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What a gorgeous day it is! I can bet that meetings, presentations and all office activity across England will be slightly reduced today as people gaze out of the window, suffer malfunctioning air-conditioning and decide to take a long lunch break outside for once. When you’re presenting and you know that there’s something else that […]

Seth Godin wrote here about taking the initiative when meeting new people. Have a read, it’s good stuff (as always). The fear of being rejected when encountering new people is completely normal, and when you’re stepping out to do public speaking in front of a group of strangers, it’s natural to want to run (or perhaps walk

Watch this very funny man. He’s called Sean Lock. Unlike Milton Jones, a naive character (see my post ‘Look and Learn‘), Sean Lock is the man-in-the-street, challenging conventional thinking. This is a very important aspect of the stand-up’s role; obviously the first is to entertain, but there’s a great opportunity – and one might argue, a

I did stand-up comedy for about ten years part-time, and then went full-time for over two years. During that time I met a lot of very unusual people: some smart, some deluded, some needy, many very talented. Here’s the secret: We were a bunch of weirdos, but we’d managed to find something we were good

I can talk about – and for that matter, tell – stories all day, and it was the basis of what I used to do as a stand-up comic. My favourite story structure is the ‘Hero’s Journey’, used for films like ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Lord of the Rings’ (read more about it here). The elements