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Sarah Kay is a spoken word poet and the founder of project VOICE – an organisation that uses spoken word poetry to improve literacy and empower people. Her TED talk is an enchanting combination of performance and public speaking delivered with captivating honesty. It is a beautifully crafted and meticulously prepared simple message. It is […]
What do you do in a recombobulation zone? Do you ever suffer from affluenza? Have you ever taken a legsie? Or is the whole lot just one big omnishambles? The English language is ever-changing – t’was ever thus and t’will always be and with that change comes a rich seam of linguistic inventiveness. And confusion. […]
Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage and authenticity and poses the following question in an insightful and inspirational talk: How do we learn to embrace our vulnerabilities and imperfections so that we can engage in our […]
If you are very clear about your key message or core theme and you have given detailed thought to what you are going to say, then all you really need to do is tell your story simply and sincerely. Brother David Steindl-Rast does just that. All too often, the first port of call when preparing […]
You don’t have to watch Strictly Come Dancing for too long before you hear some hapless celebrity being critiqued for their ‘top line.’ It’s done for good reason as the results are instant. What they are saying is, quite simply, stand up straight and be ‘open’. In a situation where you need to be noticed and remembered […]
All too often, presenters hide behind the brick walls of never-ending numbers and charts under the erroneous impression that this is just what their audience wants. It isn’t. What audiences want is to be engaged, stimulated and changed in some way. Audiences do not appreciate the force-feeding approach to facts and statistics and will generally […]
There are some 30 million PP presentations created every day according to scientist John Bohannon. How many of those presentations are actually engaging in any way? Think about the amount of billable hours wasted in the interminable mire of monotonous slides. We all agree. It is rare to come out of a presentation and say […]
Pakuranga MP Maurice Williamson caused a sesnation in New Zealand’s Parliament with his impassioned speech during the third reading of the marriage equality bill. He had MPs roaring with laughter and his four-minute oration has over 1.3 milion hits in YouTube. His hearfelt irreverence is just one of the reasons it is so inspiring – […]
In a highly engaging and entertaining TEDx talk, beatboxer Tom Thum demonstrates just how amazing and flexible the human voice is. We are all born with the same equipment and yet the infinite variety of the human voice is a true wonder. Its range, its versatility and its power makes it possibly the most useful […]
Sir Ken Robinson delivers a thought provoking and powerful follow up to his first TED talk (which still remains the most widely viewed of all talks on the site) with his urbane and self deprecatory wit and charm. Too many people spend too much of their lives simply enduring their daily lives waiting for the […]
It’s two years since the founder of Apple died, yet his commencement speech at Stanford University given in June 2005 is still routinely viewed by millions. It’s easy to see why. It makes complete sense and is a valuable lesson to us all and is inspirational, honest and motivational. From a speaking perspective, one of […]
As one of the leading interpreters of Mahler and Beethoven, Benjamin Zander has been the lead conductor of the Boston Philharmonic since 1979 as well as an international speaker on leadership. In this TED talk, Zander takes his audience on a transformative journey with his confidence, charisma and credibility and demonstrates almost effortlessly how to […]
On August 28th, it will be 50 years since Dr Martin Luther King delivered his most famous utterance to 250,000 civil rights supporters from the steps of the Lincoln memorial in Washington. The speech must surely be one of, if not the most famous public orations of all time. It was a defining moment for the American Civil […]
“I stand before you the representative of a family in grief, in a country in mourning before a world in shock” Earl Spencer. “Government of the people by the people for the people” Abraham Lincoln “Veni, vidi, vici” Julius Ceasar It is around us all the time – ‘just do it,’ ‘never knowingly undersold,’ ‘vorsprung […]
There is a popular misconception surrounding how much of a speech is down to the actual content itself, i.e. the words. The myth surrounds the 1967 study by Professor Albert Mehrabian (UCLA) which claimed that communication is broken down as follows: Words – 7%, Body language – 38%, Tone of voice – 55%. Here Barack […]