Pune SHG weekly meet – 12 Sep 2010

p { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; } Pune SHG met this Sunday (We meet every weekend, with a very few exceptions. Now we also need to focus on writing a report for every meet). Anshul, Devang, Jai, Vipin and Suraj were present. Since it was Ganpati utsav, a pandal was playing music with speakers on full, we thought of giving meditation a miss and we started with our introductions and setting a goal for the meet. A member is expected to follow his/her goal religiously throughout the meet and other members also make sure that it happens. So once we had our aims in front of us, we started the race 🙂 . The meeting makes more sense once each member has a goal and then gets involved in the activities to fulfill that goal. The next activity was word association game where a participant starts with a word and the next person says a word associated with the last word and we continue in a circle. We could see that the goal setting made the activity more interesting, fun and challenging. We made sure that everyone of us at least tried to do what we had set the expectations for us. Next was the impromptu speech round. Anshul with experience of around ten years in IT was the main evaluator for rest of us. Since we were only five, we did this activity twice and noted the improvements as result of constructive feedback in the first round. We also learned the art of giving feedback. e.g. – a feedback should always start with the positive points first and then the negatives with suggestions. Required to giving feedback also makes you listen and observe more attentively. A quality most people including PWS always lack at. Another observation from this activity was that – most of us don’t read/write very often and hence lack clarity of thought and knowledge, and hence confidence. I feel another important factor to stammer with confidence is having knowledge about the topic and clarity of thoughts. So, let us all pledge to read at least for half an hour per day. As observed in the first two activities, some of us were feeling it tough to stick to their goals due to its complexity. So we reset our goals and made them very basic for this activity – my goal it to use bouncing or my goal is to make eye contact or my goal is to smile 🙂 . Next was one word story where one of us gave a topic and then we made a story by speaking once word after other and hence forming sentences and the story. We also had some good laugh with some unexpected twists and turns. We concluded the meet with giving suggestions and feedback as to how to improve the meetings. Before leaving we also went out to check the beautiful pandal right next to our meeting hall and then dispersed. Next week we are going to do video recordings of our impromptu speeches so as to catalogue our stammer and eliminate our secondary behavious.