Category Archives: Grammarian

Making your voice heard

Our toastmaster of the day, John, started the session explaining the organisation objectives. His aim was to clarify expectations and inform our guests. Amongst them, we have a former member of a Canadian toastmaster club, an ex-member of Ericsson club, the president of Standing Ovation club, three visitors from Germany, a group of engineers from Airbus and of course some locals. All of them interested on knowing what Toastmaster is all about. Around 30 people filled Anthony’s place.

Eric, as Grammarian, proposed two expression as word of the day: “at the helm” and “only a matter of time”. Julian, the guy with the Italian name and the Australian passport as he was introduced, used both of them one minute later while explaining his Timekeeper role. That was quick!

IMG_0176 (1)Victor, who has just joined the club, delivered a Thought of the day speech around the usage of painting and architecture through civilizations. He used plenty of visual aids to demonstrated how art is a priceless mirror of the society at a given time.

Maria, apart from being the General evaluator, delivered a Thought of the day speech around Toastmaster motto “where leaders are made”. Is there anybody out there who still doubts that all great leaders are great communicators?

The two main speakers of the day were Ana and Pilar. Ana’s “Do It Yourself” speech inspired us to consider DIY as a source of self-satisfaction. The speech included tips to help us get started: use pinterest to discover projects and visit the DIY fair celebrated twice a year in Madrid. Pilar’s “Home is where the heart is” was a call to spend time discovering your local area. She explained us how her plans to relocate to Bristol have caused her to spend her summer holidays visiting Alicante’s wonders: Santa Pola lighthouse, Tabarca island, …

IMG_0181Jim and Raul were the speeches evaluators. Both of them gave precise improvement points using constructive feedback, which is Toastmasters trademark.

Finally, Christian, Juliet, Jack, Ana, Jim, Jane and John were the “victims” of Alberto, the table topic master. He made them participate in a “Secret Santa” event as part of a company party. What would be your acceptance speech after receiving a “How to be nice and make friends” manual?

I should also mention that we had a special group of guests. A family having an early dinner help everybody demonstrate how important is to project the voice to the whole room in order to be heard. Their participation on this regard was priceless.

Written by Javier.

August in Madrid

After two outdoors meetings in Retiro Park, we came back to our usual venue: Anthony’s Place.

Our new Sergeant at Arms, Jesus, who opened our first meeting in August, had imagined a poor attendance, but we had plenty of guests, and many of them were “Toastmasters”. Because some members of other Toastmasters clubs in Madrid (Excelencia, Standing Ovation…), who missed the Toastmasters environment during their clubs’ “summer breaks”, attended and took part in the meeting. And Allan visited Toastmasters Madrid too!! Allan is a member of two Toastmasters clubs in London, who was spending his vacation in Madrid.

Masha, the Toastmaster of the Day, had thoroughly prepared her role. She had written all the participants in advance, asking for their favourite quotation. Thanks to herm we learnt useful thoughts about success, mistakes… while we knew better our fellow Toastmasters.

Before starting with the prepared speeches, we attended an introduction of our supporting roles: Grammarian and Timekeeper.

Juliette, the Grammarian, chose PRACTICABLE, as the word of the day. It turned to be a great success, due to the amount of speakers who used it during our meeting.

FullSizeRenderWe are happy when a new member steps up as Victor did. He is the newest member of our club and volunteered to be Timekeeper.

But if, somebody talked about time, it was Mabel. From the very beginning of her second speech, she made us notice how we experiment the pass of time, and how talk about time: “we find, waste, spend… time”.  Mabel´s evaluator, Alex, realized that time existed for him too, when Victor, the timekeeper, showed the red card, and was about to interrupt his evaluation.

The second speech of the evening was a “Demonstration speech”, from an Advanced Manual, that Eric delivered successfully. He pointed out that while dancing “every move you make, means a lot, every step has a meaning, and remember, somebody can be watching”. Raúl Martín was watching him, with attention. During his evaluation, Raúl congratulated Eric for his magnificent body language, and how successfully “he did the most difficult thing on stage”: keeping the audience attention.

Instead of a third speech, we had an Educational Session led by Luci. In her path to become Advance Leader, she taught us that “goal setting” is in human nature, we all make new year´s resolutions…but how do we go from goal to reality? We heard some ideas and proposals. Luci suggested that we can use the tools we already have: Easy-speak allows us to make our communication and leadership goals available.

20150805_212514 Julian @ TTAfter the speeches, Ana Virtudes, led an original Table Topics session: The four victims created a story that began with our rock star, Julian. After him, Javier, tried to sell a ticket for a concert, but Nacho preferred to stay at home with his Dalmatian print blanket. The story ended when Allan invited all of us to attend a fancy dress party!!! Hard job for Alisha, the Table Topics Evaluator, to find room for improvement, but she did! And for all the participants.

Our General evaluator was Jim, who evaluated the whole meeting, and those participants who hadn’t been evaluated so far. He specially praised Alisha’s effort: “Excellent, from Excelencia”.

The meeting ended with Masha requesting members to upload a picture of each one to Easy-Speak (the tool we use to plan meetings and club events). We all concur, as our final quotation, that “Easy-speak is more important than LinkedIn, Twitter or even Facebook”.

Written by Raquel