Latin Leaders - Toastmasters Club #583774

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.

How important it is these days to manage your stress.  With the economy in the dumps and unemployment rising higher than ever in recent times, there’s a lot of reason to worry.  Our theme today gave us a chance to think about things that make us worry and hopefully help us to differentiate between the small stuff we should not be worrying about, and the big stuff that deserves our full attention.  Jorge made his debut today as Table Topics master and did a very impressive job of adhering to the spirit of the theme.  He really was prepared with some very insightful questions.  Today was our Spanish meeting day so almost the entire meeting was in Spanish.

We had two speakers today.  Alex gave his ice breaker speech in Spanish, which was a real treat for everyone.  I knew he was already a comfortable speaker and he sure proved it with a well done first speech.  Cesar is working on his Advanced manual, Communicating on Television.  Delfino acted as a talk show host and interviewed Cesar about his profession as a hypnotist.  Both speeches were in Spanish, but the evaluations were in English.  Nice!

We had two guests today, Gabriel and Wendy.  We had a good time with them and even Wendy participated in a table topic in Spanish.  We hope to see you two again next week.

The club decided to break our contest into two separate weeks, so we’ll have our Table Topics contest on March 10 and our Speech contest on March 17.  Jorge will be our chief judge and Liz will be our Table Topics Toastmaster.  Contests are always fun and we promise not to disappoint.  Everyone is welcome to come and attend our contest.  See you there.