1077: The Six Insights of Excellent Communicators with Ruth Milligan

Pete Mockaitis
Ruth, welcome!

Ruth Milligan
Hello! How are you?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m good. Very good. I’m excited to chat about speaking. I’m very motivated, if you will, to be discussing it.

Ruth Milligan
No pun intended. There we go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to hear, you’ve been in the speaking game for quite a while, coaching, consulting, curating, speaking yourself. Can you tell me, what’s the most surprising and fascinating thing you’ve discovered about us humans and speaking over the course of your career?

Ruth Milligan
The most fascinating is that we don’t want to hear ourselves talk. And that’s a challenge because we want people to want to listen because that is the number one way to improve.

So, if you can get through that threshold and get through that kind of troublesome sticky spot in your head, that you’re not going to die when you listen to yourself, and that no one actually has to know when you do, it can be very, very, very, very helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s speak right into the heart of that. It’s the most effective way to improve, and yet we don’t want to do it. Can you share why don’t we want to do it? And how can we get over that?

Ruth Milligan
I think our perception of ourselves is always different than what we see. So, for instance, I’ll listen back to every podcast, every recording, and I see my sister because we have a lot of similarities. And I think, “Ooh, do I want to be like my sister?” My sister is fine. Don’t get me wrong. But you’re like, “Oh, I want to be me.”

And then sometimes it’s, “Ooh, do I really sound like that?” and we surprise ourselves. And then that’s hard because, at least I believe, we say, “Ooh,” that’s not what we want our audiences to hear. And so, there’s this disconnect that we have to sort of bring together as to, “What do we want to be perceived and seen as? And how are we doing that?” “And are they this far apart or are they this far apart?”

And the best way to do that is habits, practice, watching, listening back. And if you just haven’t done it, it’s a little cringy. Have you listened? I bet when you started your podcast, you started listening back to yourself, right? What did you learn when you started that?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I did. Well, it’s funny, well, from lots of keynote speeches, I listened and watched those recordings as well. And so, I’ve had to go both ways. And at times I think, “Well, this is so fun and entertaining. I wish more speeches were just like this.”

And other times I’m a little disappointed like, “Oh, Pete, I can tell you didn’t actually do your research, your homework, your practice as much here, and the audience suffered as a result.” And so, I feel some guilt, shame there.

Ruth Milligan
Correct, because you’re playing through your head, “Oh, I coulda, shoulda, woulda,” and you can’t dial back time. You can’t have that time back.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Although, of course, if you listened to your recordings before the big audience presentation, you can. You can fix it.

Ruth Milligan
Correct. That’s it. And I think you can’t draw it back, and there is a little bit of regret. I don’t live with a lot of regret, but I think that in those moments you say, “Oh, it could have been…” You have to work through those emotions. And so, that’s what happens when you watch yourself is you’re going through a bunch of emotions that you normally don’t experience. And so, it’s easier just to not do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, now you’re bringing me back to, I think, the most troubling recording ever. I remember I did a whole school assembly. It was at Hayworth High School, if anyone was there. And I was just starting my career as a professional speaker. And I had mostly spoken in the student audience context at leadership conferences where they selected one student from each high school.

And in those contexts, I was crushing it. On the speaker evaluations, I was number one out of 20 plus. So, I thought, “I’m great at speaking. I’m down with the young people.” And then in this different environment of high school students, I bombed. It was really spooky. I asked the principal for an endorsement. And then he told me in a lengthy email how terrible I was and how they wish they could have gotten their money back.

Ruth Milligan
In an email?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Ruth Milligan
Oh, bad practice.

Pete Mockaitis
I was shocked. And so, I shared it with a speaker-mentor friend, Mawi, episode number one. And, really, he’s so good, he said, “Well, Pete, it’s really great that you’re doing this because a lot of people just don’t even ever want to look at it.” And it was very helpful in terms of rewatching it together. And he said, “Well, first of all…” Go ahead.

Ruth Milligan
No, I was going to say together. That’s a very important word.

Pete Mockaitis
Watching it together, it was so useful, he said, “Well, first of all, Pete, we got to take some of what the principal said with a grain of salt, because he said, ‘I heard nothing about bad things.’” This is a direct quote for the email, “And yet I’m seeing multiple occasions of this audience laughing. So, clearly, it was not 100 % bad.” Okay, cool. So, we’ve got some perspective. “And also note…”

And then we really got into it, he was like, “Hey, Pete, they don’t even understand what that word means. It’s, like, you could be speaking gibberish to this audience in this place. Also, tell me about the setup and with the client.” And it’s like, “Yes, no matter what happens, it’s going to be your fault, so you have to grab the context, the information, the goals from them even when they’re being difficult in saying, ‘Oh, I guess that sounds good.’”

And so, it was so useful going through it. And it might have been painful, but, in some ways, I was just so spooked and surprised to have missed the mark so epically, the most ever in my life in the speaking environment that I just had to see what the heck happened here with a pro.

Ruth Milligan
The biggest extra learning that we’ve had, since particularly we wrote the book, was one research study assembled all the other research studies on feedback, like 500, I don’t know, maybe millions, I don’t know. But there was one central thing, and if your listeners are listening to anything about feedback, this is it.

When you speak and someone hears you, you get to go first in giving yourself feedback before they do. Because when they’re giving you feedback, they’re the ones learning. When you are the one first reflecting or giving yourself feedback, you’re learning. And learning is the goal to do better. If I said to you, “Hey, Pete, that really sucked,” like your teacher or your principal, that’s how I feel and that’s my opinion. And you live in choice, like every audience does, to accept or reject it. You can believe it or not.

But if I said, “Hey, Pete, how do you think you did?” You’re forced to think through, “Did I prepare enough? How did that go? What did I feel like?” And I may not have to say anything to you.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So that’s the best practice when giving feedback is to ask first and…

Ruth Milligan
And the person who’s giving feedback actually says, “Tell me how you feel” first. Full stop. It seems kind of silly and rudimentary, but it’s so powerful because 90% of what you’re going to tell me is what I might want to tell you, but because you’ve come to the conclusion, you’re more likely to want to fix it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and if you do discover, “Oh, there’s epic blind spots here,” well, then it’s probably also still effective because then there’s an emotional component of huge surprise like, “Whoa.” And then it’ll probably stick even more, even though you’re sharing the same things.

Ruth Milligan
So, can I tell a quick story?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes.

Ruth Milligan
I gave some feedback to a speaker after a big presentation practice day. We were at dinner. And I’ll call him Tom. I said, “Hey, Tom, do you know what an umm-er is?” And he says, “No, I don’t know what an umm-er is.” And I said, “Well, okay. An umm-er is this, somebody who uses um’s, filler words.” And I said, “Tom, do you know you’re an umm-er?” And he said, “I am?” And I said, “Yeah.” He goes, “Like a few times?” And I was like, “Hmm, like every fourth word.”

And he really wasn’t interested in the feedback. And everyone in the room heard it. Everyone in the room looked at me, and said, “Help him.” So, two days later, we come back for another round and he comes barreling in with the same umming, not even attempting. And I said, “Hey, Tom, do you remember the recording I sent you? Did you have a chance to listen to a minute of it?” Because I’m looking for him to hear himself, right, versus me just telling him.

He’s like, “No, no, I didn’t need to listen to that. I just decided I’m going to be more conversational.” “How’s that working out for you?” He was solving the problem he thought he had, not the problem he had. And I couldn’t, at that point, you say, “Okay, I did my best.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s illustrative, because I think we all do that, or can do that, to some extent, in that, being more conversational is a thing that might be effective, but it’s a different solution to a different thing.

Ruth Milligan
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
But it’s interesting how in our brains, especially if we’re not a master of a thing yet, we can conflate, because I think, in many ways, mastery of something is largely about the capacity to distinguish between nuances. And if you’re not yet mastering, you’re going to think, “Oh, umming means not conversational.” And I’ve done that in other domains in terms of…

Ruth Milligan
So, what would that mean to you if you heard, “I made it more conversational”? Like, you’re a conversationalist for a living. Like, I couldn’t even make the connection to why he thought getting rid of a filler word would be solved by becoming more casual. Anyway, we don’t have to dissect it, but like it is interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, there’s an interesting link there and…

Ruth Milligan
Yeah, I think it’s illustrative of the gap between what we believe we need and what we do. And if we don’t watch ourselves, we’re going to pick the wrong thing.

Pete Mockaitis
I think I’ve come to learn in life, generally speaking, if we want to advance or improve a thing, a domain, we’ll probably require either time and/or money, and/or outside expertise, and/or confronting our own weakness, foibles, mistakes or so.

So, I would just say that, in a way, humility itself is a resource we can deploy to improve on a thing and sometimes it might be unpleasant but it can save you time and money. So, it’s like, “Humble yourself and watch the recording.”

Ruth Milligan
Exactly. And I promise, no one’s ever died. I mean, there are things that we do that are painful in life. That really shouldn’t be one of them, but it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you. Well, right off the bat, that’s great stuff.

Ruth Milligan
There you go. That’s all we got. Are we done? I’m just kidding.

Pete Mockaitis
We could be. But you got a book here, The Motivated Speaker.

Ruth Milligan
We do.

Pete Mockaitis
And you start the book, The Motivated Speaker, by discussing, this is so meta, the concept of a threshold concept. So, what do you mean by this term? And why is that important?

Ruth Milligan
Sure. About 10 years ago, two guys, Meyer and Land, put a label on the thing that is recursive, troublesome, sticky, and when you encounter it, you can’t go back, you don’t unsee it. It’s that transformative kind of liminal space, you have to reach for it. And when you’re on the other side of it, everything else you do becomes better.

So, to the title of your podcast, How to be Awesome at Your Job, there are threshold concepts about business. There are threshold concepts about podcasting. There are threshold concepts that you had to learn certain things in order to be really good at this podcast game. And if you didn’t learn them, you would be average at it.

Our mentor who named the concepts for learning to write, we asked her, we said, “Does anyone ever name the concepts for learning to speak?” And she said, “No.” So, she took us under her wing for the better part of a year, and the only thing we wanted to do was just be better coaches. We wanted to understand, when somebody called us with a problem, we had an anchor to say, “What haven’t you learned yet?” Not just, “What are you doing wrong?” And those are two different things.

“I can hear you say ‘um,’ but what haven’t you learned yet? You haven’t learned that breath is a central character in the story of getting rid of your filler words. You haven’t learned that the habit of working out of that is the threshold concept for replacing your filler words.”

So, we cut the cloth a little differently on this communicator versus communication, the book is about the human as the communicator, not about the thing that you’re doing, like producing. It’s not about presentations. It’s not about script writing. It’s not about slide design. It is about the things that you need to do to be an awesome speaker.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s really an interesting distinction right there. It’s, “Hey, knock off the vocal pauses. Cut it out.” But rather a threshold concept, “What haven’t you learned yet?” Like, the threshold of a door, it’s like, “Oh, once I enter through this, this has been opened up for me.”

Ruth Milligan
It’s a portal. Totally, a portal.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, could you give us an example of a threshold concept, like a there’s a time before we learned it, and then we had to get it, and then we got it, and then it’s transformative?

Ruth Milligan
Sure. These are things that we have encountered forever, but they just haven’t been organized or named in a way that they’re easily accessible. So, we didn’t create them or discover them, but we named them. Very big distinction. And so, here’s an example. If my client, the umm-er, had understood that nobody’s a natural speaker. If he said, “Ruth, you’re a natural speaker,” I’d say that’s BS. I’m actually not a natural speaker. I’m a well-practiced speaker.

Nobody comes out speaking out of the womb. We all have to learn the habits of speaking. If he had appreciated that he has to work out of that habit, like he worked into it, he would have taken the few tips I gave him and walked around saying, “Okay, I have to do this thing.” I gave him a specific thing to do. He didn’t do it. And that’s the habit.

So, the first one is speaking is habitual, not natural. We don’t just become a speaker because our mouth is open. We become a speaker because we practice at our genre with our audiences, to our goals, with our content, with our story.

So, there are six of them. They’re all in the same sort of category of things that you obviously have to encounter. And once you do, things become a lot clearer as to how to become that great speaker you want to become.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So, a threshold concept, speaking is habitual, not natural, that is a threshold concept insofar as prior to internalizing this, you are kind of stuck.

Ruth Milligan
Right. And I might say, “Oh, I can’t be that speaker.” Like, you might say to yourself, “Oh, yeah, that person is such a natural. I could never be that way.” And our argument is that’s a lie. It’s a myth. And with the right practice, like anything, you can become better at it.

And so, to dial down that, like, “I can’t do it” to “How can I do it?” well, the first thing you need to do is realize that if you practice. So, here’s a good example. We did like a practice podcast about five months ago, and I came out with, like, a bunch of ums. I was mortified. This is my business. And I walked around for a week and I just did the trick that I know that I need to do and I’m happy to share it with you.

Every time I spoke, I worked my way out of it. A few days later, it was good. What is it, 21 days to a better habit, generally? But if you don’t know you have the habit, and you don’t know how to get out of it, then you can’t practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that, well, I believe that, that great speaking is habitual and not natural. For those who are skeptical, can you prove it, Ruth? I mean, you’ve got many clients who have improved, but let’s just imagine, who were some of the greatest speakers throughout history, or in our modern era? And did they, in fact, have to build up a lot of habits?

Ruth Milligan
I’ll give you one. Nikki Glaser reported, before she gave her opening monologue at the Golden Globes, she practiced 94 times. I forget how long it was, six or seven minutes. She counted 94 times. She shows up and she doesn’t miss a beat, but she doesn’t want to take any risk.

Even though she might’ve even also been on a teleprompter, she still practiced 94 times because, in comedy, and her genre, this is a genre, us speaking on a podcast, Nikki has got a genre, timing is everything. And if she’s not practicing that timing, she’s not going to land the joke, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Ruth Milligan
Martin Luther King, actually, his talk, most consequential talk, I believe, punctuates with the right timing to make the points, “We’re moving from the heat and oppression of today to the oasis of freedom of tomorrow.” He didn’t say, “We’re moving from the heat and oppression of today to the…” It has intentionality. It has stickiness. It has suspense. It has inflection. I promise you he practiced that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I think comedians are a great example because, in a way, they do seem very natural to us, “Oh, they’re just so funny. That guy, he’s just so funny.” So, how much are they practicing those sets?

Ruth Milligan
Here’s a good example. Last month, I saw Tina Fey and Amy Poehler together in their tour. And at one point, Amy came out on stage and said, “Okay, everybody, this is the point where I’m working out some new content.” And she stopped a few times, and, “Oh, got to work on that. That’s not working out.”

Like, she’s trying to see if what she’s saying will land. She is writing in the moment. So, I think that humor is one of the hardest genres to write or deliver, personally, because there’s so much expectation from the audience to get the joke, to get the context, and to say, like, “I’m smarter because I got it. I feel smarter because I understand the humor and it made me laugh. It me feel a certain way.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ve heard anecdotes that it can, indeed, be well over a hundred times of trying, cutting, refining, refining the material.

Ruth Milligan
Yeah. And so, to think that somebody can show up on a Monday, and say, “Oh, let’s give a talk on a Tuesday and wing it and make it work,” is a little bit of, “Oh, you must be superhuman because I don’t know anybody that can do that,” unless they have been spending, you know. Here’s a good example. We’ve been spending the better part of 20 months with our content. I should be able to, and can if you’d quiz me, I have one line for each of the concepts.

It took us months and months to write and refine, and write and refine, and get to that quick point that you would understand that still gets to the point. So, we can’t shortcut these things, is the bottom line.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so there we have it. First and foremost, habitual not natural. Can we hear the other five concepts?

Ruth Milligan
Sure. And I will do it with one sentence each to see if I’ve got this down. Ready?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ruth Milligan
Speaking is social. Your audience is always making meaning of what you’re saying. You’re rarely ever just talking to yourself, and if you are, it’s probably before coffee and it’s a babble. If your audience speaks Spanish, they don’t want to hear it in French. That goes for jargon. It goes for acronyms. Your audience is also, it’s fleeting, meaning your audience is there and then they’re not, meaning your words are not going to stick. They’re going to fade. Speaking is social.

Speaking is embodied. If I asked you to pick up the book and read a sentence, which I’m not going to, you would be reading the written word, versus embodying it, delivering it, speaking it. My favorite embodiment is, if I said to you these words, you would know who the speaker was because he embodies this pace and tone and rhythm, “Last night, Michelle and I, we went to the movies.” You know who I’m talking about?

Pete Mockaitis
So, Michelle, so I will go with Barack Obama.

Ruth Milligan
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
But what I remember most about Barack Obama is that he’ll go slow and then he speeds it up.

Ruth Milligan
There you go. If somebody had written that script for him, which would have said, like, “Last night, my wife, Michelle, and I went to the Lennox Theatre to see ‘The Terminator’ movie and we had a great time.” That would have been what somebody might have written. See the difference?

So, anyway. So, number three, speaking is embodied. We have to bring our whole, and we have to get it off the page. We can’t just, like, if reading it is not speaking it, so.

Pete Mockaitis
The AI will destroy us all.

Ruth Milligan
Next one. Speaking comes in many genres. This is a genre. Podcasting, keynotes, convention speeches, they’re all different genres, and they have different rules and conventions. And for the most part, the host, you, are setting the rules. So, you tell me how much time we have. You tell me what channel we want to be on. You tell me what topics we want to discuss. Same thing with any conference, any event. So, speaking comes in many genres, and you need to know the conventions to be successful.

Speaking is messy. So, if I ask you, Pete, “What’s your life story?” You might say, “Oh, where should I start?” And the problem is there are many places to start and many places to finish. The iteration of your content, what to get in, what to get out. “How do I take that 100 pounds of information and shove it into a 10-pound bag?” requires the iteration.

Speaking requires feedback, and yours first, mainly first. And if you don’t want to listen to yourself, then you’re going to probably not hit that threshold of true learning.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, each of these are threshold concepts insofar as, if we continue to live in the alternative, the opposite of them, we will stagnate. If we reject that speaking is embodied and we live our lives reading scripts, then we’re stuck.

Ruth Milligan
We are stuck. I think you may be stuck, your ideas will get stuck, your pitches will get stuck, people won’t want to listen to you. I’ll tell you a very quick anecdote. I coached a big tech guy, last month, foreign country, heavy accent. Got him to make some better enunciation so he could be understood.

We worked hard, content, three or four sessions. He did really well. Two weeks later, he gets invited to an internal audience of executives by someone else. He takes none of that practice or habits with him, and he completely fails. And the executive that invited him said, “I’m never inviting him again to anything.”

So, the downside to not really embodying what he had learned and taking it into practice was you don’t even get invited anymore. And, therefore, then your career, “Oh, I can’t put him on stage.” It’s actually what I call a shaded habit. You have something in a small dark room that you do and everyone goes, “Oh, that’s just Pete. He just does that.”

And then you take Pete to a big illuminated stage without support, and Pete’s still doing that, and you say, “Oh, my gosh, didn’t we want to give Pete some coaching before that?” Because now everyone sees it and that’s hard to unsee. And that bridge between sort of the shaded and illuminated is the space that most people don’t appreciate. That’s where you can go through the thresholds, literally, figuratively, and find better practice so that you are invited back and your career doesn’t get thwarted.

I have coached, Pete, many, many, many dozens and dozens of executives whose careers have been largely thwarted because they ignored how hard this is and they didn’t prepare. And they showed up not prepared and embarrassed somebody. Most of the calls I get are from CEOs that say, “That guy didn’t do so well with my client. Can you help?” because the CEO is embarrassed, and they’re feeling a risk for that relationship because that person, who they put in front of that client, true story, the client is very bristly, didn’t like the information, wasn’t a good quarter.

And the executive just keeps throwing more and more and more data at him. And I suggested, “Maybe he just wants to be heard. He doesn’t need any more data. So, can you just maybe stop talking for a minute?” And he’s like, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m supposed to, like…” And you can tell he’s like one of those guys with, like, a briefcase full, decks and decks and decks of data.

And so, he tried it. He said it felt uncomfortable, but the client calmed way down, felt heard, and actually didn’t need anything more. Just needed some space. So, sometimes we don’t read the room right. Sometimes we just need to stop.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, careers thwarted. Well, to the point about, well, I guess now I’m just thinking, like, it’s a little spooky because often we never get the feedback that we need. And so, our career can be thwarted, we don’t even know why. We find ourselves on a performance improvement plan or fired with very vague feedback, which you can’t even call feedback, like, “You know what, it just wasn’t the right fit.” “You know what, we’re trimming costs.” It’s like, “Well, why am I being fired, not the other guy?” “Well, you know, we got to downsize.”

Ruth Milligan
I’ll add this. What about the interview that they give you no feedback on? And they just say, “No, thanks.” And you say, “I got to the third round. Something happened.” I have a son who’s starting to interview for internships, and the first round they gave him no feedback. It’s like, “Well, how are you supposed to learn? You know, you’re 19, how are you supposed to learn?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it could be pretty brutal in that context, if the interviewer is like, “Not my concern. Our concern is picking a winner. We don’t care about you and your life and what happens to you.”

Ruth Milligan
“Even though we just put you through a month of interviews and we just told you, you know, like…” And so, the learning, I think this goes back to, like, “What can we learn in these moments? And are we open to it?” And it’s tricky when you’re really busy and you have a thousand applicants, you don’t want to take time, “Ah, not my problem. Not my monkey. Not my circus. Just don’t want you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just as a side note to that, I would say I’ve been in both sides of the interviewing table and I, well, I’m into learning, so I love it when they ask for feedback because then it’s like, “Oh, well, first of all, I know that you want it, because I can’t just assume that everybody wants it. And it is time consuming.” So, one of my favorite instances, I rejected someone for a role. This was in college. And it was for a student consulting organization, because I’m cool like that.

And he asked me for feedback. I was so glad he asked. I gave him lots of feedback. He returned to get into that group the following year, and then went to consult at McKinsey. It’s like, “There you go. That’s hard to get into those consulting posse.” And it was awesome because he asked and I was glad that he asked. So, I guess that’s a tidbit right there. Go ahead and ask.

Ruth Milligan
And I do think, by the way, just to this point, we actually coach people to say, ask for the feedback you want, “How did I do in that opening? How were my transitions? Did it go too long? Did the story work?” I’ve had to give people feedback, like, “You’re a little tone deaf. Like, that story is not good for this audience. You might want to pick something that’s a little less, I don’t know, privileged or a little less offensive.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Something a little less offensive.”

Ruth Milligan
A little less offensive.

Pete Mockaitis
“Not zero offensive but just a touch.”

Ruth Milligan
Yeah. Like, coaching so many years of TEDx, we’d have people with such good ideas, and every now and then you’d get somebody who’s like, “Oh, you haven’t had a lot of feedback lately, I can tell. Okay, we’ll go there. It’s okay.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s so key to ask. And I think you’re right in terms of being more specific about your request, it’s like, “So, how did I do?” It’s like, “Well, I don’t know if you actually want to know, or if you’re just looking for some affirmation, validation, because you’re nervous.” So, I’ll be like, “Ah, good job.” So, it’s hard to know if that’s even sincerely what they want. But when they ask it specifically, it’s like, “Oh, okay, you’re actually keen to know this, so we can go there.”

Ruth Milligan
So, Pete, here’s a question I’ve asked a few podcast hosts. When you have to edit out, your editor has to do an extra big job of editing out filler words and what we call disfluencies, a fancy term, do you ever want to tell the speaker how many you took out?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, I don’t even think about it now because my editor just does it and we just go.

Ruth Milligan
Well, it’s just a curiosity because you actually have data.

Pete Mockaitis
I do.

Ruth Milligan
You have real data. And then I suggest that maybe you send them both versions. You say, “Here’s your before and here’s your after. If you want to watch, you can.” But at least, that to me, like, the before and after of any recording is the money shot because I can hear what I sounded like here, “Do I want to be in audience A or audience B?” But in these moments that are recorded and you have data, it’s always curious, like, “Does anybody care?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so Ruth, we got our threshold concepts and a top thing is watch, listen to the recording. You’re not going to want to, but that’s the thing that’s going to do it. Can you give us any of your other top dos and don’ts before we shift gears and hear about your favorite things?

Ruth Milligan
Yeah, I guess the other one is, don’t underestimate the power of breath. Everything about breath is what informs pace, suspense, articulation, the ability to finish a sentence strong. If my name is Ruth Milligan, and I run out of breath, I’m going to get really high and then, all of a sudden, I’m going to finish up.

But if my name is Ruth Milligan, and then I get to finish strong because I’m drawing from my diaphragm. So, knowing where to breathe from your diaphragm, not up here. If you breathe from up here, it’s called stacked breathing. I can’t really draw, like, think of it like a crochet hook. I can’t really draw the right volume of breath out.

Breath replaces the filler words. Try to say an um on the count of three while taking a breath. Ready? One, two, three. You cheated.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, but you do got to try. I’m no natural.

Ruth Milligan
So, I walked around for that week and I just took better breaths. I was more conscious about my breaths and my ums went away, the ands, the so’s, whatever. So, that’s the collection of things to draw on whenever you feel as if your speaking isn’t as strong, as confident, as measured or inflection. Look to your breath patterns. Look to your breath habits.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Any other top don’ts?

Ruth Milligan
Don’t think that you write like you speak. I cannot impress upon this one enough. I can tell within about 15 or 20 seconds if someone is reading me what they wrote versus delivering. We don’t ever want to be read to, unless we are like Isabel Allende or one of these great authors who comes to read me a chapter of your book.

I remember going to TED one year and actually Isabel Allende was on stage and she came and read, and I just could not get over, like, how they let her read. They don’t let anyone read anything. There’s no teleprompters, there’s no notes, you know, years and years of being in that genre. And then I thought to myself, “She’s not speaking. She’s actually reading her written words.”

And then John McWhorter was the one who really broke open the threshold concept for me that, like, we write in very long sentences and we speak in very short sentences. And when you are writing to speak, you don’t usually write the right way. And I had a presentation we coached last week, a panel discussion, and someone took, I think, about 10 slides of different, she was working up to talking about jazz in schools, and she was almost poetry.

She kind of showed a progression of what music does, and just used one word per image. It was just this punctuated, like 10 words. And the audience got quiet as a mouse. They were wrapped, because she wasn’t talking on, on, on, on, on. And she grabbed everyone and then she had them for her next four minutes of her presentation. It was really beautiful.

And she used long pauses, very curated imagery, perfect words. She nailed it. So, you don’t always have to be in the prose section. You can pull from things that we’ve learned from poetry, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Ruth Milligan
“Don’t make it about you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Ruth Milligan
Yeah, my most recent one, for sure, is this one, the intersection between speaking, stress, and time.

Pete Mockaitis
What do we know from that study?

Ruth Milligan
We know that when you’re in stress, when your amygdala has a response, actually, time goes like this.

Pete Mockaitis
It expands and contracts.

Ruth Milligan
Correct. And it gets slower, you’re just, like, “Well, I have a lot more time than I think.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Ruth Milligan
It is this one.

Pete Mockaitis
Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg.

Ruth Milligan
I just can’t love it enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Ruth Milligan
My voice memos. Hands down. Full stop.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Ruth Milligan
I actually love to lift weights. It solves so many problems in such a short amount of time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks, they quote it back to you often?

Ruth Milligan
I think the one I said earlier is the one that I think sticks with me, which is when you’re in front of an audience and you’re feeling nervous, stop making it about yourself. Make it about the audience. And a lot of that anxiety can wash away when you say be of service to them. You’re here to support them. And then you’re taking the focus off of yourself. And a lot of that frenetic nervousness doesn’t have a place anymore.

I had to use it 12 years ago in a sticky situation and it really stuck for me. And every time I have a speaker come in that sort of hamster wheel, I say, “Stop making it about yourself.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Ruth Milligan
I would encourage them to start at TheMotivatedSpeaker.com. It takes you to our larger website. There you can find all the links to the books, all of our podcast recordings, including yours soon, all of our blogs, and everything about our training, coaching, and what we do to help support speakers every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ruth Milligan
Go find one thing to work on. Just one. Everyone that we coach, even the most seasoned speakers, have one thing to work on. Listen to yourself. Ask for feedback. Just pick one. We actually can’t do many things at once, improve on many things at once. And it might be that shaded habit, that when it becomes illuminated, it could be the thing that’s keeping you back from being awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ruth, thank you.

Ruth Milligan
Thank you for having me. This was really fun.