Our May 2025 event was all about communication. Specifically, it was about all the various flavors (or “genres”) of speaking publicly, be that on a conference stage, in a conference room to a group of stakeholders, in a client’s office for a high-stakes pitch, or to a camera on a video call where the participants may or may not have their cameras turned on.

Ruth Milligan and Acacia Duncan, two thirds of the author trio for The Motivated Speaker: Six Principles to Unlock Your Communication Potential walked a 50-strong audience of engaged attendees through an introspective and interactive exercise in identifying their “shaded (ineffective) habits” when it comes to public speaking.

What is a “shaded habit?” It’s something (or multiple things) that every individual has picked up over the course of their lives that feels natural and comfortable even as it gets in the way of effectively communicating.

The bad news? Everyone has them.

The good news? No one was born with any of them, so whatever those habits are for an individual, they can be identified and unlearned (or, at least, sufficiently mitigated).

Ruth and Acacia opened the session with some ripped-from-the-headlines ripped-from-their-clients-with-identifying-details-removed of communication failures and led a discussion with the attendees as to the root causes of those failures. From there, they prompted everyone to think about their own rhetorical style and what they could identify as their shaded habits. Attendees jotted their thoughts on Post-it notes that Ruth (and Tim) collected and grouped for review and discussion:

The most commonly identified habit? Overuse of “filler words”: “um”, “like”, “you know”. How to address it? Breathe! And shorter sentences. With pauses that give the period its due. [artistic license intentionally taken on the preceding sentence fragments. To make a point. Just did it again.]

Other types of shaded habits that came up included: rambling, talking too fast, not minding the clock, going into too much detail, not thinking sufficiently about the audience’s needs (what questions they want answered rather than what information the speaker wants to share), and more!

Some of the shaded habits were diagnosed as being different forms of stress responses, of which there are fundamentally four distinct flavors: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. The tricky thing about stress responses is that they’re not going to just go away. They’re going to happen. But, by recognizing what our default flavor of stress response is, we can prepare for how to deal with it, be it by lifting heavy weights just before speaking (for real…!) or “grounding” ourselves (anchor feet to the floor, hands palm down on the table if sitting) or repeating a mantra (“This too shall pass” may work, but it can be whatever works for you!).

Following the exercise and discussion, we had a drawing to give away five copies of The Motivated Speaker to lucky audience members and then had a book signing (20% of the proceeds from the book sales went to Sanctuary Night).

As the emcee noted at the start of the meetup, our goal is for every event is for attendees to take something away that they can put into action within a week, and our May event absolutely delivered on that front!

Additional pictures from the meetup are below: