As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Brevity makes strong structure. The punchline is the payoff. Traditional wisdom is that the shortest distance between the setup and the payoff is best. When a story has a long set up before getting to the joke, it’s said that the punchline is carrying […]

Read More...

Add Impact When You Present Through Webinars No matter what you level of public speaking experience, whenever you open your mouth, whether you’re talking to one person or a thousand, you usually want to get a specific message across. Anyone who sets out to present, persuade, and propel with the spoken word faces pitfalls. And, […]

Read More...

Action star everyman Harrison Ford was honored with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Cecil B. DeMille Award, for “outstanding contribution to the entertainment field”-or more specifically, 35 movies over four decades, including Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Witness, The Fugitive, and Patriot Games. He said,

Read More...

One of the benefits of membership in World Champion’s Edge the public speaking community founded by Darren LaCroix, 2001 Toastmasters International World Champion of Public Speaking…is the Edge Forum where the members ask questions of each other, and the faculty, I am the World Champion’s Plus One as I do not share their title!

Read More...

5. We bring our characters to life through some of the verbs we use.
Fred casually sauntered into the boss’s office VS Fred rushed breathless into the boss’s office. Please note I am taking a lesson from the brilliant Mark Brown who taught us in a recent EDGE lesson about the importance of adjectives and adverbs.

Read More...

Surprise guest Bill Clinton said, “Ed Bradley was a brilliant, insatiable, curious traveler on a relentless quest to get to the bottom of things. He was like the great jazz musicians he so admired. He always played in the key of reason. His songs were full of the notes of facts; but he knew to make the most of music you have to improvise. We’ll never forget what his solos were: the disarming smile; the disconcerting stare; the highly uncomfortable stretches of silence, the deceptively dangerous questions, and the questions that would be revealing, no matter what your answer was. Watching him was mesmerizing — because you knew you were watching a master at work.”

Read More...

Q. When did you first start speaking? How long until speaking became your full-time job?
In 1976, when I was San Francisco’s #1 men’s hairstylist, I started delivering seminars to hairstylists for a hair product company called Markham. Through recommendations from my executive clients, Rotary Clubs and men’s breakfast clubs invited me to speak. Afterwards, the audience members often came into my salon. I quickly realized that this was an inexpensive way to promote my business.

Read More...