January 30th Review

The Toastmaster of the day was Julia, whose theme of the day was vacation. She talked about how she would soon be going on vacation, and her love of spending time with her family. Laurie W was the evaluator of the day, who reminded us to talk about the objectives of the speech and complimented Svetlana on her evaluation of Lakota's speech. She also complimented Svetlana on her unique perspective for how Lakota can improve his speech through his online background.
Lakota was the first speaker of the day, who gave his first Pathways icebreaker. He talked about his love for adventure. From skiing, fire fighting, and jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, Lakota loved the thrill of the adrenaline rush. As a wildland firefighter, Lakota travels to go fight fires around the United States. After a very bad injury that his friend got on the job, Lakota decided to tame down his job, and not go into the most risky positions. During this transition, he decided to take up meditation and he goes on sabbatical to take time for himself. As he started down that journey, Lakota found that both meditation and jumping out of airplanes giving him the same type of peace through presence of mind. Svetlana loved his speech, and all of his mini stories that he told throughout his speech. She said that Lakota was very good at eye contact, and being able to tell his stories in an engaging way. One of the suggestions that Svetlana had was that he could put up an engaging background to enhance his online presence.
Avital was the second speaker of the day, whose speech was from the better speaker series. She gave the example of an airplane taking off, which is the same as a speech taking off where the most problems can occur during the beginning of the speech. Avital talked about how you can start with participation, such as asking a question to your audience, or take a poll of your audience. Another way that a speaker can start the speech is through suspense. As an example, Avital started pretending to lurk around, stalk a creature that was not there, and preen herself. "I am a cat!" she said as the answer to who she was. Lee was the step in evaluator for her speech. He loved how Avital used different personas throughout the speech to add interest. Another thing that Lee liked about the speech was that she used the plane example because it made a lot of sense for how it could go wrong. One suggestion that Lee had for Avital is to make sure her visual aids are up and can be seen by everyone.
There were no table topics because of time restraint. The word of the day is sabbatical by Christa. The timer of the day was Linda.