Women with Cool Jobs
Women with Cool Jobs
Executive Speech Coach Helps Professionals Be Captivating Storytellers by Making the Complex Clear, with Ruth Milligan
Executive Speech Coach and Trainer Ruth Milligan has a special way with words, because she has been in the business of storytelling in many different forms over the years. She considers stories as fundamental: “A story... is a bridge between something I know and care about and [something] you will hopefully know and care about." It's that critical puzzle piece for what connects the audience with the speaker.
From her current role as business owner and coach, to being the founder and curator of one of the longest-running TEDx programs (TEDxColumbus), she's also been a speechwriter, a national press secretary, and was an embedded consultant to billion-dollar contract pitches for Fortune 10 companies.
Ruth helps professionals and organizations from science, research, medicine, and data and analytics to find their voice, tell their story, and have their message be heard.
She shares some wonderful tips and things to practice so you can improve your storytelling and communication . Plus you can learn more in her book called " The Motivated Speaker: Six Principles to Unlock Your Communication Potential."
Contact Info:
Ruth Milligan - Guest
Ruth Milligan (LinkedIn)
Ruth Milligan (Articulate website)
Julie Berman - Host
www.womenwithcooljobs.com
@womencooljobs (Instagram)
Julie Berman (LinkedIn)
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There might be a little grief of loss, of saying I want to tell them everything. Well, you know, a lot of times when we were doing TEDx for the better part of a dozen years, every single speaker was like this, Julie, every single one I have so much to say, and we'd say, you have eight minutes. And so our coaching and counseling was helping them realize that this was really getting people to be sparked, that I am igniting in them a connection, as Chris Anderson, the current curator of Ted, would say, something I know sparks with what something you know not dissimilar from the bridge I talked about, and I want to go learn more. So then the story, in that time is really meant to start the conversation, not finish it. And so that's part of reconciling where what is the real purpose of this? It's to get people to want to come and have dinner with me and hear me talk about it for two hours, not just for 10 minutes.
Julie Berman - Host:Hey, everybody. I'm Julie, and welcome to Women with cool jobs. Each episode will feature women with unique, trailblazing and innovative careers. We'll talk about how she got here, what life is like now, and actionable steps that you can take to go on a similar path or one that's all your own. This podcast is about empowering you. It's about empowering you to dream big and to be inspired. You'll hear from incredible women in a wide variety of fields, and hopefully some that you've never heard of before, women who build robots and roadways, firefighters, C suite professionals, surrounded by men, social media mavens, entrepreneurs and more. I'm so glad we get to go on this journey together. Hello everybody. This is Julie Berman, and welcome to another episode of women with cool jobs. So today, I am so happy to be here and sharing this episode with you because I'm a huge fan of storytelling. So anytime I can have a professional person who's in the realm of storytelling, using your voice, all of those, all of those related things, I love having that woman on this podcast, because there's something so incredibly powerful about being able to use your voice to tell your story. It helps you in so many ways, whether it's changing someone's mind, whether it's getting a new opportunity, and that could be right, like convincing someone in your life that you want to go on a certain vacation. It could be in a job situation, it could be convincing someone to invest in your company or invest in your work or invest in your research. So there are so many times where the ability to tell a story well is so powerful, and it's something I'm really interested in learning myself and so, so, so happy to have Ruth Milligan on today. She is someone who helps people find their voice and tell their story and have their message be heard. She works with people. She has her her own company, and so she helps people do really interesting things, like business pitches, keynotes, panels, incubator events, in defending requests for proposals in long bid processes. And the interesting thing about her is that she helps people translate, often, really complex information, and where, where they have, like, deep knowledge, where they've done a lot of research. And a lot of times it happens to be that that information has a lot of nuance, a lot of detail, a lot of jargon and abbreviation and things that are particular to that industry and field. And the fascinating thing about what she does is she helps people translate it. She helps people find a bridge in her words, from what they are trying to present to the action that they want people to take. So this was such a fascinating such a fascinating conversation. I love the tips that she shares because they're really, really important, and they're something that all of us can do, no matter, really, no matter what field we work in or what we're doing, the purpose like those are key fundamental parts of storytelling, and I think it is such a beautiful thing to be able to get better at it, because it will empower you to have more opportunities in your life. And she has fascinating background, so she's a founder and curator of one of the longest running TEDx programs in the country. She was one of the first like, I think she said, 35 people who started out way back when, and she only stopped because of the pandemic. And then she's also had some really cool jobs. She's been speech writer and national press secretary. She's been an embedded consultant to billion dollar contract pitches for Fortune 10 companies, and so it's been so cool to get to talk to her. She has a new book. Out called Discover Six Principles of public speaking and present like the best TED speakers and fortune 500 leaders that she wrote with some co authors, which you can check out and that will be linked in the show notes as well. So this was just such a fascinating episode, and I hope that if you love it, if you know someone who is wanting to get better at telling their story and sharing out their information. Please send this to them. It is such a beautiful thing to help people, and this is a way you can do it totally for free, and they can get some ideas of maybe things that they want to practice, or some things that they want to do that maybe they weren't aware of before. So thank you for being here and listening to women with cool jobs. Send it to a friend you know will love it. And here's a conversation between me and Ruth. All right, hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of women with cool jobs. I'm so excited to be here with an awesome guest with Ruth Milligan, and she does something that's very near and dear to my heart. You are a storytelling Pro. You're a communication strategist, a coach and a trainer, and you help people find their voice, tell their story, and have their message be heard. And that is why I do this podcast, to be honest. So I am so happy to have you here. Learn about what you have been doing over your career, learn about what you're doing now. I know you have a new book, and so I just know that we can get so much wisdom from you and all the all the things that you've done. So thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Unknown:Well, thank you for having me. That was a great introduction. I appreciate being here.
Julie Berman - Host:So just a little bit about your background, I think is really interesting. So you're the founder, founder and curator of one of the longest running TEDx programs, which is the TEDx in Columbus, Ohio. And you've also had, like, a lot of really interesting jobs and careers over the years. So you've done things in speech writing. You've been National Press Secretary Secretary. You've been embedded, consulted to billion dollar contract pitches for Fortune 10 companies. Sounds
Unknown:so fancy, doesn't it? It does sound it's really hard work.
Julie Berman - Host:It does sound very fancy. And so I like this is such, it's such an interesting sort of mish Mosh, for lack of you know, more beautiful words of like, what you've done over the years. So I would love for you to tell us, just to start out, like in your own words, how do you describe your cool job? Now? What do you do?
Unknown:I think you the words you said are when I say, I help people find their voice and tell their story. Okay, and that can come through many different modalities and channels, depending upon where people are speaking, what their goals are for speaking what they're thrusted into in their careers, where they want to take their careers. And so we meet people where they are, and help them level up to, hopefully, the next level, maybe two, depending upon you know what their goals are. And we do that through only executive communication, coaching and training. We are not executive coaches. We are not life coaches, although we can pretend to be them on occasion. We do use a personality assessment at work called the Berkman to help us understand where people's stressors come from. We often get calls that are really about people's symptoms of what's stressing them out, which might look like communication problems, but they're really stress related issues, so we dabble a little bit on the edges of being counselors and definitely not a professional psychologist, but things that involve a lot of mindset training, a lot of good self talk and a ton of habit forming. So we are in, we are in that space, and we do it for, I like to say that the practice we're in is for the amateur, meaning we don't work for the paid speaker. We have a few people we do work with that are paid speakers, but it's not this practice, okay, that makes sense. We support them in different ways. But this practice is really meant for the person that has something really juicy to say, a lifelong, or not lifelong, of research, science, innovation, lots of people in deep knowledge, places where they have so much access to information and they don't know how to organize it so their audience can follow them, so they can reach their goal, and the audience walks away with something to do. It's a it's a tall task for some people that carry around the job of solving some of our greater problems. Yeah,
Julie Berman - Host:I love that, and so tell me if I'm wrong, but it almost sounds like for some of the people who are doing sort of like these, these deep dives into different different topics. But maybe they're not used to translating it out to people so that they can sort of understand it in their own way, because they're like so deep into it. Is that accurate? 110%
Unknown:Okay, excellent way translation. Thing, or what we might call is making what you know accessible to others. We never want to dummy down someone's knowledge or science or research, because we always know they have their labs to do you know, to do the heavy lifting. But the minute you step out of your laboratory, whatever that lab means to you, you have to be mindful that your audience probably doesn't understand any of your jargon. Yeah, any of the concepts that lead you to the conclusions that you're talking about. The question on their mind might be like, what's for dinner? You're like, No, I want to tell you how we solve this molecular mutation thing. Or, better yet, I want to pitch you this billion dollar new startup venture. It can take on many different forms every time it's what we call recursive. Every time you do it, you learn something new, you should at least, and then that builds on itself. So hopefully, over time, you become better, and you become your own best coach. Yeah, that's our goal. That's that's really our goal is for people to know how to do this on their own, without us.
Julie Berman - Host:Yeah, I love that. That's so cool. And actually, I can see how that would be so useful just even doing this podcast, because it's really fascinating. I talked to a lot of women who are used to telling their story, and they are used to talking about what they do and and translating it, or make it, you know, making it a little bit more understandable to the general masses. And then there are also women who sometimes because they just are doing what they're doing, and they've always done what they're doing, and they haven't had to share that story in the same way. And so it's been really interesting to hear how they've shared their story. And some of them, you can tell it's like, they're nervous, whatever, but they end up doing such a good job, because it's like, I always, I'm like, Just tell them. It's like a conversation, right? And it's like, pretend I know nothing, which a lot of times is true, like I have such a foundational and very, very tiny research based understanding, but I don't have the details and the nuance and and the gray areas to inform me. So I love that about what you do that's so cool and so needed. I could see how that is really, really helpful for a lot of folks. So I want to ask, like, kind of going back to when you were younger, now, how did you get started in this area? Did you get started in this area? Because it sounds like you you have jumped around some really interesting things over the years. Well,
Unknown:I would say that the thread through the last almost 40 years now is always been communication. Okay, so you put it in that ocean, if you will. And I've been able to sort of pull out different buckets of experience from the ocean. The first was really in college. I I didn't get into business school, which is kind of funny, because I've now been running a business for 24 years, and I had to pick a major, and speech comm sounded kind of interesting, because it was like one of my first A's in college was speech comm 135 and I thought that was fun, and we do more of that. And so I ended up being a speech Comm major. My first job out of college was working in politics. I did a little bit in helping to implement national service in Ohio, just because it had to get done the first year when I was working in the governor's office, and then I became the First Lady's Chief of Staff, and my largest job for her was writing her speeches. She would had three causes, and she traveled a few times a week and doing events. And I became a press secretary for her too. And that led me to a national campaign being a press secretary, where I did right ready for this number 74 cities, 28 states in 10 weeks. Oh my gosh. Which is a common like, sort of convention to election schedule. Wow. And I had a candidate's daughter that we traveled to all the secondary cities, Tupelo, Mississippi, Tyler, Texas, Rapid City, South Dakota. I mean, I hit them all. I get very comfortable on very small planes, up and down. We had at least one and a half takeoffs every day. And you know, we'd go up, come down, go back up, spend the night, go up, go down, come back down. So that led me back to doing some nonprofit fundraising, which is another bucket in the ocean of communication, and I really missed the core communication work. So I went and started a PR firm within a larger marketing agency. They didn't have any PR practice, and they went belly up in the.com bubble burst of 2001 okay. And then I was like, I need to pay my bills and plan my wedding, and so my husband, then boyfriend, bought me a desk and I had a computer. And I was like, let's find a project. And it's really interesting, Julie. We started the conversation by me telling you this morning, the first thing I had to do was go to the cable company and get a new modem. Mm. Well, oddly enough, for the second project I had, the first project was very small. This the real first project I had on my own was a little PR project for the cable company. And I'll never forget that woman who was like, Here, I'll give you something, you know, just a little and I thought it was the biggest deal to get a contract from them. Didn't do much other work, but I still remember how thoughtful and helpful that was early in your career. And then one more big turn was in 2009 when I did the first TEDx Columbus event, which was the 35th event in the world. Wow. In context, there's probably been about 50,000 events. And my partner, Nancy and I saw the opportunity very early. They posted a little note on the TED site. Actually, I saw it while I was watching a TED talk with my husband one night. It's a great story. He falls asleep. I start to pour through the TED site. It happens to be the day after they posted this little, tiny announcement about TEDx, and I was like, I want to do that. Like, I am going to take that on. I no idea what I was doing. Julie, like, not a clue. And six months later, on the stage of our contemporary arts center, I sent you a picture of me with John Glenn, the Head of the School of Architecture. Was there a scientist from our research organization called Battelle. We had eight speakers and 350 people in the audience. And I was like, well, that that worked. And we said, Let's do it again. And we did it for 12 years till COVID, and we were, at the time, one of the longest running. There's probably a few that have caught up with us now. But we did TEDx women. We did TEDx Youth. I helped six other tedxes launch neighborhood. TEDx is University. TEDx is Ohio State's TEDx is the longest serving student run TEDx in the world. Probably they've been going on 15 years. We helped them launch and train their their team. So I have lots of different tentacles. However, the most important thing that came from that was I looked on stage after that 2009 event, and I was like, Why aren't I doing more of this work? I love this. I love people shaping their stories and helping them speak. And I went to look for somebody to teach me how to do it, and I didn't find anybody. I found speech writers who I knew from my political days. I found media trainers, and I found copywriters, but I didn't find anyone that knew how to coach storytelling coach to speakers, at least in my neighborhood, at least in my area. In Columbus, we have 2 million people here. It's not a small community, and I decided, okay, well, I gave up my PR practice and I rebirthed the business called articulation, and that was 15 years ago. Wow, this two months ago. So that's the long and winding journey, but it's all had a thread of being really supportive of other humans standing up their ability to speak. And the good news is, even as technology changes and economies change, we seem to be holding steady. Some years are better than others for live events, which is where we support a lot of speakers, but whether it's a new business pitch or a town hall within your company, or a keynote. Somebody called me this morning a keynote at an industry conference. We support a lot of new technology startups, pitching small incubator events, you name it, we're kind of across the board. And then the last thing that I love to do most, if I can only do one thing for the next five years, is to support complex teams in very large, high stakes pitches. And what that means is you get invited to defend your RFP at the end of a long bid process, and you have to show up with six or 10 or eight of your colleagues and crush it, because the last 10% of your bid comes from that orals or that interview, and those people are not necessarily prepared to do that, so I I took myself in as a team member and support them through the process, and I get to know them as people and as speakers and his experts, and then as a team, it's great fun. Wow, that was a lot. Yeah,
Julie Berman - Host:that was such a good overview of everything. I'm curious now, like, because you are so good at telling people how to share their story, do you have sort of wisdom that you live by or things that you've seen, whether myths that people think are true but they actually aren't, or like tenants that you live by. I think this is such an interesting area, and I love being able to talk to you about, you know, just storytelling, because essentially, I've come to believe, in the last few years that I've been doing this, that that the ability to tell your story is. One of the most critical parts of being a human, and the ability to do it well is a gift, but it also has so much power to create change for yourself for others, it's just like, I think, one of the most beautiful things that we can do to actually develop for ourselves. So I'm curious what your thoughts are and like, because you've been doing this for so long, because you've been you've seen so many people, what are your things that you sort of live by, or things that you've seen that maybe not be true, that everyone thinks are true, and take it in whatever direction? Yeah,
Unknown:I have one very specific thing, which is, there is always time for a story. A lot of executives or people busy people say, I don't have time to tell a story. And I always say, how do you not have time? Our brain actually works in two quadrants. The left side is looking for data, truth and proof and facts. And the right side is looking for emotion, resonation, engagement. If I asked you, Julie, to walk around a room in five inch heels, but only using one shoe, how long would it feel for you to feel uncomfortable?
Julie Berman - Host:Yeah, it would not be good.
Ruth Milligan:That is the way our brain feels. If I only talk, if I only if, in my last little diatribe there of my journey, I only told you numbers, how long I spent somewhere, what the zip code was, the address of where I worked, you'd be like, Oh, it's really boring. But if I only told you how great it was, or how I felt during it, you'd also say, Well, what did you do and how long were you there? So someone recently, this week, actually gave me a great mantra that someone else's mantra, which was Les Brown, which is, every point has a story, and every story has a point, which I really loved, and I'm pretty sure I've heard it before, but it was nice to be reminded about it. And to that end, the question becomes, Which story do you tell? So it's not do you tell a story? It's which one. And how can you get a story out in a concise way? I argue that a story could be a metaphor, you know, an analogy, that that's a bridge, because a story, really, at its heart is a bridge between something I know and care about and you will hopefully know and care about. Mm, hmm, right. Yeah, that bridge is where a story lives that I know and care about this technology and you know and care about this disease and the story between the two, which is the bridge, allows me to connect the technology with the disease, because I don't understand any of the technology, the molecular science, the cellular science that any of the trials that you've gone through, but I understand what it feels like Maybe or maybe not to live with that disease. So a story is innately human. It is something happening to somebody or somebody doing something to something else, meaning like, it's an actionable event that today the story is Julie and I had a conversation about women with cool jobs on a podcast. She's in Arizona. I'm in Columbus. We spoke for about an hour. We had a great time, and you'll be able to hear the podcast in a few weeks when it's posted. That's a story, character, setting, time, date, location, action, result, all in those two sentences. So back to my point. There's a lot of people over the years have said, I don't have time to tell it. I I always say, how do you not make time? Because that is the way an audience connects.
Julie Berman - Host:Yeah, I love that, and I love your use of the word bridge like that. It creates the bridge between things, to kind of meet in the middle, almost, and and have this, like, shared understanding. I think that's a really wonderful way of looking at it. And I'm curious, like, you also mentioned the idea of that it is essential to tell the story, but then how do you tell the story? And how do you tell it concisely? So I'm curious, like, if you've come to conclusions about this, like, how, and I'm imagining, especially maybe for the more analytical or detail oriented folks that you've worked with who are deep in research and whatever that they could just spout off for hours on all their research and all their statistics. And absolutely, that part is so fascinating to me. Like, how have you come to the conclusion of like helping people kind of narrow in on their most important parts of the story for that purpose?
Unknown:Well, we start with a very simple premise, okay, which is that there's two things before you speak that are true. One is that there. An audience and two you have a goal, okay? And that audience hopefully has a question that you can also answer in trying to reach your goal. So let's just take an example. Since you used science, we work a lot with academic medical researchers, people who are primary investigators and very large like curing cancer, kinds of things. And let's say there was a cancer, an oncology researcher who wanted to raise money. This is pretty, pretty typical, like, how do I translate my technical side to a lay audience, using it for that reason? So we would say to the oncologist, who are you speaking to? Oh, I'm speaking to, you know, million dollar donors or prospects. Great. What do they know about your science? Not much. What's the question on their mind? Well, they might say, when is, when are we going to get a cure? Or how is your research getting us closer to a cure, or how can you save my mother? Right questions that audiences have are often very personal, but the researcher says, But I have this like 17 books worth of research that I want to share with them, and I would just invite them all with the most amount of grace to say that is exactly what they're expecting from you to know and to have done, but it's not necessarily what they want to hear. So the difference between what you know and what you bring to them is the messy iteration of what will be most relevant to them in their questions and to me, and my goal of wanting to ask them for money. So there is there lies in the the work that we largely do with folks is trying to help them, what I would call sift and iterate on narrowing down, because guess what? Then the event planner says you only have 10 minutes because attention spans are short and forgetting curves are long, and they have to get to dinner right. So now we are thrust in the moment of the genre of the speech and the genre of the event. So now we say, Okay, what's the most important things in that 10 minutes that you have to get out but they can still understand and still help you get to your goals? So that's how I believe any presentation or story really gets developed. And it doesn't happen overnight. It usually takes time they have to go away. Think about it. A lot of people have very connected pride and ego to their work and what they know. And that's not wrong. It just may not have a place in this particular event, yeah, and they have to sort of separate that a little bit. There might be a little grief of loss, of saying I want to tell them everything you know. A lot of times when we were doing TEDx for the better part of a dozen years, every single speaker was like this, Julie, every single one I have so much to say, and we'd say, you have eight minutes. And so our coaching and counseling was helping them realize that this was really getting people to be sparked, that I am igniting in them a connection, as Chris Anderson, the current curator of Ted, would say, something I know sparks with what something you know, not dissimilar from the bridge I talked about, and I want to go learn more, so that in the story in that time is really meant to start the conversation, not finish it. And so that's part of reconciling where, what is the real purpose of this? It's to get people to want to come and have dinner with me and hear me talk about it for two hours, just for 10 minutes. Yeah. So you can see where the big my colleague Acacia that works with me, and as a co author of the book, she talks a lot about the messiness of storytelling and how there's no one clear beginning and no one clear ending. And you can start that I could have started my story of me as a two year old. I started my story today with me as a freshman in college, not getting into the business school. A lot of times I start my story with the moment I found TEDx. Other times I might start my story with the origin about our book, right? So it has to do with who's on the other side, who wants to listen. What's the question on your mind?
Julie Berman - Host:I love that. And when you were talking about almost starting with the idea of sparking people's curiosity and having it as a starting point versus an ending point. That's such a cool and interesting thought. I love that, and also it made me think just all that you were saying when I was in I have a background in adult education and training. Thing. And one of the things that we learned in this is the concept of how I think of it is like this idea of the idea is, as adults, we learn differently than kids. Learn. As adults, we have, like, all this past experience, and we have education, and we have all these things we can glean from. And so when we're learning, we want to actually be able to connect the dots, and we want to be able to see how our past relates to our future, and how we what we know can connect to what we don't know. And I've since, you know, thought about it as this, like ever expanding spider web where we're where we're starting, kind of from the beginning is like little, tiny babies and we grow out, but then we can start to make our own threads and connections to different parts of our spider web. And so I, I love this idea that you just said, of the of the concept of taking the story and using it to spark curiosity and having it as a starting place, because it creates, like that connection or that bridge and connects to what we already know, but allows us to go further. So I think that's such like I love that I'm definitely going to remember that. So there's one
Unknown:thing you there's one thing that you'll remember exactly, and
Julie Berman - Host:I'm curious too, like so I know that you just have a book that came out. So congrat huge congratulations on that, because it's been a few weeks. Thank you. And I know you have some co authors who have done that, so I can put that in the show notes too, if you if I have the link, and then people can go look for it. But for your book, I think the some of the things that you talk about in, in your colleagues talk about just the idea that you guys have all this beautiful experience in in sharing stories and teaching people. So I'd love for you to speak a little bit about like, what is in your book? What are the things that you kind of came together on in this book, to share with the world? I think people would really like to hear about that too. Well,
Unknown:as someone who used to be in adult education, and probably are always in adult education. It sounds like we discovered so this might take, like, I'll warn your listeners, it might take about 90 seconds for me to give the sort of the pretext to them, sure, because I think we have a minute, and I think it's important. So bear with me and thank you for humoring me. There's a woman at Miami University, which is in Ohio, who has really pioneered naming the threshold concepts for learning to write. So we'll start there. Okay, so what's a threshold concept? It's that recursive, liminal, troublesome space that you have to push through in order to learn something really well, right? So think about like pushing through a science concept or a math concept, or like writing in a particular way, or maybe that short talk, whatever it happens to be there was it's it's a it's messy, but when you push through it on the other side, you can't unsee it ever again. It is forever in you. And so you can learn to do things, but you may not learn to do them well unless you sort of experience the threshold concepts and understand what they are. So she's written and named them for learning to write. Writing scholar across the country. Actually, she has retrained all of the Maricopa Community College professors on new ways of teaching writing. Oh, wow. Speaking of Arizona. So I heard her speak. She spoke right after me at an event, and I was like, I was blown away. And I thought, oh my gosh, who has done this work on these threshold concepts for learning to speak, if she's done them for learning to write. Now they're very closely related, but there's still differences. We begged her to take her us under her wing. So the three of us went to Miami for a day, and she helped us to essentially start to frame them out. We didn't discover them. Julie, we named them. There's a big difference. They've existed forever. But this is around putting them in a way that says, Oh, if a client calls us and says, so and so, isn't doing well, we normally would say, Okay, well, let us figure out what's going on. Now we can say there's probably one of six things they missed. So if I may, would you like to run through? I can give you my top two. Sure. Yeah, I can run through all of them really fast. I know how to do it's,
Julie Berman - Host:yeah, it's up to you. Whichever you can run through all them really fast. You can go the other way. It's really, it's totally up to you. I'll
Unknown:run through them quickly to inspire people to want to read more. How does that sounds good? And then I'll click through on two that I think are the most salient, if you can. So they are number one, speaking is habitual, not natural. Okay, have you ever said, Oh, that person's such a natural speaker. Her, yes, many times. That's a myth, really. That is so fascinating. We're not born speakers. Wow. Does anyone run the Boston Marathon? And you just say that person's a natural runner? No,
Julie Berman - Host:yeah, that that's so interesting that you have that comparison. Because I don't know the two in my mind are very separate, like I think I would have always assumed just some people are natural, but I've come to learn in a just a complete other tangent, and I'll let you go back to I come to learn at the beginning of my podcast, I interviewed this woman about confidence, which was really beautiful time for me to interview someone about confidence, when I was just starting this podcast and learning to use my voice. And the ironic thing is, she was talking about how confidence, essentially, she thinks of it like a bank, and you put little deposits in every day to build your confidence bank. And I always thought confidence was like an innate skill that you're born with. You either have it or you don't. So I love this. Okay, so tell us more about this. I'm very fascinated now.
Unknown:Well, I will. I will come back to habits in a second. But it is about habit forming and building good habits. You can get into bad habits and but you can get out of them too. So we talk all about speaking just fluencies and things that get in the way of us listening to you. So when you listen back to your podcast or listen back to me, you might find something that's like, ooh, that's sort of nudgy, like, I wish she hadn't have done that. Or, boy, she really can command pause as well something I work on. I like the audience to be able to catch up with what I'm saying. Okay, if I'm a fire hose all the time, hello. My name is Ruth Milligan. I'm from Columbus, Ohio. I love to be a speaker coach, and I also quilt and play pickleball and have a stupid dog, ooh versus Hello. My name is Ruth Milligan. I live in Columbus, Ohio. I love to quilt coach, people on speaking and play with my stupid dog being see the difference? Like, when I'm using my breath, and that's part of the habit for me. So habits, okay, not natural. Number two, speaking, is messy. We actually already touched on that in the storytelling, lots of beginnings and ending places, lots of iterations, lots of recursive like, ooh, do I really need that much data, or did I really need that much story? People will come and say, I have 172 page deck for my 13 minute talk, and yours that's messy, because the mess for them will be, let's start over. That's a that's a talk about, like a, oh yeah, yes, all right, speaking is social number three, there's always an audience. Have you ever just talked to yourself for no particular reason? Okay, fine, before coffee, maybe you're just mumbling around the house, but we have a purpose in speaking right now. Yeah, this has we're hoping your audience or is interpreting what we're saying is picking up something they can do. There's never a time where you're just talking out loud, and if you are talking without your audience and consideration, you are probably not being heard. But that's social number four, moving down list, speaking contains multiple genres. This genre is an interview for a podcast. I coached somebody this morning for a keynote for a big CIO conference. Yesterday, I was in a pitch for a $15 million firehouse for a construction company. Wow, every day there's a different genre. So, and if we're not ruthlessly, I like to say pun intended, interrogating what the genre is and the norms are and the rules, we won't do well, and we also won't understand how to break them, which may sound like a little bit of a shift, but if you walked into a panel discussion, admittedly my Most unfavorite genre of speaking, and you see these tall stools that have no backs to them or tiny little backs, and they're supposed to be women on the panel and dresses and how uncomfortable for anyone to sit. You know? Why can't that panel be in comfortable chairs? That's one example we give. But why does it have to be a panel at all? Could it be short talks that then is facilitated with questions between the panelists? I mean, I can throw together a lot of different ways in which to still get out the general idea of a panel without it being a panel. Interesting number five, speaking is embodied, so let me read something to you. So close your eyes. Okay, everyone, close your eyes. And I shouldn't tell you I'm reading, but I am. And performance adrenaline. Adrenaline has its benefits. It allows you to think on your feet, making adjustments when things go sideways, when harnessed, it can also give you the presence and energy it takes to command. The stage, if you prepare it, talk, open your eyes. Okay, it is clear. I am reading yes versus so let me tell you a little about performance and how the adrenaline around it has some benefits. First, it allows you to think on your feet, making adjustments when it goes sideways. I am using my hands, using my facial expressions. I'm working on my breath. I'm giving inflection. I'm trying to keep you engaged in the content. So the point I'm trying to make here is that speaking is embodied. It is not just about thoughts in your head, words on the page. It is about how they all get translated through your entire body when you speak, yeah. And if we don't appreciate that, we had a speaker once, Julie who watched himself on a video. It was during COVID. It was the recording era, if you will. And he kind of looked your audience, can't see this, but he's got like, one shoulder up that's a little cockeyed, and the other one's down like this. And he kind of has this, like, stern look on his face. And he calls this, and he says, Why did you make me look like an animated corpse? And we did the best we could to coach him to a better behavior, but in the moment of that recording, he was just stiff and frozen and didn't really know how to embody it in his bones and in Soma, and he walked in there just kind of that way. And it wasn't until he saw himself, which is threshold number five, six. Sorry about feedback is essential for great speaking, including your own. He had never watched himself before, so therefore he never really put himself in the shoes of the audience, which is why the bookmark that we had made to go with the book says speaking, public speaking, isn't as scary as watching yourself speak.
Julie Berman - Host:I love that. That is also so true. I yeah, that is so good. I love that. And it's interesting because I, at the beginning, I edited all of my podcast episodes, and so I was oftentimes, sometimes I was watching them, and I was definitely always listening to them. And that was like, I used to think at the beginning that my voice sounded like nails on a chalkboard, like I literally could not. I hated listening to it. And luckily, because I did it over time, it got easier. And I don't feel quite the same way, you know, but it's so I could see how, and I haven't watched myself that much, but I could see how this is a huge tenant that you guys have figured out is very key, so very interesting, that that's in there. It's
Unknown:probably habit forming at the first and feedback at the last of the six concepts, if you listen to nothing else, those are the most important. And feedback is tricky, because you could get good feedback, you can get bad feedback, and you can get just feedback that is unhelpful, yeah, so knowing how to ask for the right feedback is as important as getting feedback. And we've learned this over time of coaching teams, where maybe 20 other executives might be in the Zoom call, watching the six people get ready for a pitch, and they might tell them something that's on their mind, but really isn't helpful for them, developing the better way to say something, simple way, simple way To explain it. So we have become very acutely interested in psychological safety and preparing people for success and giving them constructive feedback. And the summation of all this is when people don't get feedback in those quiet, shaded rooms. I call them shaded habits. The person that says, um a lot, the person that goes on way too long. And then when they move from those quiet, not dark, but quiet rooms, the laboratory, the staff meeting, and they move to a keynote, a board presentation, a presentation to executives, that habit goes with them, because nobody gave them feedback in those quiet rooms and really didn't do them any justice or service. I finished coaching a executive for a board presentation. He's a new CEO to a it's an investment company, essentially, and his board chair the first year, said, You gotta go get some help. And he's 55 years old, and we worked on his second year presentation, and he said, Ruth, why had no one ever told me this before? And it was a very pervasive problem. Wow, he was getting in the way of him being heard. And I. Said, because we don't have social capital with each other. Julie, if you and I, if you were, if you and I were peers, it's not my monkey, not my circus, to tell you how to do better, but if you and I were peers, in a in a collaborative way that says, Will you tell me if you hear something? And I'll tell you, then we might have tapped each other and said, Maybe you should work on that. Otherwise we just sort of shrug our shoulders and walk out of the room and say, That's just Julie, or you would say that's just Ruth, but it's going to hold you back when you want to move on. And so that's what we're aiming for, is for people to reach their full potential, find that full voice, tell those full stories, and that's what we're aiming for in the book. It's called the motivated speaker, for a reason. It's not about motivational speaking, it's about people that want to do better. Yeah,
Julie Berman - Host:I love that. And those are also, I think, just like very practical, but also not necessarily things that people would perhaps think about and put together for themselves and just in practice. And I think what you said at the end, too, about someone being in this position, a leadership position, but never, never really being told like this is something you could work on that will really help you, like, step it up. That's, yeah, like, that's, we all deserve to sort of know those little things so we can become our best selves. And so I'm curious, how do you for people who are listening to this, like, and maybe, you know, they're managing others, or maybe, you know, like, even for myself, I have kids, how do people sort of put themselves in those positions where they are able to get feedback and start to develop those relationships, where they can have really helpful conversations that go both ways. You know that, that you realize someone is coming with your best interests in mind.
Unknown:Well, the first is to set up the conditions. Let's say you are going to do a draft presentation, you know, practicing, and you can say to everybody, the best thing you can do is to say, I'm looking for your feedback on these three things. Did I get rid of my ums, how did my opening sound? And did I make the transition okay in that one story? Come with specific requests? Okay versus how do you feel about what I said? There is science, Julie, that we found in doing the research for the book. There was a summary of research on feedback. So there was dozens and dozens of research on feedback, and someone did a summary post on it, like another paper. And the thing that we learned that blew us away was, Julie, if I ask you to give feedback on yourself, first we're talking, you give a presentation, and I stop and I say, before I say anything, Julie, how do you feel? And I shut up. I am inhibiting what I want to tell you. You in the process of giving feedback, are actually learning about yourself, hmm, the process of you evaluating, what did I do? What did I want to say? What did I say? You actually are learning, and you're going to come pretty close. We find that you might come like 90% to telling us what's on our mind. Wow, because you are self reflecting in a very productive and learning way. Now, if the tables are turned, and I told you first when I saw I'm the only one learning in that exchange, and you live in choice, whether or not you want to believe it, and you can say, now I have seen this over and over and over again when we give advice to clients that don't believe what we're saying is true, and they can say, yeah, that's just Ruth. But if I say to you, Julie, here's a recording of yourself, what do you hear? It could be 30 seconds. It doesn't have to be long. You will hear the things that I want to tell you, and you will be far more motivated. This is kind of Gestalt theory, 101, you will be far more motivated to want to change them if you hear them and identify them first. Yeah, nothing is more powerful about the feedback loop than what I just shared. So then the second part of that is for you to say, Ruth, I'm looking for those three pieces. Did I nail my opening? Did I get rid of my ums, how was that transition? Did I go too long? So those are the two things. Is first we want. To listen to yourself. And second, when you are in a trusted, you know, environment where somebody is really carefully listening to you, ask them for specific feedback. Don't just say how they do. You may only get what's on their mind, and they may be having a bad day, fair enough. They may say, they may say that didn't go so well. And you'll say why? They're like, I just don't feel it. And you're like, Well, it's because you have a toothache, or if you're hungry, or I had a walk with a friend the other day, and she was so cranky, and at the end of the walk, she's like, Oh, my, Tylenol just worn off. I have a tooth infection. And I was like, Oh, I thought you were cranky about work. She was just cranky because her tooth hurt. You know, you just never know what's going on with people, right?
Julie Berman - Host:Yeah, that's so true. Okay, I love that. That's so that's so good. Hopefully that was helpful.
Unknown:I know it takes a minute, but I yeah, there's one gift I want to give to people. It's the willingness to listen back. Because the productivity is so far, it's so far exceeds what anyone else can tell you,
Julie Berman - Host:yeah, I love that. That's such a good tip. So I want to ask, you know, just as we kind of wrap up, is there anything else you know, we didn't touch on that you feel like is really important to share just throughout you know, whether your career with doing the TEDx, throughout your career? Right now, I would love to kind of hear if you didn't touch on something, well,
Unknown:we haven't talked about one thing that bugs me a lot, okay, which is, do not read a slide, Ooh, okay. And don't put words on slides. Like, words have to really, really, really matter. They have to be like super important and high value for a word to earn the right to make a slide. And the reason that I say that is I like slides that help both the speaker and the audience guide through and reinforce I do not appreciate or like slides that make me stop listening to you and read this slide, you're now forcing me to do two things at once, and I want to listen to you. And I think if there's something on the slide that's more important than what you're saying, and then, more importantly, if you're reading this slide, I'm tuned out, because I know that you're not embodying that talk. I want to hear you. I want to hear your perspective, your point of view, your inflection, your emotion, the storytelling, and that's not so that's just a we can all do better. And really that's you just haven't finished the talk. If you have too many words at a slide, or you just need to give yourself a little more time to finish.
Julie Berman - Host:I love that. Oh, that is good advice. I feel like that is a challenge to to me and maybe other people listening to be like, Hmm, why do I have so many words on a slide? If I have it well,
Unknown:and I would say, I would say the words are fine to put them in your talking points, yeah, you just haven't finished. You haven't gotten to, like, what's the image or the one word or the one phrase that the audience needs to connect with? What that's what that one side is trying to do. Okay, whole bunch of work behind that. But
Julie Berman - Host:yes, I can't imagine. Oh my gosh. All right. Well, this, this is going to get me really thinking now for the next time I love that, um, so many amazing just like things that you've shared. So I want to end with the questions that I ask. Um, yes, everybody. And I think, or, you know, I actually before I get there really quickly, because I realized I just forgot this. So are there any steps that people can take for people who want to they you have your book out that people can read, for people who are wanting to become better storytellers? Essentially, is there anything else that they can do that we haven't touched on that they can start with to really start becoming a better speaker. You mentioned your book. You mentioned really like listening to yourself, just speaking, okay, there you
Unknown:go. As many times as you can speak, record yourself, listen back. Just find more opportunities, low stakes opportunities, the practice of speaking, even to at your dinner table, to friends in class, raising your hand, all of those are aggregated in your confidence. If you will, back to your friend, put money in your confidence bank and and become more aware of the learning thresholds that will help you become better. Just become aware that I will share the first chapter on habits has a story in it about somebody who I told was an ummer. He didn't believe me, he didn't practice he showed up a few days later with the same behavior. He chose a different pathway. He just said, I'll be more conversational, which was positively not anything I told him to do or that I knew would work, and he did not do well. And so I think pay attention to your own behavior and just practice. Just take as many chances as you can. It doesn't have to be Toastmasters. It doesn't have to be NSA. It could. Just be finding small stakes, places to to build skills, habits, confidence. I
Julie Berman - Host:love that. Yeah, so speaking practice is speaking practice. It's just it is what it is. Okay? I love that. That's right. Um, okay, so the first
Unknown:title of the book was the practice of speaking Interesting. Okay, you didn't think it was very sexy.
Julie Berman - Host:I can imagine there's reasons for naming things, yeah, in different
Unknown:Yeah, and it's a big word that a lot of people use practice and speaking. So we that's how we came up with the motivated speaker. When we were like, what can be feel more forward, energetic. And it does represent, it does represent the mindset and characteristics of the people that we work with. They are motivated,
Julie Berman - Host:yeah, yeah, with good reason. Yeah, awesome. Okay, so now to our final question to end our conversation today, will you please share a sentence that uses verb as your jargon from your field, and then translate it so it's understandable to us? So
Unknown:this jargon may not feel too jargony, but it does take a minute to really think about the question the statement. So one of my favorite aside from don't make this about yourself, which is not jargony. That's how I get people to be less anxious. Make it about the audience. That's not jargony, but it's one of my favorite takeaways, is make your audience the essential character of your story. Okay, make your audience the central character of your story. It has a little twist in it, yeah. And what that means is, in lay terms, when you want the audience to adopt, appreciate, engage, make sure they see themselves in what you're talking about. So that could mean that you use the word you, your, our. I love the shift of pronouns, not so much gender pronouns, but the pronouns away from I and me and we. Those are my story. But when I say, Julie, you have a gift of podcast hosting, you have a gifts. You have lots of gifts. And I also know that you have a desire to level up. And I've got one tip here to help you. The story I want to tell you is about somebody and I could then reveal and we're not in a coaching situation, so I haven't been listening in that way at all. But you see where I started with your intention and your goal. If we start with I'm an executive speech coach, and I can help anyone do better. Hmm. Amos, fancy pants, you're the smartest one in the room, and I don't want to work with you. But when I recognize who you are the audience, you Julie or the listeners, then I have more empathy for where you are and what you want to do, and then how I can help you. I know you've talked about the hero's journey before, but it is similar to the Luke Skywalker is like the audience. He's the hero. He gets to live in choice. Obi Wan Kenobi is the guide, whispering missives in the in his ear and the light. The lightsaber is the tool that you use, and the villain is Darth Vader, which is that habit, that bad habit you need to overcome. But the audience always lives in choice, whether or not to see themselves, whether or not to listen to you. And so if you walk in there and think you're Luke Skywalker, you'll never have an audience. But if you walk in there and think you are Obi Wan Kenobi, and I'm here just to whisper a few ideas to you about how to use that lightsaber a little better, and you live in choice and how to use it, chances are you're going to be more willing to listen and willing to engage. Yeah, make the audience the central character of your story. I love
Julie Berman - Host:that. I love that twist on it that is so good. Well, thank you so much for ending with that. That was such a fun way to end, and it was so nice to have you on Ruth and just learn about how you have taught people to share stories and all these tips that you have that are so doable, so approachable, so yeah, such such a gift to have you on. It's still hard, still hard. Yes, of course, yes. I mean, the thing is, right, we can all listen all we want, but then to do it in in practice is, is we have to practice, we have to take action
Unknown:to build the right habits. Julie, thank you so much for having me on. This was a blast. It really good.
Julie Berman - Host:You are very welcome. So it was such a pleasure. And then, if people want to find you find your book. Where can they go and do that?
Unknown:The easiest place to start is the motivated speaker.com you'll link to all the channels that have the book for sale. You'll link to all of our training classes and coaching offerings. And we also have a key. Note that goes along with the book to for for anybody who has a conference or a workshop, and you would like us to bring our shaded habits keynote. It's a very interactive workshop that builds on the concept that we discuss, that you have habits in shaded rooms, and when they get illuminated, they're not going to serve you well. And we, we sort of do the the audience gets to decide which shaded habits to work on, and then we workshop them in the in the hour, and it's super fun. Very engaging. People walk away with tons of tips and they see themselves in the story. That's
Julie Berman - Host:awesome. That sounds great, I bet, yeah, I bet it comes out with so many interesting things for people who are there and that they learn about themselves that they never realized. So super awesome. Okay, well, thank you so much.
Unknown:Thank you, Julie. This was a blast.
Julie Berman - Host:Hey everybody. Thank you so much for listening to women with cool jobs. I'll be releasing a new episode every two weeks. So make sure you hit that subscribe button. And if you loved the show, please give me a five star rating. Also, it would mean so much if you shared this episode with someone you think you would love it or would find it inspirational. And lastly, do you have ideas for future shows. Or do you know any rock star women with cool jobs? I would love to hear from you. You can email me at julie@womenwithcooljobs.com, or you can find me on Instagram at women cool jobs. Again, that's women cool jobs. Thank you so much for listening and have an incredible day. You.