Early Birds Blog
How to keep the audience attention during online presentations.
By Ian Hawkins If you are presenting to an audience on a virtual platform, you need to have a strategy to stop people dropping out. We have all been guilty of not giving a speaker our full attention, even when we are in the same room. This problem is magnified when...
How to be great at Zoom meetings: experienced speakers give their rundown of what makes an online meeting work and what should be avoided
By Ian Hawkins Early Bird Speakers is regarded as one of the best public speaking clubs in the UK.With regular weekly meetings held in the heart of London, it draws members from all walks of life: a good number of barristers swing by from the nearby legal district,...
Show Your Working
By Neil Coleman In this post we peek behind the scenes of the speeches over the last few weeks at Early Birds to uncover the creative processes that brought them to life on our stage. “20 Years is Enough” For 20 Years is Enough, Ernesto decided...
Cliche Corner: I’m Looking Forward To Your Next Speech
By Niels FootmanThis sentence doesn't mean what you think it means.On the face of it, that seems an absurd claim. Anyone hearing that line could be in little doubt that its speaker has just heard a speech from someone within the club, has evaluated it, and...
How To Stop Saying “Er”: Field Research
By Ian HawkinsIf your New Year's Resolution is to improve your public speaking, you are probably one of the many people who struggles with filler words – the ‘um’s, ‘er’s and ‘you know’s that sap your credibility and confidence. Do you struggle with filler...
The Blessing – And The Curse – Of The One Hit Wonder
By Niels FootmanIn the summer of 1979, Norman Greenbaum walked onstage to a sense of expectation so great, you could almost touch it.Whoops arose from some faces in the crowd. Guitar strings were tuned. A bass drum pounded two or three times in quick...
What The World’s Toughest Fish Can Teach You About Public Speaking
By Niels FootmanIn September of this year, scientists from Newcastle University made an astonishing discovery.Using an ultra-resilient rig they'd built themselves, the team sent bait, traps and HD cameras to the unimaginably cold and forbidding depths of...
Grand Expectations: Hitting High Standards At Your Toastmasters Club
By Shaheen Mufti When you first came to Toastmasters, you had a set of expectations. That time when you visited your first Toastmasters club, you would have probably thought, “This is where I am going to improve my public speaking” or “This is the place...
WORDS FROM THE PREZ: Why We Make Them … And Why We Break Them
By Niels Footman "The road to hell," Stephen King once said, "is paved with adverbs." If anyone should know what makes up the approach to eternal damnation, the most successful horror writer of all time is probably your guy. But this quote echoes a wider...
Soapbox: You’ve Tried Everything And You’re All Out of Ideas
By Luke Pearce I've never considered myself to be much of a creative person. In school, my dreary art teacher wrote off my early drawing attempts as no more than "acceptable"; meanwhile I could never hope to improvise as well as that dope-infused jazz piano kid in my...
Cliche Corner: The Dead End of Journeys
Earlier this year, on British TV sensation and cultural totem Love Island, Dr Alex reclined on a sunbed next to his on-again, off-again spoon-buddy Alexandra, and burbled: "I definitely have feelings for you but I want us to keep our options open. After all,...
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