Category Archives: Our Club

19th September – meeting cancelled

Dear fellow toastmasters,

Unfortunately the meeting on 19th of September is cancelled due to problems with the venue.

Apologies for the inconvenience and thank you for understanding. More information will be shared soon.

 

Last meeting in January

Attina opened the meeting leaded by Nacho acting as Toastmaster of the Day. In my 6 months in Toastmasters this was the best one I have ever attended. Absolutely impressive! No doubt that the club, the oldest not only in Madrid but in Spain, is becoming more and more popular. As a matter of fact, the number of guests overcame the number of members.
Garth and Cristina came to the stage to explain their respective roles as Grammarian and Timekeeper providing support to the leader and members performing. After that, a short introduction with the “Book of the day” by Javier B.
IMG_3525The main body of the meeting consisted of three formal speeches delivered by Ana Díez, Maximilian Bergauer and Lucian Riestra. Well done colleagues! I am sure that all of us enjoyed them all and learned about body language, conflicts resolution and speech evaluation. Then, part of the toastmasters expertise: Navinya, Javier A and Mabel gave a well structured feed back that complemented the attendees personal views and opinions.
As usual, the second part of the meeting was focused on table topics and impromptu speeches acting Luis Pérez as Master. Due to time limitations only three members took part in the session, however short it was short but an excellent opportunity to show improvisation skills specially from Max. And eventually, the colourful and inspiring global evaluation by Benito.
Did you think of the real benefit of the meeting? Undoubtedly each of us got something valuable for himself. In my opinion we could benefit from three main issues:
1. A multicultural atmosphere with members and guests from different nationalities able to communicate and learn together.
2. The possibility of taking an active part in a meeting and improving our communication and leadership skills.
3. The chance to go further as there will be another meeting soon to practice more and more. Perfection does not exist, there is always room for improvement.

Written by Rosario

Working Behind The Scenes

An effective mentor is essential for a new member when taking his or her first steps at Toastmasters. It makes them feel more secure and that, as a club, we are interested in them. Given that we meet just twice a month and we are all “so pleased to see each other” we can look like a clique and a difficult group to break into.

A good mentor will give – in addition to guidance with the first four speeches – feedback on smaller roles taken, like Timer, Grammarian and Thought of the Day. They will introduce the mentee to other members and chase them up if they miss two meetings for example. A good mentor will also encourage the new member to set goals, a speech perhaps once every two months. While some mentees/mentors meet for a coffee to discuss speech ideas, I find it just as efficient using email. It is nice if this system is explained to our guests as it is reassuring, and it might even sway the balance in favor of joining Toastmasters.

VP of Mentorship is, in fact, a new committee position that we started in Madrid Toastmasters a few years ago in order to take some pressure off the VP of Membership. It has proved very successful and our sister club, Excelencia Toastmasters has also introduced the role. The VP of Mentorship can, for example, speak to new members before and after the meeting, while the VP of Membership can look after guests. It is helpful if the Sergeant at Arms, or Toastmaster of the Day, can be reminded to introduce these new members at the start of the meeting as they can easily be confused with visitors.

When looking for a mentor for someone I encourage the new member to come along to the main bar after the meeting where our free tapas await us. I introduce them to several members and observe what experienced member they chat to the longest, and the following day I suggest by email that they pair up! Another question to be kept in mind is that some of our members also join to improve their English, so it is quite useful to pair up a native with a non-native speaker.

Speech ContestThe VP of Mentorship should also leave some time to follow-up the introduction. Is the mentor actually being proactive? Are they still attending meetings? Some mentors may forget who they have been assigned (if they are mentoring several people) and a mentee may be waiting in the sidelines for the other person to take the initiative.

It is always a thrill when a member makes a tenth speech and becomes a Competent Communicator, but we should always remember that behind every successful speaker there stands a mentor!

Written by Jane Kinnear, CC, CL

Happy 15th Birthday, Toastmasters Madrid

Jack Campbell recieving the Madrid bannerToday is our official 15th birthday as a chartered club in Toastmasters. 15 years of Toastmasters in Spain, seeing how we grow in our skills by practicing in a safe environment. We asked the founder of our club, Jim Dodson, to tell us something about the beginnings of our club. Here you are his words.

It was in May of 1997, when I was invited to an initial start-up meeting. Lunch time at the Irish Rover Pub on Avenida de Brasil, 7. I had heard of Toastmasters before, when I lived in Sao Paulo. I had even attended two meetings as a guest in 1971. I could not join then, though.

This small group got together, maybe 6 or 7 of us, under the guidance of a young English Businessman. We met monthly for the lunch meeting, and having paid our fee, had manuals and a club number, 9605. Our Englishman leader left in September that year, being recalled back to the UK by his company. And he has not been heard from since! The meetings progressed, and we all advanced in this unchartered club.

The Founding Members (1998-99)

Then, in early 2000, Mike Monroy and his wife Jackie came to visit from Rota and convinced us to charter. Which finally happened in May of that year. The Rota club did so a couple of months later, followed by Palma de Mallorca and Marbella. Interesting to see how the same great idea blossomed at the same time in different places in Spain.

Oficial Charter Ceremony Gala Dinner

2001 came and Mike was back with a US Navy Lt. to encourage us to join the District. We “resisted” until 2002, as we were happy doing our thing, by ourselves.

Ed Macquisten, Mariana Zanchi and Valerie Hobson

Moving on, Toastmasters clubs then started throughout Spain, but in 2009 we were still only eight clubs, The ninth club was created (Standing Ovation), which was the beginning of the Division H in District 59, that comprised the Iberian Peninsula.

Dianne Kiddell and Peter Finch

The recent history of Toastmasters in Spain is a history of growth. People have realized Public Speaking and Leadership skills are both important and fun to develop and Toastmasters is the perfect environment for that. From being alone in Spain, our club is now part of a network of seven clubs in Madrid, with almost 400 members in Madrid, and roughly 1500 in Spain.

Thanks to Jim for the memories and Mike for the pictures.

From China With Love

Luciana was our Toastmaster of the Day. She conducted the meeting very cheerfully and efficiently. She had asked the speakers what their favorite festival was, so since we have members from all around the globe there was input from Moldavia, Brazil, the U.S. , Holland, Philippines, China (not to mention downtown Valladolid).bennyIMG_20150218_212922
Anselmo was out first speaker, who executed Project 2 (Organize Your Speech) with a very piquant speech called “Desire, Sex and Love” that had our Toastmaster of the Day rolling around in stitches. He took us through the different “breathtaking emotions that explode within us”…
The next speaker to brave the podium was Lilian with a Project 7 speech (Research Your Topic). Her speech was entitled “Something about sharing the economy” which took us through crowdfunding, AirBnB, car sharing and the importance of trust.
Raquel, Anselmo’s evaluator commended him for a very brave speech but suggested he kept his energy going throughout the speech.
Jim, Lilian’s evaluator, thought it was a good speech but that Lilian should avoid looking at the wall and ceiling for inspiration and that there weren’t enough statistics. (Somehow he got on to the subject of the President of the US….I wonder why)
Eric doing Table Topics impressed us with a blue file with lots of pockets that contained words and a question. His three “victims” (Jaime, Bobby and Julian) had the “opportunity” of answering the question using five of the words.erikIMG_20150218_210049
Carlos, evaluating Eric, congratulated him on the original idea and preparation, but he felt the exercise had been rather complicated.
Maria, our Grammarian then started wrapping up the meeting. She berated us for not using the word of the day enough which was “nuance”.
Alex A. gave us our times, berating two of our speakers for running off at the yellow light when they still had one minute to go.
wpid-img-20150218-wa0006.jpgBobby our visiting DTM from China and General Evaluator, said how much he had liked both us and the meeting. He complemented Luciana on successfully bridging the gap between the speakers and the audience. He then came to the defense of Lilian, pointing out that in his opinion she had in fact done plenty of research which was visible on the graphs she handed out. This had enabled the audience to get the point even better but he felt the content of her visual aids had been overlooked by her evaluator. Luciana was delighted with the present he handed her for our club at the end of his evaluation and Bobby left the stage wishing us all a very happy Year of the Sheep.
Jaime, our President, reminded us of our Speech and Evaluation competition on 4th March and Raquel closed the meeting.