Michael Chad Hoeppner, author, professor, and the Founder and CEO of GK Training, shares the very specific background he and Adam have in common, and covers topics such as embodied cognition, the Lego trick for memorization, the 5 P's of vocal variety, a tactical exercise for sales people, the BAD speaking advice you've heard 100 times, being present for the audience, the risk in using prepared materials, and the parallels between sales and acting.

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Welcome to The Action Catalyst. Today's guest

is Michael Chad Hoeppner, the founder and CEO of GK Training,

a firm dedicated to giving individuals, companies and

organizations the communication skills to reach their highest

goals in work and life. He's a coach, a professor and a

curriculum designer at Columbia Business School, as well as the

author of the new book, Don't Say, Um: How to Communicate

Effectively to Live a Better Life. Michael, thank you so much

for making the time. I was really looking forward to this

conversation for many reasons, one of which is that both my

parents were opera singers.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, I knew that. I mean, I of course,

did a little research about you, and that's the coolest thing,

because you have already a shorthand vocabulary for a lot

of this. And my parents similar, were both professional cellists.

Wow.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, similar kind of artistic

passion, but yeah, my mom, in fact, is retiring from the

Colorado Symphony Orchestra after 63 years.

Wow!

Michael Chad Hoeppner: In the orchestra, yeah, my dad played

more than 50 so together they have something absurd, like 115

years in the symphony, or something crazy.

That's amazing. You can tell your parents that I

was temporarily dedicated to the cello until we moved to Boone,

North Carolina, and my parents decided to relocate our house

about a half a mile from where the bus would drop you off,

uphill. And in order for me to practice, I had to slug that

thing all the way. And quickly lost my inspiration.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Time to switch to a violin, right, or

the triangle.

The triangle sounded like it would have been

a good choice. Well, that's amazing. So yeah, you know, I

can relate a lot to what it's like to grow up with music. And

there's part of your story I was really curious about, which is,

you know, what was your initial inspiration to become on day?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Hilariously, nothing of the kind. I come from

a blended family, eight of us kids all together, and none

pursued professional music. So I don't know if it skips a

generation or what that would be. But I actually was focused

on, I wanted to be a paleontologist or an

archeologist or a marine biologist, and that obviously is

not what has come to pass. So I didn't really get interested in,

let's call it communications of any kind, until middle school

and high school, and that was when I was getting into theater

a little bit. The pivot I'll hone in on, is actually fast

forwarding all the way until about oh 2010, or so, which is I

was a professional actor for about 10 years, Broadway film

and TV and but what I began to discover is that even more

interesting than portraying characters on stage, I became

totally fascinated by how people learn to do that activity. And

so I started becoming really obsessed about, how can you help

people be more more effective and calmer and more themselves

in front of audiences? So this was a somewhat natural evolution

into that. The biggest thing is that we really developed a way

in which to use embodied cognition, and by that, I mean

getting people to use their bodies to build habits. So, you

know, like the adage of learning to ride a bicycle and you never

forget, and we developed a whole suite of kinesthetic tools to

help people be more effective. So they're a little bit related

to theatrical training, but not really, because I kept hiring

actors to try to be coaches within our firm, and they looked

at me a little bit baffled when I would teach them some of these

exercises. I really discovered, as an actor, half my time on

stage was slightly equivalent to torture, painful, agonizingly

self conscious, hyper aware of every little thing, and

relentlessly self critical. Many, many artists out there,

and certainly most performing artists out there can relate to

that. And what I discovered was that if I could put my focus on

something very concrete, it was literally the only way I could

navigate through those, those moments of like, really painful

self consciousness. What I discovered was that, or that I

thought about it, the worse I felt, and the more I obsessed

about my feelings and my pain and things like this, the worse

I actually felt. And what I discovered was that simply

doing, putting the focus on doing and doing behaviors, and

just putting one foot in front of the other actually led to

much greater healing and greater escape, deliverance, all those

sorts of words. For many people, public speaking is equivalent to

agony. If you give them very concrete things that they can do

and succeed at, they can get past this agonizing moment and

experience a little, tiny, brief moment of victory. And from that

moment of victory, you can build and build and build, and pretty

soon they've established a completely different kind of

muscle memory that can help them succeed. One of the first

profound experiences I had individually coaching someone is

when I dreamt up this Lego block idea because he was having a

really difficult time memorizing anything. And so. What I was

trying to get him to do was to give himself just a moment

longer before all the terrible self critical, berating voices

came alive in his brain. And so I had him share one idea at a

time and stack a Lego block at the end of each idea. It gave

him something to do. Rather than you're terrible, you can't

memorize anything. What a terrible communicator you are.

He had a distraction, something he had to do, and then in that

moment, this total miracle happened, which his brain had a

moment to think and actually recall the information he was

trying to remember. So it was this really powerful moment of

kinesthetic learning. From there, I just developed these

exercises working with with real life communicators, both very

high stakes communication situations, like presidential

candidates for debate prep, but also people much more, you know,

Junior, which would be like high school students trying to get

better at speaking so they can give a good oral report.

Yeah, quite, quite a wide range. I remember the

first time I encountered a challenge speaking. If I wasn't

in a good head space, I, like, my vocal cords would, like,

constrict or something, and I'd have to, like, clear my voice,

like, seven times. Super annoying.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yes. So blushing, you know, turning beet

red, dry mouth. There's a whole bunch of things that people

experience that are these physical manifestations of

feeling tremendously nervous.

And so, your process is often to try and work

through the I don't you call it psychosomatic part, but the

emotional response, the nerves before diving into maybe more of

a tactical approach?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, you use the tactics to unlock what I

call a virtuous cycle of good communication. So you

essentially fix the problem with these kinesthetic tools. They

use embodied cognition. They change the pattern dramatically.

And then once the pattern is changed, what also tends to

change is all those automatic responses that are happening

when the pattern is not going well. So there was a person I

worked with one time, who would always blush very, very

intensely, and I mean, instantly, she would start

public speaking, and instantly turn beat red, and she felt

terrible about this, and very self conscious. And so the first

thing she said to me is, I have to stop turning red. And I said

back to her, that's not true. You have to stop moving your

feet. She looked at me rather blankly, and what was going on

was that she would begin speaking, and totally different

than how she would stand or use her body, if she was talking to

a friend at the proverbial water cooler, she would begin to

relentlessly shift her weight back and forth, back and forth,

back and forth, back and forth, almost like miniature pacing,

but very rapid, rapid pacing. At the same time, she'd be turning

beet red, and she'd be trying to hide this by continually

smoothing back her hair over her face, trying to almost

camouflage this activity with this motion of her hands over

and over again. So I actually crouched down, and I gave her

feet some physical feedback to find stillness that tapped on

the top of her feet, put some books on top of her feet to keep

them anchored to the ground. And when she did that, all of a

sudden, magically, she actually took a breath in. Her diaphragm

dropped down. Her lungs filled with air, and her entire

communication instrument became still. And all of a sudden, she

spoke more slowly. For a moment, she breathed in. She got a

better idea. She realized she actually has something to say to

start the speech off, and she didn't blush.

Sometimes you have to act your way into proper

thinking, instead of trying to think your way into proper

acting, right?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: 100%. If I could, if 1,000% was a thing,

I would say 1,000% but 100% Yes, precisely. Actors know this as

Inside Out versus outside in approaching of a character. You

can see this in other aspects of life too. I mean, anyone who has

become aware of some of the sort of approaches or focuses for

health and wellness and mental health, you hear people talk

about saying out loud each morning some gratitudes or doing

these physical things that are reminding you of some of the

mindsets that you want to keep. And yes, absolutely. I mean, if

you want to go religious for a second, think of all the

religious traditions in the world and how very often, if

there's a level of devotion that is trying to be unlocked, they

actually do physical rituals, sometimes even regimens. And

yes, these ways of acting, and if you want to use sort of

philosophical language, acting virtuous can unlock positive

feelings too.

So almost an anchoring and through your

physical actions. One of the things I just... not to do a

perfect segue here, this will just kind of take us a different

road. But I have to ask for our listeners, the five Ps of vocal

variety. I'd love to hear what the five Ps of vocal variety

are, because I've learned how important vocal variety is.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, the first thing I should say is I

did not invent vocal variety. Humans use vocal variety. We've

been using it as long as. We're human, and there's some really

important reasons why we use it, which we can get into but let's

cut to your question, which is these five Ps and those five Ps

are pace, pitch, pause, power and placement. Probably the

first four are instantly familiar. Let's go through them

quickly. Pace is speed, so that's fast and slow. Pitch is

the note on a musical clef, high or low. So high or low, pause is

exactly what it sounds like, silence, and maybe even varied

lengths of silence. Power is just another word for volume, so

that's loud and soft, and then placement is probably the only

one that's not instantly familiar. Placement means where

is the sound placed in your body. A big misconception that

people have about speaking is that it's a totally cognitive

activity, like if I think of smart words, I will say smart

words, but it's actually a physical activity. It takes 100

muscles to do what you and I are doing right now. It's a physical

activity. I mean, even just the act of enunciation, if you think

for a moment, even just saying the word enunciation, how deeply

physical that is, that final p of placement, just to be very

clear, because sometimes people get a little confused about

this. That means where the sound is placed in your body. So the

The easiest example to think about is, if you have a friend

with a really nasal voice, what's happening technically, is

the sound is only amplifying in like the nasal passages in the

nasal area of the face. So that's if P placement, and we

use these 5p of vocal variety to do a whole bunch of really

important purposes, like convey meaning, convey emotion, create

surprise, and more and but those are the five P's.

It's amazing. And as you keep going, I just, you

know, I do actually a lot of interpretation of these lessons

with my kids, because it's so relevant right now. Yeah. And

you know, your voice and communication is like the one of

the most essential things that I want to make sure they they can

do, because it's so critical to human relations. So anyway, I

love all of this training as a parent just as much as a

professional.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, let's talk about kids for a

second. So we are actually in the midst of a real crucible

moment in which how our kids learn to speak is a little bit

under threat because they spend so much time looking at these

devices right here. And for those of you who are just

listening, of course, I'm holding on my cell phone and

because they're not actually kind of learning interpersonal

behavior and interpersonal dynamic in the same three

dimensional, 24/7, kind of way that previous generations did.

It's fraught. It's in a little bit of danger right now, and I

applaud you for taking your one and a half year old's

development seriously, because it matters, and we take these

skills for granted. We should not.

Hmm. I don't know how much international work you

do, but do you find change based on the geography someone's grown

up in, like a German person who's working on public

speaking, versus someone who's French or Korean? How that

impacts those five Ps?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, for sure. So to answer the question,

yes, I've worked with folks on most of the continents of the

globe and all kinds of different walks of life. I for many years

when I lived in New York City, I taught at Columbia Business

School in the PhD program. And a lot of the folks who get their

PhDs at Columbia speak English as a second or third or fourth

language. I coach in the startup world a lot, and a lot of the

founders who are building companies in the US speak

English as a second or third or fourth language, and oftentimes

hail from somewhere else. And there's two ways I would suggest

we think about this. On the one hand, there are the core things

that humans do, and we do them all over the world, and that's

partly because we are communication instruments.

Communication is not a side card of being human. We built this

incredible system of spoken language to be able to team up

and gain an evolutionary advantage over somebody else or

some other creatures, or stop the marauding, you know, cave

bears or whatever it is. So this is just part of being human. But

then on top of that core, there is endless complexity with how

different languages work. So yes, there are these these

changes and these differences all over the place. And then

oftentimes, what you're trying to do, though, no matter what

culture, is not unlock how an American would speak, or how a

German would speak, or how a Brit would speak, but you're

trying to unlock how that person would speak, but crucially, when

they are not thinking about themselves and how they speak,

but thinking about the person they're trying to reach, and all

of what we think of as the behaviors of presence or the

behaviors of confidence, that means enunciation and eye

contact and gestures and all the rest these come out flawlessly

when we're in that. Activity of really, truly trying to reach

the other person. So no matter the culture that I'm working in,

that's what I'm trying to help people unlock.

So important. What do you see as the bigger

challenges as it relates to vocal, not just vocal variety,

but speaking in general, for salespeople? What are some of

the common concepts you end up leaning into the most with

people who are in that profession?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: I'm going to offer a tactical suggestion

first, because it's so useful and so relevant to selling, and

you can do it today and make your life better right away. I

teach an exercise in a skill called linguistic Well,

actually, sorry, the exercise is called finger walking. The skill

is called linguistic precision, which means, essentially, are

you choosing words, or are words just choosing you? So the

exercise is simply when you're practicing asking questions and

getting better at doing that, you walk your fingers across a

table or desk, choosing each and every single word that comes out

of your mouth. The finger steps are the equivalent of the act of

choosing words. So in a sense, you're walking your ideas across

the table. Now that's the skill, but the way to apply it, if

you're in a selling situation, is to practice asking single

questions with linguistic precision. There's no filler, no

non fluencies, and then at the end of the question, draw and an

imaginary question mark in silence. Now this is really

powerful for people in a sales role, because what you'll see is

that oftentimes they're great at chit chat, they're great at

rapport building, they're really good at asking questions to

learn more about the person. And then they get to the crucial

moment of asking for a next meeting or asking for the

business, and their communication falls apart, and

they ask like, nine questions in a row, and they talk really

quickly and a bunch of samples, and they go down, they back up,

they don't let it and all of it crumbles. And so you're

practicing this very singular skill of asking one question

with linguistic precision and then tolerating relaxed silence

at the end, so that you build the muscle of saying something

like, how would you like to move this forward? When would you

like to meet again? Is there anyone else that we should loop

into this conversation? And these kind of, what we call, you

know, closing questions, and very often, sales folks will

have a moment or two within interactions that feel really

fraught for them. And if they can build that skill single

questions with linguistic precision and relax silence at

the end. It really helps them.

That's great. That's a great technician way to

look and reverse engineer successful communication. You

have this engineer mind about you that's allowed you to

extrapolate the tools to make someone a good speaker.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. You ask really insightful

questions. I don't actually relate to having much of an

engineer's mind, I think I have much creative artists mind, or

even an inventor's mind. Creativity is the thing that I'm

pretty much addicted to. What I would say is that the

engineering concept is right in a certain way, which is I became

frustrated with how stymied people were by really bad

advice. And I don't mean to say bad advice, like they're being

sabotaged by people, but bad advice sounds like this. Just be

yourself. Just be conversational, Just be natural.

These sorts of things are intended to relax the the person

you're talking to, but they don't, because all they do is

make the person think more about themselves. And they're not

relaxed. They don't feel like themselves. They don't feel

conversational. They feel perhaps rocked with self

consciousness, as I became interested, like, how can you

get in there when someone has been really messed up, and

engineer them for greater success? By setting up their

physical and their vocal communication instrument for

success. I helped set them up for success, but it's them who's

doing it when they have like an engineer, set themselves up, set

their physical and vocal communication instruments up for

success. All of a sudden, their brain is dazzling, and it does

what it's incredibly good at, which is thinking about ideas

now that it's not totally jammed up with anxiety and and

multitasking of Don't be nervous. Don't look like an

idiot. Don't look like a fraud. Don't mess up. Don't all of a

sudden, brilliant things come out of their mouth. And if we

think of part of speaking as this act of being present and

being focused on the other person, you can't be present if

you are thinking about all the stuff you forgot, or anxious

about all the stuff you're about to forget. So very often,

written materials, although intended to be a support, very

often, they cannot be that helpful, because it puts you in

the past or the future endlessly. And the act of

speaking is a physical one. You're not going to be giving

someone a PDF with a bunch of bullets on it. You are turning

air into sound and then sound into words. You're doing it real

time, and it's being received real time. So anything you can

do to help yourself be in the present, as opposed to, you

know, those two other time zones that are not that helpful can be

powerful. Because here's the funny thing, I've actually

helped many people experience that, that wow, I'm better when

I'm not quite so anchored to my notes. The hard part is getting

them to have the trust and faith to actually try and test it

without it, and kind of get their sea legs with that,

because it it takes some bravery of letting go.

Yeah, I love that. And I, you know, I'd have to

include this question, because I think of sales and acting and

how they're similar in so many ways. In sales, I'm very clear

you have a sales script, there's a purpose in remembering it,

because the words do matter to an extent, but not so much to

the extent that it affects the emotion of the conversation in

acting. This is the part in the world, I don't know, and so I

would love your thoughts. I don't know how often the

directors so hard on getting the exact words where you have to

get caught up in the words, or if you don't rehearse enough to

know all the paragraphs of information, it creates that

trauma cycle of, am I, you know, saying the right line, or if

you're allowed to be emotionally engaged, how does that? How does

that work in acting, and what's your take on scripts versus no

scripts in communication?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: So you have to promise to interrupt me

a lot in this next answer, okay, because that's a big, juicy

question, and we could do a whole separate podcast based on

that question. Okay, it depends on the version of stage

performance improv, there's no script. There may be a couple

like pretenses or a couple starting points, but then

there's no script at all. That's part of the delight. Sort of

like watching jazz musicians improvise, you get to watch

people impromptu come up with these hilarious and amazing and

heartfelt real time scripts. It's totally astonishing. On the

other side, you've got classical texts, Shakespeare, Chekhov,

things like that, where oftentimes the script is so well

known that if you really had a line club, some of the audience

might Hey, he forgot that word in general, stage acting is

required to be a bit more precise than film acting in a

couple different ways. So film acting, as long as you're not

having to do a bunch of takes in which lines are are piggybacking

100% on each other, then you may have some freedom, and the

director may want to take just the best take. So an example of

this is, if you're watching serial drama, law and order,

those sorts of things, there's quite a bit of latitude with the

script. Other times, there's not, and it also depends on the

playwright or the screenwriter. So there really is some nuance

there. But the place I want to do a tiny, deep dive, though, is

actually about this idea of scripting stage actors. What

they're striving for is the exact opposite, that it's not a

activity of trying to remember and a burden of mental memory,

but rather that the process of learning this language actually

informs them, and so these words become irreplaceable. These

words actually teach them who the character is. And if they

really get behind the words. They actually teach them what

the action often is. I mean, as an example, here's a piece of

poetry I question things and do not find one that will answer to

my mind and all the world appears unkind. Now, if you

listen to that, a bunch of those words have final voiced

consonants. Question things do not find one that will answer to

my mind, final voice consonants just mean consonants that have

vocal tone, de ne, those sorts of things. So if you really get

behind that language, it begins to activate a sense of

onomatopoeia, which is the word sounds like the thing that it

is. And all those final voice consonants that can be drawn out

actually give you some indication of what the character

is doing, which is essentially searching and trying to squeeze

every possible answer, because their answer list, they cannot

find the thing they're looking for. So I don't mean to get too

you know, dramatic or artsy with this whole thing, but actors

often rely on the words. It's not trying to master them all,

and it's a burden. No, those words are their tool, their

superpower, in many ways. Now, what the heck does that have to

do with public speaking? The same thing, which is, if you

have a script, first of all, do you have to learn a script?

Learn it physically and learn it with variety. Don't rehearse the

same way. Every time, don't rehearse the same way. Every

time, don't rehearse the same way. Every time don't rehearse

the same way. Every time you're memorizing vocal variety, you're

not memorizing the ideas. So move around in space, walk like

an elephant, slowly, big, swinging arms through the room,

saying the words and the next time, whisper it into your phone

like you're at a library, trying not to get scolded by the

librarian. So you're learning the ideas, but you're not

memorizing vocal. Variety also get to know the ideas in what

you're sharing, not just the words in the page. In fact, I

often suggest that people write out their scripts like a poem.

Make it look how the ideas make sense, not just how the word

processor has divvied it up on the page. That has nothing to do

with the ideas and the lines. It just has to do with how many

characters fit on a line of text. It's a big topic. It's a

worthwhile question you ask. But I also don't want to give you a

whole soap opera on this one question.

No. I mean, it was great, and you've, you've split

up the little pieces of nuggets of wisdom really well. Michael,

I hate to even in this interview, because I feel like

we're just scratching the surface. There's like another

three hours in us. Where can everybody go to learn more about

your work?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Sure, three simple places for the

book. It's just DontSayUm.com just the title of the book .com.

Don't say um.com, my company's name is GK training, and that's

the same URL. G K training.com and then you can find me on

LinkedIn. Michael Chad Hoeppner.

Wonderful. Well, I will be looking at your

resources for sure, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners will be

as well. Thank you so much for joining us.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Thank you for the interview, and thank you

for the really interesting questions. I know that can also

sound like lip service, like every guest is like, what a

great question. You're so smart. But really fun to get to answer.