This Wednesday, our well-prepared Toastmaster of the Evening Marina introduced the theme of the evening “O Yeah!”. Afterwards, she wonderfully set the scene for every speaker.
Petronela delivered CC manual Project #3 entitled “Sharing is Caring”. In her speech, she told us about her project: sharing a garden in the heart of Berlin and using permaculture in order to maintain it. Permaculture is about caring for people (collaboration), caring for the Earth (minimal resources) and fair sharing (share the output). Petronela also shared with us some of her lessons learned from her experience and permaculture view, one of them being: there are no problems, only challenges and opportunities.
Matt delivered a speech on multitasking entitled “Meet the sneaky lie that’s making you less happy and less productive”. His speech was given as Project #3 from the CC manual as well. He convinced us (or at least me) that we humans are not good at multi-tasking. Actually people who think they are multi-taskers tend to be worse than the average. He supported his point with several studies. For instance, Clifford Nass (n.a. Professor of communication at Stanford University) mentioned in one of his interviews: “We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out multi-taskers are terrible at every aspect of multi-tasking. They’re terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they’re terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they’re terrible at switching from one task to another.” (I will think about this the next time I vacuum my appartment and rehearse my Toastmasters speech at the same time 🙂 ) Matt finished his speech with a call to action: “Have your own radical day of doing one thing at a time.”
Khushi delivered Project #4, A Fact-Finding Report from the advanced manual Speaking to Inform. The title of her speech was “Fairytales, Family and Facts”. She presented facts about Mercury and concluded that forming a new club would be a good opportunity to deal with Mercury’s increasing membership. The new club – Center Berlin Toastmasters – is in the heart of Berlin and will meet on 2nd and 4th Mondays. You are invited to attend their meetings as well.
O yeah, it was a stellar meeting! Thank you to all who contributed to it.
Word of the Day: stellar
Lesson learned: The term multi-tasking was first mentioned in 1965 in an IBM paper about computers.
