January Open House Was a Success!

When I walked into the Top of Texas Toastmasters meeting this morning, I was greeted with a host of members and guests mingling and chatting before the meeting. It's meetings like this that make me pleased to be club president. I was especially proud because this particular meeting was the Open House!

I have never attended an Open House, but these kinds of meetings focus on introducing potential new members to how a meeting is run so that they can understand Toastmasters, our club culture, and how they might find their fit here.


We had a superb Toastmaster with Jodie Sanders taking the helm in explaining how Toastmasters can help anyone, how we all can use Toastmasters to "Break the Barrier," and she introduced our two speakers, Susanne Nickerson and Marshall Lehr. Susanne's speech was especially befitting for the Open House meeting, "Toastmasters and the Alphabet Soup," as she discussed how one can move about from being a newly minted Toastmaster to becoming a Distinguished Toastmaster (and all the acronyms in between), emphasizing how it is totally self-paced and not meant at all to be daunting. Marshall followed that with another encouraging speech, "From Doubt to Daring: One Simple Step," which encouraged us all that the difference between those two is simply saying "yes."

 Following the speeches were our Table Topics to give speakers the chance to speak on the fly, and one of our guests volunteered to speak, and not only that she won Table Topics!

With six guests in attendance this was a successful and fun Open House.

DeAnna Wolf