welcome to new beginnings with karen dell and i am thrilled to have joining me president and c e o of o j miller international miller it was a pleasure to be with you absolutely so we you know have crossed paths absolutely and i know that you have been an actor you are currently teaching and one of the things that is new for you is developing this business it is indeed and so tell us a little bit about the business what got you started you know where where is it coming from i'll back up just a little bit sure and this starts in high school when i first became engaged in the performing arts and a little fire underneath me before then i like a lot of teen young men was very interested in sports and still am interested in sports but i took this theater class and fell in love with the teacher in terms of her energy her humor and just her transparency and then started competing in these forensics competitions which were dramatic compositions between competitions rather between our high school and other high schools in the area and i was bit by the book of storytelling and then that led to me pursuing an undergraduate degree in speech communications and theater and then living there and pursuing a masters of fine arts and acting here at rikers missing girl school of the arts which brings me to the east coast so through those many years of exploring the art form and just loving the power of communication a lot of friends would come in on my voice indiction and requests strategies for improving their own voice and diction so i was informally doing this work over many years even offering workshops to universities like the university of memphis health science center working with their professional track as people were coming through med school and pharmacy school working on the importance of being able to articulate your thoughts so it's been many years of doing it informally and i just decided it's time for a new beginning to crystallize this and for my own company great so what's your target who are your target audience my target audience or first of all people who stand before others often so i'm looking at thought leaders change agents clergy executives entrepreneurs people who want to maximize the time that they are afforded before others and then those who aspire to be before others most of us want to make sure that we're understood but often our communicative ability gets in the way of  is worse than being misconstrued than not being understood when it's your own for and so i wanted to come along and help people because i know the joy of being understood i know the joy of getting your message across and i know the pain of not getting it across in so the target audience again is anyone who wants to stand before others with proficiency wonderful so many of the obstacles that people are concerned with because you're talking about in many respects public speaking yes and you know people say the you know it's like number two and maybe death is number three i don't even know what number was but you know what are some of the obstacles that you've seen people have when they've come to you to to get better well i think the first obstacle is the fear of humiliation the fear is so srong that i am going to be insufficient in my ability to articulate and buy a ticket i mean having words at my disposal to adequately express my my fought and my feelings and so we feel that we won't do that well and that increases our anxiety and in the anxiety down our ingenuity and creativity and so a lot of times people are coming simply to receive strategies to overcome the fear and then others have problems with organization they feel i think big thoughts noble thoughts but when i begin to speak i delude them and so i'm looking for strategies to be concise for six percent brevity is the soul of wit and sometimes we over speak and sometimes we're convoluted we're not clear we're not straightforward and so these are some of the issues that people have that they want to address and then at other times we're simply not as creative as we could be and so they come to understand how language functions so that you can use how do you use language so that you're let's go down the path of any military aid it is absolutely well a lot of times i go back to understanding the basis of the thought that we have to have a subject and a lot of times when people are delivering literature actors who act or even speakers who are delivering a speech they really don't bring the audience in and make them pay attention to what the subject of the sentence is doing like honing in on the verbs and making sure that you emphasize the verbs and then when we have words that are modifiers like adjectives so it wouldn't simply be a house it would be a yellow dilapidated house and so making sure that you really color those words so that you engage your audiences sensory apparatus you want imagery to begin to arise in the mind of your listeners so you have to love on words and then of course sometimes we have the challenge with relaxed articulation in the sense of how we form both vowel in consonant sounds so getting back to that and understanding that speech is a tool that which is physiological that distinct movements happen with my articulators in the articulator just parts of the body that help you to shape the outgoing air so when you have an understanding of what your articulators are doing then you can use it at your will  you can relax it your will so the diaphragm i think of in particular as the vocal chords the breath yes what else well the diaphragm is really really really important in terms of making sure that we are breathing breathing correctly for speech the way that we tend to breathe on a day to day basis is not sufficient for speech because most of our breathing happens here in the thoracic cavity and it's also a vertical breath doing that as opposed to a deep los sintered breath that takes place in gauging the diaphragm it's three hundred sixty degrees all around the body where the lungs are expanded and there is an easy rise and fall of the abdomen because the diaphragm the dome shaped muscle intendant that is between your thoracic cavity and your a dead abdominal cavity the two largest cavities in the body when you take in air and it pushes down then it causes your abdomen to expand and then on the release of the air it rises causing your stomach to deflate and so there should be an easy rise and fall of the abdomen but a lot of times that is no longer happening so we have to retrain ourselves to breathe properly so that we could have sufficient air so that it can then be formed if you run out of air you have nothing to form and so your voice doesn't have the power and the distinctiveness that you want it to me think about the times being disciplined as a child and then that happens to your breath because it's something traumatic that you've just gone through and we just had a professor that once said that speech carries with it the truth of the experience so if i run into a friend that i haven't seen in years in my expression you can tell that this is someone i think fondly of or the absence of much air that i use with someone that i'm really not fund of sound carries with it the truth of the experience of yes carries the truth of the experience that i love that and so we should see that reflected and if you're delivering a line and in that line is a happy thought but your body is doing something else the audience will always believe your body more than they believe your words and you're going to write where i was going that is which are the non verbal and nonverbal so you're talking a lot about speech yes and of absolutely but in order to have a message yes the you want the audience you know you want it to land you want it to resonate you want it to be inspiring or motivational or whatever absolutely speech is certainly part of it right but there's also the non verbal absolutely so to show us about speech is actually a very very small part of it only about seven percent of it and then the rest is body language and then tone of voice and so nonverbally we have to understand how to communicate using our body that our body is often in line with our psychology the way that we think about ourselves the way that we think about the speaking situation or the environment the context that we're delivering the speech and all can cause us to give certain body language that can be income grew and with the words and of our body language is income growing with the words the people are going to believe our body language so we want body language that is empowering in fact there are studies now that show that prior to going in for an interview you can engage in what's called power poses and through those power poses you can then counter at cortisol the stress hormone the fight or flight situation that happens when the body has perceive that it's about to engage in something difficult which causes sometimes our palms to swear our voice to quiver our knees to shake because our body there's a physiological response to a psychological state oh man this is going to be i want to make sure that i do well here and all of that begins to happen and anxiety really is not a bad thing but if we don't channel it properly it becomes a bad thing actually it could bring focus and help us do well in the speaking moment but if not it will shut us down yeah yeah so what tips would you give someone who's experiencing what you just described right so if you're experiencing nervousness if you're as an anxiety the first thing that i would say is know that it's common even the great speakers amongst us get nervous so once you know that when it comes you can see this is normal there's nothing to freak out about but prior to that of course preparation is golden if you prepare they gives you a little more confidence if you don't procrastinate if you get the information that you need about the speaking moment in terms of doing a situational analysis you do a demographic analysis so that you pick a topic that you think is appropriate that you have a message that is audience centered so that you can then begin to focus on your message rather than your fear give yourself a mental pep talk visualize your success when you're preparing recreate the speaking environment when you're when you're preparing so preparation is part of it and just accepting the fear understanding that it comes to all but not to let it shut you down to do it in spite of the nervousness and perceived nervousness as a good thing rather than  debilitating thing and i think those things will help you know you talked a lot about the physiological but it's also linked to the psychological i was alluding absolutely true confidence yes talk about that i huge is huge because if you have a self demeaning or limiting thoughts it's going to affect your breath is going to affect your projection because you're still uncomfortable with judgment you still uncomfortable with being adjudicated and so you then tend not to project your voice in you're still judged so one of the things that we have to address when we are preparing for a life of public speaking is how we think about ourselves and often because we sometimes exalt others we make them bigger in our minds then they actually are meaning we stripped them of their humanity stripped them of the times where maybe they were nervous or we are we don't know the amount of coaching that they've come through and so if we can begin to reconstruct the way we see ourselves in to start first by virtue of me being human i have a right to be heard because i have a human experience and my experience is unique no one else has my experience no one has gone through the same exact things that i've gone through so my voice has significance in the earth and i have to get more and more comfortable with that so that i don't marginalize myself that i don't push myself into obscurity and i tell clients and i tell students that when you speak in public you're auditioning for leadership when you speak in public you're auditioning for leadership because if you say a string of logical coherent things then all of a sudden they're look what will care what do you think because you have consistently said something that was logical in useful and that helped the company move forward it was something that solved a problem and if we don't speak up even if we're brilliant we do ourselves a disservice absolutely absolutely you know i do executive coach and so you know you're touching all the right buttons for me there's that's  so can you give us a case study of you know an example of a client you have helped tell us a little bit about the situation yes you know what were the remedies that you used and you know what was the result what i've helped a number of clients who wanted to move closer to neutral american speech nas and the first thing that we discussed is that this is a tool you won't use this in every occasion there is formal and informal speech if i am going to a gala i'm not wearing a swimsuit i'm going to a poor party i'm not wearing a tux so language is a tool now if you are not a native u s speaker you may have a di that dialect may not be helpful for the career that you're in let's say for instance you're dealing with people's money and they're calling you up to talk about the money if they're having difficulty understanding what you're saying then that becomes a hinderance for you and so that's something that you want to address so i've helped clients to understand phonetics understand how to move from a dialect to a more neutral way of pronouncing words more neutral way of pronouncing sounds because sounds of course coalesce and become worse so if we can understand those individual sounds or phoning then we can begin to be more proficient in our conversation when we need to be i even till  young students that i have that if a friendship is already established you guys can make up words in fact shakespeare made up words and many of his words we now use so but when the context changes you have to go in your to busk when you took it pull out another tool and utilize that so that is a common issue dealing with a regionalism a way of speaking that connects you to a particular region when your vision is larger than that region and you know then we have people now probably some of your clients who do who not only do what they do in america but then they cross the seas and that's a whole nother ballgame because people have cultural norms so the way that we communicate here that's not necessarily acceptable in another location so these are the things that people are desiring to know just so that they can increase their bottom line yeah so how do you know people neutralize their dialect what we go to the study of phonetics ok and so we learn that speech is physiological there are distinct physical movements of things like your tongue your lips your heart palate your lower jaw and so we the international phonetic alphabet is an accepted way of pronouncing selves the sounds of spoken english and english can be very very difficult no absolutely as a language because you have a word like k e r in l pronounced the same way people to the study of phonetics and you go over those individual sounds now you prepare them to use resources like a pronouncing dictionary of american english they can go within the dictionary they see the sounds that are within that word and now they can pronounce the word for instance we have a word like specific which a lot of people have trouble with they say pacific so in actuality they have no problem with the word spit and the the first three phonemes are the their set of difficult words and i mean these could be brilliant people right but certain words trip them up and so we look at that word for unethically what are the sounds within that word and sometimes we exchange the vowel sound with in words doubt in it's direction yes so you know those are just the subtleties now you might want to say directions if you're playing a particular character right and that's where you would have that mobility if you're an actor but if you're going for a neutral american speech if you're playing the character of the corporate marketplace then you just have that along with your suit right and all the other tools that you have it doesn't diminish who you are doesn't mean that you're not being who you are is just like in your closet you may have a pair of t more relaxed moment and you have your nice pair of dress shoes you know you have your classic black pump and this is just another resource that you add to that yeah i love what you're describing because many times level and people do need help with absolutely because great content poorly deliver becomes wasted content yes absolutely it becomes ways to content so we have to work on the delivery but of course you want to have sound content you want to make sure that things are organized proficiently first of all start off with understanding what is my general purpose which would be one of three things i'm either speaking to inform persuade or entertain and there's always a mixture of all three because if i'm truly going to be informative i have to have a degree of being entertaining otherwise people are going to and of course if i'm going to be persuasive i have to be informative informative as well but starting  your general purpose is and then move on to understanding what is my specific purpose what do i want the audience to know or to do or to fill as a result of giving me their precious attention yes and starting there to understanding that people's time is a precious commodity so you ought to be a better steward of it so that you don't get with thoughts that go on so many diversions that now i'm left as the audience member to compartmentalize what you're saying when that was your job at home to give me some signposts like if you and i start out on a trip i'm looking out at the signs how many more miles do we have to go so in your speech i want to know how much longer do i have to listen are you on your first point or you i need some context and in the beginning i need you to tell me where we're going right and so often that is missing from public address and then that leaves people feeling weary listening to you as opposed to i know exactly where we are and you told me where we're and you're going there nice any fish and i'm on this journey with you yeah so you know the way that i know you've heard this before but the way the you know people summarize what you just said i it is very important so you know you have your previews you have your transitions within your introduction you're going to have an internal preview and then in the body of course as you move from main point to main point you have your transitions and it's move it doesn't have to show your homework over time you learn how to blend it really smoothly but you made you may have to start off just really at hearing to the r just like if you're learning jazz you're at hearing the rudiments in the beginning and then you become a master of improvisation but you can always go back to the rudiments and sometimes it's hard to get people there because they feel well i should just be able to stand up and go for it but that's not how it works and i even tell young actors that analysis and interpretation preceded performance when i ready to perform you haven't even analyzed the text you don't quite know what you are responsible for performing you don't know the imaginary circumstances that you are to come under you have to know that first in order for your acting to really live and thrive and it's the same for four speakers then there needs to be a portion of analysis that takes place before you get up otherwise you know you're not going to maximize the moment and you're going to leave the audience wanting more because there's this non verbal expectancy theory which means if you contradict an audience is expectation of you as a speaker then they will shut down right and by virtue you getting up and mounting a platform they expect for you to have a good delivery absolutely so really you know what's resonating with me right now is asking you who do you think are the great orders i mean i'm sure you're going to you're going to name the people that we think of right now but i'd love to hear who you think is you know someone that i think is a great orator although she is not often thought of as an orator is viola davis each time that she has given a speech accepting an award it's always very very impactful and of course i appreciate oprah winfrey's ability to communicate her thoughts clearly and the way that she emphasizes the words that she wants you to take note of like she's a master at hitting the operative words those words that are essential for you to really take hold of the thought that she is conveying those are two people that i really appreciate of course merle streep's ability to communicate is another person that i admire ok along with of course you know dr king and the many other people that probably would be quite common to others great know those those you know that's interesting i'm glad i asked that so what is your new beginning for twenty everything my new beginning for twenty eighteen i guess is a range of things one to really hone in on physical fitness because i think that plays a tremendous impact in your ability to communicate first of all it helps with your posture and your posture communicates a sense of strength vitality and being a command in control so i want to address that area of my life consistently so that i can then carry the call to be the communicator that i'm called to be and just putting more time and focus on this entrepreneurial journey that's my new beginning just expanding my focus expanding my paradigm for twenty eighteen and being in the places in the spaces where networking can happen thank you all right well red old fellow it's been a pleasure having you have learned so much is going to pleasure being here and thank you for tuning into new beginnings with kar