The Action Catalyst
How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
Tue, 04 Mar 2025
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.Mentioned in this episode:Learn more at SouthwesternConsulting.com/Coaching/StudentsSouthwestern Student Coaching
Chapter 1: What challenges does Michael Chad Hoeppner face in public speaking?
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.
So it was this really powerful moment of kinesthetic learning.
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Welcome to The Action Catalyst. Today's guest is Michael Chad Hepner, 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.
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.
Wow.
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.
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Chapter 2: Who is Michael Chad Hoeppner and what is his background?
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.
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.
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 relaxed 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.
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.
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.
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
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