TOASTMASTERS helps members improve their public speaking, presentation and leadership skills. TRANSFORMERS CLUB meets the 2nd and 4th Monday's of the month at the Morningside Country Club in Johannesburg, South Africa. Come and visit us to see what TOASTMASTERS is all about!
Theme for 2011/2012: The Club is the newest member

John-Peter reveals the laughter in life

Monday's Transformers meeting saw an amazing variety of speeches, from varied levels of the manuals.
Congratulations must firstly go to John-Peter who successfully presented his CC1, with his speech entitled "Finding my Laughter" which gave us an insight into his life.

Rod engaged the audience with his speech entitled, "Cognition, perception and perceptual blindness", where he proved that if we focus our attention on a particular item we become oblivious to other things happening around it. How many people saw the gorilla?!

Keith simplified the Eskom dilemma of "Load Forecasting" with a presentation that illustrated the main consumption and anticipated growth sectors in South Africa.

Our guest speaker Ian Bratt, entertained us with "Opportunity Knocks", a pair of personal stories that had made an impact on successes in his life.
He delved in the stages of his rugby endeavours and provided a message for all of us to take home.

Ruth then took control of the table topics session, which was highly entertaining. She challenged all participants to choose one animal that they would like to be for just one hour of their lives, and asked them to explain why.

Rod presents perceptual blindness

Rod opened the floor with his desire to be an eagle, soaring above the earth with amazing views of the world.
Next up was Ian who was a shark, with views of the underworld. He surfaced for a while to scare off some people on the beach.
Keith was third and chose to be a sloth, for the simple reason that he just wanted to hang around and do absolutely nothing.
John-Peter jetted off to Australia to be a kangaroo for an hour, particularly because he wanted to feel what it was like to have an embryo growing outside of his body.
Glenice wanted to be a cheetah on one specific day, in order to have a record-breaking Comrades run.
And lastly Mary wanted to be one her cats, so that, apart from being pampered, she could get an understanding of what her feline companions get up to during the day.

Opportunity Knocks
Guest speaker Ian

Our word master grammarian, Jackie, gave us the word "Victual/ vittle", which means food supplies or provisions and a number of speakers managed to slip it in during the evening.

It emerged that the theme of the evening, autumn, is not only a very colourful season, but also one of the top 100 most popular names for US girls!

Join us on the 20th of April for our next meeting.
In addition, our Area contest takes place on the 15th of April at Hatch Toastmasters in Woodmead, whilst the Division H contest is provisionally set for the 22nd, Election Day.

As always, guests and visitors are welcome!