Minutes from Friday, May 9, 2025
Sunrise Toastmasters
This week’s meeting started with a warm welcome from our President, Toastmaster Kerstin Haase. She commented on change and a recent Executive Order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” and the potential this has for affecting museums such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. This led us into our moment of silence in recognition of the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing struggle for racial equality. She concluded with reminders such as use of the bias flag as a tool toward becoming conscientious speakers before turning the meeting over to our Toastmaster of the Day, Toastmaster Bettina Ross. Tina Joe introduced the word of the day, “fortitude”. It is a powerful word defined as having a strength of mind to encounter danger, pain, or adversity and to face it with courage. She was herself an example of fortitude this morning, having endured several days of vertigo and a sick child over night, and yet summoned the strength to show up for “her Toastmasters!”
Toastmaster Norris Bass introduced our first speaker, Toastmaster Kendra Hiatt who spoke on the topic “Reflections on Move-in Days”. Kendra mentioned her friend who’s daughter and only child will be going to college in the Fall, and how this has been recalling her experiences with her own children, Olivia and Evan. She described the need to have and exhibit fortitude for Olivia, who was unexpectedly emotional that day. Kendra had to control her own emotions in order to support Olivia, as it would have been no help if she had not remained strong. In contrast, a year later, dropping off Evan was a completely different experience. He was excited to spread his wings and start school! After a hard day of moving in, running to the Student store, back to the dorm, and finally to the car, Evan was ready to be on his own. He chose to not join his parents for lunch. This time, Kendra needed to have the fortitude to sustain her own emotions in order to be strong and not dampen her son’s excitement.
Toastmaster Dave Burr introduced our second speaker, Toastmaster Summer Murphy who is learning to speak Spanish in her new home and focusing on a pathway goal of using expression and body language, presented a talk completely en Español! Her excellent use of hand gestures and expressions told the tale of 2 sisters playing with their Lite-Brite™ toy, and one of them swallowing one of the plastic colored pegs used to make colorful pictures such as flowers or rainbows. It was quite an adventure that ended up with a trip to the hospital and cost $500 when all was said and done. Summer was engaging and it was surprisingly easy to understand “the gist” of the tale for those of us who do not speak the language due to her expressive use of body language. ¡ Muy bien!
Table Topics was led by Toastmaster Anu Parvatheni, whose presented who had purposed today’s questions to focus on personal or conceptual examples of fortitude. Kim felt fortitude represented pushing through to the end and was different than resilience which represented maintaining a position in spite of challenges. Toastmaster Matthew Choate shared the fortitude it takes to manage an 8 month old puppy and remained focused on training. Toastmaster Savannah Murphy felt that too little fortitude prevents a person from moving forward while too much fortitude was comparable to being overly goal-focused and could lead to burn out. Toastmaster Tim Murphy shared that he had difficulty defining the role of his personal inner strength and how it contributed to fortitude because one never really knows how nurture versus nature shaped oneself. Dave described the fortitude found in responding to obstacles, his difficulty in setting realistic limits, and the best outcomes occur when he takes time to think it through first.
We then moved onto the Breakfast of Champions, speech and meeting evaluations. Savvy served as our General Evaluator, turning it over to Norris to complete Speaker 1 evaluation and then to Dave to complete Speaker 2 evaluation. Kerstin and Dave filled the roles of Timer and Grammarian.
Word salad from today:
Jelly wobbly
Trudging
She really makes us happy when she’s not destroying stuff
Just being here
Roles for Friday, May 16, 2025 are as follows:
Toastmaster: Tim
Speaker 1: Matthew
Speaker 2: Dave
Table topics: Kerstin
Gen Evaluator: Norris
Evaluator 1: Abdulrahman
Evaluator 2: Kendra
Timer: Savannah
Grammarian: (Open)
