Great video of Markus Buckingham. Always glad to get ideas of good examples of speakers who are not politicians or Steve Jobs ;-)

I have been thinking a lot about this question since a conversation with my father over Christmas about whether social media changes the game - and opens up a possibility of building relationships of trust through bits rather than requiring a physical, face-to-face moment in order to construct true friendship. Your story helps put clarity. However, I have at least 2 cases of people that I have never met physically, but have shared deep stuff with them - deep, personal stuff that would not be shared except with a true trusted friend. I still think physical contact accelerates the process, but it may not be irreplaceable. Shared unique experiences are what build my strongest bonds with friends. Having a daughter and being a single father has forced me to ask for more help from friends than ever before in life - and has interestingly led to much deeper connection. A bit rambling, but this is an important post!

I love the reflection of reading novels as an older form of VR ;-) I have travelled to a lot of places in my childhood reading via the great stories than I ever visited physically.

Going to see if i can set up some practical joke right now ;-) need a good laugh! Ha ha.

What is presence? Where does it come from? Great content or great delivery or both? I came up with 12 tips to speak as a leader - number 1 being "speak with an intent to move people to action". I think the quality of executive presence is highly connected to dealing with an individual who projects that they are on a mission, there is a change in the world that they wish to effect. The rest of the 12 are here: http://www.conorneill.com/2009/08/12-tips-for-public-speaking.html Great post.

What if your kid says "you are great mum"? What if your kid finds their passion and changes the world? What if your kid is President? What if your kid is the best thing you can ever leave behind when you're gone? What if you find that you can't do it alone and are forced to ask friends, family for help and they appear and really help you in a way you have never seen them engaged before? One note: What if my kid thinks I'm lame? This is not a what if... this is called the teenage years. Another note: I don't believe that you can "instill values". If you want your kid to read, it is better that he sees you reading than that you read to him (or her). I heard this and started reading downstairs rather than always in my bedroom... and my daughter now picks up her book and sits next to me to read (before asking for cartoons to be put on the TV). You clearly have strong values. Your kid will see how you are and will internalise what he sees. He will rebel as a teenager and deliberately test you, but around 35 years later he will come to you one day as a father himself and say "did you really do all this for me?" "wow." "Alone?" "wow." "you are the best mom ever. Thanks."

...just wanted to clarify that the Starfish paragraph in my original comment was "tongue-in-cheek" and meant to be humourous... the only problem is I re-read it now and it sounds bad. Sorry :-(

I was going to go next week. Now I need to go tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with a sci fi geek (in the right context) if you can be Starfish (in all the other contexts). On Starfish... maybe they are missing something? Worms can also split themselves in 2 (or 3 or 4). Then again, you have the female queen bee at the other end of the spectrum ;-)

This post reminded me of a session I had with Verne Harnish, author of Mastering the Rockerfeller Habits. He asked "what is the most important capability of successful visionary leaders?" Pattern Recognition. Great visionary leaders give themselves access to data and then put themselves in an environment that they can see patterns in the data. Regularly taking a step back and asking "what have we learnt?", regularly getting out of the everyday environment, seeking out S.W.P.s (Tom Peters says we should all seek out Seriously Weird People in order to see the world in new ways that we are currently blind to). There are many situations in life and business where we try to fix a tree while the forest is burning down.

Jim Rohn has a famous quote "we each have the choice of one of two great pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret". Tom Peters says "the only source of good knowledge is bad experience". I have learnt far more from when things have not gone to plan than when everything has just worked out. I think about how to help my child develop a different attitude to failure - I think failure to try is absolute failure, failure to learn from our failures is stupidity - but nothing new or great will come without some accidents along the way. Keep blogging ;-)

This is a fantastic introduction to delivering webinars. Thanks for providing so much useful information in the blog post. Do you recommend any particular technology for delivery of Webinars? What do you use today? Thanks

I have been teaching persuasive communications at IESE Business School in Barcelona for the last 6 years. Your blog is a great source of useful information. I like these tips and will be thinking about how to include them into my sessions with the MBA class. I have a recent post with my 12 tips... http://www.conorneill.com/2009/08/12-tips-for-public-speaking.html

I have been standing up in front of groups and speaking for 7 years (a few more, but only 7 years where I thought about it in advance) and have gone on a journey from thinking content was important to now being convinced that the single most important thing is the speaker's projection of credibility on the topic. Thanks for some great material here in your blog. I put some thoughts together on the 3 things that non-verbal communication should help a speaker achieve http://www.conorneill.com/2009/09/3-keys-to-powerful-body-language-while.html