The Motivated Speaker (eBook)

Six Principles to Unlock your Communication Potential

Ruth Milligan, Acacia Duncan, Blythe Coons (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
235 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-394-33804-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Master the mindsets and practices of the world's best public speakers

A team of veteran communication and speaking coaches delivers a groundbreaking new framework to becoming a great communicator. Thanks to the authors' decades of experience, readers will discover the six essential threshold concepts needed to give talks like the best TED speakers and Fortune 500 leaders.

Their practical and accessible approach will help you establish powerful habits in your speaking practice. You'll understand what's preventing you from being influential and persuasive, and build a new foundation toward being a highly effective communicator.

This trailblazing book goes beyond cliches like 'overcome your fear' and obvious advice like 'don't read your speech.' It dives deep into the transformative, integrative, and challenging ideas that will enable you to level up your speaking.

Included here are:

• Deep explanations of what it takes to become an effective communicator
• Insights into the dispositions, behaviors, and skills that great speakers consistently demonstrate and how to develop them in yourself
• Expert guidance on how to use the latest technologies to augment your public speaking development

A comprehensive framework for learning public speaking, The Motivated Speaker is the perfect resource for working professionals and leaders who want to learn to speak persuasively, confidently, clearly, and compellingly.

RUTH MILLIGAN is the founder of Articulation, a communications training and coaching firm. In her over 35 years of wide-ranging experience, she also founded and curated TEDxColumbus, one of the longest running TEDx programs in the world. She is a proud mom, quilter, and pickleball player.

ACACIA DUNCAN has coached thousands of speakers to captivate their audiences with purpose, precision, and passion. She is a theatre director, writer, and actor; an avid hiker and baker; and a life-long Trekkie.

BLYTHE COONS is a communications coach who uses her experience as a business leader and professional actor to help clients uncover their powerful stories. She loves running, baking, and supporting the arts.

Textauszug

PRINCIPLE 1
Speaking Is Habitual

It's awfully convenient to think speaking is natural. If you’re not that great, that’s okay. As in, some people have “it” and others don't.

But that's entirely untrue.

No one is born speaking.

And while your capacity for language development grows with age, you don't learn it without another human speaking to you. As a quick primer and evidence, here are the key steps we all experience from birth:

• Listening and Imitation: Babies attempt to imitate sounds they hear. Mama, dada, a dog's name—all things they hear often or are taught to say first.
• Social Interaction: Parents and caregivers are the first teachers of talking, singing, reading out loud, and of course, screaming and yelling.
• Feedback and Reinforcement: When babies attempt to make sounds or words, what do parents and caregivers do? Ignore them? Hardly! They smile, talk back, ask more, and most importantly, provide encouragement to keep trying.
• Exposure to Language: The more words a baby hears, the more they are influenced toward language development. Dare we say also, if they are in a French‐speaking household, they most certainly will not learn, say, German.
• Cognitive Development: As the brain develops, so does the capacity for more understanding and language production.

Okay, enough brain science for today.

But … but … “That person is such a natural‐born speaker,” you may say.

“They were not born one,” we say.

Babies start with gurgling sounds, and then move onto babbling, eventually uttering distinguishable words usually around a year old. Even as adults, we are still learning new words all the time. No matter our age, we are always listening to others and learning from them, from our parents at birth to our leaders in our careers. And as we learn, we practice, and this builds our habits.

That’s why the threshold concept is that speaking is habitual. We believe speaking is learned and practiced, not natural—even when it's something you do without thinking. A speaker who hasn't yet encountered or embraced the threshold concept of trying to build a new habit will not work their way into better habits.

Let's make this concrete with a story. One habit that many people carry is too many filler words (ums, like, you know), trite phrases or other “disfluencies” that get in the way of being heard. Ruth worked with a client with such vocal patterns. This (true) story illustrates how critical it is that a speaker wrestles with this first threshold concept:

Ruth:

So … I’m engaged by your company to help with speaking effectiveness, especially for this pitch. By chance do you know you are an “ummer”?

Client:

Uh. What's an ummer?

Ruth:

Someone who says UM, UH, YOU KNOW, RIGHT?, LIKE a lot … They are what we call “disfluencies.” Or filler words. Or things that get in the way of us hearing your message.

Client:

Ummmm … that's just how I talk. Are you saying I do that a lot?

Ruth:

Yes. A lot.

Client:

Really? I do? (In disbelief.)

Ruth:

Well, I counted 23 times in a three‐minute response to a question. On the phone last week, I heard it every three to four words. I didn't hear it once today—but that's because you were reading your prepared script.

Fast forward a few days to another session. Shoot! Ugh. The ummer is still umming. He didn't hear Ruth. Or do what she suggested, which was a specific breath exercise to begin to get in a better habit and out of the ums.

Ruth:

Did you listen to the recording?

Client:

Once I did. (Not convincingly.) But I should again probably. But I did try a more conversational style, did that help?

Ruth:

So sorry. I wish I could say they are the same. While a “conversational style” and disfluencies are for sure cousins in the spectrum of speaking, they are distinctly different. One is a casual approach to word choice (as in using colloquial, not formal language) and the other is a pile of boulders sitting between you and your audience.

And. Sigh. Back to square one. But this is what keeps us in business.

Ruth's speaker suffered from the dreaded ums, and they were getting in the way of being heard. More often than not, ums are a result of a person verbalizing while they are thinking. Speakers vocalize as they cover that thinking process, and perhaps subconsciously let the audience know they are not done. Eventually the ums become a habit. A bad one.

We taught this speaker a specific breathing tactic to get rid of the ums, but he hadn't practiced it and therefore, he was still showing up with them. While he understood the declarative knowledge (or said he did) about how to get rid of them (the breathing tactic), he ignored the procedural knowledge about how to apply the learning (the process for working breath into speech to replace the ums). That's the habit part.

One of our clients aptly said:

“You diagnosed pretty quickly and easily what I need to change to do better. But damn if it isn't incredibly hard to do it.”

Exactly. Habits are hard work—both to form and break.

As human language progresses from babble to the geography bee to the corporate business review, there is endless learning and training of the brain. We've offered but one example of a hundred different small skills that require practice and habit.

Even the most seasoned keynote speaker is learning about a new audience, new host, new venue, new message every time they speak.

Even if they seem natural, they always have more to learn.

Know What You Did to Be an Effective Communicator (Then Make It Your Habit)

In Ruth's first year of coaching TEDx speakers, she watched how eight speakers took the stage with incredibly different preparation paths and habits. The preparation of two particular speakers and their different results really stood out to her.

One of the speakers went away to a silent retreat for three days to write his talk. He spent time brainstorming, writing, editing, probably starting over, and doing it all again. Another one showed up with two talks condensed into one deck that made the talk twice the suggested length, and … with no focus. She didn't consider what her one idea really was, let alone how to best support it. There were a lot of good thoughts and visuals, but nothing threading them together. Results reflected their disparate preparation journeys. One had done the hard work of the “logic and thinking” of the talk. The other hadn't. It didn't stop there, as the one who didn't do the hard work had a talk double the time and even harder to follow.

Ruth saw first‐hand how the habits (or lack thereof) in preparation impacted the outcome not only for these two speakers, but all eight who took the stage that year. Only a few of them could reflect in hindsight what worked or didn't work for them.

Two years later, still coaching TEDx speakers, Ruth wrote a guide with a colleague and TEDxOhioStateUniversity longtime advisor, Dr. Amy Barnes, called “How to be a TEDx speaker coach” based on the specific procedural steps that they saw were successful in coaching somebody for the short‐form talk. Amy and Ruth were attempting to make sure students could coach faculty members for the student‐run event and wanted them to have some tools to be successful (because what tenured faculty member wants to take coaching from a student?).

After that guide was written, we kept hearing speakers say “I will never present the same way again after giving this talk.” Mind you, they weren't all TEDx talks, but any talk that needed organization, story, and practice.

In hindsight, writing the guide gave us clarity on what really worked and didn't. In general, we outlined four coaching sessions plus a rehearsal, the specific development goals we had for each call, and various forms of feedback at each step. As a result, the speakers didn't just succeed, they actually knew what they did to succeed.

Our role was to be their accountability partners, helping them to know where to edit, stay within time, bring inflection to the mundane, and cheer them on for each step closer they got to an embodied talk. (We'll address this in Principle #5.)

And after coaching thousands of speakers over the last 15 years, we can confidently predict the large procedural tasks you will need to complete a great talk to your audience in a specific genre—but your specific habits will be uniquely yours.

Knowing the specific habits you need to form to become a great communicator will usually come from immediate reflection after a talk.

But in speaking, sometimes you walk off stage and you have no...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 28.4.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management
• Schlagworte: clear communication • communication book • Communication Principles • communication techniques • effective communication • persuasive public speaking • Public speaking • public speaking book • public speaking principles • public speaking techniques
• ISBN-10: 1-394-33804-X / 139433804X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-394-33804-7 / 9781394338047