JEREMY'S 2026 KEYNOTE: "PRESENT-ATION"
- Jeremy Connell-Waite
- Jun 9
- 2 min read
I never usually do this, but I thought a little over-sharing might be in order. Since I came back to work from a major surgery, I have been working on a keynote, so I thought it might be fun to take you behind-the-scenes and show you my private rehearsal. In the 6 months that I was off work, I dreamed about giving an unconventional commencement-style keynote, with the hope of helping others to tell better stories and communicate a bit more effectively at work.
This month (June 2026) I had the chance to give such a keynote to a couple of large audiences in the UK and Europe, so not only did I think it might be nice to share my slides, but I thought I'd also record my rehearsal, and share a few insights with you about how I put it together.
How does that sound?
[Click to Download PDF: 80 SLIDES - 18.4MB]
It's always nice to hear a positive keynote with some practical advice which helps you to do your job a little better, but it's even nicer when you have an understanding of how that keynote was constructed.
This keynote is FAST. There's a lot going on and in same ways, it breaks every rule of presenting. I'm not usually a fan of PPT as I prefer to use a whiteboard or flipchart and show a live demo of whatever technology I'm talking about - but this one goes ALL in on PPT as that's what this occasion required. It's a lot of content delivered pretty quick-fire, in a similar style to how I've seen my presenting hero's such as Scott Galloway, Seth Godin and Benedict Evans do over the years.
It's not for everyone, but since it I am sharing so much information in such a short amount of time, I thought it might be helpful to share the recording and the slides on here - so anyone can go through them slowly in their own time.
I usually work to about 1 hour per minute when I'm writing a new presentation. That's pretty consistent with this one: it's a 35 minute presentation which took 30-40 hours to build.
Terry Szuplat (former Obama speechwriter) shared with me his 50:25:25 rule when we chatted a while ago, and he made a big deal of it in his outstanding book Say It Well.
No matter how long you have to prepare:
Spend 50% of your time researching
25% of your time writing
25% of your time rewriting & rehearsing
That's exactly what I did with this presentation. The lions share of the work was in the research and the rehearsing & rewriting.
"Don't practice until you get it right, practice until you can never get it wrong." - Tony Robbins
So here you are, a warts-and-all private recording of me, and my dog Waffle(!), running through the presentation and checking the timings for each story - or as you'll soon see, each "present".
Enjoy.
[CLICK to PLAY: 67 minutes]
