Mr. Eric Bergman

Eric Bergman first became fascinated with the power of the spoken word in 1981. The professor of his college presentation course was leading a team that was preparing a presentation for delivery in Baden-Baden, (West) Germany. The purpose of the presentation was to convince the International Olympic Committee to select Calgary as host of the 1988 Olympic Winter Games.

“We were given a peek inside the strategic process,” Eric recalls. “I'll never forget the moment I heard the news that Calgary had been selected to host the games. It was a defining moment of my career. I was hooked on the power of the spoken word.”

Eric started his communications career as a government public affairs officer in June, 1982, and wrote his first speech for a senior government executive less than a year later. “It was a retirement speech, so it was fairly low risk,” he says. “But I worked almost five hours to craft that five minutes. I received a lovely note from the speaker, which I still have.”

He left government in September, 1985, and set out on his own as a freelance communication consultant. For the first eight to ten years of his freelance career, he wrote hundreds of speeches for executives in the private, public and not-for-profit sectors, earning local, national and international awards for his work.

In the 1990s, he began providing presentation skills training and one-on-one coaching. Over a span of thirty years, he has helped thousands of clients from six continents develop effective, compelling, meaningful content for a host of speaking challenges. He has helped them deliver that content memorably with a conversational style, one bucket at a time.

Eric holds a bachelor of arts in communication studies and a two-year college diploma in advertising and public relations. He received designations as an accredited business communicator (ABC) in 1991 and an accredited public relations practitioner (APR) in 1993. In 2002, he was named a master communicator (MC), which is the highest distinction that can be bestowed on a Canadian member of the International Association of Business Communicators. In 2015, he joined the College of Fellows of the Canadian Public Relations Society (FCPRS).

In his spare time, he and his partner love to travel, especially by motorcycle. They have logged more than 200,000 kilometres on two motorcycles spanning the breadth and depth of North America. Once COVID-19 becomes a memory, they will actively seek ways to explore other parts of the world on the back of their Honda Gold Wing GL1800.