Content is still king (even if your hands are shaking) You’ve probably heard this before. Only 7% of communication is words.The rest is tone, posture, body language. It’s comforting.It’s simple.And it scares a lot of people. Because if that were true, then the moment your voice wobbles or your hands shake, your message stops mattering. That’s not how real communication works. I’ve been rereading The Road by Cormac McCarthy.No quotation marks. Sparse dialogue. Sentences stripped back to the...
14 days ago • 1 min read
When a horse gallops, are all four hooves ever off the ground at once? They argued a lot about horses in the 1800s. Every time you saw a picture of a horse running, two hooves on the ground.Front legs stretched forward.Back legs stretched behind. It looked right. No one questioned it. Until someone slowed it down. When Eadweard Muybridge lined up a series of cameras and let the horse run past, the argument ended. For a fraction of a second, all four hooves were off the ground.Tucked...
21 days ago • 1 min read
Bond Never Starts at the Beginning The first thing James Bond does is move. He doesn’t explain the mission.He doesn’t introduce himself.He doesn’t tell you what’s about to happen. He drops you straight into motion - skis already carving, breath already shallow, the ground already falling away. By the time the title sequence rolls, your brain has already decided: this matters. Bond doesn’t ask for attention.He demands it. 💡 ONE IDEA WELL Starting in medias res — in the middle of things — works...
28 days ago • 1 min read
Silence feels longer from the inside. Especially when you’re the one standing at the front of the room. You’re mid-talk.You’ve just finished saying something that matters.And for a moment, the next thought doesn’t arrive. It’s not that you don’t know what comes next.It’s that stress has briefly made the path harder to find. Your heart pounds.Time stretches.The pause feels exposed—like everyone can see it happening. That happened to me when I spoke at Compassion Revolution last year. I’d...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
You can feel the moment it changes. You’re ten minutes in.The audience is with you. Heads up, nodding along. That sense that you’ve got them. Then something shifts. A glance at a watch.A phone lights up briefly, face down again.A small, collective exhale you can’t quite hear—but you know it’s there. Not because the talk is bad.Because it’s running over. Nobody ever tells you off for finishing early.Nobody thanks you for using every second of your slot. But everyone notices when you go long. 💡...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
I’m giving the first talk of the day soon.08:35. A general audience. Coffee not quite doing its job yet. It’s meant to be about common ENT presentations in children.Things that are better out than in ears, noses, or throats. But I’m not starting with the anatomy.I’m starting with the approach. Because first thing in the morning, people don’t need a data dump. They need orientation. And that’s not a failing of motivation or preparation. It’s biology. Early in the day, attention is still...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
I finally finished Stranger Things. And like a lot of people, I felt… flat. Not because the show was bad. In fact, most of it was brilliant—especially the early seasons. The world-building. The music. The quiet moments with Steve and Dustin. The heart. The hair. The hero. But that final episode? It dragged.It fizzled.It didn’t stick the landing. And it reminded me of something I see in talks all the time. A speaker holds the room for 20 minutes—clear message, great rhythm, engaged audience....
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
The talk that made your brain work too hard Most presentations don’t fail because the speaker doesn’t know enough. They fail because the speaker is trying to impress you with the sheer breadth of what they know. I used to do this too. Before I started writing a talk, I’d open five tabs on my laptop and try to work out how I could cram all of that information onto the fewest possible slides. It’s easy to tell when someone has done it. They put up a slide full of dense text in a barely readable...
2 months ago • 6 min read
Every year people make resolutions about steps, sleep, inboxes, diets, finances, habits, fitness, mindfulness…but almost no one makes a resolution about the thing we all do more than anything else: Communicate. We speak in meetings.We teach.We explain.We pitch.We persuade.We present.We stand up in front of rooms — small, large, virtual, fluorescent, hostile, bored — and we try to share ideas that matter. Yet very few people ever say: “This year, I’m going to be better at this.” So here’s your...
2 months ago • 2 min read
