Present. Enjoy. Be happy.

What´s our club culture? This was the question that I made to the audience. As it was explained in one of the Toastmasters magazine (issue April 2014), the key factors that influence club environment are:

Fun Factor – learning should be fun!

Hospitality – how well do we welcome our guests?

Evaluations – do our evaluations elevate or deflate?

Bilingual club – the variety of sessions due to language difference

Let’s see if we meet these important standards! So far I can tell you that two factors are already fulfilled – guests are welcomed and invited to continue participating in the meetings. As well, our club is bilingual – variety guaranteed.

Meeting started with the provocative theme of the day that was chosen by our Toastmaster of the day – Felipe de la Cruz.  Politically incorrect questions and answers, situations in life and reactions, emotions, this is what the session was about. Our talented technical Team (Enrique, Rayane and Olga) provided their explanations of the roles and did a great job providing the reports after the session.

I was amazed by the variety of the speeches topics and inspiration of the speakers!

Maria Luisa explained us her vision of mindfulness. She presented her #3 project from the Competent Communicator – get to the point. And she did it. Are you multitasking? This is the opposite of the mindfulness. The great take home message that I remembered today when I woke up – the quality of life is the more important than the life itself. Present is the only thing you have, so let’s live and feel today, let’s be grateful and appreciate what we have - today.

Second speaker of the session – Georgiana with her #4 project of the Competent Communicator manual, with amazing speech – enjoy it! We did. We enjoyed this fresh energy, this amazing power of personal story, thanks for sharing with us! Georgiana engaged the audience since the beginning by improvising with lights and prepared meditation for the audience. Even in the hardest situations of life, the best thing that you can do is to learn and to enjoy!

Are you pear, strawberry or apple? The prepared speeches part was closed by our third speaker, Laia, with her #8 project from Competent Communicator manual, and she got very comfortable with the visual aids as it was one of her objectives for this speech. Thanks to her we are aware of the importance of the personal branding and how to make this astonishing and amazing look! Lots of interesting ideas shared by Laia, even half of her own wardrobe was used to provide us tips on how to get most of our look.

Evalutions – our next quality standard.

All evaluators used the strategy of sandwich, when the positive points of the speaker’s speech are pointed out at the beginning, then followed by the points for improvement and finally, evaluator is motivating the speaker to continue with the journey of competent communicator. The main points for improvement from Gerard Vidal, who evaluated the speech of Maria Luisa – ensuring that power point is projected properly before the speech, enhance interaction with audience and add more humor to the speech. Our second evaluator, Paul Conde, who was evaluating the speech of Georgiana suggested to improve transitions, to make call to action more powerful and explain the audience the purpose of the challenging questions during meditation. Finally, our last evaluator of the session, Mariyana Tasheva, suggested the following points of improvement to Laia – stronger introduction, improvement of the slides shown – to avoid so many information, that can be destructive to the audience and to show the visual aids (clothes) without wearing all of them.

No doubts, that another quality standard was met as well – helpful and positive evaluations.

Fun factor?

In the improvisation part I think this is more than covered! Our amazing Table Topic master – Beatriz initiated politically incorrect situations where volunteers were caught with strange questions and situations. Beatriz reminded us that it’s important to follow the same structure during the impromptu speech as well – short opening, body with three main points and conclusion. Great job!

Finally, our talented and charismatic General Evaluator of the session, M.A. Garcia reminded us on the points that can make our club even stronger – check presentation beforehand, in order to avoid technical issues, to avoid too long scenarios explanation during the Table Topics, do not forget – to shake the hand after leaving the stage – this is toastmaster’s spirit!

We can proudly say – we met all 4 standards of the good club – fun, hospitality, good evaluations and language variety. But the most important is that we stayed focused, we enjoyed the moment and we continued in the bar…. (ok, this might be not that important, BUT – this is where another fun part starts, so be sure you are not missing it next time!).

Present. Enjoy. Be happy.

Jelena