Rotary Central Melbourne Breakfast Online Meeting Report (Zoom Meeting)
Tuesday 11th July 2023
Posted by Kerrie Hicks
President Michelle Crawford opened the meeting with an acknowledgement of country and warmly welcomed those in attendance including our guest speaker Dr G and visitors Sashi and Buddhima Edi and acknowledging the terrific turn out. President Michelle suggested for those who are not aware of the lands they are on for acknowledgements, to consider researching via their local council website.
President Michelle advised that Pamela, Doug’s wife, has been in touch and thanked RCM for our well wishes. President Michelle acknowledged and thanked Rebecca and Neville John for the support they provide to our members and their loved ones.
President Michelle welcomed and congratulated David Laurie on becoming an Australian Citizen. David advised it was a great ceremony at the Collingwood Town Hall and is a real honour to hold an Australian passport. His Aussie accent is continuing to develop!
Member Milestones
Member Birthdays
Campbell Chambers, 16th July
Bruce Heron, 18th July
Partner Birthdays
NIL
Wedding Anniversary
Koren Harvey and David Batty, together 10 years since 13 July 2013
Date Joined Rotary
Peter Duras: 50 years Rotary Service on 12th July – WOW! Congratulations and thankyou for your service, Peter.
Meeting Chair, Rana Ebrahimi, raised a toast to Rotary International and introduced guest speaker Guest Speaker Gihan Jayaweera, also known as “Dr G”.
Finding Happiness and Balance: A Doctor’s Perspective on the Challenges at Each Stage of Life
Dr Gihan Jayaweera is a GP, speaker, coach and podcaster dedicated to helping people find happiness and balance in each stage of their lives. Dr G’s experience as a General Practitioner has provided him a crash course in the human condition. Dr G outlined the 3 games we play in life and how we usually approach these three games in silos, isolated to one another.
1. The Happiness Game - relationships with important people in your life and yourself. Are you truly happy?
2. The Health Game – more of a physiological game – sleep, exercise, diet, fitness. Are you healthy?
3. The High-Performance Game – fun game, income and wealth, accumulation of power and influence over time, the amount of impact we create in the world. Are you performing at a high level?
The aim of any game is to win and the art of it is understanding the synergy model when these games interact together. Dr G discussed 3 stages of life and encouraged an increase in one domain of life e.g. health, can lead to an increase in all domains of life i.e. high performance and happiness.
1. The busy professional, aged in your 30-40s your growing family, generally purpose is to grow career and to provide for your family. A key challenge in this stage is work life balance. High Performance can go up at the expense of happiness and health.
2. The transition to semi-retirement, aged in your 50-60s. This may be the stage of transitioning to an empty nest and taking on the responsibility of ageing parents. This is a fun stage of life where we tend to reap a lot of rewards of hard work. High performance is still high and the biggest barrier that comes up is often health.
3. The transition from semi-retirement to retirement when our purpose is around connection with family and friends, maybe grandchildren with a big focus on longevity. Health is a key challenge and the sometimes insidious challenge of loss of identify, especially for high performers who derive a lot of passion from their work.
Dr G provided a role model of Dr Gladys McGarey who is 102 years old and considers anyone under 90 years old to be young. She is still working as a doctor, volunteering, recently published a book, podcasts, TED talks, walks 3500 steps a day, and is healthy, happy, full of love and surrounded by love.
Dr G provided invited RCM members to email him at Drg@drgihan.com putting “Rotary Central Melbourne” in the Subject Line to receive a copy of his white paper on Work-life Balance and shared these 3 useful tips: 1. Set aside time – audit all domains of your life, course correct as needed.
2. Set aspirational goals in all areas – have exciting goals for High Performance and Health.
3. Design for synergy – believe that it is possible.
Member Announcements
Rebecca John: Youth Projects Update, thank you for the sleeping bags provided. There is now a need for toiletries for female clients, items such as small soap, toothpaste, female sanitary items, and small shampoo / conditioner. Maureen Jackson is coordinating the collection and has asked to please see what you can find and bring to the in person meeting on Tuesday 1st august. For further information or questions: Maureenjackson23@gmail.com.
Roger Thornton: A reminder of the tree planting day on Philip Island on Saturday Aug 12th in conjunction with Landcare group. Tree planting fits the happiness category that Dr G spoke about! Roger shared last time he participated he felt exhausted but satisfied with the tangible achievement and encouraged others to participate this year. Please contact Roger or Kevin Love by the end of July if you are interested.
Suvam Ganguli: Meeting change pilot is underway. Our first F2F meeting was on 4th July at RACV in the Theatrette which was lovely and set up well for us, you don’t even need a microphone. Suvam noted with any transition there are always minor issues, and the bistro hadn’t been told we were attending. This issue has since been fixed and RACV have assured us that from our next F2F all will be in order. Tables will be put aside for members to sit at, and you can either order from the buffet menu at $29, a la carte menu and pay a la carte prices or you don’t have to have breakfast and can just have a coffee. This provides a lot more flexibility for with our hope to see more members at F2F meetings to enjoy company and fellowship. Suvam thanked everyone for their patience and support for the pilot and welcomed ideas and questions to SuvamG@gmail.com. Suvam also advised he is taking a new members suggestion to the board and will provide and update in a couple of weeks. The link for online meetings will be included in future bulletins and can also be found on the club calendar on our website.
President Announcements and Closing Remarks
1. Gratitude to and acknowledgement of the stellar work of David Jones organising speakers. We are now transitioning to Justine Murphy who will perform the coordinator role. We would love to tap into RCM networks for speaker suggestions. Please email any suggestions to Justine or President Michelle.
2. There will be a 2.7% increase in fees ($345) per year. $260 will be directed to Rotary International. Whilst preference is a one-off payment, if anyone would like support or an alternate two payment instalment please let President Michelle know. President Michelle noted the reduction in cost to attend F2F meetings makes the membership price increase more accessible.
3. Earlier this year, Rana, Rhys, Doug and President Michelle developed a funding submission and are very happy to update that a $7.5K grant has been approved to hold a friendship dinner during Ramadan in 2024. Thank you to those involved in preparing funding submission.
4. President Michelle thanked Dr G for his presentation and shared these resources:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/solve-for-greatness/id1602161106
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jun/05/a-new-start-after-60-i-was-devastated-by-divorce-at-70-but-at-102-i-know-the-secrets-of-a-well-lived-life
President Michelle concluded the meeting, acknowledging our 2023-2024 Rotary Theme: Create HOPE in the World and shared a quote from Dale Carnegie: “Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.”
