A painting on a wall of a butterfly made me think of the good and not-so-good aspects of making a presentation or speech.

When it goes well, we are the magnificent butterfly: delicate but powerful, spreading our wings and being the best we can be....

Today’s quick quiz question: who recently said: “Speeches make me nervous. I’ve always been really tentative.”

OK, if you answered Brad Pitt, award yourself an Oscar.

Brad Pitt is no stranger to making speeches. This year...

A couple of months ago I was taking part in a workshop with that wonderful Newfoundland writer, Donna Morrissey. A novel-writing class with the award-winning author of Sylvanus Now, The Fortunate Brother, and Kit’s Law, was pretty daunting -...

Once a upon a time there was a CEO. He had to make a speech to some very important and influential people. So he hired a speech writer.

The minute he looked at the speech, he knew he was in big trouble. He knew that with the script he’d been...

If you’ve seen any of those horrific pictures from the wildfire disaster in Australia, you may have wondered ‘what can I do to help?’

Here’s something you could consider… something a little different from simply...

Our brains are wired for speech naturally. Children learn to speak at a very early age. They learn to read and write later. You can speak and understand a language, without necessarily reading or writing it.

From the cradle we become used to the...

I cleaned out my office this month. It took four days. I got rid of a mountain of old dead files, two filing cabinets, a pile of CDs (what did we ever use those for?) and various knick-knacks that were just collecting dust.

I wound up with lots...

Have you checked out our 10 Second Tips yet? We’ve put together about 15 snippets of advice for presenters and speakers - and they’re all really short… around the 10 second mark.

Obviously in ten seconds we’re not going to...

Your phone just pinged and you checked the news alert. You may be up-to-the-minute, but are you well-informed?

The question is prompted by some research done this month in the UK, into how people have been keeping ‘informed’ about the...

Stories are all about shifts. Shifts from loser to victor, from oppressed to liberated, from lost to found, from unloved to loved.

That’s why stories are such effective tools for communicating a vision of change, for persuading people to...

If, as speakers and presenters, our only source of inspiration came from politicians, our spirits would be plumbing the depths. It’s easy to think that public discourse these days is dominated by bare-faced liars, cheats and dissemblers. Any...

If you really want to make your messages memorable, turn your words into images.

If you’re delivering a speech or presentation, it’s probably not the mass of your words that will convince an audience to march to your drum. More likely,...