The Grandmother of Toastmasters

First session after that Marisol left the committee… First session for Aga as our new VPE in English! and I have to admit, she did a really good job!! She found 3 speakers in 3 days and 2 evaluators in 10 minutes. Congratulation Aga for your motivational skills!

We started the session with Mariyana who, after giving her IceBreaker last week, was doing her first steps as the Toastmaster of the night. How brave and motivated is she! An example to follow.

Mariyana brought us all to her native country, Bulgaria. More specifically, she brought us there for a particular occasion: Grandmother’s day. What a good theme to remember what a luxury it is to be with the loved ones. 

Our “technical team” was enhanced by the presence of Dani as our timekeeper, Isabel as our ah-counter and Eric, a TM member freshly arrived from Canada, as our Grammarian.

We directly notice the difference when a native English Toastmaster from another club arrives, because he gives us very difficult word of the day!!! Try to use “PERIPATETIC” in a sentence…… “Traveling from place to place, esp. working or based in various places for relatively short periods”.

I was wondering if this word as the same meaning in English than in French… I’ll let you look online for the translation of “péripatéticienne”. For sure they have the same roots!

Mariyana explained the structure of the agenda with the prepared speeches, evaluations and Table Topics. Thanks to Hans who broke the ice with a very funny joke, as usual, we were to enjoy a delighting session…

Our 3 speakers were in order:

- Matthias, who told us the benefit of collaboration to be stronger and more visible

- David, who made us laugh out loud telling the story of great people from his school and … him. He prefers “just to be”.

- Marion, who tried to motivate our TM members to organize a conference to share with innovators our Public Speaking knowledge and help them shape a better world.

The 3 assigned evaluators were Katya, Hans and Aga. They all did a great job evaluating the 3 speakers, with positive feelings and elements to improve.

The session continued with Andrea who was our Table Topics master of the night. She used the theme of the meeting “Grandmothers” to create delicate situations of the everyday life when you have to use your communication skills:

- Djanira was the grandmother of a boy who couldn’t stop playing with his smartphone so she had to find a strategy to make him leave the device and play with her and go out.

- Lidia had to face her grandmother and explain why it was impossible for her to go back home after the party at 8pm. At the end, it seems that she had the midnight autorisation! Good job!

- at the end, Andrea picked a guest to respond to her last topic. He had to convince his son to come less regularly with the grandson because they needed time alone.

When the Table Topics ended, we got the general evaluation of the technical team and our General Evaluator Ana.

Again, we witnessed the difference between clubs and that we are so used to proceed the same way week after week.  When asked to give his report, Eric got up and walked to the stage. Of course, like any other roles in the session, why not giving the speech in front of everybody… We got surprised! Thanks Eric to disrupt our habits!

Ana gave at the end a particular thank you to Mariyana for her first time as the Toastmaster of the night, to the technical team and to Aga for the great effort (and success) she accomplished for this session. And since we looooove it, we all applaud our new VPEs (Aga & Ana)!!!

If you had to read just one thing in the whole article, it’s the following:

Ana gave a specific advice for all of us: please, confirm your attendance to the meeting every week, check if you’re coming to the session, it makes the VPE’s job much easier because they know to whom they can ask for collaboration.

So thank you to ALWAYS confirm attendance on EasySpeak. For the next session, you can confirm here.

At the very end, we all celebrated Mariyana’s IceBreaker because the President forgot the week before… (shame on her!) so she received her very first ribbon. She has now started her career as a Toastmasters. Keep an eye on her, she is very promising!

Finally, Marion asked for volunteers for 2 events:

- the club contest that will take place on March. We need volunteers to organize it with Katya who will be our Chairman.

- Volunteers to organize the conference on April to help the social innovators with their public speaking skills.

Any question about these 2 events or if you’re interested, contact Marion: marionc.tmt@gmail.com

I’ll stop writing here because afterward we all went to have a beer at the “bar de la Tostada de Juan” and I don’t remember!   ;)

See you next Wednesday!