From Speaker to Trainer

Dan, Wendy and I put on a "From Speaker to Trainer" seminar, which is a Toastmasters International program. We had a great response - all of the seats sold almost right away.


After the training was Sam's going away party. We'll miss him a lot.

CAT

Sorry for the lack of posts - my blog is still blocked in China, so I can't publish anything to it from home!

I'm been doing quite a few Toastmaster things lately. Last night I was Grammarian at People's Square TMC. Here's a link to my report. http://chinaadvancedtoastmasters.com/

Last Thursday, we had a special China Advanced Toastmasters meeting for our club found, Sam, who is moving back to the US after 11 years in China. Check it out here.

CAT Speech contest

China Advanced Toastmasters (CAT) held its humorous speech and table topics club contest tonight. I placed 3rd in the table topics contest. In table topics, you are read a question and then must give a 1-2 minute impromptu speech on it.

Syna, Dan, me , Jenny and Chris


Delphy, Chris and Syna.

Delphy won the contest with a speech about Chinese culture. It was very funny - how fighting on the subway is actually just preparing for the Olympics and such. The topic was "Flexibility" and she did a great job of making the whole speech have a point, and using humor to get it across. Some humorous speeches only try to be funny and have no point. Hers had both. I'm excited to see how she polishes it for the Area contest!

CAT & Amazing Fridays joint meeting

CAT (China Advanced Toastmasters) had a joint meeting with Amazing Fridays. I was the GE. (General Evaluator)

Most of the CAT officers were there, so we thought we should get a photo. L-R: Daniel - Membership VP, Delphy - Secretary, Joyce - VP of Public Relations, Rebecca - Treasurer, Emily - Educational VP, Sam - President.

CAT

CAT stands for China Advanced Toastmasters. I'm the VPE Elect (Vice President of Education.) The image is of our meetings for the next few months. CAT is the only club in Shanghai dedicated to the Toastmasters who have reached the first goal of giving 10 speeches, or their Competent Communicator award. I was in the Daktronics corporate club back in Brookings and received my CC award then. I just earned my CL (Competent Leader) award a week or so ago.

Humor speech contest

Last Tuesday was my Toastmaster's club humor speech contest. I was one of the 5 or 6 contestants from our club. Peter and Bill are known as the funny guys, and they placed 1st and 2nd as expected. I did get 3rd.

The speech I gave was called "Age Discrimination" and was about the many times Jon has been mistaken for my father. I gave it almost a year ago to the Daktronics Brookings club and they suggested that I polish it and enter it. So I did! I think I would have done better back home where they understood my humor a bit more.

Delphy put the contest on her video blog. http://www.eyesfront.net/info.asp?articleid=57 I am the first contestant so you don't have to watch the whole thing to see me! :-)

This Saturday I am the contest chair for our Area contest.

Toastmasters Area Governor Training

Our Region's District Governors and Assistant Governors. I'm in Area 23, and am the Assistant Governor of Training and Education. Interesting fact: there is no Area 24 (or any other number with 4 in it such as 4, 14, 34, etc) because 4 is very unlucky. It is pronounced like death (si) only with a different tone. Most buildings don't have any 4th floors either.

Lucy Liu, the AG, and I.

People's Square Toastmasters Club

Last night I emailed a couple fellow Toastmasters from the Daktronics corporate club. They thought hearing my new club was interesting, so I'm going to share it with everyone.

Two weeks ago I gave my first speech from an advanced manual and was inducted into my new club at the same meeting. :-) Last week was their "Toastie" awards, which is a big members-only banquet and every dressed up like movie stars and pretended it was the Grammy's, acceptance speeches and all. It was pretty fun!! The photos below are from that night.

This week, Wendy Wang, the new President, asked me if I'd be the club Treasurer, as the girl who was elected was unable to do it. I told her I would, but I was a bit concerned about paying bills that were all in Chinese! Pretty much all that I need to do is pay the room rental fee and collect the entrance fee money from the greeters each meeting. I also wondered if maybe there should be an election. Wendy basically told me that they still were used to appointed officals so it was no problem, and that elections were usually just to appear democratic! Only in China.
Tonight, Lucy Liu, the out-going club President and new Area Governor, asked me to be the Area VP of Education. (The Area is a larger region and fairly important.) Training is Sunday morning at 8:30 to noon. (once again, only in a Communist country!)

So, TM has been very interesting so far! Everyone thinks I am just so advanced, which is a bit embarassing. But it will make me work harder to live up to those expectations! My first few times in front of the new group, I was very nervous about speaking too quickly or using words they didn't understand. I think I was too focused on that, so didn't really appear confident while speaking. I think I am pretty much over that now. They have good English skills, so I just try to speak clearly (which everyone should do anyway.)

One misconception that people had was that USA clubs don't need a grammarian, since English is our first language. Here, one role is Gender Confusion/Ah Counter. The "gender confusion" role really threw me at first. It is counting how many times people use HE instead of SHE or HIM instead of HER. It's a common mistake to make when speaking in English as a second language.

We originally met at an old YMCA, with cracked walls, a window air conditioner and a green chalkboard. The new venue is a bit nicer, with better air conditioning and we have been upgraded to a white board! It would be so great to have a projector. It's a bit different from Dak, where we had a new meeting room built for us, meals catered in, perfect climate control, and a computer and projector permantently installed. :-) All of the members are very enthusiastic though. When giving a speech or evaluation, all eyes in the room are on you. They nod in agreement or answer back out loud. If the speaker asks a question, he or she always gets many answers shouted out.

Any visitors are welcome to come on a Tuesday night to the People's Square TMC! http://shanghai585.freetoasthost.info

Most of the club members. Many people come as guests for a long time before joining. Two of my co-workers have come to meetings, and they are concerned that their English skills are not up to par. I think that they'd be fine though! No one bashes anyone if they use a word incorrectly or anything. The grammarian will list off phrases used incorrectly but not say the person's name who made the mistake.

Top row: Delphy, Mary, Michelle, Wendy, Cleo, Sissi, Rita, me, Amy and Cher. Bottom: Lucy, Amy (up), Xiao Xiao, Helen and Jenny. Wow, that's pretty good that I remembered everyone!

Emma, me, Jenny, Wendy, Mary, Eric (the former Area Governor) Amy, Rita, Helen, Cleo and Amy.

Here is a link to the club's blog. http://tmc585.blog.sohu.com Just scroll down to see more photos.

Toastmasters

I discovered I can just email posts to my blog. However, it doesn't support photos. I may be able to get around that using Photobucket. We'll see.

Yesterday I went to a Toastmaster's meeting. http://shanghai585.freetoasthost.info/index.html It was near People's Square. I was the only American. There is a guy named Warwick from London that started the club - I think we are the only native English speakers. I met Beate, a German lady, who just happens to have friends in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. AND - she's actually been to SF to visit. It is such a small world!!!! Most of the other people are Chinese, but I think there are a couple more expats. The meetings are all in English though. Everyone was super-friendly and excited to be there. It seems like a very good group of people and they also get together informally fairly often from what I know so far. The President of the club, Lucy, and several other officers expressed how excited they were to have me and how much I could help everyone with all of my knowledge.

It's hard to know how sincere compliments are. "Face" is very important here, and sometimes I think they are trying to give me face by saying that. Almost daily I get told how beautiful I am. How are you supposed to respond to that? I certainly don't think that I'm any more than average. And I'm definitely much fatter than all of the girls in the office!! (OK, actually than the vast majority of Asian women.) The sales girls told me that I am thinner than when I was there in January. They also told Jon he has gotten fatter. That is pretty brutal honesty!

A couple days ago we bought the 3rd season of LOST. The show got over about 2 weeks ago, and the DVDs aren't going to be released until December 11th. The piracy is so bad here. All of their videos have Chinese subtitles and sometimes it's bit difficult to navigate through menus in Chinese, but I've been able to figure it out so far. The remote also being labeled in Chinese does complicate things though. :-) LOST is certainly not the High-Def quality as the show is though. We may just buy it at home too, since we have the 1st and 2nd season boxed sets already.