After two outdoors meetings in Retiro Park, we came back to our usual venue: Anthony’s Place.

Our new Sergeant at Arms, Jesus, who opened our first meeting in August, had imagined a poor attendance, but we had plenty of guests, and many of them were “Toastmasters”. Because some members of other Toastmasters clubs in Madrid (Excelencia, Standing Ovation…), who missed the Toastmasters environment during their clubs’ “summer breaks”, attended and took part in the meeting. And Allan visited Toastmasters Madrid too!! Allan is a member of two Toastmasters clubs in London, who was spending his vacation in Madrid.

Masha, the Toastmaster of the Day, had thoroughly prepared her role. She had written all the participants in advance, asking for their favourite quotation. Thanks to herm we learnt useful thoughts about success, mistakes… while we knew better our fellow Toastmasters.

Before starting with the prepared speeches, we attended an introduction of our supporting roles: Grammarian and Timekeeper.

Juliette, the Grammarian, chose PRACTICABLE, as the word of the day. It turned to be a great success, due to the amount of speakers who used it during our meeting.

We are happy when a new member steps up as Victor did. He is the newest member of our club and volunteered to be Timekeeper.

But if, somebody talked about time, it was Mabel. From the very beginning of her second speech, she made us notice how we experiment the pass of time, and how talk about time: “we find, waste, spend… time”.  Mabel´s evaluator, Alex, realized that time existed for him too, when Victor, the timekeeper, showed the red card, and was about to interrupt his evaluation.

The second speech of the evening was a “Demonstration speech”, from an Advanced Manual, that Eric delivered successfully. He pointed out that while dancing “every move you make, means a lot, every step has a meaning, and remember, somebody can be watching”. Raúl Martín was watching him, with attention. During his evaluation, Raúl congratulated Eric for his magnificent body language, and how successfully “he did the most difficult thing on stage”: keeping the audience attention.

Instead of a third speech, we had an Educational Session led by Luci. In her path to become Advance Leader, she taught us that “goal setting” is in human nature, we all make new year´s resolutions…but how do we go from goal to reality? We heard some ideas and proposals. Luci suggested that we can use the tools we already have: Easy-speak allows us to make our communication and leadership goals available.

After the speeches, Ana Virtudes, led an original Table Topics session: The four victims created a story that began with our rock star, Julian. After him, Javier, tried to sell a ticket for a concert, but Nacho preferred to stay at home with his Dalmatian print blanket. The story ended when Allan invited all of us to attend a fancy dress party!!! Hard job for Alisha, the Table Topics Evaluator, to find room for improvement, but she did! And for all the participants.

Our General evaluator was Jim, who evaluated the whole meeting, and those participants who hadn’t been evaluated so far. He specially praised Alisha’s effort: “Excellent, from Excelencia”.

The meeting ended with Masha requesting members to upload a picture of each one to Easy-Speak (the tool we use to plan meetings and club events). We all concur, as our final quotation, that “Easy-speak is more important than LinkedIn, Twitter or even Facebook”.

Written by Raquel