The Subtle Art of Public Speaking | Stage, Page & Screen Podcast

Back in September of last year I had the wonderful honour of virtually chatting with Josh Shipp and Jesse Rice for the above podcast.

I’ve slept since then so had forgotten what we chatted about but boy did I love experiencing this conversation again as a listener.

There’s lots of insights here from my lived experience as a speaker coach and speaker myself plus how to present online effectively. I also got to ask some questions also of Josh and got some advice / insights from his brain.

I featured Josh in a MediaSnackers podcast back in 2009, met up with him a couple of times during the following years and kept in touch ever since. He’s one of my favourite speakers and humans on the planet. A mentor. Author. MTV advice star. TV personality. Now business leader / youth speaker agency founder. An exemplar of the practice of oratory.

Thank you Josh and Jesse (cohost / producer of the podcast) for their time, questions and wonderful (listen to their wonderful back catalogue of podcasts here).

Have a listen and let me know what you took away in the comments below.

Published

#62 March 2024 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

A bunch of things (which I added to my Tumblr) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on (as no longer on Twitter).

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“Regulators and lawmakers fail to make any changes to proactively protect the public, while allowing crypto firms to advertise and recruit new customers who seem far more likely to wind up as victims of yet another collapse as they are to become the next crypto-millionaires. How many people will have to lose how much money before we stop believing the lies from an industry that has preyed on people’s trust and hopes for financial miracles, only to dash them on the ground in failure after failure?Bankman-Fried is going to prison, but nothing has changed.”

Sam Bankman-Fried is going to prison. The crypto industry isn’t any better for it | Sam Bankman-Fried | The Guardian

“Use of the arts in healing does not contradict the medical view in bringing emotional, somatic, artistic, and spiritual dimensions to learning. Rather, it complements the biomedical view by focusing on not only sickness and symptoms themselves but the holistic nature of the person.When people are invited to work with creative and artistic processes that affect more than their identity with illness, they are more able to “create congruence between their affective states and their conceptual sense making.” Through creativity and imagination, we find our identity and our reservoir of healing. The more we understand the relationship between creative expression and healing, the more we will discover the healing power of the arts.”

The Connection Between Art, Healing, and Public Health: A Review of Current Literature – PMC

“MSI Reproductive Choices (formerly Marie Stopes International) and the Center for Countering Digital Hate claim the platforms are restricting local abortion providers from advertising, but failing to tackle misinformation that undermines public access to reproductive healthcare. MSI, which provides contraception and abortion services in 37 countries, said its adverts containing information on sexual health, including cancer advice, had been rejected or deleted by the platform.”

Meta and Google accused of restricting reproductive health information | Global development | The Guardian

“A study published by a team of international researchers last month found that gravity batteries in decommissioned mines could offer a cost-effective, long-term solution for storing energy as the world transitions to renewable power. Scientists from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) found that the world’s abandoned mine shafts could store up to 70TWh of power – roughly the equivalent of global daily electricity consumption.”

This disused mine in Finland is being turned into a gravity battery to store renewable energy | Euronews

“For many, it’s not just about recognizing a global issue but feeling a deep, personal impact on their mental well-being. Especially for those with a strong connection to their environment or homeland, this pervasive anxiety and distress manifests in unique ways. Such feelings can give rise to “solastalgia,” which refers to the dread originating from environmental change. Unlike nostalgia, which is a longing for a place or time in the past that one cannot revisit, solastalgia is the experience of distress from belonging to a home that is undergoing change.”

A Psychologist Offers 3 Tips To Deal With ‘Solastalgia’

“Scholars might call it a philosophical treatise. But it seems familiar to us, and we can’t escape the feeling that the first text we’ve uncovered is a 2000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life.”

Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the scrolls! | Vesuvius Challenge

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Curated list of games no betterverse.be to help you think critically and imaginatively about the future of society, and collectively imagine brighter tomorrows.

Love the way this muzzleapp.com demonstrates the problem it’s going to solve (see notifications examples on the right hand side of the screen).

Starting a couple of new projects soon and always good to get some inspiration from onepagelove.com.

Want to practice your typing? typelit.io does that for free, online, and gets you to type out classic books.

morss.it creates RSS feeds from websites and a whole lot more, check it out.

ambient.garden is an algorithmic audio landscape.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#51 April 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Nope.

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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Here’s a completely non-technical explanation of AI and deep learning which really does help you get how they do what they do (and through the metaphor used discover it has nothing to do with intelligence).

Another article on how awful Bitcoin (& crypto mining) is for the environment and another for good measure.

This article about Long Covid is scary stuff, which is echoed in some conversations with those in my networks who are suffering the same fate.

A great exploration of the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT work with bonus link of how this site is listed even though probably without them carrying on the terms when referenced.

A cheeky monkey who entered an AI created image and won a photography competition.

A different taken AI (that’s “Augmented Imagination”) to spark some thoughts.

How one company scraped 30 billion images from bookFace & other social media sites and gave them to cops: it puts everyone into a ‘perpetual police line-up’, douches!

A clean energy milestone the world is set to pass in 2023 which is news we all need more of.

Where I live in Wellington there is a danger of every street lamp falling out (which weighs that of a full grown turkey) plus the nation is becoming less attractive for rich foreigners based on visa numbers.

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Draw a character, upload and animate. So much fun for the little & large humans!

Just live air traffic control with lofi hip hop.

Iceberger: draw an iceberg and see how it will float.

Humaaans, which is a mix-&-match illustrations of people, CC0 free for commercial or personal use.

Mockdrop is a free device mockups site.

Ukiyo-e Search, is a collection of a wide variety of Japanese woodblock prints.

This podcast with to Rex Weyler (one of the founders of Greenpeace) on Team Human, good for the ears and brain.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

#49 February 2023 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Dublin Dock sunrise
Dublin Dock sunrise on my recent trip there to deliver more of my ‘purposeful storytelling’ public speaking masterclasses.

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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How to visit a Disney theme park and still keep your privacy.

There was a secret cross-party summit held to confront failings of Brexit by those who created it (licking wounds & admitting the failure but not in public).

An open source seeds project because “a 2012 Oxfam study found that four companies dominate more than 60 percent of the global trade with grains.”

Why Total Eclipse of the Heart is the most epic song ever written.

How the James Webb Space Telescope is creating awe.

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Scribble Diffusion: turn your sketch into a refined image using AI.

Peel.fm: a drum machine in your browser.

Openverse: An extensive library of free stock photos, images, & audio, available for free use from WordPress.

This page generates nonsense words based on a frequency list of phonemes as they occur in legitimate English words.

Poline: an enigmatic color palette generator.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Published

Leadership Now Podcast With Dan Pontefract | Sharing Insights From My Speaking Coaching & Creative Producing Experience

Chats about public speaking, coaching, presenting online vs in-person, event design and delegate experience development etc.—all the stuff I’ve been doing these past few years condensed into 30mins.

Dan produces a very impressive podcast with an eyebrow-raising amount of featured talent (like Daniel Pink, Tom Peters, Arianna Huffington etc.). Was lucky enough to spend some time rapping about what I’ve been up to in the past few years and hope you enjoy!

Here’s all the places you can subscribe for further episodes: Apple | Spotify | Amazon | Google | YouTube Channel Video Interview | Forbes Column

Thanks again Dan for your interest and invitation to share some stories on your esteemed platform.

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Helping People Perform Podcast | My Journey & Current Approach

A guest podcast feature.

What a joy to be invited by Paul Teasdale (ex-Operational Performance Specialist for racing team McLaren and now Leadership Performance Coach) to participate in his great podcast he has going:

This podcast focuses on the individuals who have chosen a career path of helping others perform, in whatever guise that takes. Hear from coaches, trainers, teachers and lots of others about what it takes to perform in the industry of helping others.

In this 45minute chat I get into the following:

  • potted career history
  • new vs social media
  • relationship with failure
  • designing TEDx experiences
  • details on what I do now
  • presenting online skills
  • who I want to work with

Hope you enjoy and if you do, check out more podcasts and subscribe at Helping People Perform, thank Paul.

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Creative Welly Benchmark | The Experimental Journey Continues

78 humans, 39 episodes, over 18 months, one idea to have ‘courageous conversations with bold humans.’

It has been a pure joy to sit down with such a diverse range of leaders. Learning from such talent in such an unencumbered way, celebrating through storytelling their current position in life whilst evolving ideas through simple conversation. Nothing can replace this purely analogue process of interaction for me.

What you might not know is that we record three episodes back-to-back in one day which shocks people but actually it’s so energising whilst I’m in it.

Was validating earlier this year to receive a sponsored opportunity to apply for a Webby Award, basically like the Oscars for the web although it’s pretty pricey to apply. Didn’t win but was lovely to have the opportunity to put the little project forward for it and very nice of the award body to invite us to for free under one category (have a personal gripe about awards you have to pay for although as it was for free thought there was nothing to lose until I then got spammed like hell from their parent company with snail mail (seriously) for other online awards, sighs).

Creative Welly is still a self-funded and voluntary-produced endeavour, in association with video extraordinaire Jono Tucker from Empire Films (special thanks to David from Flashdog Studio for allowing us to utilise the space at cost), and there’s now approximately 65 hours worth of unique video content exploring the creative talent in my network.

And all those episodes are out there as audio as well, uploaded to anchor.fm (which is owned by Spotify) where recently they told us we’re in the top 4% of content creators:

I’d suggest you go subscribe via the site to the video version, as I’ve discussed before, it’s so so unique because it’s specifically designed to create intimacy for the viewer in a never seen before format. If audio is your jam though here’s the subscription options.

So thank to all of the participants up until now. For many it’s been a big deal to step into the public arena in this way and am always enamoured by their bravery.

Am already looking to book in January 2023 recordings and continue on this journey as still got a juicy list of humans to get through. Until then, here’s the bumper list for you to work through for the silly season:

  1. Jessica Manins & Sarb Johal
  2. Olie Body & Ged Finch
  3. Raqi Syed & Gabe Davidson
  4. Sandy Gildea & Jase Te Pu
  5. Hiria Te Rangi & Guled Mire
  6. Haritina Mogosanu & Gareth Parry
  7. Pia Steiner & Thomas van Raamsdonk
  8. Lindy Nelson & Clive Spink
  9. Janelle Fenwick & Tom Probert
  10. Bron Thomson & Paul Atkins
  11. Elizabeth McNaughton & Rohan Wakefield
  12. Melissa Clark-Reynolds & Cesar Piotto
  13. Mayu Suzuki & Trent Yeo
  14. Audrea Topps Harjo & Alex Matthews
  15. Conrad Johnston & Pat Shephard
  16. Natasha Zimmerman & Ben Preston
  17. Victoria Spackman & Mark Bradford
  18. Anne-Marie Brook & Cody Ellingham
  19. Paula Eskett & Ari Sargent
  20. Karen Fifield & John Holt
  21. Shadoe Stone & Troy Hammond
  22. Jane Guy & Brian Lucid
  23. Samantha Gadd & Phyo Thu
  24. Jo Cribb & James Partridge
  25. Isabella Cawthorn & Richard Shirtcliffe
  26. Glenis Hiria Philip-Barbara & Sam Trubridge
  27. Negin Imani & Derek Bradley
  28. Janine Sudbury & Mark Gee
  29. Emilie Fetscher & James Bushell
  30. Pamela Bell & Josh Forde
  31. Victoria Crockford & James McCulloch
  32. Michelle Kitney & Rob Cousins
  33. Cynthia Hunefeld & Mark Westerby
  34. Bernadette Casey & Tan Huynh
  35. Freda Wells & Dan Neely
  36. Laurinda Thomas & Guy Marriage
  37. Kimberley Gilmour & Joseph Harawira
  38. Antonia Milkop & Dion Howard
  39. Kristen Lunman & Tim Pointer
Published

#47 November 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

fail whale rises from the depths

A bunch of things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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Serious concerns about the environmental impact of major productions including Amazon’s Rings of Power where “the first season of the show, …had generated roughly 14,387 tonnes of carbon dioxide.”

Facebook owner Meta to sack 11,000 workers after revenue collapse by so thinking / hoping this is just a start as finally the data extraction business models are starting to fail.

It looks like the same platform has been hoovering up users financial information who use online tax-filling platforms.

Read with nodding head this article on The Hollow Core of Kevin Kelly’s “Thousand True Fans” Theory.

A new study shows on-screen meetings hinder creative collaboration whilst other research shows that real-time collaboration tends to stifle creativity and diverse perspectives.

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The livestream of The Pitch Drop experiment, the longest running lab experiment (established in 1927 to demonstrate how tar is the most viscous liquid, there’s been 9 drops have fallen in 95 years).

Whilst it still breathes, check out social.perma.cc which allows you to capture a thread from Twitter and archive it in sealed PDFs to attest to legitimacy.

Also, use this python code to convert all your tweets into Markdown whilst converting the shortened urls to the originals plus downloads all associated images (worked for me).

Plink, where you can create beats and jam out with strangers all over the world.

twitterisgoinggreat.com (self explanatory and just like web3isgoinggreat.com).

Listen to this episode of Team Human as it’s worth your time.

floor796.com, you’re welcome…

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Image credit: The Oatmeal.
Published

#40 March 2022 | Monthly Digital Breadcrumbs

Several things (which I tweeted) for your eyes and ears plus brain to spend time on.

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This annotated critique of a cryptocurrency piece in the New York Times by fifteen researchers.

An overview of the current state of the NFT & Metaverse space (it’s on a serious wane).

A technical look at how Web3 is not centralised and the shortfalls of it all.

Another two articles about how countrywide adoption of cryptocurrencies in El Salvador & Kazakhstan has failed (not to mention the incredible amount of ewaste & carbon emissions created by the ventures).

A court ruled that Sussan Ley (environment minister for Australia) does not have duty of care to protect young from climate crisis.

Another stark piece covering ice shelf collapse in Antarctica related to climate change.

Inside Finland’s plan to end all waste by 2050 through education.

If you use LinkedIn you probably have noticed how bad the content is nowadays and how you never see stuff from those directly in your network⁠—check out this illustration of me scrolling for over a minute and not seeing anything from those in my network, then this post where you can show your support for change.

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A short audio piece from Radio 4 on Getting Better Acquainted with Words (featuring Ted Hughes, Virginia Woolf, Charles Bukowski).

Another amazing BBCRadio4 piece this time on “Welsh Identities.”

Use for free, Spoke, a way to create 3D social scenes for Hubs, where you can meet, share and collaborate together in private 3D virtual spaces.

A BUMPER a list of free software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own server(s).

There’s Quodb if you’re ever struggling to find a quote from that movie you like OR find out where a specific quote came from.

A list of pricing psychology techniques.

All monthly digital breadcrumbs posts.
Image credit.
Published

Creative Welly Episodes Catch-up | Maturing The Format

The passion project progresses.

Above is the latest episode of the little side creative endeavour launched a few months ago in response to the lockdown anxiety we all felt (and many are still feeling around the globe):

Revealed only in retrospect these past couple of years, is a thematic thread through my past projects / experiences of ‘giving people voice’ (which has become my spoken purpose plus evidenced in both my producing and coaching roles).

Creative Welly is a mash-up-manifestation of this and my hunger for curating good people…

After six episodes, I’m reflecting on how important intentional space is, what the mix of curious humans and intersecting disciplines ignites plus how listening is the fastest route in connecting to another person.

Am still trying to get the balance right of tangent following plus the drawing of the connections between those guests invited to participate. Sometimes it just flows, softly and eagerly, other times it requires a more focused attempt…

…then again, that’s the same with every day conversation with folks we all interact with.

Onwards!

Oh and Episode 5 was released a few weeks ago and is equally worth your time also:

All episodes are shot and edited by the wonderfully talented Jono Tucker, Empire Films. An extremely diligent and personable soul who has added a polish to the resulting video which I never could’ve achieved, thank you Jono.

Hosted at Xequals, a centrally based web development agency who provide us with a kick-ass office which totally gets kitted out for the shoot. Thank you Alex Matthews for being so gracious with your space.

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