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New Year… New Website

Welcome to the new web for the first Toastmasters Club in Spain, Toastmasters Madrid. Its content has been created to be useful both for the visitors that arrive to our web curious about what Toastmasters is about, and for the members that are already part of our club. The main idea behind the change is to make it a live page, with more interaction and more frequent updates.

It contains information about the different tracks we have in Toastmasters, about the kind of people that belong to the club, our meetings, how to join Toastmasters, or who are now the current officers and what they do.

As an image is worth more than a thousand words, we have also included a Resources section, where you can find some speeches texts and videos. If you have any speech online (written or recorded), share it with us and we will publish them.

If you are already a member, the new Members Area contain useful information for your membership and evolution in Toastmasters, as well as some resources for the officers. We have also included some historical information that we have collected about the club (archaeology in the files).

Banner-ToastmastersMadrid-Since2000

The most important new feature in this website is what you are reading: a blog. We will use the blog to communicate news about the club both for the club members and for the rest of our visitors. We expect you (yes, you!) to collaborate in this blog whenever you feel like by writing meeting summaries, or creating specific posts about any related topic. Note that you have a small form to subscribe to the blog updates in your e-mail.

Last but not least, as we always like to do it in Toastmasters, some feedback and credit. All feedback is welcome, so take a look to the web, and let us know any idea you may have to make it better. And let us thank the team that has created this page by giving ideas and creating content: Luciana, Fabiola, Jorge, Guillermo, Susana, Pilar, José, Jane, Jim, Raquel, Jaime, Javier and Nacho.

Meeting Summary – 17/12/2014

Public Speaking is a challenge for almost anybody without any speech disorder, so imagine how it can be if you must practice that suffering stuttering. This was a common idea that came to our mind when the first guest introduced himself, Ben, from Israel, and told us about the club he is creating back home in the Israeli Stuttering Association, where he is the president. This visiting Toastmasters also participated as Timekeeper of the Day.

The meeting agenda contained one Icebreaker (first speech in the club) and two projects number 4 from the Competent Communication Manual (“How To Say It”), so there were many good examples on the usage of the language in oral communications to effectively communicate your message in a specific context. Just one from each speaker:

“Expect nothing, appreciate everything” (Tony Bryant)

“Your life is in your friend’s hands” (Jesús Clemente)

“You are skeptic or you are a Harry Potter like me” (Maria Marjevscaia)

The two first ones make you reflect, and survive the speech itself. They are powerful to stick the message in the audience’s brain. The last one had a specific purpose during her speech: connecting the audience to the speech, to the speaker, and introducing a piece of humour with the reference to Harry Potter.

The club’s founder, and Distinguished Toastmaster, Jim Dodson, offered us an interesting Table Topics session, and served as inspiration for future Table Topics Master in the future. He commented some news, making everybody be part of the story and form an opinion about it, and suddenly dropped the question to the victims. The main advantage of this technique is that you make everybody be prepared for the question, so that everybody participates in a way, and the speaker is ready for the mini-speech.

Written by Nacho