Johanna was our lively Toastmaster of the Evening of the meeting on the 13th of August. She encouraged us to always try out new things and get out of our comfort zone. She acted as a role model and did things that every TME should do:
a. She mentioned and explained the theme of the meeting
b. She contacted the speakers in advance of the meeting and introduced them wonderfully – with background information etc. She put the speaker in the spotlight and set up a nice platform for them. Chapeau!
We had 3 amazing speeches and I genuinely enjoyed each of them:
Prateek, the Engineering student from Cottbus, gave his Icebreaker. He spoke about the biggest transformation of his life and his culture shock in Germany where he has been living for almost one year.
Coming from the chaotic, colorful, hot and humid India, Prateek was shocked by the German punctuality “where the trains are so punctual that you can set your clock to them”, the perfect order and the man that no one disobeys – the Ampelmann! Within his first weeks in Germany, he learnt the German motto “mach schnell”, learnt the concept of rolling up your own cigarettes and was surprised that studying here is not as difficult as he had previously thought.
He ended his speech wonderfully, saying that he continues to live his life one day at a time, writing one more page in the story of his life.
Violetta shared with us her secret of how she made the best of a bad day. She opened her speech with a rhetorical question: she asked us to shout out synonyms with a bad day. She confessed that she found herself in such a situation, and then, she asked herself her favorite question: “What is it that you could still do today?”. She went to a library and bought a little red notebook- her “salvation” for a rough day. After having bought the notebook, she walked into a coffee shop, sat down with a coffee and wrote her first notes down. Afterwards, she felt happy and satisfied. She realized that everything starts with small doable action steps that are in her existence capability.
She left the audience with a question “What is it that you can still do today that will take you closer to your biggest dream?”.
Dieu Hao Abitz gaved her second speech entitled “All You Need Is Love!” from the Speciality Speeches handbook. She gave a wedding speech as a father of a bride named Linda. She congratulated the couple and admired them for going back to tradition. She advised them to keep sincerity in their hearts and preserve their love in every situation of life. She succeeded in uplifting the spirit in the room, she finished her speech with the The Beatles song “All You Need Is Love!” and everyone in the audience sang with her. Love, love, love, love is all you need 😉
In the table topics section, Marina advised us to really enjoy Berlin and its diversity of culture, not to judge people and to pay everyone a compliment- the rain, the sky, the people in the u-bahn. This is what she does, in her mind, she pays a compliment to everyone she encounters.
Word of the day: flummox, which means to confuse, to perplex: I’m just flummoxed by his rhetorical skill.
