April 20th Eagle Toastmaster Virtual Meeting

Eagles,

Last night, we had 15 people join us for a virtual meeting. Here is why we were all smiling….

It all started with our Virtual Sergeant at Arms, Sandra Centorino, starting up the meeting…..on time. She opened up with her usual high energy, introducing our President and Toastmaster of the evening, Christine Austin. Christine got right to the point and introduced Speaker #1……Tony Centorino.

Yours Truly gave a speech about his High Performance Leadership Project, Pathways Now! (That is “Now” with a “!”). Tony shared the results of his project along with the talent and teamwork that ensured the project’s success. A very, very, special thanks to the team….Sandra Centorino, Kate Kelly, and Christine Austin!

Speaker #2 was Ann McGuire. Ann spoke from the Pathways Persuasive Influence Path Level 2 project “Introduction to Toastmaster Mentoring”. Ann talked about the many mentors in her life, specifically naming 5 of them……She also coined the de facto word of the day when she said “luuuuv mentor”. Ann’s overall message is that you can learn something from everybody….her call to action was for each one of us to think about who our mentors are.

Maryanne Shirshac, our third speaker, spoke out of the Pathways Project “Connect with your Audience”. Maryanne’s project was to speak of a topic that would be unfamiliar with her audience. Her topic was accounting. Maryanne explained that accounting goes far beyond the numbers…..Accounting is about collecting, analyzing, communicating and presenting. Maryanne also shared that she joined Toastmasters to help her with the communicating and presenting. Something she did well in her speech!

While the evaluators were feverishly completing their forms, Diana Grippen, ran our Table Topics. Diana engaged almost all of the remaining Eagles that had non-speaking roles. We learned how Deep Tawari keeps his sanity during our physically isolated times, Sandra’s adventures to Florida in an RV, Debbie Herget’s humorous moments, and how Maryanne was locked in her bathroom. We learn the strangest things at Toastmasters! My apologies to Abhi Palande for not hearing his Table Topic as I was engrossed in trying to complete Maryanne’s evaluation form.

Thank you to all of the dignitaries that participated in our meeting not mentioned above….Chris Scoppetta (General and Speech Evaluator), and fellow evaluators Christine Austin and Tony Centorino. Ann McGuire served as our Grammarian…..and Markus Schumacher humbled many of us as the Ah Counter….complete with a screen share of bar charts. If he keeps this up, he will be the permanent Ah Counter!

Our next meeting will be another virtual experience (really!) and will take place on 5/4. Please sign up for a role……Ann – please sign up to be our Toastmaster….you will luuuuuv it!

Tony Centorino

Eagle Toastmaster Secretary