Event: Public Speaking | Adequate to Excellent In 30 Days
LOCATION: Zoom, plus a secure online private group on Signal
EVENT DATES: 14 September – 13 October 2026
This course is open to individuals.
For corporate enquiries please get in touch directly.
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How would you like to be a confident public speaker?
Adequate is good enough. And good enough is good enough. Excellent is even better.
This is a 30-day email course for accomplished people who already speak in their work – or are about to – and who want to do it without dread.
Fifteen minutes a day, delivered to your inbox. At the end of the month, you’ll be a confident speaker.
I asked the people who came on my last course
“This sounds interesting and also quite scary (I can’t think when I last did anything in a group as my default setting is to be alone preferably hiding beneath the duvet); that said, I think it would be a good thing to do. . . My tendency is to be fairly scripted and funny(ish), so I think your challenge to try the untried is very valuable.”
“I’m delighted you’d like me to come, and despite all the experience am strangely quite nervous.”
“I’m really grateful to have a group as I need to get back on the horse. I’m completely out of practice. I don’t even know what I know. I never have a script, I always riff and my favourite bit is the q & a. If I had a bit of a practice when it’s my turn I’m hoping I’ll get my confidence back.”
“I want to be free to bring myself to any engagement without fear getting in the way. So to allow my self – or rather the public self – to be front and centre, rather than a cowed version of that self… I want to connect with audiences. I want to be confident enough to be spontaneous. . .”
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Who this is for
Experts about to give their first big talk to a new (to you) audience. Writers facing book tours. Professionals who keep getting asked to present and want to stop dreading it.
If you’re already accomplished at something and need to add public speaking to your toolkit, this is for you.
I have a particular talent for teaching people who are really good at one thing to become really good at something related. For example: when I posted on LinkedIn about what speechwriters can learn by delivering a speech, Barack Obama’s speechwriter Terry Szuplat shared it with the words:
“Learn, as I have, from John-Paul Flintoff. Highly recommend.”
I still feel dazed.
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A bit of background
I first ran a version of this course in 2020, around the launch of my book A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech.
Since then I’ve taught public speaking in London, in mainland Europe, and online. Some participants are bouncy and loud, others quieter. My job is to help you find your own style and really be super-duper at that – not to make you sound like anyone else.
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Classical What?
“Adequate To Excellent” public speaking combines insights from classical rhetoric with improvisational theatre exercises.
If classical rhetoric sounds like a yawn – it really isn’t. It’s terrific. Here’s a drawing of Me In Specs On A Greek Vase, just to give a sense of how much it amuses and pleases me:
I like teaching classical rhetoric because it seems so deeply unfashionable – and it connects me to the great traditions of Ancient Greece, Rome, the Bible, Shakespeare – you name it.
If you want to make classical rhetoric even more fun, try doing it “all wrong”.
You’ll soon see that if you DON’T follow the basic principles of classical rhetoric your speaking will be – well, less than ideal.
How the 30 days work
The course is built around the five steps of classical rhetoric. We spend roughly a week on each, with a final week putting it all together:
- Invention – what kind of audience do you have? What do you actually want to achieve? (Most beginners skip this, which is why everything afterwards gets harder.)
- Arrangement – what to put in, what to leave out, how to use facts, how to use story.
- Style – sharpen your rhetoric. Find your own voice. Raise the emotional temperature when you need to.
- Memory – mnemonic techniques for those who need them.
- Delivery – what to do before, during, and after the moment itself.
Each weekday you’ll get an email of roughly fifteen minutes’ reading or doing – sometimes a short piece from me, sometimes a prompt, sometimes a video to watch or record. At weekends you rest, or catch up.
Once a week there’s an optional office hours on Zoom (Thursdays, 6pm UK). Come if you can, ignore if you can’t. The course doesn’t depend on it – but people who use it often report breakthroughs there.
There’s also a private group where you can post a short talk (up to 15 minutes) and I’ll give you detailed feedback. That’s where the work gets real.
Improvise? You?
The fifth part of classical rhetoric is the bit that comes after all your planning: Delivery.
My aim is to make you confident either
- delivering your prepared talk
- chucking it aside and improvising because – let’s face it – sometimes the prepared material is not appropriate any more.
Crumbs! How can you possibly do that?
Well, I’ll teach you with exercises I did myself when I trained in Impro with the late great Keith Johnstone, author of The Book:
Till You Are Blasé
Finally… I’ll encourage you to record videos, with help from others, into your own phone.
I want you to do it again and again and again, so that you become blasé (Dictionary: unimpressed with or indifferent to something because one has experienced or seen it so often before.)
You’ll be able to use the video subsequently for, eg, social media.
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What Happened Last Time
One of the most recent iterations of this course was in person, in London. It went well. I was happy, and it seemed participants were happy too.
Three participants were kind enough to post about the session online.
One, Isabel Berwick of The Financial Times, posted this on LinkedIn:
Then came this, from another author who was there:
And later still came this, from Philippa Perry, who has tons of experience as a speaker (she’s also presented TV shows). She joined my speaking course as a kind of refresher before embarking on a HUGE book tour.
I’d messaged on Instagram, where she uses the alias KevinKittyCat, to ask how it was going. She replied:
And this from N.J., who took the online version during lockdown:
“Thank you so much for what has been the best course I’ve taken. Not only has it been invaluable in getting me to think properly about what a) public speaking means, and b) what I actually want to say, it’s also inspired me with fresh ideas about what to do and where to go creatively.”
By the way, if you’re thinking, “Gosh, those look like rather high-powered and intimidatingly brilliant people, I couldn’t possibly go on a course with the likes of them,” I say PISH.
Some of the anxious quotes at the top of this page were from some of these high-powered and intimidatingly brilliant people, but I’m not saying which.
We all deserve to speak, and be heard.
The Price
£495
One price. No early-bird mechanics.
This is what the course is worth, and I’d rather state it plainly than do the dance of discounts and deadlines.
If £495 is genuinely out of reach and you’d still really value being on the course, email me and we can talk.
Buy now
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If you have questions about the September cohort, please email me or subscribe to my newsletter.