Tonight has been a fun small meeting. After Sergeant at Arms Dima kicked the meeting off, Xavier welcomed our guest Ernesto (?) and pointed out the great tool set that the club has access to: beamer and pointer for visual aided presentation, and a brand new sound set with different kind of microphones to try and experiment with their handling.
Toastmaster of the Evening Marie was very excited to be with us, and present us the Word of the Day "Unity". In her intro she told us all about the great time Barack Obama and her spend together. Xavier - now wearing the General Evaluator head - presented his team José and Rosy. Then Marie handed over to Dima for his session of Table Topics. He presented the task of remodelling Plaza Catalunya, and guided buy his photos we listened to the following proposals: David wanted to create a Zoo at its place, Rosy explained us that a prison would be a better option, Ernesto - a first time guest - took up the challenge and explained why at this location a night club should be built instead, Marie wanted to have a cemetery there, and Xavier argumented quite logically why the space of Plaza Catalunya should be used for a waste recycling plant. We then voted for the best proposal, and the waste recycling won with one vote more than the night club. Go figure!
Next in the agenda was the icebreaker of Ivo, and boy was that a start into a speaking career. He explained how he grew up near Ultrecht, played field hockey, went to school by bicycle in order to spend the bus money for other things, and two interesting stories related to hygiene from his university shared living. David, his speech evaluator could hardly point out anything that needs improving. He recommended a more firm beginning, and then just highlighted all the great delivery aspects that Ivo used: no notes, no nervousness, great body language - especially using the hands, using humor, a simple but effective toothbrush as visual aid, and even giving a moral: "That's when I stopped caring what other people think of me." Oh, and David mentioned what his personal relation to the Dutch culture looks like. Very well done to both.
In between Ivo's speech and Dave's evaluation, I presented an educational session called "Going beyond our club", which was a great framework to talk about the upcoming spring contests in "international speech" and "evaluation", as well as the learning and leadership opportunities around conferences and the area/division/district layers of the international toastmaster organisation.
Towards the end of the session, GE Xavier was calling up on his team for the technical reports. Rosy explained that the Ah-Counter task is far more difficult than it appeared to be, which I personally agree on. Timekeeper José told us that almost all stayed within the normal time or 30 seconds over - which is the limit for competitions. Only my educational session run 38 seconds too long - I think I got carried away.
Lots of positive words from GE Xavier, along with the comment that we need to get more experience on the microphone. He then briefly gave the stage back to Marie, so that she could call him up again as our President Xavier. We received positive feedback from our guest and concluded the evening by playing Tetris with all the boxes that need to fit in our cupboard.
Make sure you keep the evening of March 7th and the day 8th free - that's when we plan to be in Gratallops. We will likely leave Barcelona around 6pm using car sharing, meeting for dinner there at 9pm, followed by some toastmaster or TableTopic activities. During Saturday we will have the Area level competition as well as some fun and educational sessions. For Saturday night you can either come back to Barcelona, or spend another night there or in the region. Not sure how the wine tasting, that the village is famous for, fits into that schedule, but I guess we'll figure that out soon. See you in 2 weeks - where we are still looking for a Toastmaster and many other roles. Keep filling your CL manuals!
One more thing: Our club member Govind said "hi!" via email from India, where he spends time currently. He has been visiting a Toastmaster club in his home town, which is exciting news for me as his mentor. I'm hoping he will tell us all about it in a speech when he is back later in February.
Good night. Kai
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
Club Meeting 13th Jan 2009
We really filled the big room with 16 members attending, and we welcomed 5 guests: Gil (Belgium), Michael (from Germany), Arthur (from America) and Maria and Pau (from Barcelona).
The room setup looked a little different, since we introduced clipboards to replace some of the tables - this should improve the time we need preparing for and cleaning up after the meeting. Special thanks to everyone who assisted with some last minute preparations, such as making speech feedback copies (Melinda?) and organising chairs.
Dima got us started almost in time. In the President's Introduction, Xavier welcomed our guests and also inducted Tulia and Rosy to the club: both acknowledged the Toastmaster Promise and all attending members confirmed they will assist them in their learning progress as best as we can.
Toastmaster of the Evening Edith then had to announce all the last minute changes in the agenda: Marie and Brenda could not come (hope you get better soon!), and in their place we had Raisa and Xavier added as Speech Evaluators. Rose could not prepare her Advanced Speech on time, so she and I (Kai) swapped roles: I delivered a speech and she would evaluate me. With the agenda sorted out, we jumped right into the Table Topics, where TT Master Carol Ann gave challenging situations from the life of the Human Resource department: Dima dealt with an senior member of the fictive company, Raisa gave tips to her colleague on how to deal with sexual harassment, Ivo took over an HR role as well, and Rose dealt with an employee who is expecting a baby soon.
Prepared speech 1 was from Gertrude, working on Competent Communicator (=CC) Project 2 (Organise), speech title "Searching for Answers". She presented and recommended a book "Anti Cancer" and explained the sad personal event that lead her to finding this book.
Before going on with the other prepared speeches, Edith introduced the General Evaluator - so David explained his role, as well as his Team Ivo on the lights and JoAnn counting our fillers.
Speaker number two was Jose Castellano, working on CC Project 3 (Get to the Point), and with "Atheist buses vs. Faith buses? God is in the debate" he picked up a topic that recently caused some public debate in Spain.
After a great introduction from Edith, Rosy followed with a brilliant Icebreaker titled "Never too late to be what might have been". She explained details from her childhood in Scotland, uni and interesting times working among 60(?) men on an offshore oil rig. As visual aid we had 3 fossils going through the room.
Speech number 4 by Kai titled "Where do I start" was about how a new Toastmaster can work on the Competent Leadership manual assignments in parallel to the speech projects from the CC manual, and there was a hand-out along with it.
Evaluation Time. Xavier highlighted all the good details from Gertrude's speech and also gave some tips about hand movement. Melinda's evaluation of Jose also included the physical side of the speech delivery, as well as content and giving practical advice for improvement along with motivation. Raisa had the tough job of evaluating Rosy's great ice breaker, and she did well. She pointed out that being too relaxed as a speaker could be perceived as "sloppy", but overall gave a lot of praise for a speech that had the feeling of a great "Bed time story". Rose's evaluation of my speech was positive on what and how I delivered, but she also pointed out correctly that part of the required objectives from the manual were not meet by the content, so we agreed I would do that one again.
Wrapping up, we Ivo and JoAnn gave their reports, concluding that we were not too bad on the filler words and could improve a little on the time keeping - I think 1 speech and 2 evaluations went over more than allowed. Then David gave a great General Evaluation of the meeting, highlighting all the TI standards such as banner in place, starting in time, and giving dedicated praise to each of the Speech Evaluators. "That's where we all learn in every meeting."
Tonight has been a special schedule, so the next meeting is next week! 20th January.
The room setup looked a little different, since we introduced clipboards to replace some of the tables - this should improve the time we need preparing for and cleaning up after the meeting. Special thanks to everyone who assisted with some last minute preparations, such as making speech feedback copies (Melinda?) and organising chairs.
Dima got us started almost in time. In the President's Introduction, Xavier welcomed our guests and also inducted Tulia and Rosy to the club: both acknowledged the Toastmaster Promise and all attending members confirmed they will assist them in their learning progress as best as we can.
Toastmaster of the Evening Edith then had to announce all the last minute changes in the agenda: Marie and Brenda could not come (hope you get better soon!), and in their place we had Raisa and Xavier added as Speech Evaluators. Rose could not prepare her Advanced Speech on time, so she and I (Kai) swapped roles: I delivered a speech and she would evaluate me. With the agenda sorted out, we jumped right into the Table Topics, where TT Master Carol Ann gave challenging situations from the life of the Human Resource department: Dima dealt with an senior member of the fictive company, Raisa gave tips to her colleague on how to deal with sexual harassment, Ivo took over an HR role as well, and Rose dealt with an employee who is expecting a baby soon.
Prepared speech 1 was from Gertrude, working on Competent Communicator (=CC) Project 2 (Organise), speech title "Searching for Answers". She presented and recommended a book "Anti Cancer" and explained the sad personal event that lead her to finding this book.
Before going on with the other prepared speeches, Edith introduced the General Evaluator - so David explained his role, as well as his Team Ivo on the lights and JoAnn counting our fillers.
Speaker number two was Jose Castellano, working on CC Project 3 (Get to the Point), and with "Atheist buses vs. Faith buses? God is in the debate" he picked up a topic that recently caused some public debate in Spain.
After a great introduction from Edith, Rosy followed with a brilliant Icebreaker titled "Never too late to be what might have been". She explained details from her childhood in Scotland, uni and interesting times working among 60(?) men on an offshore oil rig. As visual aid we had 3 fossils going through the room.
Speech number 4 by Kai titled "Where do I start" was about how a new Toastmaster can work on the Competent Leadership manual assignments in parallel to the speech projects from the CC manual, and there was a hand-out along with it.
Evaluation Time. Xavier highlighted all the good details from Gertrude's speech and also gave some tips about hand movement. Melinda's evaluation of Jose also included the physical side of the speech delivery, as well as content and giving practical advice for improvement along with motivation. Raisa had the tough job of evaluating Rosy's great ice breaker, and she did well. She pointed out that being too relaxed as a speaker could be perceived as "sloppy", but overall gave a lot of praise for a speech that had the feeling of a great "Bed time story". Rose's evaluation of my speech was positive on what and how I delivered, but she also pointed out correctly that part of the required objectives from the manual were not meet by the content, so we agreed I would do that one again.
Wrapping up, we Ivo and JoAnn gave their reports, concluding that we were not too bad on the filler words and could improve a little on the time keeping - I think 1 speech and 2 evaluations went over more than allowed. Then David gave a great General Evaluation of the meeting, highlighting all the TI standards such as banner in place, starting in time, and giving dedicated praise to each of the Speech Evaluators. "That's where we all learn in every meeting."
Tonight has been a special schedule, so the next meeting is next week! 20th January.
Regular Club Newsletters -- a New Years Resolution
Fellow Members and Dear Guests,
Happy New Year! Over the last 6 months a lot of my time as the VP Public Relations of the Prestigious Speakers Toastmaster Club has been consumed by the migration to and adoption of the Easy-Speak management system. Now that this is completed, it's time to pick up the habbit of creating regular club newsletters again.
This also creates the opportunity for club members to contribute, especially when I cannot participate at a meeting, and will be rewarded with progress in the Competent Leadership Projects #6 "Help Produce the Club Newsletter" and #10 "Club Newsletter Editor"!
I will move existing content from Florian, Rose, Xavier and other previous authors of News / Meeting updates etc. over to this blog, too. So this will create one common archive full of Prestigious History. Enjoy!
Kai Steinbach, Januar 2009.
Happy New Year! Over the last 6 months a lot of my time as the VP Public Relations of the Prestigious Speakers Toastmaster Club has been consumed by the migration to and adoption of the Easy-Speak management system. Now that this is completed, it's time to pick up the habbit of creating regular club newsletters again.
This also creates the opportunity for club members to contribute, especially when I cannot participate at a meeting, and will be rewarded with progress in the Competent Leadership Projects #6 "Help Produce the Club Newsletter" and #10 "Club Newsletter Editor"!
I will move existing content from Florian, Rose, Xavier and other previous authors of News / Meeting updates etc. over to this blog, too. So this will create one common archive full of Prestigious History. Enjoy!
Kai Steinbach, Januar 2009.
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