Stu Lloyd shares his deeply personal story of his purpose and passion in life: Storytelling. (He's been an award-winning professional storyteller for over 20 years, The Telegraph UK even calling him 'The Perfect Storyteller.' ) This video is cleverly compiled from two of his keynotes in 2019: the World Marketing Congress in Mumbai, and the Social Selling Conference in Singapore. You'll be gobsmacked by this story about Marvin. But what you don't know is that the story has a very sinister second part involving Wilson ... Breaking News: Stu was given the "all clear" and is in full remission as of July 2020. He's proud to have missed only 1 client workshop during 4.5 years of treatment. Please join Stu's probono initiative #CreativesAgainstCancer (https://www.facebook.com/groups/581935582739935) if you've been touched directly or indirectly by cancer, and would like to help out or be helped. Transcript: This was me exactly four years ago was to the day. Now I just come back this particular weekend from a dive trip and co summit Island in Thailand. And every weekend I'd love to Skype with my mum. Then it was once a week, these days it's every day or two. Hey, mom, how you going? And you always ask, how are you? I say fantastic mum, hitting the gym every day. Business's great. Working with some amazing people. Life's brilliant. Couldn't be better. Very happy shit. That's good. Let me speak to my mom. This was me four weeks later. Oh, so what happened? Well, I was feeling so fantastic. So if it's a healthy, so full of life, then I thought this is a good time to go for a medical checkup, I think could possibly be wrong, right wrong. I go in for this checkup and in the process, they'd given me a scan and they said, Oh sir, we found something. That something was a cancer tumor. The size of this Rubik's cube Susie on the album inside of my stomach, right there. Needless to say that was a bit of a shock because I'd had no pain, no symptoms, no warning of this thing. So suddenly there I was lying in a hospital bed. Now, one thing you need to know about good storytelling as marketeers is every good story should have a name. And a friend of mine named Mike Chuma Marvin. Sorry. You can Google Marvin, Marvin as a cartoon character. And the great thing is this personalized, my struggle with cancer. It wasn't the students got cancer. Boom. It was Stu versus Marvin, that death match. And that helped pay to face this battle with great courage and humor and levity. And to this day, people are talking about that, Marvin. So it was Marvin. It really stuck in their minds because we personalized it. We brought it down to the scale of one, but as I lay there in that hospital, that ended up being 12 days. Yes. With beautiful morphine swirling around my brain. I just thought, how did I get here? But more importantly, where do I go from here? Who am I, if I don't make it out of this hospital has my life, has my time on this planet being worse, wild. And I reflected back, who would I be? What had I done? What did I achieve? And I thought back to 20 years and international advertising agencies as a creative director, I thought back to the dozens of songs I've written for Warner music. I was their least successful signing ever. The time I had spent as a special interest to in military history world war two is my passion. The 13 books I had written, the hundreds of marketing stories, articles, features I'd written the newspapers and magazines. And the transformative trading work we've been doing for the last 20 years. And I thought about all of that and looking backwards, it made sense. At hot, I realized I was a storyteller. That was the common thread that tied everything together that I've ever done in my life. And I thought that's it. If. When I get out of this hospital, I am going to devote the rest of my life, no matter how long or short that is to spreading the power of storytelling to people, giving them the power, the pleasure, the privilege of enriching and rewarding life, which storytelling had given me. And so at that moment on that hospital bed, this company CatMatDog was born. I'm pleased to say that for the last four years we've had full record is a business. I moved out of that toxic place. I was living in Bangkok, moved up to the mountains of Chiang Mai. My life has been on the up and up ever since. I'm pleased to say, and I'm here today and I lived to tell the tale, thank you very much. That's what I do. And that's why I do it.

Presentation skills training and communication skills training often goes deeper than what's on show on the outside. Especially when Stu strives to dig more authenticity from his attendees. In this case, it was a seasoned newsreader. Watch what happens when Stu encouraged her to dive deeper within herself ...

StoryLeading is about articulating your mission and getting internal and external alignment with it. In this communication skills course (typically energetic as you'll see) Stu included a number of strategic exercises which underlined the lesson they had just learned. So it puts them on a voyage of discovery, and also imprints the lessons well because it becomes a deep-learning experience. This is what makes CATMATDOG one of the leading public speaking training companies.

One of our attendees, a marketing manager from Colgate Palmolive, talks about what she got from this 2-day program. We later customized a program to run for hi-po regional teams inside Colgate which has proved popular and effective.

CATMATDOG was tasked with helping the team at Citi in China to find their voice, literally. A one-day kick-off program surprised everyone because many displayed hidden talents and confidence on stage and in group break-outs for the first time. The lessons were well learned as you can see! If you need your team to say it better, reach out to us for professional storytelling courses.

Stu has been a TEDx MC, speaker coach, and event advisor, in China, USA, and SouthEast Asia. He enjoys working with people who want to passionately share their great idea with the world, but need a little help to structure it, and give it a little more impact. In this case, it was decided that Ryan was better suited to an interview style to bring out his amazing experiences as a war photographer. This gave him the confidence to later adopt a 'stand and deliver' TEDx talk.