Full of people and excitement

[Wednesday, September 18th]

Hello everybody, my third time in a TM session as a guest, and this time I am even more excited than in the previous ones as I am going to be the blogger of this session! I have never written in a blog before, so this is a challenge for me and I am happy to take it.

The room is full of people and I can feel the warmth and excitement of everyone here. Jesús Salillas, our Seargent at Arms, calls to order and the session starts. He introduces our acting president, Isaac Riera. Before the session, I have a chance to talk to Isaac and he tells me that he joined the club this year, I simply can’t believe it as I have seen him in many roles and he always seems to be so confident and he speaks so well… I just marvel at what this club can do to us, we develop skills very quickly! He welcomes everybody and introduces the guests and encourages them to say a few words. About ten people (me included) introduce themselves but I am not sure of the number as I pay a lot of attention to what they say and get caught by their enthusiasm and lose track of my counting… sorry! After this, Isaac, as the toastmaster, explains the subject of this session which is reaching our goals not forgetting our starting point and not getting distracted in the way which means that we have to stay motivated in order to achieve what we want. Then, he introduces the technical team: Sandra Almeida as the time-keeper, Madalina Burghelea as the Grammarian and Nacho Téllez as the Ah-Counter. All of them explain their respective roles very well and clearly for new people to know what they do and the importance of their roles. Spanish people are trembling as Madalina promises that she is going to keep a very close eye on Spanish mistakes… glups! She also presents the word of the day: the verb keep with different prepositions. We all know the importance of using the prepositions correctly in phrasal verbs as the meaning can change completely depending on what preposition you use.

And now it is the time for the speakers. Barbara Carrasco is the first speaker and she seems to me as being a very courageous person as she belongs to another club but gives his second speech in this one which is not easy as you are not familiar with the people you have in front of you. But having said that, you feel at home the moment you cross the door of room 502, people there are very kind and always ready to help you so things are far from being difficult. Her speech is very well organized and we end up with a very clear idea of why Tokyo has won the celebration of the Olympics 2020 and why Spain has lost this opportunity.

The second speaker is Jesús Salillas. His speech simply takes me and all the audience through a roller coaster of emotions and we are transported to his story while he is giving the speech. He not only gives a speech but he is also an actor, a singer, a comedian… what a talented guy! He talks about his very close relationship with Bruce Springsteen, his favourite rock star and how his lyrics have had a parallelism with his life.

Our third speaker is Javier Macias and he gives us a business presentation, in fact, the presentation of his own business. He is a very kind man who says that helping other human beings keeps him motivated and you can see it in the way he talks about his project of helping family businesses. He really believes in what he is doing and you can see that spark in his eyes when he presents his project. I am sure he will be successful in his business because it is not only about money (although we all know that this is important in a business) but mainly about people. He invites us to ask him some questions making the whole thing very interactive and making him reachable.

After the three speeches, Isaac introduces our three evaluators: Mariyana Tasheva, Ana Villar and Marion Chevalier, who evaluate the first, second and third speech respectively. It is always a pleasure to listen to what evaluators have to say. They enumerate all the positive points of the speeches in a very enthusiastic way which makes the speaker smile openly and then they give some suggestions on how to improve some things, because this is the way to keep getting better in public speaking.

Isaac appears on the scene again, this time to introduce the table topic master of tonight’s session, Gerard Vidal, who says that what keeps him motivated is to face problems and be able to find a solution for them. We have to learn a lot from this guy! He talks about the importance of being able to give a speech in a spontaneous way as sometimes we find ourselves in this situation in real life. He presents two situations in which one person has to convince or persuade another one in order to achieve what they think has to be done. Two volunteers, Alex Carol and Rayane Bachammar, take the challenge and make us laugh with their creativity.

Now Isaac introduces our general evaluator, Oleksandr Raspopov, who asks the technical team for reports on filler words, grammar and time, with Madalina being very disappointed as Spanish people are not as bad at English grammar as she thought we were going to be… wonderful!

Oleksandr then shares his comments about the whole meeting with all of us with a big smile on his face.

Finally, Isaac gives the opportunity to say something to a couple of guests as we are short of time and then says goodbye to this session leaving us all with the desire of coming to another session in order to daydream for a while…

Doriana and Catalina are the new members of the club and everybody welcomes them with a huge applause. 

Isaac reminds us that our Club Contest for Table Topics and Humorous Speeches for both Spanish and English will take place on October 2nd. We still need to fill some roles so, if you want to participate, please contact Regina Fullana.

Thanks to all of you for having come and I hope to see you again very soon!

Ana Revilla