This episode covers so much, in one interview. Dr Nic Hooper talks to me about what it's like to prepare to publish his first book; about mental health (good and bad, his own, mine, other people's); about how illustrations can complement words, without being cheap; about the physiological effect of watching Tom Cruise hanging off a skyscraper with one glove; what Nic will remember when he's dying; whether to keep video recordings to put on a website he doesn't even have (yet), and why I needed to trim this interview.

Nic's (new!) website is here: https://www.nichooper.co.uk

If you're talking about something delicate, it's important to set up expectations from the start. 

This episode contains the beginning of a workshop I delivered to an audience of speakers and would-be speakers, courtesy of a charity, Illuminate, which helps people to overcome their mental health problems, then talk publicly about their experiences. 

In other words, what you're going to hear is me giving a talk about giving a talk. So apologies in advance that it's a bit self-referential. Some members of the audience had already delivered talks of their own, others hadn't. In this recording we considered how to set up a kind of "working relationship" with each audience, from the start.

The session as a whole lasted just under an hour, but I'm sharing only the beginning, to keep this episode relatively short.

Thank you to participants, and to Cambridgeshire-based Illuminate for organising this session.

Ron Boyd-MacMillan wrote a remarkably useful and entertaining book, Explosive Preaching, which I picked up while researching my own book. His insights, intended to aid religious preachers, are useful to anybody who intends to make a speech, whether at a wedding or for work.

In this interview, Ron tells me why the great early preacher St Augustine used to improvise;  says he's been disappointed that churches, in Covid, have sounded like bureaucrats interested only in health and safety; and tells stories about his work training preachers across the world and in many denominations. In particular, he explains how he prepared Chinese "house church" preachers to memorise dozens of hours of sermons all at once. 

Whatever your interest in communication, you'll learn from Ron how to think about your purpose, your audience, the arrangement of your material, the style you adopt, how to memorise your material, and how best to deliver it. 

PLUS: Whatever kind of creative work you are doing, you will want to stop occasionally and assess it. That applies to public speaking, writing a book, and making a podcast. In this episode, I perform a quick assessment of my own progress with this podcast, and note that I would never have started if I had hoped to know all this at the beginning - a reminder to all creative types to get started.