John Paling

Dr. John Paling

Oxford University Biology Lecturer, Emmy Awarded Wildlife Film Maker, Author, Risk Consultant, Historian, Winston Churchill Fellow.

John Paling has achieved some minor successes in a diverse variety of careers during which time he moved from his original home in England to become a citizen of USA. As he seemingly stumbled through his careers, the common factor in his choices has remained his passion to be learning new things, relating them to his “Lessons from Nature” and then sharing his enthusiasm and knowledge with others.

Professional Keynote Speaker

Throughout his life, John has relished sharing his films and his perspectives of life with people of all backgrounds. From the outset his film group became recognized on British Television as a rather unusual collection of university biologists that made amazing films of topics that the public would never have known about (E.g. mating behavior of fleas.) This novel combination of being Oxford academics who had the knowledge and talents to deliver unimaginable views of the secrets of nature lead them to be asked to speak at all types of events.

Most of his colleagues did not enjoy putting on a show but John happily seized every opportunity and came to be sought out as a keynote speaker at conferences throughout the world.

Life In The USA

Early on in his filming career, John was astonished to find that meeting planners actually wanted to pay him to go to interesting locations and share his enthusiasms for revealing Nature’s ways on film! For example, while still building the film company at Oxford, the National Audubon Society paid for him to travel to USA and do extensive lecture tours entertaining their local chapters. He commonly travelled from city to city by Greyhound bus and was met in and hosted in the homes of local Audubon members.

These experiences gave him a rosy image of life in America which has stayed with him all his life and later contributed to him marrying Wendy, an American Lady (“Well she was actually from Texas, but it is almost the same thing”) and becoming an American citizen back in 1996.

Dr. John Paling In America
John Paling Keynote Speaker Keynote at international medical meeting.

Emmy Award-Winning Films

Adding brief animal sequences to the content of his presentations proved to be popular for all manner of audiences and this lead to all sorts of unheralded opportunities. A prestigious group of young corporate presidents who held national and international meetings found that John’s presentations proved highly popular with their members and took him around the world for several years speaking alongside many eminent business, societal and geopolitical leaders. And by sitting in on other speakers’ talks, he learned a huge amount about different aspects of life that he would never have otherwise encountered.

His trademark then and now has been to show short segments from his Emmy-Awarded, National Geographic wildlife films (narrated live) as metaphors to make the main points of presentations stick in the minds of his audiences. This entertaining approach has been successfully applied not just to general strategies of dealing with change (a topic for which Nature has a lot of experience to share) but also very specific topics based on John’s personal research and experience.

As well as delivering exceptional value to support the meeting planner’s objective for the meeting, another lesson for successful professional speakers is to develop a consistent “brand” so that the content that is being offered has context and clearly matches the qualifications of the speaker. Another is to respect the commonly shared wisdom that “You don’t need to include humor – unless you want to get paid!”The combination of these factors resulted in John always positioning himself as a British speaker who made his topics both informative but also entertaining.

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