On Tuesday evening, we enjoyed another regular meeting in our beloved Blue Monkey Restaurant.
Vanessa, acting as President in Roland’s absence, opened the meeting. She gave an enthusiastic report on the Division E speech contest, mentioning members who were involved. Alice and Monica took second place against stiff competition in the Evaluation and International Speech Contests respectively. The contest was organised by Harry (Contest Chairman) and Karina (Division Director). Vanessa chaired the Evaluation contest and Anna was the chief timekeeper.
The theme of the evening’s meeting was ‘illusions’ and the Toastmaster of the evening (TME), Gabriel Espadas, used it throughout the evening to present us examples of illusions in art, acoustics and how they inspire people in their everyday lives. Every speaker had to answer a well-thought-out question on how we bring the benefit of illusions into our lives.
We had 4 great speeches from our members.
Samira shared with us an important life lesson, “The value of speaking up” through the personal transformation she experienced at her first job. Illustrating that teams progress through the collective intelligence and everyone in the hierarchy has something to say and value to add. Speak up!
Harry introduced us to the wilderness desert with his vivid descriptive language and usage of many rhetoric techniques to achieve this. Enabling us to visualise the comparison of the size of the desert to China, to demonstrate how big the Sahara actually is beyond the numbers of 9.2 million km2. He used multiple adjectives and vivid, colourful descriptions of the dunes, the oases, and the transportation means to describe the vast desert.
Kevin gave us an insightful speech of how he rationalised, implemented, and finally embraced the feedback he receives after his speeches to become a better speaker. What a great way to show the importance of the feedback we provide to the speakers and what an impact it may have on the speaker’s journey for personal development. In this case, strengthening his public speaking skills.
Sabine gave us a well-filtrated analysis of how to plan and implement a project plan in only 3 minutes, as required by her project. She excelled on delivering the key elements of how to create and implement a plan for a long trip with a full agenda on personal development with humorous elements. We travelled to Uruguay and Argentina and enjoyed the story! Maybe some of us got inspired to plan a long trip for themselves. Samira and Harry shared the Best Speaker award.
Selma, Yesenia, Etienne, and Vanessa provided the evaluations, with Etienne awarded the Best Evaluator ribbon. Nicola as General Evaluator gave a thorough overview of the meeting and how the team executed flawlessly the roles, making the evening another enriching experience that lived up to the expectations of our high-quality meetings.
We broke the record with the usage of the word of the day – ‘expectations’ being used more than 20 times.
Denisse used her creativity to the maximum with the selection of Table topics; asking us to describe life situations that we all face during life. Pairs of speakers had to describe a situation, with one talking about the ‘expectations’ and the other one describing the ‘reality’. Michelle, with the profession of comedian as reality, won the session.