Play with fire and you'd get burnt. Dance with wolves and you might lose your innocence. The converse is just as true, when you lose your Innocence, you'd learn to dance with wolves. Don't get us wrong, "Dances with Wolves" and "Innocence Lost" were two separate speech projects but one could not stop to wonder that they are related in some way. The former were delivered by yours truly (Chee Yoong) as part of my CC Project 5: Your Body Speaks while the latter was delivered by Toastmaster Abdul Rahman as his ACM: Humorously Speaking Project 1 : Warm Up Your Audience.

"Dances with Wolves" shared stories about thiefs who preyed on material gains. These ‘wolves’ may be living near us, working with us or even those that we depended on for protection. Do we know who they are? Maybe the next speech will touch on 'Tigers' instead to match the mainstream celebrity hot topic.

"Innocence Lost" touched all of us deeply with stories of how we have evolved to be less tolerant over time as we matured. When we were young, we had less 'barriers' towards people of different race and religion but as we grew, we began to be constrained by 'social practices' and guided to see things through a contorted lens.

With the honour of playing Toastmaster of the Day, I opted to continue with our newly found tradition, the signature clap. Our Madam General Evaluator Toastmaster Lay Choo commented that this is indeed something special that Exact should continue. She also shared many suggestions with us on our speeches, evaluation and things that we can consider to incorporate.

Speaking about special, we saw an exciting Table Topic session conducted by Toastmaster Abdul Rahman. Mystery Mayhem was the overall theme whereby participants had to complete a story and let their imagination run wild. It saw 5 courageous Exactians exercising their prowess at table topics with stories on drug checks at a club, Batman scolding his butler over his suit, ghosts, maid and stalker. Thank you to Loon, Yuen Kai, Andrew, Joyce and myself (feels weird to thank myself) for participating. We believe that the overall experience gave Toastmaster Stefanie, who was our TT Evaluator a wonderful first visit to Exact. She had many a wonderful comment for us as well including how to make table topic story-telling more convincing. Toastmaster Loon won the best table topic speaker.




In the interest of sharing, Toastmaster Andrew conducted session to share the learning points from the judging forum in TLI2 with everyone. It started off with the video playback of the winning international speech by Toastmaster Ong Swee Keat. Toastmaster Andrew then shared about the judging criteria as well as the opinions noted by the Judging Forum, Dr. Arul, Stephen Fernando and Geoff Andrew on the Speech Content, Delivery and Language respectively.



With that we concluded our Meeting #63, which happened to be our LAST meeting on Tower 2 KLCC. Join us as begin our new journey in a new office, our FIRST meeting in G-Tower - noon, 26 Jan 2010.

Until then, take care.


The photos above can also be found in our Photo Gallery.

Taken from Exact ADC Toastmasters blog. Contributed by Chee Yoong, Lai.