This was supposed to be a series of posts about the process of speaking at the summit that I could use for marketing. Marketing? Me? Just imagine! Instead it’s just one long unloading. Enjoy!
If you’re not familiar with it, the Speaking Business Summit is Oscars of my industry – or at least that’s how I explained it to my children. They likened it more to the Glastonbury Festival. (More of that analogy later!)
Getting the gig
A while ago I’d been challenged by a friend of mine, also a speaker, David Hyner to do something at the last conference, so I applied for and ran a workshop, looking at how to pick the stories you use in your presentations, as that was the topic that was exorcising me at the time. (For example see this post on Linked In.) To be honest I was horrifically nervous in the build up but I got a full room and a standing ovation. (Okay, only about half the room, but for a workshop that’s astounding – and you can probably see my surprise in my face on the clip!

Spurred on by that response and the sort of feedback I was getting on LinkedIn, I figured I should do more with it and applied for MainStage for 2024.
So I did.
Twice in fact – once as a keynote and once as another workshop.
At the end of January I got the confirmation that my application was successful and that I’d be speaking in one of three strands of the conference
- speak more – where the stuff was going on that I want to see myself! 😉
- speak better – where I’d be speaking
- speaking business

Chuffed? Yes, very! But also a tiny bit disappointed, because although Chantal, the National President, said I’d be on MainStage, as it was only one of three simultaneous strands the egotist in me spotted a problem. I’d be there with at best, one third the conference attendees, in a room big enough for all of them. It’s damned hard to work a 2/3 empty venue!
Turns out I needed have worried, ‘cos when the full conference timetable, it looked like this! MainStage with everyone there.

One tiny downer was from my kids. Remember I said they’d likened this gig to Glastonbury? When they saw who I was following the immediate response was “Yeah – like being Guns ‘n’ Roses, but only after Beyonce has hit the main stage.” I never liked my children! 🙂
Right. That’s all the boring background stuff done. Time to start talking about what goes into actually crafting a keynote presentation as important as this.
Let the sleepless nights begin!
Designing the structure
I actually sell a physical product to help people do this, so it would be hypocritical of me not to have used it. First things first, know exactly what I want to say. For me, that means for tonnes of research material. I use Notion to keep track of it all, with pages and pages of thoughts, notes, and links to various research papers etc. I’ve also got a notepad beside my bed for the three o’clock in the morning idea of “what to research next”.
Yes, it’s a bit obsessive, but I’m about to tell a couple of hundred of the world’s best professional speakers how better to use stories, so I’d damn well better have got my facts straight!

I read everything from PhD submissions of the impact of motivational speaking, to medical research on the half-life of various hormones. Some of it was even interesting but I’ll leave you guessing as to which! 😉 I’ve even done interviews with computer games designers about “frustration theory”. Obviously I’ve played the games to do the research too! It would be rude not to, right? As I put it on a comment to a LinkedIn post: I’ve gone down so many research rabbit holes I’ve visited Australia.
So… on to figuring out which bits to include. The human brain isn’t very good remembering things. It’s great at processing what it can see though. The simple solution at this point then is to put anything and everything that I might want to include down on index cards. The rule is pretty strict that each card can only include:
- one thought
- one opinion
- one idea
- one fact
- one of whatever…

Now I have to admit I did cheat a bit here. The idea is to do everything from scratch so that all cards are equal. That’s pretty important and I hold my hands up to a bit of hypocrisy. There are some things that I’ve done in previous presentations that were so obviously relevant I printed the old slides off and stuck them to the index cards!
The idea here is to find the intrinsic ‘golden thread’ through the content and we do this by moving the cards around on big table. It’s important to do this physically outside of your head rather than trying to do it internally, ‘cos, well, basically ‘cos the human brain can’t do that unless you’re a world champion chess player.
My cards got bunched together, shuffled, rearranged, and re-bunched, re-shuffled etc for far too long. The table in our spare room was out of action for well over a week as I tried to get the perfect flow and pattern. To be totally honest here I struggled with this one, ‘cos there are genuinely a few things that overlap so much they all need to be said at the same time. It’s a sort of A-explains-B-explains-C-explains-A sort of mess, but that’s where this process is so very powerful. It allows you to experiment and “play” in a way that you simply can’t if you’re trying to do it inside PowerPoint.
As well as the brain-capacity issue I just mentioned there are two other reasons for using an external process.
Firstly, PowerPoint’s order manipulation is a bit clumsy and requires you to spend some of your head-space on the tech, not the content. Secondly, once you’ve gone to the trouble of creating a slide, you’re wedded to it. By putting things alongside each other in this way, every bit of content – old and new – was more or less equal in my head.
Time for content…
I’m not one for scripts. They sound scripted. A better process is to be so familiar with the content that “improvising” on the day is so easy it can’t go wrong. That means it sounds fresh, because it is. It sounds more conversational, because it is. It sounds more engaging, because it is.
The downside of course, is that it can sometimes make it a little harder to keep to time, etc but it’s worth the risk. I cannot stress strongly enough how often you should go over things out loud. Firstly and obviously this helps timing because speaking happens at a different speed to thinking. Secondly, you’re learning a physical action. Now, while there’s some experimental research about mental practice being (nearly) as good as physical practice, it’s not quite so good, even under ideal conditions – and most of us have neither the ideal conditions or the mental self-discipline!
So out loud was the way I went. Around the table; around the local park; and around the gym.
The key idea here is that each point is explored verbally. If it feels right, keep it and repeat it. If it feels clumsy in your mouth you need to rephrase. The other thing I kept in my head as I worked was that I wanted to be pitching at smart 12 year olds. Why that age? Because smart 12 year olds know very little but they learn unbelievably fast. That’s the perfect analogy for an audience, of course!

I was also anxious to reduce the ‘shock’ of moving from sitting in front of my computer to the stage, so I wanted to practice some movement too. You’d be amazed at how easily simple things like controlling a remote clicker (rather than my Mac’s mouse) can thow things. So I commandeered our living room and plugged into the TV!
First run-throughs were with my iPad on the ironing board (who says the professionals have all the best kit?!) but later runs had the iPad away from me so the clicker was my only option.
Obviously I also timed it, tweaked it and sweated it. This is the bit where I actually learned it.
… and time for poetry
I mentioned that scripts aren’t a good plan – but there were two points where I’d created, for lack of a better word, poetry. One was a key moment in the middle and one was the end. I’d got rhythm, pattern, alliteration and pretty much every trick in the book designed to give The Big Finish. Not only was I doing that to help people remember things (any pattern helps plant things in people’s heads) but I wanted to have an impact on the day, too. Frankly, this was too good an opportunity to miss. Serving my message is the most important thing for me, and then serving my audience, obviously, but I figured the content and structure ticked those two boxes and I could afford to take a tiny liberty at the end and create the kind of finish that got an immediately positive result in the room, too.
Photo opportunities like this are few and far between, frankly, so I semi-engineered a huge response. I used the rhetorical technique called Antimetabole. “Sure, we’ll make fewer exceptional people, but we’ll make more people who can do exceptional things“.
Those were the moments I learned pretty much verbatim – but only those two moments.
Off to the conference
You know the drill I’m sure, but I’ll give you the outlines of what I did to control nerves in case it’s helpful.

- On the drive down, I’d loaded with plenty of cracking podcasts. Six hours in a car on your own is a dangerous place. You can get lost in your own head pretty easily. Obviously I didn’t manage to not things about things all the time, but I gave it a go! I made a point of really looking at the scenery as well as the road to keep myself grounded
- I’d arranged to meet people for a meal the night before the conference so I wasn’t alone and brooding
- The night before I went to bed at my normal time, using my normal routine – or at least my normal hotel routine. I’m not 100% up on the research for this but what I’ve read suggests that things like “early to bed” just unsettle your subconscious and so make the situation potentially worse. What I had done, however, was make sure I’d got plenty of sleep for the week before, just in case I couldn’t sleep this time. That way I’d only be carrying one night’s sleep-debt rather than the bigger load that most of us usually carry
- I was staying at a hotel about 40 minutes walk away from the conference, which helped too, as it allowed me to get away from the physical presence of everything. As I walked too-and-fro I made a point of looking around me too. I’m not claiming this is the best photo in the world, but it was something I saw that made me smile as I saw it
- I’d got my logistics all sorted out well in advance. My diary was set to bleep at me at the key times, such as when I needed to leave for my sound-check. That frees up a lot of headspace for the gig itself, and removes a significant chunk of a potential source of nerves.
- I touched base as soon as possible with the organisers and the tech crew. Getting names is handy, so you know who to ask for if things go wrong. 😉 I also made sure they’d got my mobile number in case of last minute stuff
- I had my phone on DoNotDisturb with a setting that allowed through only the organisers and my wife, so I knew I could keep it on and not miss anything, but I was also not distracted by it
The day
Honestly, I can’t tell my much of what happened before my session, except that there was a problem ‘cos at 8:30 my slides were lost. I’ll mention that in another post for another day.
Before me was the incomparable Russ Bernstein – who’s literally spoken on all seven continents! As he finished his powerdrive of a presentation all I could do was mutter “F*** me, how do I follow that”. But to quote my wife (she’s a saint): it’s not about comparisons, it’s about being useful. So I did a Catch the Apple exercise, listened to my introduction and off we went…
Did it work? Apparently.