Michael Chad Hoeppner
Appearances
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
My funny answer to your question is that I think for both groups, their perception is not equal to reality. And what I mean by that is most of the folks who think they're terrible communicators, they're not actually as bad as they think. They have some sort of tape playing in their head about how bad they are in this situation. They can't tell stories. They can't tell jokes.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
And usually they're being too hard on themselves. And on the flip side, the people are like, ah, I communicate all day long. I'm great at this. You know, I've been talking to groups my whole life. Very often, they're not nearly as good as they think.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
The thing I see the most commonly, and I'll give it one big title, but then I'll show you how it manifests in a bunch of behaviors, is that people contract when they're in these higher stakes kind of communication situations. And I mean that technically.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
They close their mouth more, they use their face in an expressive way less, they restrain their hand gestures, they collapse their posture, they breathe in a more limited way, they use less vocal variety, they use less dynamic enunciation, all of those things.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
The problem with this is that what ends up happening is they don't look like more professional or more dignified or as though they're conveying more gravitas. No, they just look like a more limited version of themselves. bored by their topic, perhaps. And the assumption they make that I should be more serious or I should be more professional shoots them in the foot pretty badly.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
That then manifests into a whole bunch of things, more monotone voice, faster rate of speech, more stumbles, more ums and uhs and filler, but you can trace a lot of that back to that first initial adjustment of contracting. And is that nerves? What causes that? Well, for some people, yeah, for sure.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
I mean, I'll give you, you can think of the three evolutionary threat responses of fight, flight, or freeze. When you're giving a big presentation or you're at a networking event or whatever the thing might be, you can't fight anybody. There's no one to fight. You can't flight. You can't leave the room. So what do you do? Well, you freeze a little bit. But speaking is moving. To speak is to move.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
We breathe in, our diaphragm moves down, our rib cage expands and moves out, and then we allow the air to flow over our vocal cords, our mouth moves in this tremendously dynamic way to enunciate words. Speaking is moving. So if those nerves and those anxieties manifest in freezing, what you're doing is, yes, contracting yourself quite dramatically. Other people contract for different reasons.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
They might, as I suggested earlier, think it's more professional or dignified or something like this. And most of the time, in my experience anyway, it's just wrong.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
Yeah, you ask a really important question. oftentimes they do prepare badly and it shoots them in the foot and i'll give you the primary culprit most people think of preparation as writing so they type a bunch of stuff or they write out all their comments but they're doing an activity that is completely different from what they're actually going to do in the moment which is speaking
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
So one of the first missteps people make is this writing first approach. And what I often coach people to do is something I call out loud drafting. And it is exactly like it sounds. As opposed to grabbing the laptop or a pad of paper to begin, No, stand up, walk around the room, and ask yourself some big open-ended prompt to get your ideas flowing.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
Something simple like, if my audience were to walk away with one thing from this today, what would I want that to be? And then answer the question. Well, the first answer is gonna be bad. Fine, do it again. Second answer, a bit better. Third time you answer the same question, I promise you, you will already have come up with something that you can begin to work with.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
Not only that, but it will sound more like how people actually use language in speaking. You will have come up with it with a muscle memory experience of relaxation and release as opposed to effort and tenseness. and you will already have started to loosely memorize what you want to say, and it's almost instant.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
So once you've done it a few times, then sure, grab a pad of paper or grab your laptop at that point and jot a few notes, but begin the process by doing the thing you're eventually going to have to do anyway, which is speaking. So that's on the preparation side of things. But then when it actually comes to delivering your communication message, whatever it is, there's some pitfalls there too.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
You want me to get into it? Yeah. So people try to correct problems, not just ineffective ways, but counterproductive ways. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
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Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
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Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
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Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
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Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
Well, when you do that, you've unlocked your brain to do what it's really good at, which is make real-time decisions between one word and another. But you've deeply, deeply enhanced your brain's concentration on that crucial activity of choosing words.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
And so, therefore, the ums go away as a byproduct of you actively trying to choose your words, as opposed to just opening your mouth and letting a bunch of words tumble out.
Something You Should Know
What Your Doctor Doesn’t Tell You & How to Unlock Your True Voice
Most of the folks who think they're terrible communicators, they're not actually as bad as they think. And on the flip side, the people are like, ah, I communicate all day long, I'm great at this. Very often, they're not nearly as good as they think.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
Half my time on stage was slightly equivalent to torture. Painful, agonizingly self-conscious, hyper-aware of every little thing, and relentlessly self-critical. 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 a table.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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. So there's no filler, no non-fluencies. And then at the end of the question, draw an imaginary question mark. in silence.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
Now, this is really powerful for people in a sales role because what you'll see is that oftentimes they're great at chitchat, they're great at the 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
And they ask like nine questions in a row and they talk really quickly and they have a bunch of stumbles and they go down and they back up and all of it crumbles.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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?
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
Yeah, similar kind of artistic passion. But yeah, my mom, in fact, is retiring from the Colorado Symphony Orchestra after 63 years. Wow. Wow. Symphony orchestra. Yeah. My dad played more than 50. So together they have something absurd, like 115 years in the symphony or something crazy.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 relaxed silence at the end, it really helps them.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 artist's mind or even an inventor's mind. Creativity is a 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
totally jammed up with anxiety 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,
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
You can't be present if you're 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
You're not going to be giving someone a PDF with a bunch of bullets on it. You're 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 really powerful. Because here's the funny thing.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 takes some bravery of letting go.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 flub, some of the audience might, hey, he forgot that word. In general, stage acting is required to be a than film acting in a couple different ways.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
So film acting, as long as you're not having to do a bunch of takes in which lines 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
That it's not an 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
So if you really get behind that language, it begins to activate a sense of onomatopoeia, which is the word sounds like a 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 they're answerless.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
They cannot find the thing they're looking for. So I don't mean to get too 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. Yeah. Now, what the heck does that have to do with public speaking?
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
The same thing, which is if you have a script, first of all, you have to learn the script, learn it physically and learn it with variety. Don't rehearse the same way every time. You're memorizing vocal variety. You're not memorizing the ideas.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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. It has nothing to do with the ideas in 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 asked.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
But I also don't want to give you a whole soap opera on this one question.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
Three simple places. For the book, it's just don'tsayum.com. Just the title of the book, .com, don'tsayum.com. My company's name is GK Training, and that's the same URL, gktraining.com. And then you can find me on LinkedIn, Michael Chad Hepner.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
My pleasure. 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 archaeologist or a marine biologist, and that obviously is not what has come to pass.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 2010 or so, which is I was a professional actor for about 10 years, Broadway, film, and TV.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 effective and calmer and more themselves in front of audiences. So this was a somewhat natural evolution into that.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
So it was this really powerful moment of kinesthetic learning.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 moments of really painful self-consciousness.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
What I discovered was that the more 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,
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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. 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
From there, I've just developed these exercises working 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
Yes. So blushing, turning beet red, dry mouth. There's a whole bunch of things that people experience that are these physical manifestations of feeling tremendously nervous. Yeah.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 beet 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
I tapped on the top of her feet and 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
She realized she actually has something to say to start the speech off, and she didn't blush.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
A hundred percent. If a thousand percent was a thing, I would say a thousand percent. But a hundred percent, 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 P's. And those five P's are pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement. Probably the first four are instantly familiar.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
Placement means where is the sound placed?
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 a hundred 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
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
how deeply physical that is. That final P, a 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 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
So that's if P placement. And we use these five Ps of vocal variety to do a whole bunch of really important purposes like... Convey meaning, convey emotion, create surprise, and more. But those are the five Ps.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 out my cell phone.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
And because they're not actually kind of learning interpersonal behavior and the 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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. 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
And a 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 sidecar to being human.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
So yes, there are these changes, 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
Yeah, I knew that. I mean, of course, I 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.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
So no matter the culture that I'm working in, that's what I'm trying to help people unlock.
The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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 and a skill called linguistic... Well, actually, 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?