Alden Mills

When you go to do a talk, do you then have a pre-meeting to understand what that person really needs that audience to hear, and then do you say, like playing Tetris with your stories?

Tetris, and yes, we do a pre-meeting, and often I’ve done a pre-pre-meeting. Sometimes the pre-pre meeting is like, “Well, I’m trying to decide between one, two or three.” And I’ll be like, “Well let me tell you. What are you looking for? What are the outcomes? I’ll tell you how I’d approach it.” That can be the pre-pre meeting, and then when we get into the building of the speech, because I like to say and it’s the truth, that no two speeches are the same. I take these different stories as they apply to what the desired outcomes are.

That’s where I can speak to a truck supply association all the way over to the internal technology networking company of Cox Communication, and we can have threads of success because you also need to go early and meet with people and weave in their themes of what they’re trying to get across to further make a connection with your story. It doesn’t do me any good if I tell a Navy Seal training story, or an entrepreneurial struggle moment and I can’t relate that back in their vernacular to their issue. Talking to somebody who’s dealing with truck axles is much different than talking to somebody that’s dealing with 5G networks. However, the struggles are almost exactly the same.

Tell me more about improv and how you use that in your speaking.

The improv part of the joy I get out of speaking is that you can feel that energy. When you connect, musicians call it going in the pocket. I like to think of it like we’re getting in the pocket together. Like right now, I can feel we’re in the pocket together, and that pocket means, “Hey, how deep are you willing to go?” To me, the only way to go deeper is to give more of myself. To give more of my authenticity, and I’ll come up on the stage with the intent to be as authentic and raw, but I want to make sure I hit some key points, but I’ll feel and see in the eyes of people and you can see it in their body language right? They move forward. Their feet come underneath their chair. Their elbows are up on the table. The phones are down, and when you start to feel that, it all depends on where I am in what story, I’ll keep the story going. I will go deeper into what some nuances of the story would be. Nuances like this one story that sometimes I tell, sometimes I don’t about how invaluable your mind is in the hardest of moments and what happened in Hell Week when you’ve been up for 96 hours.