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
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment