Author: Eric Bergman

For more than thirty years, Eric Bergman has used these tools to help his clients shape their stories and tell them effectively. Eric became a student of the spoken word in September, 1981. The professor of his presentation skills course at college was a member of a team preparing a presentation for delivery in Baden-Baden, West Germany. The objective of the presentation was to convince the International Olympic Committee that Calgary should host the 1988 Olympic Winter Games. “We were given a front-row seat to the process, ” Eric says. “I”ll never forget waking up to my clock radio to hear that Calgary had been selected to host the games. For me, it was one of those “where were you?” moments.” He started his communications career as a government public affairs officer in June, 1982, and wrote his first speech for a senior executive less than two months later. “It was a retirement speech, so it was fairly low risk, ” he says. “But, as the first one, it was stressful. I worked on that five minutes for almost five hours.” He left government in 1985, and has since been self-employed as a communications consultant. He relocated to Toronto in 1987 and, as a significant part of his consultancy for nearly a decade, wrote hundreds of speeches for executives in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors. In the early 1990s, he shifted his focus to providing presentation skills training during workshops and seminars, and in one-on-one coaching. Over the ensuing years, he has used this toolbox thousands of times to help his clients develop strategic, compelling, effective content for a host of presentation challenges.