It felt good to drive down to Connellsville on Tuesday night for my Laurel Highlands Toastmasters meeting. It felt even better telling myself that I’m all in after a January slump. Whether or not I honor that remains to be seen.
Meeting online is nice but it has its setbacks. I can’t tell you how good it was to meet in person for the first time since September. Plus, we had a guest who’s familiar with Toastmasters. Nick came to us from New England and is now one of our newest members.
This meeting brought a couple of rare occurrences with it as well. We had a speaker get evaluated twice. Our club president is competing in the evaluation contest at the end of February. He needed the practice. In addition, he also gave feedback to our guest whose speech counted as his ice breaker speech. Now comes the task of choosing a path.
The theme for our meeting was “Hearts on our Sleeves”. The Word of the Day was LOVE, but it wasn’t used too much. Love is stronger than hate. I saw that displayed at the Super Bowl Sunday night.
We had a fun table topics session that had everyone laughing. We picked a card and read the question out loud and someone gave their answer. In addition, we also gave a thirty second response on how we can build membership. That’s the thing we need to work on to achieve our goal to be a Smedley Distinguished club in 2025-2026. We stand at 14, so we’ll need 11 to meet the requirement.
Right now at the point in the Toastmasters season, I stand at 5-5, and I will be putting all the chips in to ensure a great end to 2025-2026.
An officers’ meeting is coming up soon and the main topic will be membership.
Before the Laurel Highlands meeting on Tuesday, I attended a training session online. In attendance were some of our dignitaries as well as other members and two from District 10. The point of training was on membership and public relations. Area 23 Director Autumn did the PR training (I attended her TLI training) and Club Growth Director Lorie did the Membership training.
Three things I learned from both the Membership and PR trainings:
Membership–Renew, Reward, Recruit
Public Relations–People, Progress, Pride
Visiting five other clubs is something that’s not new to me, as I’ve visited other clubs plenty of times. Cranberry High Noon holds the most visits as I’m almost an unofficial member of the club. I’ve also visited Earlybirds and Johnstown, as well as Western Maryland (online). This June, when I’m off, I plan to visit South Hills in person.
This was what helped jump start my week and refueled my Toastmasters ride. While I’m not sure I can make the contests, I will be registering very soon for the Spring Conference. It will be the final event for District 13 as they get ready to merge with District 10 to form the new District 219.
The next training session is February 23. Our next three Laurel Highlands meetings are February 24, March 10, and March 24.
Stylish 🍒 