SpeakHQ Blog

How to show time during a presentation

By Berkun | February 16, 2011

João Adolfo Lutz asked me recently about noting time progressed / remaining in slides: I’d like to know what do you think about printing kind of a “timeline” in the slides, lightening the topic that is being shown at the particularly moment. One teacher of mine says it’s very important for the crowd to know…

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Discovered: The Amazing Dr. Fox Video

By Berkun | February 3, 2011

One famous speech in public speaking history is the Dr. Fox lecture. Researchers hired an actor to pose as an expert, and he gave a meaningless, but complex sounding, jargon filled speech to a group of true experts. The result? The majority of them were fooled into thinking they’d learned something, despite there being no…

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An open letter to conference organizers

By Berkun | February 2, 2011

Dear Conference Organizer: For centuries you and your peers have helped spread good ideas. For that, I like you. Events are important and organizing them is a thankless job. I’ve run my share of events, so I know. But there is an unspoken, often forgotten, problem I’m compelled to bring to your attention: most speakers…

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How to Prepare: a Checklist For Great Talks

By Berkun | February 1, 2011

To help celebrate the recent release of the paperback edition of Confessions of a Public Speaker, as well as it’s 100th review on amazon.com, here’s a checklist you can use to help make sure things go well at your next presentation. You can download a nice printable PDF of the checklist: Before the event Questions…

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Toastmasters on Confessions (Podcast)

By Berkun | January 31, 2011

To celebrate the release of the paperback edition of Confessions of a Public Speaker, here’s a kick-off post for a week of posts on public speaking. The good folks at Toastmasters published an excerpt of Confessions in the November edition of their newsletter. And to follow it up, they invited me on to their monthly…

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Confessions now in Paperback

By Berkun | January 31, 2011

Confessions of a Public Speaker has reached the sweet milestone of being republished in Paperback.  It’s now cheaper, smaller, and friendlier. It won’t hurt your foot so much if you drop the book on it, and you can bend the cover in all kinds of creative ways to fit into bags, big pockets or tight…

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SCRUM for Weddings?

By Berkun | January 5, 2011

I once wrote that Everything is Project, and its true. Recently Gregory Heller gave an ignite talk, at Seattle Ignite 12, that takes this idea to the extreme: Scrum Project Management for Weddings. There’s good advice for weddings and all projects, including a telling of the Chickens and Pigs tale.

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Great talk: How to Solve a song

By Berkun | January 4, 2011

Here’s my favorite talk from last month’s Seattle Ignite 12 – How to Solve a Song, by Karen Cheng. The video doesn’t do it justice – which happens sometimes (any theories? leave in the comments). Not sure if it’s that the audience energy isn’t picked up well in her microphone, or what, but this was…

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Seattle Ignite #12: the recap

By Berkun | December 8, 2010

Last night was the 12th Seattle Ignite and they celebrated their 4 year anniversary. How awesome. I had the honor of speaking at the first Ignite in 2006, and it’s amazing how far this thing has come (Photo credit: Eugene Hsu). When it started it was a crazy format that few understood (20 slides per…

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How much to charge for speaking?

By Berkun | November 18, 2010

Question from the mail-bag: I’m an excellent speaker but there isn’t high demand for my talks yet. I’ve been speaking for free to attract clients, but now I’m being offered money. I don’t know how much to charge, especially when the truth is, I will speak for free if I have availability and room for…

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