For all the lucky ones who were on holidays

Welcome one more week to our ToastMasters blog.

Last week we had a not common session, since half of our team members had the luck to be on holidays, and actually, that word, "holidays", was the one inspiring us during the rest of the evening.

Our toastmaster, Marc Mayoral, mentioned a word I fell in love with. I cannot recall a Spanish word capable of expressing this, but maybe we should invent it. He expended his holidays "nesting" (from nest), which means, being at home, doing nothing.

As a technical team, we had Bea as "ah-counter", Zuzana as grammarian, who choose the expression "piece of cake"as the sentence of the evening (it means that something is extremely easy), and Carmen was our time-keeper.  

Camila was our first speaker, with a very useful speech about how can we change the way we feel about ourselves, or even other people's feelings, just by changing our words.
She also made us realize how hard we can be to ourselves sometimes, so as she said, please, ask more often to yourself " Do I really believe what I just said to myself?" and, even if so, " Would you use the same words towards someone else?" 
Negative self talk affects self-confidence, and besides that, you wouldn´t allow anybody else to talk to you that way, so do not allow yourself. Talk nicely to yourself, because you deserve it. 

Our second speaker was Hugo, with his speech "Machine Learning", and with it, we learnt how fast machines intelligences grow and at the end, we are responsible for it. 
By the year 2045, machines will have the same capability as a human brain, and now is the time for us to choose what do we want to teach them.

Alba Lucía made us be under her skin with the speech "Everything happens for a reason".
During this 6 minutes, she drove us through her life, and how even the things you believe are worse things that can happen to you, at the end, when you look at them you realize how important they were, in order to make you be the person you are today.

Regarding the feedback that our evaluators gave, I would like to remark some tips. They mentioned that for some people, may be useful to practice the speech in front of the mirror; once more they commented that sometimes Powerpoint's, if we are not familiar with using them, it can be more a trouble than a help for you; and last but not least, we cannot forget how important our tone can help us to wake up the audience in a way we would not expect.

As great news, I need to share with all of you that the 6th of May we should all keep the date, because ToastMasters is becoming 40 years old! So of course, you cannot miss the party!

And after sharing all this, I just need to thank you all for keeping on reading this blog and I hope to see you all next week!