Latin Leaders - Toastmasters Club #583774

Hello Everyone! Enjoy our first issue of The Leading Edge. If you want an article to be published in next month’s newsletter please send an e-mail to Wendy Agredano. Have a great day

Today’s meeting began with new officer elections for the term 2009-2010.  The new club officers will begin their term on July 1 following their training on June 6 and 20.  Congratulations to the following persons:

Cesar Vargas - President

Nahetzin Velasco - VP Education

Wendy Agredano - VP Public Relations

Daniel Cossack - Secretary

Todd Swain - Tresurer

Ramon Diaz - Sergeant at Arms

The club also voted to modify our meeting time.  Meetings will now begin at 6:30 PM and end at 7:30 PM.  Meetings will continue to be scheduled every Tuesday at the same location.  This time slot should make it easier for working professionals to attend.  Good luck to all of the new officers and we’re looking forward to another very successful year.

The theme of this meeting was “Cinco de Mayo” and the word of the day was “Sombrero”. It was also the first Tuesday of the month, so as all you know that means we had to speak in Spanish. It was my first time as toastmaster. I was really excited and nervous!!! I got a chance to read a book to everyone, it looked like they enjoyed the reading Unfortunately we did not have any speakers, but none the less we made it a fun night!

Cesar Vargas did an excellent job as Table Topics master. He had a fill in the suspense story setting, which was really thrilling. We all had fun inventing the plot, with the guidance of Cesar of course, and adding to the suspense. Liz brought up the Swine Flu in her speech, we all enjoyed that little laugh!! Todd was very knowledgeable about the genetics/DNA great uncle he included in his story! Delfino did an excellent job acting his roles as a “maid” and a “boss” and including the “dog” into the story…the story took off from there as you can imagine! We had dead man, followed by a resurrection, and ending with it all being just an act! It was a fun night filled with laughter! Outstanding job Cesar with Table Topics!!!

This was Gabriel’s first time as General Evaluator, which I think did an excellent job in evaluating the meeting. He appeared to be very confident, even without the Corona’s!!

Ramon was very kind to bring tamales after the meeting; I couldn’t eat any of course because of my diet!!!  Thanks Ramon!

We have a few speakers scheduled for next week (maybe myself)!! Hope to see everyone there this upcoming Tuesday!!!

Our long time friend Seth Sherwood stopped by for a visit this meeting to inspire us all.  First Liz Allen gave a speech about managing stress.  I guess she knows what she is talking about because she didn’t look stressed at all.  Seth gave a speech in Spanish of what seemed to be an ice breaker type speech.  We had a round robin evaluation for him.  Seth is working to start up a Spanish Speaker’s Bureau here in Orange County that many of our members, including Delfino (pictured here), have been asking about.  Wendy was on table topics today and that was a lot of fun — except I had a really hard question as usual.

Don’t forget to join us next week for Cinco De Mayo!!

I’ve missed updates for the last few weeks so let me see if I can recap.  We had our two contests.  Ramon and Alejandro competed in the table topics contest with Ramon taking first place and Alejandro the runner-up.  We’ll be seeing them at the area contest this Friday.  Cesar participated in the speech contest but was uncontested (so he won by default) but he won’t be able to attend the area contest on Friday so our club will only be participating in the table topics contest.

We’ve had two new members join us, Wendy and Gabriel, and Wendy is scheduled for her Ice Breaker speech next week, so you don’t want to miss that.  We love ice breakers.  We also had a couple of guests at our last meeting.  David works in the same building, and wanted to visit and participate in our table topics.  He already has some good speaking skills but would like to improve.  Carlos Avila had visited us before and now has made it his goal to join the club and improve his public speaking skills.  We certainly welcome both of you.

For fun, we did table topics a little different than we did in the past.  This time we asked the members for comments after each speaker so that the speakers could hear immediate feedback of the speech.  The last time we had the speaker answer two table topics, one before and one after the feedback so that we could see the improvement right away.  This was a great way to learn and everyone had a chance to try it.  We should be doing this more often.