Speaking to some 5 million students during the past 30 years has given Bill Sanders the chance to perfect his delivery.

He asked an auditorium full of Steel Valley Middle School students last Thursday morning: "You wanna know how skinny I was?"

"How skinny were you?" they shouted back.

"I was so skinny, I had to run around in the shower just to get wet."

Nervous snickers morph to full belly laughs and gets the crowd going.

But Mr. Sanders, an inspirational speaker who has contributed anecdotes to two of the popular "Chicken Soup for the Soul" books by Jack Canfield, wasn't there to discuss how skinny he was as a child. He was there to help the kids be better people, something that at first did not strike eighth-grader Amina Wilson as particularly cool.

"I thought it'd be cheesy," she said after the speech. Instead, "it was life-changing."

Mr. Saunders, a Michigan native, talked to the students about being kinder, being themselves and taking charge of how they treat others. His one-hour speech, presented by the National Character Education Foundation and the office of Allegheny County Pretrial Services, was a mixture of stand-up comedy, inspiring stories of kids facing extraordinary obstacles and words of encouragement. He pinballed from one to the other, bouncing off one emotional story to the next, all the while racking up laughter.

Telling the students he wanted them to "be known as the person who works the hardest," Mr. Sanders began with the story of a seventh-grade star pitcher from Illinois who taught himself to pitch with his foot and stop line drives by diving in front of them.

Mr. Sanders told the kids to count their blessings with the story of a girl who'd been in and out of 48 foster homes, but who still wrote down something she was blessed with every day. He was hardly done with her story before launching into how to "freak people out" on an elevator: Start at the tenth floor, hit nine, eight, seven, get off at the ninth and take the stairs down to show back up again on the seventh floor.

Amid the laughter, Mr. Sanders said "Put your hands together for having fun at no one else's expense!"

"I want you to feel good about yourself. I want you to enjoy being who you are. You are the only one who controls you. Don't let other people upset you," he told the students.

And then he was telling them about the Haves and the Have Nots, the two groups in every school, and the impact small, seemingly inconsequential kindnesses can have on a fellow classmate.

Eighth-grader Shane McGuire liked Mr. Sanders' message of kindness.

"I was made fun of for a while. I feel better knowing that someone knows my situation. And he told you things to cope, how to be strong with who you are," Shane said.

In the end, Mr. Sanders said, it all comes down on how the students choose to act.

"I can't keep everyone nice in the hallways. Neither can your principal or teachers. That's where you come in," he said.

Which is something Jeffrey Gardner, also in eighth grade, took away from the talk. "Saying hello to someone could change their entire day."

For more, visit www.billspeaks.com or www.chickensoup.com.

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