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.
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