The Spring 2015 Toastmasters District 71 (UK & Ireland) conference took place in Nottingham.
Nottingham is quite a happening city. There was plenty of people out in the evenings and a good range of restaurants. We also did a walking tour lead by Robin Hood. He told us that the city was originally called “Snotingaham” which it turns out is true.
Workshops
The workshops were a mixed back. You get a lot of professional speakers and motivational coaches running workshops, and they send to speak a lot of shit. Erick Rainey for example started his speech with a slow motion run down the aisle. I thought to myself “brilliant, this is going to be a sarcastic post-modern take on how stupid a lot of the motivational crap is”. But then he did it all seriously. He’s a great communicator, and has loads of good stuff to say, but then he mixes it with nonsense like NLP.
Rav Chambers presented a good workshop on video. It did not teach me anything I did not know already, but it was valuable to have a reminder of all the things I know I should be doing when shooting film.
Vinay Parmar’s workshop on personal branding was interesting. However, for someone who focuses on how you present yourself, he really needs to spell-check his slides as there were several errors in them.
International Speech Contest
The district final of the International Speech Contest took place on the Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t the best venue for it as it was in a lecture theatre. The speeches were good, but I am looking forward to getting back to competing. Two years ago, in Torquay, I felt out-classed (to be clear, I wasn’t competing). Here, I sat there thinking there are a bunch of us in Area 15 that could compete at this level.
Opening ceremony
The Friday evening is a buffet and fancy dress party. Of course the theme was Robin Hood!
Gala dinner
The Saturday night was the Gala dinner. We had the Sheriff of Nottingham as a guest and for one of the raffle prizes, she let someone wear her robes and hat! Best of all, Gillian took the prize.
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Tags: conference, nottingham, robin hood, speech contest, Toastmasters
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2015 at 10:23 am and is filed under Public Speaking, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.