Dinner time. Meeting 11th July

Dinner time

Wednesday 11th of July 2018 – another session of TM has started under Barcelona’s scorching heat and we had cosily found shelter in the cool and fresh headquarters.

Isabel Montero, our president, opened the ball with a question addressed to the audience: What does it take to be a good leader/communicator? According to her, it’s all about being a good listener.

After letting us reflecting on the matter, the ToastMatser of the day, Paul Conde, made a sensational entrance justifying his 5 minutes late with a “shit happens”, proving that eloquence doesn’t necessarily match with punctuality.

The theme of the night was “if you could have dinner with anyone on earth, who would it be?”, and our TM used the dinner metaphor to present the structure of a TM session: appetizers, main course and dessert.

As appetizers, we got introduce to the technical team, composed of Alvaro Fernandez Martinez as Ah-counter, Marc Majoral as Grammarian and Angela Delgado Castillo Gill as Timekeeper.

We then moved on to the main course: the prepared speeches!

The first one was a delightful and touching icereaker from Sonia Vilella, who delivered her first speech in a perfect English. She shared with us a few personal details with emotion and humour.

The second course consisted in Maria Luisa Gomes’s “Conversing with Ease” speech from the Interpersonal Communication Manual. With this speech, her goal was to initiate a conversation with a stranger, and demonstrating us how a good conversation shall be structured. To this end, she presented us the 4 different levels of conversation: small talk -> facts disclosure -> view point and opinions -> personal feelings, and illustrating these 4 stages in an amusing roleplay with Manolo, former member but dear to the heart of the club, freshly returned from Madrid. 

The third main course was brought to us by Maryana Tasheva with a “Persuade and Inspire” speech from the “speeches by management” manual. She inspired us to “get in the game”.

After getting served the “side dishes”, consisting in the evaluations of the three prepared speeches, respectively by Sebastian Ortega, Isabel Montero and Zuzanna Smakalova, we moved finally to the long-awaited dessert, the table topics.

Our table topic master of the night was Sean Palit who also chose to stick to the dinner theme.

The idea for the speakers was to imagine having dinner with a random celebrity and trying to convince them to change their job. The first speaker was Alexa, who had to convince Penelope Cruz to drop her actress career to become a football player. The second one was Maria Blancas who had to persuade Dali to become a chef. Lastly, Olga Escribano had to convince Fernando Alonso to become a surgeon. In a nutshell, a delightful and highly digestive dessert.

The session was finally closed by Sandra Almeida as a general evaluator, who delivered a deep and detailed evaluation and gave to each and every one of us some very useful advices.

After such a complete and delicious dinner, we all headed home (or to the bar, for some us) well fed and happy.

See you next week!