The business of public speaking is a strange one. There’s no real “product” - not much to measure – and nothing you can put in a box or weigh in your hands. Just you talking. Your client wants to make the “perfect” decision and will often run you through a gauntlet of...
I have a superpower I want to share with you. No, it’s not Thor-like strength or the web-crawling agility of Spider-Man. But, this superpower will make you feel better, help avoid disastrous outcomes and undoubtedly make you money. I’m talking about the ability to get...
There’s lots of opinions about how to start a speech. Some say start with a joke. Some with a story. Some with a confession. Some even use video to break the ice. All of those can work, but in this post I’m more talking about what comes next—how do you hook your...
It took me 10 years to discover - completely by accident - the one secret to public speaking that not only saved my bacon countless times, but actually made every speech better. Today, I’m going to tell you what that secret is. But I’m getting ahead of myself. When I...
We’ve all been there. We were looking forward to the presentation - it could have been a webinar, keynote speech or office meeting. And then there were the slides… …tiny fonts, long lists of indecipherable bullets, fuzzy clipart from the 1990’s and blocks of text...
Congratulations - you’re about to give a speech! Or maybe you’re speaking at your bi-weekly team meeting, or it’s a presentation at your company’s annual dinner. The problem is you’re boring. To be fair, it’s not so much you that’s the problem - it’s your audience....
I don’t know if I was more scared or excited. I’d been invited to speak to over 1,000 Rotarians - my biggest speech yet (by an order of 100). I had just under a month to prepare. Every evening I hammered away at a script—adding, deleting, moving notes around until I...