Respect

Karen, our Chair, started the meeting narrating an experience she had last week at the local ravine. A local citizen 'disrespected' the boundaries that the City had marked out for a construction project. Karen shared her thoughts about how it's important to respect the boundaries. If we don't, we could end up hurting ourselves or someone else in the process. I could see that she was passionate about this topic. Maybe this could be a speech we could hear from Karen in the future. We had 1 new guest attend the meeting.
Our 2 speakers today, Melrose and Marcia, delivered their speech #8, Get Comfortable with Visual Aids, today. Both of them have unique styles that help them shine in different ways. Melrose talked about ANTs. I was expecting her talk to be about how ants are so disruptive and it's difficult to remove them. Her speech was all about that, however, the ANTs were Automatic Negative Thoughts that plague every one of us now and then. Her speech was inspired by a book she recently read. I thought it was very clever. With her effervescent personality, Melrose makes difficult topics quite fun to learn! Since this project was about getting creative with visual aids, I would've liked to see Melrose be more creative with the visual aids in their speeches.See her speech here. Marcia has a very professional style of speaking. She seems confident and in control of her topic. Marcia shared her experience volunteering at various organizations and encouraged the audience to consider volunteering to make a difference. She brought one of her T-shirts and shared a booklet where her name was displayed in the list of volunteers. See her speech here.
Pam conducted the Table Topics session. She posed questions to the audience keeping the meeting theme in mind. Tie added his own humorous twist to the idea of mutual respect. He shared how it's important not to have respect all the time because many jobs (e.g counselors, lawyers) make their living out of this! Needless to say, he won the Table Topics session today! Anthony rounded up the meeting as the General Evaluator. Christine and I will be speaking next week, both from our Storytelling manuals! Better get going on that!