Liverpool Speakers Club

On a cold, dark January night our members braved the traffic chaos that was brewing outside and came together for our first meeting of the year. That meeting was all about evaluation. David gave a short presentation about how to do an evaluation.

Critical evaluation is a very important skill in all facets of life, but in public speaking it’s really important. Honest feedback is how we learn and how we improve, and that’s not just hearing it but delivering it. There’s an art to giving feedback in a way that is positive and constructive, but also doesn’t come at the cost of the speaker’s confidence.

We did an exercise where David gave a speech- curiously about Grapefruit!- and everyone in the room made some notes while he was speaking. Then, they worked in small groups to turn that into an evaluation, which is a mini-speech in itself.

It was brilliant to see some of the newer members getting involved and dipping their toes into evaluation for the first time. Jake and John even managed to come up to the front and delivered their evaluations and did a fantastic job.

We then had an excellent topics session led by John Dove, and that proved to be great fun.

Our February meeting is on Feb 7th, so please come along! Guests are always welcome.

Happy new Year everyone!

2022 was a good year for Liverpool Speakers Club. We were faced with several challenges at the start of the year. It was our fist full year of being able to meet up after the pandemic. We have changed our regular meeting day from a Monday to a Wednesday, and it took some time for us to re-adjust as that wasn’t suitable for all members.

However, we’ve managed to regroup, pick up some new members who have been excellent additions to the club, and we feel that we’ve got some momentum going into the new year which we are very eager to build upon. We have also altered our membership fee structure, which we believe is far more suitable than our old way to face down the cost of living crisis.

We were also active in the wider speakers club community. We welcomed some members from Stockport Ladybrook and Manchester Peterloo to our meetings in 2022 as well as Area President Claire Tunnicliffe and District President Ann Bouget. We were delighted to be able to return the favour with David, our education director, acting as a judge in Stockport Ladybrook’s evaluation contest. Our members also fared well in area and district competitions this year.

Now that we feel as though we have adjusted to a new meeting day, we have some big plans for 2023. We want to focus on constantly changing up the format of the meetings, re-emphasise education and development of our members, not just in terms of speaking but we can teach critical evaluation and how to chair meetings.

We also want to develop the social side of the club to make it feel like a community.

In short, we have a lot of ideas for this year, so watch this space! We would love for you to be a part of it, so please feel free to come along to one of our meetings any time.

Well, 2021 was only marginally better than 2020 wasn’t it?

Once again, we spent the bulk of our year confined to virtual meetings.

However, in November we were able to hold our first in-person meeting in 18 months, and again in December we were back in-person.

The online meetings certainly served a purpose, and allowed the club to keep going and for us all to keep in touch and keep our skills up, but it’s so much better being back to seeing each other in person!

Hopefully, we’ll be able to keep this up throughout 2022.

2022 is a momentous year for the club. We’ll be celebrating our Diamond Jubilee this year as it is our 60th anniversary of our foundation. We’re hoping to mark that with a celebratory dinner and we’ll be looking to come up with some special events. Watch this space!

In the meantime, our first meeting of the year is on Wednesday 12th January. This is because our venue isn’t open yet on Mondays, but the plan is to revert back to Monday once this happens. So, if public speaking was one of your New Year’s Resolutions, then please come along and see how we can help!

For the first time since March 2020, Liverpool Speakers Club will be meeting in person!

During the past 20 months, the club has kept going online and we’ve done well but we’re all very excited to be able to get back to meeting in person.

The meeting will be on Wednesday 10th November at 7:30pm. As always, guests are more than welcome so please come down if you want to give speaking a go!

Finally, there are reasons to be optimistic!

The evenings are getting lighter, the temperature is getting warmer and we can finally see a way out of the troubled year we’ve had.

The club has kept going through the past year. Although we’ve not met in person since March 2020, we’ve managed to keep virtual meetings going throughout. It looks like we’ll have to continue meeting that way for now, but hopefully we’ll be able to met in person sometime later this year. We are still meeting on the second Monday of the month, and all meetings are being done via Zoom. Guests are still welcome to attend, so please contact us via email or through our socials and we’ll give you the link so you can jin us and get a taste of what the club is about and how we can help you meet your public speaking goals!

Liverpool Speakers Club has been meeting since 1962, but never like this! As we aren’t able to meet up in person for the time being, we decided the next best thing to do is meet up online.

This first meeting was just a catch-up, and a test of the technology to see if it’s feasible to hold meetings via Zoom.

We then had a quick topics session, where our members discussed what they’ve been up to during the lockdown, which has ranged from working on the front line of nursing, participating in hackathons to help find a technical solution to the effects of the virus on society all the way to kicking a ball around the garden and playing a lot of FIFA!

Our next meeting will be on May 4th. Guests are still welcome so please get in touch if you want to join us then!

Due to Covid-19 and the necessary social distancing measures that are in place, the club cannot meet as normal for the time being.

But, that doesn’t mean we can’t meet at all.

For the first time in the 58-year history of the club, we will be having an online meeting on Monday April 20th at 8pm.

Our first meeting will be a short topics session just to test the technology and to see how we need to adapt our meetings to the change in circumstances.

We may have shortened this meeting so that everyone got home before storm Ciara got too bad, but that didn’t stop our members from coming along and making February’s meeting a big success.

Maggie gave a great speech about the importance of sleep, then David bravely gave an impromptu speech about why it’s too soon to worry about Coronavirus!

Following a break, Satya chaired a great topics session where we covered topics such as ‘do we make our own luck?’, ‘what is a fair exchange’ and Adrian told us all about golddust!

We were also delighted to welcome Ruth to the club as a new member!

Our next meeting is on March 9th and we’ll be practicing another form of speaking by having some mini-debates!