Our Origin Story: How Bespoken President & CEO Jackie Miller Found Her Voice
Bespoken President & CEO Jackie Miller is a communication and public speaking coach based in New York City.
After fifteen years working in theater and arts administration, Jackie felt inspired to apply her experience to coach others on how to connect with an audience, communicate a sense of purpose, and empower them to find their voice in the workplace. Today, Bespoken works with companies all over the world to help them build stronger communication skills, align with a company’s core values, and maximize efficiency in service of collective goals.
To celebrate the launch of Bespoken’s new website, we caught up with Jackie on her background in professional theater, her work with clients, her vision for the future, and why the connection between the arts, public policy, and the corporate boardroom can all be connected to affect positive changes in the workplace and beyond.
Where did you begin your professional journey?
I transferred from the theater program at USC to NYU and was struck by how actors in New York were immediately treated as working professionals. Your campus is the city. Living here at that time opened up this pathway to me, being in the heart of it. I started auditioning, had survival jobs, and I co-founded a theater company, producing content for festivals for about five years.
I wanted to support myself without losing the spark of the creative process, being connected to the arts, telling different stories, and being in the presence of an audience. That led me to the world of arts administration, and that’s where I stayed for upwards of fifteen years. It afforded me an opportunity to always be creating and brought me to working with different audiences, such as children with special needs, bringing the magic of arts into their lives. It was deeply rewarding. That led me to my Master’s Degree in Arts & Public Policy. I was part of the first wave of students admitted into the Arts Politics program at Tisch School of the Arts, studying how the arts can be used to affect social change and to address pertinent societal questions and issues.
What prompted the move into communications?
A friend of mine was focused on anti-harassment work, specifically focused on ending gender-based harassment in public spaces. The TED organization had an initiative called TED 2.0, and its focus was looking at how we live in cities. They had asked her to speak and she asked me to help her prepare.
As an activist, she was able to have a flexible view of my skills while I had (an unknowing) fixed mindset about myself. She said, “I need to connect with that audience. I need them to leave that room seeing that the world without harassment that I see is possible, and you can help me.” And she was right.
I wasn’t going to charge her for it because I came from the barter culture, where people don’t necessarily think that their product or expertise is worth payment. But she paid me and paid me correctly. And that was fun! I was using all of my understanding of what I learned in my conservatory training of how to connect with an audience on stage and tell a story, and I felt respected when I was properly compensated. That blew open the path I’d been looking for.
Communication consulting is a crowded field. What differentiates Bespoken from other companies?
I initially started the company with a partner, and we were so careful to not try and do something we weren’t perfect at. I’ve talked a lot in my work subsequently about how women tend to feel they need to meet all job qualifications in order to apply, and men feel they only need 30%. So it took a long time to own “I can do this, I’m good at this.” We began the formal steps of creating a company: incorporating, setting up a website and bank account, all the things that guide a for-profit business. A very dear friend of mine with a law background believed in me deeply and guided us through the entire complicated, overwhelming, multi-pronged process of incorporating a business. I still tell him to this day what that meant to me. Not just the help he offered, but how deeply he believed in my ability to do this.
What set Bespoken apart was a genuine honesty in talking about the nature of the voice. Still to this day, I say “I am giving you techniques and choices that have to work for your communication style.” It’s not formulaic. I’m very, very good at quickly and discerningly understanding the culture of a team. Every organization has its own alchemy and flavor of communication, and I believe that if a communication consultancy has a static platform and a plug-and-play approach, given how complicated, dynamic, subjective, and personal this work is, it is doomed to be yet another professional development session where everyone checks a box and says they got their hours of professional development in and goes home and it never leaves that space.
How did you decide to transition from your full-time job to starting your own company?
The only way to build a company when you’re in an office for 40 hours a week is to lean on your network deeply and unapologetically. The early days necessitated really clear messaging about the type of work Bespoken could provide, clearly stated values, and looking for anyone in the greater network who could benefit from guidance, coaching, and support in preparing to connect with an audience in a high-stakes environment. That could mean raising money for a startup, defending your dissertation, or giving a quarterly report to your team at work. Referrals from those first clients that came through personal networking is what opened the door to clients that weren’t directly connected to a friend.
Through a current client, Right To Be, I’m doing what is ultimately my most fulfilling work: supporting their team in-house and offering on-going guidance on strengthening their communication and collaboration skills. It’s been an incredible trajectory for a client relationship.
How do you assess the kind of coaching your clients may need? What problems stand out to you when you walk into a room?
Although the audience and circumstances vary greatly, the basic needs of what we want communication to do for us in a workplace are universal. We want communication to help us convey our value, excite people about our product, motivate a team to their best performance, explain a complicated idea, promote equity and inclusion, and leverage the power of listening to our audience. The way that shows up and how people need it to serve them is where the aptitude comes in, but I always start there and that always gets me to a place of clarity around how I can be of value.
What about this work do you find fulfilling?
The pandemic created a terrifying shift in my industry. Up until March of 2020, I went to an office and worked with humans in a conference room all the time, and that abruptly stopped. What virtual client work has done has broadened my reach exponentially. Now, one of the things I find really interesting is working with global teams, where there are different cultural norms and communication styles and navigating asynchronous communication. If someone is online at 9 a.m. and it’s 2:00 in the morning for their direct report, how are you able to create a balanced and generative dynamic with your team?
Something else that continues to greatly inspire me is the balance between my private one-on-one coaching and my team training. What makes me different is that not a lot of consultancies offer both. It’s a very different skillset to be in a shared space with one person to support them through their point of view of what success looks like, then pivot and flex that ability in a room with 50 or even 300 people. Now that my profile has increased and I've worked with global fortune 500s and traveled around the country doing this work, I find such a great creative reward in the variety.
What are your hopes and goals for the future of Bespoken?
I would like to formalize a collection of key contributors and collaborators and explore more opportunities for cross-pollination of platforms and knowledge. I have colleagues that focus deeply on executive coaching at a global C-suite level, and that’s a nuanced difference to what I do. What would it look like to collaborate on something where I bring in a sensibility around how you’re communicating with an audience and they are helping someone think deeply and strategically about their leadership, with all of the other complicated components that come with being at that level?
Also, because this is a muscle that takes time to build, getting to embed with a team and be the communication support feels really exciting. I’ve done that with a few clients, and long term engagements over six months or a year where I can support people consistently in many different arenas. That feels really exciting because I feel like I’m making sustained progress.
I feel grateful and committed to the values that created my initial career path. How can I connect and leave the world a little better than how I found it? I’m committed to Bespoken and leaving that footprint.
From the arts to non-profit to Fortune 500s, managers and team members need to understand communication skills to maintain their focus and keep a company moving forward. To see how Bespoken can help you and your team enhance their collective performance, re-align with your core values, and speak with purpose, book a consultation now.
About the Author
Jackie Miller launched Bespoken in 2015 to channel years of professional performance experience into techniques that improve public speaking, presenting, and professional communication skills. She holds a B.F.A. and M.A. both from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.