As usual, our Sargent at Arms Marcel had everything ready on time to start a new great session of Sagrada Familia Toastmasters. We had the club’s President José Manuel opening the session from the street, wearing even a mask following local regulations (he later joined the meeting from home without the mask).
The President invited to the digital stage the great Toastmaster of the night Roberto who introduced the theme of the session ‘Anecdotes’, inviting the audience to use their own stories to communicate effectively using the three pillars of persuasive communication Ethos, Pathos, Logos.
After a quick but thorough introduction by the technical evaluation team, the first speech of the session was presented by the great speaker Mercedes with the title‘ The importance of doing nothing’ where she invited us to do more by not doing anything; taking a rest from time to time can bring more positive outputs in our life.
When we run our lives a hundred miles an hour, slowing down is great advice to us all, that’s the beginning of Scarlet’s evaluation of Mercedes’ speech. Another way to slow down is by talking pauses during the speech, a masterpiece she mentioned in the speech she evaluated.
Continuing with our session, a cat lover Amy share with the audience the speech ‘For Every Problem, There is a Solution’, forget the word problem they are just challenges. Remember to give context if you want a word or a message to be fully understood! Felipe was in charge of her evaluation; he did a great job giving constructive feedback including the great involvement of the audience in Amy’s speech.
We moved forward to the Table Topics mastered by Juan Carlos, a guitarist who hated his first guitar lesson. Linked to our session theme, Juan Carlos chose ‘First times’ to ask volunteers to present an impromptu speech, sometimes in life, we need to talk without preparing what we want to say (wait… that happens every day). We had enough time for four volunteers Scarlet, Alba, José Manuel, and Rebeca, the volunteers explained things that happened to them for the first time, it’s always fun to hear these stories!
The evaluation team gave the report, Desideri with clear information about the timing of the participants; Marcel congratulated everyone in the session and constructively shared those feeling words we mentioned during our participation; Juan explain the club did a great job however the word of the day ‘Straightforward’ was not mentioned by many of us (oops…); and finally the General Evaluator Rebeca gave a detailed evaluation highlighting how the people in the club are getting better and better, every time is more challenging to evaluate the participation.
The word was given back to the Toastmaster Roberto who closed the meeting by remembering us to use storytelling, anecdotes as a way to get the audience to listen carefully to your message.