Next week I’ll be speaking at the ASOHNS meeting in Hobart. Right now, I’m performing the ritual that happens in hotel rooms and home offices all over the world in the days before a talk. Opening the slides one more time. Click.Click.Click. Checking everything still works. Fonts.Videos.Slide order. Because every presenter knows that beautiful slides have a habit of falling apart the moment they meet the conference computer. You arrive early for your session.Hand over your USB. And suddenly...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Every year at the Academy Awards, someone walks up to the microphone and loses the war with their own nervous system. The lip trembles.The breath goes shallow.The words dissolve into tears. Think of Gwyneth Paltrow in 1999, voice cracking as she tried to steady herself.Or Halle Berry in 2002, overcome as she became the first Black woman to win Best Actress.Or Renée Zellweger in 2020, visibly fighting to keep her speech from drifting away from her. Sometimes those moments are moving.Sometimes...
16 days ago • 3 min read
Lately, I’ve been staying up far too late reading the Aubrey–Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. I tell myself I’ll stop after one chapter.Then another ship appears on the horizon.Another decision needs to be made.Another thread is left hanging. Before I know it, it’s 1am. I’m currently deep into The Commodore, the seventeenth book in the series — with four still to come. And hovering over the whole thing is a strange, slightly melancholy fact: the twenty-first and final book was never...
23 days ago • 2 min read
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...
30 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...
about 1 month 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...
about 1 month 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 2 months 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 2 months 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...
2 months ago • 2 min read
