The Falafel is the best part.

I am still recovering from an intensive Toastmaster Meeting, which was a showcase of seasoned speakers sharing rich experiences and tools.

Vivien was our Toastmaster of the day, swiftly guiding us through the session. The meeting subject was winter holidays and Vivien shared her thoughts about her upcoming holiday in Tekapo, as she discovered the ideal winter holidays of all our speakers and introducers.

We witnessed 3 wonderful speeches giving us a set of tools for our personal and professional improvement:

• Fraser revisited his previous talk, refining a framework that helps us understand personal motivations. Based on the lessons by Daniel Pink, we were introduced to how Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose form the trinity of motivation. If you are interested in the subject, you can have some further learning here
• Louise walked us through her busy week by sharing the contents of her journal of emotional intelligence, as part of her motivational strategies pathway. She reminded us how our keeping a track of our emotions can enhance our recollection of experiences. And we received a valuable lesson: the falafel is the best part of the souvlaki.
• Roydon gave us a hint of what is being one of his corporate clients, as he took the drivers’ seat showing us the first part of a multi-series presentation: What makes a difference? What does impact the employee well-being and performance? We enjoyed a first view of the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) Model which ended with the promise of delivering more knowledge in a future session.

It was a close call for all contenders: we ended the session having a bigger bag of tools to understand our professional development. Helen had the difficult task of selecting the winner of the Toastie award: ROYDON!

Another interesting takeaway from this session was Ian, who playing the Grammarian role, stepped up the game by counting our ums and ahs. And gave us some necessary feedback to remind us to be more conscious about our filler words.

And I can see the red light now. That’s all I can share for the moment. See you in the next session when we will discover our new committee. Stay tuned.

Jorge out.