The day after the three Wise Men visited Madrid to distribute presents among all Toastmasters, we had the first meeting of the year with the participation of 18 members and 3 guests, not bad considering the date. The reward that we got for attending was good pieces of learning about public speaking.

The agenda had for us two Thoughts of the Day, delivered by Julian and John, and two project speeches of the Competent Communication Manual: an Icebreaker by Rosa and the project #7 by Alberto, who had to present his research about a topic. Finally, the Table Topics Session had four participant speakers improvising answers around the topic of unexpected Christmas Presents. Let´s summarize what we could learn out from the participations.

Julian engaged the audience right from the start speaking with a topic almost everyone relates: the new year resolutions, this time with a twist, the negative aspects of having them. This unexpected perspective caught our attention and he enriched with humour his speech.

John did a review of the acclaimed TV Series Breaking Bad, no spoiler intended, which he had recently discovered. He used it to speak about how a loser transforms himself into a powerful person. John provided a perfect example of speech flow and voice projection.

The Icebreaker from Rosa had us getting to know many facettes about her life, from family and traditions to her professional life as medicine doctor. As soon as she eased into the first lines of the speech the passion and confidence when speaking about herself were evident. She managed therefore to master this important milestone for a public speaker.

Alberto spoke about the problem of longitude measurement at sea and the invention of the maritime chronometer. He started with a powerful visual hook, imitating a spyglass with a rolled pirate flag, in order to engage the audience into the more technical aspects that would come later. With clear examples and data he managed to have the audience remembering the key facts about his speech.

The table topics session had Jaime presenting the theme of Christmas Presents, then describing specific situations so that everyone in the audience had some context and seconds to find an answer. The participants who were then picked up and called to the stage, Wanda, Maria, Alex and Lucía, managed to develop entertaining answers within the time alloted of 1 to 2 minutes.

On the evaluation side, Eva offered a good point for Alberto to enhance his good research speech by suggesting to include personal anectodes the audience could relate with. Nacho stressed the good points of Rosa´s speech in order to encourage her to keep delivering on stage.

We had good feedback on the use of grammar by Jane and Jim, as general evaluator, recommended the timer to address each participant in the session by name when reporting the times.

Written by Jaime.