I sent out a whole lot of tweets last night about Ignite Waterloo - I’m sorry for filling your Twitter inbox, but I had to, it was that awesome!

For anyone who doesn’t yet know about Ignite, we wrote about Ignite Waterloo 2 on the CuteGecko blog.. which was also totally wonderful. The evening seemed to just FLY by:

As usual, there were too many gifted speakers to mention them all, so I’m going to stick with a few of my favourites. Patrick McMahon talked about the thrill of ‘soaring’ which is an air sport where the pilot fly’s a plane without unneeded things such as engines. Instead the planes glide on naturally occurring air current created by the earth. Ooo

Jennifer Gough from Minds Eye Studio got up on stage to talk about ‘the eternal question’: what would you do with your life if you could do anything? Jenn’s inspiring story of how she became an artist surely got some of the audience wondering if their own dreams could become a reality.

Another favourite was Rebecca Blackburn’s account of running the Boston Marathon.  She described her training up to the event as well as a walk(run)-through of the whole marathon.  What an experience that must have been!  Running with Minnie Mouse?  Congrats on an awesome talk as well as running the race Rebecca.

I also loved Natalie Brown‘s talk about… talking.  Well, Natalie, we all know you love talking, but your subject was much more enlightening than just that.  Natalie spoke about speaking up when you hear someone being racist, sexist, or just downright unfriendly. I even heard some people using her mantra after her inspirational speech.

And also…

Finally, another of the speakers that just ‘spoke’ to me was Natalie MacNeil. Natalie talked about the history of social media.  Interestingly enough, her history included a time long long before the invention of the internet… or even computers!  She noted that humans have been using social media since we were able to carve pictures and stories into rocks in order to be seen and understood by others.

Every one of the speakers at last night’s event was polished and spoke with pride about their subject.  Congratulations to all of you, you’ve got something that I don’t – the ability to speak calmly in front of a crowd!

I’ve seen some other posts about this event – head on over to RQ Magazine for another fantastic recap

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