Food is not just what you eat, it’s what defines you!

Definitely the session on the 11^th of February tasted well - each of the participants described themselves as a dish, vegetable, fruit or even desert! And you, how would you describe yourself? Toastmaster of the session Julia Ripoll was the chef of the session, introducing the whole culinary mixture – Hugo Perez as timekeeper, Joan Marc as a Grammarian – the world of the day chosen “fiasco” (something planned that goes wrong and in a complete embarrassment) and Blanca  Ozcariz as an Ah- Counter – the marvelous technical Team.

 What do we have on the session menu today? For starters – prepared speeches.

The first speaker of the session, Catalina Maldonado presented her #8 project from the CC manual “Productivity 2.0” – the main objectives of which were to get comfortable with visual aids. Did you know the capacity of the human brain? We got the answer – 2.5 petabytes which is equal to 2.500 Terabytes! So all you need, is to start training your brain and Catalina shared with us 3 techniques of improving our memory – downloading the application to train your memory which is free app for all devices, training your brain and using the repetitions. Simple things that can improve the quality of our lives! Increase your memory and you get your productivity increased for free! Great speech, congratulations Catalina!

Madalina Burghelea was the second speaker of the session presenting her #1 Project from the Advanced Communicator Manual “Spice up your sandwich” from series Speeches by Management which objectives were to organize material and tailor to audience’s needs! What a great and practical speech Madalina – tailored specifically to our audience! Madalina introduced the new technique of evaluation of our fellow Toastmasters – by giving the positive feedback first and then introducing examples of improvement – the key point is not to come back to the strengths after we mention the points of improvement, since according to the scientists, human brain is only remembers the first and last part of the evaluation – therefore if we start with positive things and finish our evaluation as well with the positive ones – the speaker is tend to forget or minimize the importance of the points to be improved. Let’s spice up our evaluation sandwiches!

Let me present you the main dish of the session – evaluations! Jordi Varela evaluated Catalina’s speech and pointed out some strengths and what could be improved – the main points of improvement were not to use back slides, to expand the usage of the space and to use the body language more vividly. Gustavo Loewe while evaluating Madalina’s speech mentioned the confidence and accuracy that speaker had, the following points of improvement were suggested – to use more pauses, to have more eye contact with the rest of the audience and to introduce more passion to the speech. Thank you for the great evaluations our fellow Toastmasters!

What do we have for dessert? Impromptu speeches of Table Topics – the most funny and enjoyable part of the session! Joan Marc introduced some funny situations and the activity was open for all guests, therefore we had 4 different improvised speeches! Congratulations for those who stepped out from their comfort zone and increased their creativity – well done!

This session we had another great speaker coming from Youth Toastmasters, Julia Pardo, the General Evaluator of the session provided us with some very good feedback and of course mentioned some valuable points of improvement. The strengths of our club were the organizational aspect – session very well organized, slides that we use to present every speaker, Julia congratulated the evaluators of the session for giving the real examples taken from the speeches on how to improve it.

Our President, Catalina Maldonado encouraged to increase the participation of everyone – dear fellow Toastmasters, in order to have our marvelous club strong and happy – we need your participation and commitment!

See you next session,

Blogger of the culinary session

Jelena Vetockina