EP473: Ruth Milligan - Building Influence Through Better Words

Ruth Milligan with HUB ad (May 13th 2025): You ever seen that person and you say, "That person's such a natural speaker"? Mm, that's a myth. They're a habitual speaker. They've practiced it. They've worked at it. We didn't come out of the womb talking. We've mimicked our parents. They give us feedback when we say things that are accurate, and they give us feedback when they want to correct us. Welcome to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper. Keeper Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a fantastic one. Our guest is the founder of Articulation, an executive speech coaching firm, and the curator of TEDx Columbus, Ruth Milligan. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. It's a delight. It's great to have you. And before the show started, we were talking a little bit, and maybe we'll save that actually and get into it after we get to know a little bit about you and how you ended up doing what you're doing today. It sounds pretty exciting, the work you're doing. I love the work I do, which is to help people find their voice, tell their story, and really own their ideas, their research, the stuff that they're working on, whether it's their business or something they're launching that they've discovered, and help them really earn it, own it, put it out there in the world through the power of our own voices. Very cool. Now, that's powerful stuff. What— you've been doing this a while. How did you transition into doing that work?

So in fact, when I went to university, which was at a school called Miami, which is not the one in Florida, but the first one in Ohio where the Miami tribe. The Indians were settled in Ohio for a time, and Miami was founded in 1809. I went to school there and I got a degree in speech communication because I couldn't get into the business school. And we'll talk about that later, about what that means to, to running a business. And I found myself as a speechwriter right out of college, and then I was doing PR. I was a press secretary on a national campaign. I did crisis communication. I launched big real estate projects, and one day in 2009, I found the TEDx