A internationally renowned expert on inter-personal communication, Dr. Buckman is also one of the funniest speakers in the world. He combines a mischievous sense of humor with world-class communication training that set the standard for personal and professional development programs. Dr. Buckman's skills have been honed in some of the most challenging settings imaginable. A medical oncologist, his techniques are taught at hospitals and medical schools around the world. Communicating difficult messages has always been one of Dr. Buckman's critical skills, and laughter some of his best medicine.

In recent years he has parlayed his remarkable abilities into a series of successful television and video projects, including a medical training series with friend John Cleese of Monty Python fame, and the award-winning Discovery program Human Wildlife. His books, on everything from skin care, to how to provide help and support to terminally ill patients, as well as his own hilarious memoirs, Not Dead Yet, are a hit with readers around the world.

In this keynote, Dr. Robert Buckman shows you how to become a better communicator and a more effective champion of your company’s products and ideas. Based on years of field research and practical experience, his S-A-L-E-S approach to communication is the ideal tool for salespeople who need to learn how to win the hearts and minds of their prospects and customers. This talk is also perfect for those who need to learn more effective communication skills for inter-company and inter-office relationships, including human resources professionals, administrators, managers, and other key staff. Your group will learn how to combine Setting, Agenda, Listening Skills, Emotion, and Strategy into a highly effective and easy-to-learn approach to communicating with others. Tailored to speak directly to your audience, he illustrates each of the five steps with memorable demonstrations, anecdotes and examples. This practical approach provides you with concrete tools you can use the next time you have to communicate an important message to a group or an individual. Dr. Buckman will often use humour to drive home his points. Blended with his unerring sensitivity, he ensures that your group will learn the “how” of effective communication. As audiences have said repeatedly over the last decade he has given this talk: "This stuff really works."

The main advantage of a team is that it consists of people with different abilities and skill-sets. The main disadvantage is that it consists of people with different abilities and skill-sets—people who might not share the same vision of the project. In this presentation, Dr. Buckman shows you the element that is most frequently ignored in team-building: the emotional one. In all ventures, it is important that emotions are acknowledged. This does not mean you have to agree with the other person's viewpoint, but you do have to identify and acknowledge their feelings. Dr. Buckman shows us that the communication techniques for doing this are relatively simple and easy to learn. And in this talk, he guides us through them.

This talk is also known as Dr. Buckman's R-E-D-C-A-R STRATEGY For Coping. Every life has stress in it-a little of it may even be a good thing. In this fascinating talk, Dr. Buckman discusses how to work out whether a particular stress is essential, and even helpful, or simply counterproductive. For the times when stress is part of the problem and not part of the solution, Dr. Buckman has developed a six-step R-E-D-C-A-R strategy that can be learned quickly and which can be used in stressful situations to reduce unnecessary frustration and to maximize useful actions. He walks us through how to recognize our stress, how to pinpoint the actual issue, and how to methodically deal with it in an effective way, under any circumstances.

In this presentation, Dr Buckman analyses—with countless examples—the essential elements of what makes us laugh, and why it's important to do so. He shows how humour is a deliberate diversion from the expected and that all humour shares this basic structure. Humour also has several functions. Many of us use it to deal with events that are in themselves threatening or frightening (illness, airlines, sex and mothers-in-law to name the top four). These are not intrinsically funny in themselves , but the act of constructing something funny about them brings the threat into perspective—in other words, the act of making a joke is a coping strategy. Furthermore, if the joke is appreciated it reinforces the communal expectations of the joker and the audience and draws them closer to together. This presentation is very funny (and deliberately so) but also explains why laughter genuinely does matter and genuinely does us all good.

Go to Top of Page