Category Archives: Visual Aids

Together As One

Our second consecutive meeting in Retiro Park saw Toastmaster Excelencia and Toastmaster Madrid combine as a joint group.

Joint Meeting with Excelencia

Mauro, the Toastmaster of the day who spoke Spanish, English and Italian added a trilingual touch to the meeting. First in welcoming guests, and then throughout the leading roles of the meeting, he alternated between the 3 languages. After the guests had introduced themselves, Ana and Adolfo explained their respective roles as the timekeeper and grammarian.

For Thought of the Day, Carlos treated us to a soothing music as he talked about music. Next was Ana who spoke about the book “Finding Your Element”.

DavidThe first speaker was David who talked about his life experience, breaking up with his girlfriend and going to Camino de Santiago on a trip that lasted 25 days. David used hand gestures, and maintained eye contact through his speech. His added humour left the audience begging for more.

Second to deliver his speech was Yago who was smooth, and appeared calm and collected as he talked about the “meaning of words”. Taking full advantage of the stage he moved around and spoke in a convincing voice. Pedro, his evaluator, commended him on his in-depth explanation.

At this time of recession, Maria thought it was a good idea to base her speech on job applications. In her speech, she suggested tips to succeed in a job interview. Maria used visual aids and lots of humour to present her information, needless to say that it was enjoyable.

JosephineThe last prepared speaker, Josephine centred her speech on grooming. She shared the stage with a colleague who role-played various grooming routines as Josephine talked. This made her speech entertaining and eye-catching. From a public speaking point of view, her speech was humorous, loud and clear and engaging thanks to the role-playing.

Alex led the table topics with intriguing questions like personal relationships with partners. Pilar and Nacho were among the unsuspecting members of the audience to participate in the impromptu speeches but responded equally well to the questions they faced.

Written by Christian

What is behind a name?

Eric opened the meeting inviting our guests to introduce themselves. Therefore, we met Felix, Veronica from Venezuela, Darío from Dominican Republic, Elena and Lee from Korea. The last two names are not real names but easier for us to remember than the real Korean names of their bearers.

Names were very important in our last club meeting: Eric had thoroughly looked for the meaning and popular bearers of the names of all the participants in the meeting. We learnt popularity statistics and that most of us share the Biblical origin of our names.

We all loved how members who recently joined our club (Maria Mirat, Christian, Maravillas, Juliet and Ana), played a very important role in the first part of the meeting.

TimingDuring the introduction of her role as Timekeeper, Maria Mirat made us remember the story of the “Men in Grey” from the novel “Momo” by Michael Ende. Those “Men in Grey” represented the “Time Saving Bank” and promoted the idea of time saving.
Christian, our Grammarian, chose “Impeccable” as the Word of the Day. And he confessed that he had just learned that the Spanish word was very similar.

Just before the prepared speeches, Maravillas recommended us to see a film: “The good lie”, in a longer than usual, but very interesting Thought of the day.

Two prepared speeches were Icebreakers. The Icebreaker is the first speech in the Competent Communication Manual, the first milestone for every member in her Toastmasters journey.

Juliet, the first speaker, remembered with emotion, her first working experiences in the city of Jos (Nigeria). She taught us how we can influence and touch lives with something small and trivial: Chocolate!!

The second prepared speech of the meeting was Ana’s Icebreaker. With “the pets of my life”, she presented the different stages of her life, her family, the period of time she spent in the US… and how animals have always had a prominent role.

Masha is nearly Competent Communicator!! She delivered her 8th speech on last Wednesday. With her magnificent body language, vocal variety and all the visual aids she was requested to use to reach the objectives of her project, we learned “The true story of Matryoshka”. According to Masha, originally Russian Matryoshkas consisted on 7 figures. Each one was painted in a certain rainbow colour, from red to violet, in the same way that the 7 chakras or 7 life force-energies in yogi tradition have a corresponding colour.

When speakers are finished, evaluators take their turn:

  • Both Teresa and Raquel focused on the opportunity that new members give the rest of us to know them better with their Icebreakers.
  • Jim evaluated Masha and he pointed out that “as always, it is a pleasure to listen to you”.

Julian, the Table Topic Master, gave us the opportunity to travel through time (as Rosa and David did), and through space, because Elena flied over Ibiza. During Table Topics Evaluation, Nacho focused on the great Rosa´s performance and that Elena “gave us more than a short speech of a minute”.

Before the meeting is finished, our supporting roles (Grammarian and Timekeeper) gave their reports:

  • According to Christian, paying 0.10 € for each filler word is always something to celebrate, as we are helping others with the money we get.
  • Maria divided us in three groups: the frugal, the moderate and the talkative ones, depending on how long we talked.

General evaluator is always the last role of each meeting. Jane, Gift of God, as her name means, pointed out that we had struggled against noise and heat during the meeting. Something that the new Club Committee has to face for future sessions, next one on 17th of June.

Written by Raquel.

Meeting Summary – 18/03/2015

Somehow in contrast with the required formality and ceremony of the Club´s International Speech and Evaluations Contest held in the previous meeting, the session on March 18th was a showcase for entertaining conduction of a meeting. In addition, high quality feedback for the participants rounded an enjoyable evening. Let´s review the highlights.

With at least half the audience composed of guests, Toastmaster of the Day Eric David nailed it with a cheerful and funny flow of his introductions of the participants. Humor always works with new audiences. Also important on his side was the clear explanation of the titles and merits of the speakers (Competent Communicators, etc…) to the guests so that they could get an glimpse on what the progress in Toastmasters means.

The members in supporting roles such as Timer (Catalina) and Grammarian (Rosa) displayed humour in their explanations as well, thus easily conveying the message on what their roles were about.

The two first speakers, Anselmo and Iñaki, delivered both their project #3 speeches, with the focus on getting to the point. Different use of body lenguage from their side to tell us about professional matters and personal journeys. Maria, on her side, reached project #5, so she will get soon her recognition for the achievement (as other members recently did, read about it here). She also mastered her facial expressions and body language to tell about personal growth.

All three speakers, and the audience as well, were fortunate to listen to high quality feedback from their evaluators. In this meeting they deserve special attention. Aline and Jane provided feedback to Anselmo and Iñaki, who had same objectives for their speeches. Great value came from the direct comparison between the two evaluations. Aline touched many aspects of Anselmo´s speech, i.e. from body language to structure so the audience got a thourough reiview of the speech, also addressing specific points of the speech that had been agreed beforehand with Anselmo, showing preparation. Jane, approached it differently. She focused on less points of Iñaki´s speech but could ellaborate more on each of them, i.e. providing detailed example on how to improve the informative value of the speech.

Alex Hristov came handy as replacement for a last-minute drop, acting as experienced evaluator for Maria. He made the introduction of the objectives of body language with a great example of it himself. The audience, again especially newcomers, would then have a visual reference to measure the upcoming speech against. He provided a comprehensive evaluation of Maria´s progress from her previous speeches regarding facial expression. His candid evaluation about a somewhat confusing use of props rounded his task.

For the improvisation part, the Table Topics, the entertainment gained the stage again with John Gonzalez as Table Topic Master, creating a musical and provoking atmosphere very engaging for the audience. All selected speakers (Jesús, Julian, Pilar, Mabel and Jaime) came up with answers to his questions. Afterwards Luci gave, in her role as Table Topic Evaluator, specific praise to all speakers and to the overall conduction of this section. However, the general evaluator (myself) did not let go unnoticed that no critic had been made about the absence of the presentation of the purpose and goals of Table Topics to the many guests present there.

To close the meeting, Eric went on with his last jokes, rounding a succesful and entertaining meeting that could prove useful in converting guests into club´s members. Great job Eric.

Nice post meeting atmosphere (Here after Club´s Contest)

Nice post meeting atmosphere (Here after Club´s Contest on March 4th)

Written by Jaime