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IT’S good to talk was one UK telecom company’s popular advertising catchphrase and a one man talking machine has proved that it can be a pleasurable and profitable business too, writes Mai Al Khatib.
American Lance Miller, an award-winning world champion public speaker and trainer, recently held a seminar for the Bahrain Society of Engineers in Juffair to help people find their voice.
“It’s hard to separate leadership from communication because in order to lead you need to communicate and when you communicate you lead,” he said.
The 55-year-old from Los Angeles is a member of Toastmasters International, a non-profit educational organisation that operates clubs in the kingdom and throughout the world for the purpose of assisting members to improve their communication, public speaking and leadership skills.
There are 13,500 clubs located in 116 countries with 280,000 members. Mr Miller has delivered over 2,500 speeches in over 28 countries from Saudi Arabia to China on the fundamentals of effective management and overcoming failure and adversity.
In 2005, he emerged from a field of 28,000 contestants from 90 countries to win the title of the World Champion of Public Speaking Distinguished Toastmaster.
He now travels the world to share his real life experiences while teaching others how to achieve their personal and business goals through his hands-on leadership approach.
He said: “Most people join Toastmasters to develop their leadership and communication skills. I joined in 1992 because I had a passion for public speaking. It looked like it was going to be fun. Also, there was an audience around and I had a lot of things that I wanted to say.
“My career grew throughout my Toastmasters experience. I became active in leadership and everything I learned at the clubs could be used in the workplace. My communication skills developed. I believe that if you can express yourself articulately and with confidence then people will look at you differently. I even started to get more management positions.
“Now I get invited to hold seminars as I did in Bahrain. In fact, Bahrain was the first place I visited in the Middle East after I won the World Championship.”
More than 250 individuals of different ages attended his two-and-a-half-hour seminar where they learned some of Mr Miller’s top tips to speaking success.
He explained: “I ran an exercise I call find the extraordinary in the ordinary. I presented three common items to the audience and then asked a member to come up and select one to discuss.
“I then asked them to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. By the end of the night they would have come up with a number of speech topics and through their ideas, I write a speech and read it out.
“Through that I demonstrate the way to write and develop key tricks to form a speech. Afterwards I held a question and answer session.”
At the workshop, he taught people the three ‘knows’ of public speaking. Know your audience, know your message and know your room.
He then went on to share five talking tips. He said: “When you are talking to the audience, look at one individual at a time for about a second. Most important of all, you need to believe in what you are saying and it’s not about being sensational as a speaker it’s about being sincere.”
British comedian and TV show host Alan Carr dons the title of Chatty Man (BBC Entertainment Channel on OSN), but he isn’t a patch of the real McCoy, Mr Miller, who has held sales and management positions in his career with an Olympic organising committee and global giants Nestle, Anheuser Bush and Katz Media Group.
For 15 years he developed and managed sales and marketing programmes for businesses in the fields of law, construction, international finance, alternative health and the internet.
l Editor’s note: Mr Miller’s interview session with GulfWeekly was recorded and the reporter removed more than 2,600 words off her Dictaphone. We even sent arguably our most ‘chatty’ journalist to meet the speaker and she admitted that she had met her match.
