about happiness. They are in the form of close relationships, quality relationships, and stable and supportive marriages. Loving Arva talked about how she woke up one night at 3am to make a lifetime decision to lose weight and lead a healthy lifestyle for her only daughter, Zoya. Our beloved Bei’ An, inspired us with his family story of caring for his late grandmother who was in a vegetative state when the rest of his relatives could not take responsibility to do it. Every one of us in the audience could feel the tough journey he and his family went through. In spite of it all, they did their best and his grandmother passed on, in peace years later, with all her loving family members around her. Congratulations Bei’ An on completing your Competent Communication with this speech project. It is truly inspiring for all you and your mum had done for your Po Po. And no guess for the best speaker of the evening. That would be our talented actress, Arva Rangwala.

Our honorable evaluators, Muhammad Taufiq, Novena Methani, Prem Methani and Mohd. Hijazi Sudarmaji played an important role evaluating our wonderful speakers. They have offered many praises for our speakers and at the same time, also gave constructive criticism for them to reflect so they could become better for their next project. That is the beauty of our toastmasters club that offers our members internal support from our club mentors but also external evaluations from quality evaluators. How could we forget the most important evaluator of all, the Language Evaluator? He was none other than Zaid Yassin. Besides being known to be a hot toastmasters in Singapore, he is also much sought after for his poetic evaluations for countless toastmasters. We were indeed very honored to have Zaid as our Language evaluator for the evening. The word of the day he had given us was “trammel”.

Chandran, our witty TME, used the most number of “trammel” accurately that night. Before the Table Topics started, Chandran mentioned that “if you could not think on your feet, sit down”. This had helped to ease the nervousness among those ready to take part of the “think on your feet” 2 minutes speech. Our Table Topic Master, Mannan Pacha, had came up with several “leaps” idioms. Our club member, Mike Lee, won the Table Topic of the evening with the idiom, “Doing is a quantum leap from imagining”. He was not only funny but also very witty about his own experience of thinking to quit his job and be in a much better place to doing it and ended in the new job he had interviewed not long ago. His sense of humor is inevitable and I really look forward to Mike joining the humorous speech contest next year.

Before we ended our night with the next Leap of Faith (II) on the 18th March 2016, we have a new guest, Shawn Lee, who was here in our club for the first time. He joined us as a new member of Toastmasters Club immediately after our chapter meeting ended. We are delighted that many new Toastmasters have chosen our club as their stepping stone to become a better communicator in their life. With this piece of good news, we ended the night and looking forward to many more quality chapter meetings.

Hope to see you in our club soon!

Catherine Lai