About Us

The Public Speaking School was founded in 2010 by Laura Penn, Ph.D.  Below is an excerpt from her bio:

“I was brought into the wide and wonderful world of public speaking through a surprising chain of events.  My three loves are dance, theatre, and conservation.  While enjoying the first two performing arts as hobbies and favorite pastimes for over 20 years, I gave my heart to the field of conservation biology, specializing in the communication of conservation messages in order to help protect wildlife and wild places.  This was my career until 2009, when I relocated to Switzerland.

Not finding the work opportunities I had hoped for, I re-invented myself.  The light-bulb moment happened when I was sitting-in on a conference of conservation colleagues, watching them deliver HORRIBLE presentations.  They were ticking every box for what-not-to-do when speaking in public…reading from their slides, mumbling, speaking too fast, and on and on and on!  A thought came into my head, which said: “Conservation is a crisis discipline.  Wildlife and wild places can’t afford to have the people protecting them FAIL at public speaking…something has to be done about this and fast because conservation can’t wait!“.

Fuelled by this urgency and motivation, I started a club based in a major conservation organization, called “Communicating Environment”.  Using my background in both the performing arts and conservation, I taught my colleagues how to “promote conservation through effective public speaking”.  A huge success! I ventured on and earned more credentials in public speaking, including winning awards, authoring a book called “How to Enhance the Performance of Public Speaking: A Pocket Coach” and delivering TEDx talks.  This broadened my reach and soon, I changed the name of my business to TheProfessionalSpeakerCoach.com.   Yes, I agree, the name feels like marbles in your mouth, so shortly after this second name change, I changed it once again, to The Public Speaking School.

The vision of The Public Speaking School is to empower people from all walks of life, in fields far and wide, with the speaking skills they need to make their messages matter.  We hold you high to create your best work and we are delighted to welcome you into our world…”