To Be Or Not To Be

 

The Speedrun in Summary

Here's a little showreel of the whole speedrun.

Its quality isn't very good, because I had to make it from Zoom or smartphone recordings, often without very good audio, and from scans, screenshots and PowerPoints. Also my video editing skills are nothing special. But this blog was never about film-making and I'm not intending to make it about that, now.

This may be the final post to this blog. This has been a blast! I really enjoyed the whole process. And I must end on another "Thank You" - not just to everyone who is listed at my acknowledgements post, but to everyone involved in any way or in the audience at any point - and to you if you've enjoyed reading this blog. Thank you.

Pathway Completion Certificate

 

UPDATE: And here's the pin:

Basecamp Scorecard - After the Speedrun

 

Reflect on Your Path

This was the very last speech of the pathway, given at Cardiff Toastmasters exactly two weeks after the icebreaker of the same path. 

Here it is:

I tried to set up the meeting as a livestream. I had invited everyone to it, but since I hadn't had a following during the speedrun it seemed unlikely anyone would attend online. In fact I was delighted to see Aki Yoshida of Sapporo Pioneers Toastmasters, who left this lovely message:

The main reason I was determined to get it on Zoom was so that videos would be available for this blog. Here is Ken Evans' very kind evaluation:

And here are extracts from his evaluation form:

Here are the evaluation slips. I quite like the really big one at the top:

I was delighted to win "Best Speaker" this evening:

Finally, there was a presentation, which I was really chuffed with:

A massive "Thank You" with knobs on, to Cardiff Toastmasters' members and committee.

Wye Knot

As a social event, I thought the Wye Knot meeting, and its continuation afterwards in the pub opposite, was the most fun I had during the speedrun. They are a very friendly and supportive club. And while I'm supremely grateful to all the clubs I met on zoom, without whom the speedrun could not have succeeded, I do think Toastmasters is at its best when conducted live face-to-face.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I struggled more with the level 2 speeches than others, but in the end I was quite proud of this one. I'm grateful for some conversations I had with Helyn Ashford and with Alistair Driscoll on the evening of the meeting, which helped me to inject some meaning into a speech which had previously - in my head - just been a series of anecdotes.

I don't have any videos. Here are the evaluation slips. You have no idea how long I had to spend with a scanner, printer and double-sided-sticky-tape to achieve this:

I had another role, too. I was doing the "Active Listening" project, which involves being the Table Topics Master for the evening. I used a theme which I've done before: "The H G Wells Time Travel Club", in which the audience have survived their journey from 1922, and we have some experts in the room to give them a briefing on various aspects of modern life.

Here are extracts from Rick Cooper's evaluation of it:

Lead in Any Situation

I don't have any videos of my "Lead in Any Situation" talk, although I do have the PowerPoint slide set that I used, and here they are. My 360 degree evaluations were mostly positive, which was nice, although I did speak as honestly as I could in the talk about some of the conflicts we had to deal with.