Toastmaster session of November 12th

Today was my 5^th Toastmasters session and it was great! It is incredible how each Toastmaster session, although having a pre-establish structure, is always unique and full of surprises.

The topic selected by Isabel Valdivieso,  Toastmaster of the day, was Athletics. It was a great idea for a topic since all TM members have something in common with   athletes, in the sense that we  invest time and effort in becoming confident speakers. As the athlete Jesse Owens once said: “We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.”

Isabel had a great team in this session, with Hugo Perez controlling the time of the speeches, Enrique Sanjurjo counting all “ah” “eh” “iii”, and Sofia Lopez analyzing the grammar of the talks.

The first speaker of the night was Julia Ripoll who gave a talk entitled “Dreams that talk about me”. In her speech, Julia emphasized the idea that “dreams are what define us” and she described her own dreams in her Ice Breaker talk.  Julia dreams about happiness and changing the world! Dreams that she defines as “naive” but that actually are what the world needs right now! In order to achieve her goals Julia plans to study criminology, politics, and law. Once she finishes her studies she will apply for a job in the United Nations. Meanwhile she accomplishes all these dreams, she first wants to start helping local people in Barcelona like youth without a home.

Nacho Téllez (1^st evaluator) remarked Julia’s confidence in giving her first speech, the story-start of her speech, and the good use of voice changes she made in order to add meaning and interest to the message. He also suggested things to improve like controlling body movement during the speech, making the structure of the discourse different (from easy to difficult or chronological), and referring to the audience by their names.

Lukasz Zagroba was in charge of  the second speech of the night, entitled “Lessons learned”. Lukasz made us imagine that one day we go to work and our boss informs us that we have been fired. Lukasz went through this situation some time ago, and although he had a difficult time he also learned many life lessons like “change is good”, “minimize the risk”, “listen to feedback”, “you can’t not predict the future”, and “practice those activities you love”.

Magdalina Burghelea (2^nd evaluator) highlighted Lukasz capacity to make confident and relaxed speeches. Furthermore, she also remarked the originality of the topic and the great anecdote beginning of the speech. She suggested Lukazs to make more body postures changes during the talk (e.g. use poses to represent certain phrases of the speech like “up” and “down”) and to maintain the same passion in the voice throughout the speech.  

For the third speech of the night entitled “Swimming in the air!”, Beatriz Fernández Molina talked about the meaning of our dreams. In the first part of her speech, Beatriz reminded us the chaotic and illogical structure that a dream can have, e.g. dreaming about reading, your mom, Brad Pitt and being naked. But is it dreaming “subconscious waste” or does it have any function? Based on her bibliographic research, Beatriz talked about different author’s explanations about dreaming and how they might be connected to real life worries.

Ana Villa (3^rd evaluator) highlighted that Beatriz fulfilled all the objectives of her speech, specifically empathizing her capacity to stimulate all the senses (visual, auditory, olfactory, touch) through the speech and the way she engages the audience by making constant questions. As points to improve, she suggested Beatrice to reduce the use of power point slides and put the same passion and strength at the start and end of the speech.  

The last speech of the night was entitled “The road to Barcelona” and was given by Paul Conde. Paul grew up in Mexico and remembers that his first memory of Barcelona is watching the Olympics games with his family. Together with his mother, they imagined about travelling to different places in Europe. Paul’s profession led him to travel around the world and visit many of these places like Brazil, Madrid, Paris, and Barcelona. In his beautiful speech Paul talked about the difficulties of being far away from his family and the life lessons he learned from this brave process.

Rosa Gonzalez (4^th evaluator) highlighted Paul’s ability to empathize with the audience and generate mental images of the discourse. Furthermore, she congratulated Paul for being so brave in giving this very personal speech and also for establishing perfect connections of the events contained in the story.

We finished the session with some fun table topics, in charge of Jelena Vetockina, were volunteer speakers tried to convince the audience to practice “extreme ironing”, “wife carrying”, and “cheese rolling”.  

Sofía Seinfeld