Conference.

As a Toastmaster, going for a district conference is always something to look forward to.  And for a rather  newbie Toastmaster like myself, it was also very exciting.  I was looking forward to the competitions, looking forward to the workshops, looking forward to the keynote speeches, and of course, looking forward to meet Toastmasters from other parts of South China.  You could be surprised, but the way Toastmasters is developing in China is so quick that it was really amazing to see all these clubs springing up, and many of them are getting a lot prestigious recognitions from Toastmasters International.

The Conference itself was very fruitful.  The keynote speech by Dr Vikas Jhingran was a very enlightening one because he touched on things that I previously didn’t really think about – talk about inspirations from a world champion!  And then the workshops were also very useful and while some of them were giving me a lot to think about, I would say that I learned quite a lot through them.  These workshops gave me new perspective for my speeches in the future and I hope I could see improvements from my speeches.

And of course, what would a Conference be like without the competitions?  The evaluation and humourous speech contests were held during the Conference and I would think the results generally fell within my expectations with a couple of surprises.  But what I really felt strongly about was the level of English of the Toastmasters from Mainland China, as well as their competency in speech delivery, were just excellent.  In fact some of them were so good that they made a lot of us in Hong Kong look bad.  Of course it isn’t fair to compare like that, but I would really think that we in Hong Kong have a lot of work to do if we want to keep our level high.  And I am confident that with hard work and support from the Toastmasters community, we would be able to produce a world champion from Hong Kong!

One slightly down side about the trip was that besides the venue of the conference, I hardly had time to tour around Huizhou and it was pretty much straight back to Hong Kong after the end of the event.  I think perhaps the next time I would just take one or two days of leave so that I could have some time to walk around!