Tag Archives: madrid

Club Speech and Evaluation Contests

wpid-20150304_205405.jpg On March 4th we held our Club speech and evaluation contests. The meeting had been efficiently prepared by Raquel, who also acted as Contest Chairwoman. A number of club members volunteered in the supporting roles. The meeting run smoothly, in the same friendly atmosphere as always.

Both contests reflected the high level of the club members. At the speech contest, we enjoyed the pitches delivered by Eric, Jane and Teresa, who was brave enough to enter also the evaluation contest, this one together with Luciana and Jaime. Each of the speakers managed to enthrall the audience, each one with a very different topic and style. Not an easy job for the judges, who declared Eric the winner of the contest, followed by Jane. The variety of the chosen topics, the differences in the presentation techniques and the feelings that all speeches aroused on us reflect the high level of our club members.

Despite the careful organisation of the meeting, the planned test speaker for the evaluation contest did not show up and Nacho volunteered to replace him. His was a truly impromptu speech, focused on informing about the Division Conference to be held the last weekend in April, where Toastmasters from all clubs in Spain will meet in Madrid to compete in these same categories at national level. There will also be workshops to develop our leadership and public speaking skills, as well as networking activities.

Teresa, Luciana and Jaime showed their command of evaluations by giving very comprehensive, structured and productive syntheses of the test speech. They highlighted both the most remarkable aspects of the speech, and those few issues that could have been improved, indicating explicitly how that could have been done. Another tall order for the judges, who declared Jaime winner, with Luciana ranking in second place.

We all had great fun and learned a lot by listening to the contestants, both in the speech and in the evaluation contests. The next step for the winners (who are now part of the club’s Hall of Fame) will be the Area Contest on 11th April, where they will compete against the other Madrid clubs’ winners for a seat in the Division Contest.

Written by Alberto.

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.

What was your favourite toy as a child?

This was the question that our Toastmaster of the Day, Teresa, had asked all participants while preparing the first meeting on February. She used the answers to introduce members with roles. Therefore we all were able to remember our first bikes, skates, dolls and “mecanos”…

wpid-2015-02-04-20.39.19.jpg.jpegAnd, not only we discovered Anselmo’s favourite toy as a kid, but he also shared with us his favourite book; because, the meeting agenda contained a first short talk known as “Book of the day”. Anselmo related how “Our Ancestors” by Italo Calvino made a long-lasting impression on him, since the first time he read the book: “I thought what Don Quixote must have thought”. Prepared speeches are always the core part of every Toastmasters meeting, and on February, 4th we recorded them for the first time.

Two of our youngest members of the Club, Alex Alves and Pilar gave their projects number 5 and 6 from the Competent Communication Manual. Alex conveyed a speech full of passion when he related his experiences as a volunteer in Ethiopia with the NGO “Living Meki”. We learnt that we can make this world a better place, that volunteers receive much more than they give. But, when Alex fulfilled his body language objective singing and dancing “A ella le gusta la gasolina”, we learnt and we will never forget that Ethiopians are really fond of reggaeton music.

wpid-20150204_204933.jpgMusic, music was in the title of Pilar’s speech “What music means to us”, but mainly in the content: she explained her feelings towards this artistic expression, scientific facts related to music, she played the guitar and she sang, even including the Word of the Day: Fringe. Our Grammarian José was shocked.

The Table Topic session is always the funniest and most creative part of the meeting. The Table Topics Master, Aline, had announced on her Twitter account, she felt especially creative when she was preparing the questions.

We were delighted when Mario, a first time guest, acted as if he were a tennis ball.

But this meeting had something new too. Toastmasters Madrid held a short Awards Ceremony for those members who show commitment and have done 5 speeches or more. This recognition will become a tradition in our club. But beyond celebrating our past success, we are focused on the future. As an incentive to keep on learning and improving, Alex, Pilar, Alberto, Lilian, José and Aline received a homemade Certificate and a Toastmasters International pin. Our Club President, Jaime led a warming and friendly presentation, in which members who could not attend (Guillermo, Ana V., Javier and Irene) were also recognized for achieving such an important milestone in their Communication Track.

Lilian and Alberto

Lilian and Alberto

Aline and Jose

Aline and Jose

Pilar and Alex

Pilar and Alex

Written by Raquel

Spring Contests in Toastmasters Madrid

In less than one month, on 4th March, our club will celebrate a special meeting, the Spring Contest (although we are a bit ahead of time this year and the club contest will be celebrated still in Winter). Contests are a great opportunity to put in practice all your public speaking skills, in a special set up. We are still in the safe laboratory where you can explore your limits, but the adrenaline of competing plays a role that everyone should try, and we can assure you that if you try it once, you will repeat.

Area Contest - Jose winningContests are a way to explore your boundaries, and cross them, especially if you win and compete at Area Level (Madrid), Division Level (Spain) or District level (South Europe). It is also a great way to get stage time, which is a fantastic strategy to grow as a speaker, as we all know in Toastmasters. As everything in Toastmasters, contests are plenty of fun and emotions, both for the contestants and for the audience, that get moved by the speakers.

Spring Contest comprises two different contests: International Speech Contest, and Evaluation Contests. The first one consists of 7-minute speeches with all the ingredients to engage the audience into it. A target speaker delivers a speech that the Evaluation contest participants will then evaluate in a 3-4 minutes evaluation.

If you are thinking about taking part in this great event, contact our VP Education a.s.a.p. to secure your seat in the contests. If you still have doubts or need some inspiration, take a look to the following resources:

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.