About Seize the Room

How can you be a better speaker? Be a teacher!

You want to get better at speaking. You're probably pretty darn good already. But you feel like there's something missing. The things you say when you're in front of a group don't always seem quite right. You wonder if there are ways in which you could do better. You wish you could tell if people are understanding what you're presenting. You're struggling with some of your slides and how to present information effectively. There's always something—even if it is just wondering how you can build more variety in to your full-day workshops.

Most of all, you want to do your very best work.

When you do, that leads to success in so many ways. You get invited to speak at more events. You actually get paid, and paid well, to speak. You build a fan base of people that want to do business with you.

In many ways, we all want that, don't we?

Who am I to talk?

In 18 years of experience teaching and speaking, I've learned a lot about how to speak and teach effectively and want to share them with you here. We're not talking about things like "not saying um" or "how to gesture" or other mechanical aspects of speaking. We're talking about things like great ways to manage your talks, how to frame things, how to decide what content to include and not include in your presentations, and how to make those most out of presentations from a business perspective. We'll also explore planning your talks and workshops so that those longer speaking engagements are more than just you delivering a lecture for 6 hours.

I'm here to help you be a better teacher. To Seize the Room.

I'm Derek Featherstone, a professional speaker. Actually, scratch that. I'm a teacher. I also happen to speak professionally, and get paid pretty well to do so. I've been teaching and speaking for 18 years in schools, colleges and universities, and as a professional speaker at conferences around the world. In 1999, I left teaching high school to pursue my own business. I've been a very successful consultant ever since, and I owe a lot of our business success to the work that I do as a speaker. Because I teach.