If you’ve got a presentation to give at work or school — or are perhaps getting ready to speak at a TEDx event? — we recommend these talks to help get you pumped up.
Thanks to college near-classmate (a year behind) Larry Fagan MD for this, which was in turn pointed out to him by one of his students, Sarah Aerni. (I met Larry for the first time last month at the Stanford Medicine X conference!)
All told these will take 80 minutes. If you’re not willing to spend that on being a better speaker, you’re not a cadet. :) The roster of talks:
- Julian Treasure: How to speak so that people want to listen A whole lot of practical skill in these ten minutes. (If you don’t care about “so people want to listen,” you haven’t been paying attention to this series.)
- Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you are. Guaranteed to make you laugh and think.
- Joe Kowan: How I beat stage fright
- Melissa Marshall: Talk nerdy to me <=oo, I haven’t even watched this (as I write, here) and I’m already in love
- Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action <= he spoke at the TEDx where I did
- Sebastian Wernicke: Lies, damned lies and statistics (about TEDTalks) <= I used Sebastian’s thinking in planning my talk
- Megan Washington: Why I live in mortal dread of public speaking
- Clint Smith: The danger of silence – a five minute talk with 263 comments. Why?? Pay attention and think.
Enjoy, and learn.
This is the latest in the Speaker Academy series, which started here.
Next in the series: #27: Impact speakers! Get the “Official TED Guide” to speaking
Everyone in the “health 2.0” world knows that the Health 2.0 conference is the conference in the health 2.0 world. It’s where everybody has to be, if they want to be known in that high-powered innovator world. Proof got even deeper when, a couple of years ago, they shifted venue from downtown San Francisco to the belly of the beast: Silicon Valley.
It’s 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Hacker Lab, 1715 I Street. 
Regular readers know that a large part of my becoming a global advocate has been the vision and influence of Lucien Engelen at Radboud University Medical Center (RUMC) in the town of Nijmegen, on The Netherlands’ eastern border. Way back in 2010 he announced that his upcoming TEDx would be primarily about patients; the TED Talk I did there put my speaking career into a catapult; then he put his own money where his mouth is by launching the 
#PatientsIncluded initiative, saying he would not attend any event where patients weren’t actively encouraged to participate; and he has continued to lead in thoughts and actions, every year since (including 3D-printing my lung metastases last year, below). Lucien is the standard, the exemplar of the “pay me with action” clause of 
For that reason, when he asked me this summer to participate in something even newer – something brand new – I immediately said yes. What was it? A three day event, “Inaugural Grand Rounds,” launching a completely redesigned curriculum at RUMC – redesigned with patients participating in the process. Yes, patients – people with no medical experience – except as “the ultimate stakeholders”; as patients, helping guide how we teach students.
