On Wednesday, with sunny weather outside, we decided to come to the Mercury meeting and drink cocktails of words. It was, once again, a lovely and relaxing evening.
Mounia’s second speech told us about habit: the definition, the process of creation and how to change it. The process of creation is a three step loop: the cue or a trigger, the routing or the behaviour itself and the reward – something that your brain likes. As an example she told us about how her pregnant friend succeeded in quitting smoking: the reward of having a healthy child made her break the habit of smoking in a blink of an eye.
The fantastic speech structure made it easy to follow her speech and served as a model for writing a speech.
Mariana gave us an informal speech about the presidential elections in Indonesia, which were held on 9th of July 2014 and we toasted the future of Indonesia. Joko Widodo – leader who listens to the people’s needs – won with 53,15% against Prabowo Subianto – Indonesian businessman and politician. However, Subianto mounted a legal challenge to the result, saying that the results were mishandled. But Mariana shared her optimism and trust in the new president.
Yet again, we had an amazing Table Topics session. Violetta asked the table topics speakers to speak about their favourite cocktails, made up of ingredients mixed up in all the eccentric ways you can image. For instance, Eliza’s prefered cocktail is entitled Inspiration and is made of vodka, powerpoint and bikini, thus she shared her secret key for inspiration and her permanent smile: vodka 🙂
Word of the day: eccentric, which means deviating from customary character. In geometry, it shows how much a conic section (a circle, ellipse, parabola or hyperbola) varies from being circular.
Lesson learned: Never embarrass the general evaluator of the evening because this Wednesday was the birthday of our happy guest, Pascal.
