SpeakHQ Blog

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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How to speak to a bored audience

By Berkun | October 21, 2010

In a series of posts, called ask berkun, I write on whatever topics people submit and vote for. This week: How to speak to a bored audience All audiences are bored. If not now, then soon. Listening is boring, and listening to boring people talk about boring work in boring ways is even more boring.…

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Ira Glass live: review

By Berkun | September 8, 2010

I saw Ira Glass, of This American Life (TAL) fame, speak recently in Seattle at Benaroya Hall.  Years ago I met him backstage at a conference in NYC. He’s tall. and thin. And very funny, nice and slightly sarcastic all at the same time.  We chatted about my sacred NYC places tour, which he seemed…

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The Four Minute Presentation

By Berkun | August 19, 2010

We’re very proud, in this day and age, of our capacity for consuming information. We often brag (or lament) about  the speed of the world and the acceleration of change. Surely our TED talks, lightning talks, and 99 second presentations must be recent inventions, right? I wrote for Forbes about this fascinating trend in public speaking. But it…

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In Defense of PowerPoint

By Berkun | July 20, 2010

Every few months there’s another article on the evils of PowerPoint, but it’s a poor craftsman that blames their tools. If you can’t think of a decent sentence to write, would you blame your pen? If you seem to habitually crash cars, would you blame the shape of the steering wheel? Regardless of how good…

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