Would you benefit from speech training?

It’s great when people get you. Right? When you express yourself clearly and well, they usually do. When you don’t, they don’t.

That’s why improving your public speaking skills can make you happier.

Effective speech is a work skill that makes you more persuasive and less anxious while delivering presentations, pitches, meetings, job interviews, and networking.

But it also makes your personal life better— because we all want to be known and understood.

I wrote a book about this—both the personal and professional sides of it. I’ll never forget some of the stories I heard as I interviewed people around the country.

One of them was Roy Chenier, a former prisoner at Angola State Prison near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Roy had to wait 20 years to get his first parole hearing. No one had ever coached him on public speaking of any kind, let alone to a parole board.

At his hearing, Roy became flustered, looked at the ground, mumbled…and blew his opportunity. He was denied parole. Over the next 10 years, he had three more chances, and the same thing happened each time. It was more than frustrating—it was agonizing.

Then he joined the prison chapter of Toastmasters. Seven months later, at his next parole hearing, he spoke eloquently about his plans to live a better life and his desire for freedom.

This time, he walked out of jail.

Learning the gift of effective speech gives life to our dormant potential and puts it out into the world.

I spoke with wildly successful business founders like Tom Monaghan (Domino’s Pizza) and Debbi Fields-Rose (Mrs. Field’s Cookies). Both had suffered enormously from speech anxiety. But in order to lead and succeed, they had to learn how to explain their ideas to rooms full of people. So they did.

I talked to finance executives, engineers, and scientists who told me how speech training helped them learn people skills they didn’t even know they had.

Some described how it freed them from emotional limitations that had socially isolated them. One woman said she’d never been capable of talking meaningfully, even in private, about her true feelings. Her definition of success was being able to be her authentic self.

All these people were very glad to finally be able to speak up at work and make their points to a conference room of colleagues.

But they were even happier to report that learning to communicate more effectively had made them more content with their lives.

I’ll be writing more about this in future blog posts.