Speak with Confidence: The 3Fs to Master Public Speaking | Michael Chad Hoeppner

27:02OK, so imagine you're helping a dear friend who is going through a crisis. Now, try to imagine what your hands are doing, what your eye contact is doing, how quickly you're speaking, how much you're talking versus listening in terms of the ratio. And then what you want to do is just like someone studying. To your point about analytical audiences, study how you communicate in those situations and replicate it when you're having a harder time being other focused. And that means you take on all those same behaviors you do so well when other focused and do them when you're more self-focused or self-conscious.

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29:42Yeah, I find oftentimes in these scenarios that we run in our classrooms, that the addition of the camera adds a layer. And pandemic forced all of us now to be camera ready. Johnny and I, when we first started the podcast back in the day and we moved to video, we recognized that, well, we needed some coaching in this area because we didn't know how to present ourselves on camera and we felt that pressure. And I find even with clients, we pull out the camera and immediately they go inward and they're like worried about, am I touching myself too much? How's my hair? All these other things that we often don't think about when we're in just a normal in-person conversation with someone that we're interested in or someone that we know well.

30:24So let's talk a little bit about the dynamic of the camera because I know our audience and And certainly our clients feel that pressure as they're finding themselves presenting more and more on camera, especially in careers where they never thought they would be sitting on Zoom so much. Yeah. Well, I mean, you guys probably unlock this scene. I, of course, have gotten to know you from the digital footprint you have out there in the world, but I've never been in one of your sessions. But I bet you've discovered this in your sessions that the flip side of that negative aspect of the camera is a gift because you all obviously set up a very friendly laboratory kind of vibe in the classroom.

31:02Pretty quickly, people lose their nerves. And the camera is a great way to replicate that same experience of like adrenaline and to do it kind of over and over again. So in a way, it's a good teacher to have that resistance to push against. But yes, we all have to be more camera ready than we used to. And I give people some really simple suggestions on this, which is you know how to frame and help someone else look good in a photograph. Do it for yourself. So if you're taking a snapshot of somebody, you never shoot them at a terrible angle. You make sure the light source is looking good. This is not rocket science necessarily.

31:38Do the same thing you would do for a friend, but do it for yourself. And you can just do screen grabs and things like that and look and see what does it actually look like and ask yourself, would I let my friend take that picture or not. One of the tricks that I picked up on, and even now we're doing this virtual session, is hiding self-view or shrinking self-view. And I find so many of us get so focused on how we appear on the camera and that's all that we're paying attention to. And it can be really helpful with a simple setting change to just remove the video view or shrink the video view so that you can see more of your audience and you can actually see their body language and their response to your communication versus that constant, consistent self-reflection we have by looking at our self-view.

32:22And I know for many of our listeners and clients as well, they struggle with the idea of practice your public speaking in front of a mirror because now they're just staring at themselves. And again, they're getting more internally focused than actually on what their delivery is for the audience receiving it. And when I was preparing for a talk, I think it was like seven or eight years ago, I was a new audience. I was testing some new material and I was really nervous about how it was going. And I was flipping through the slides, flipping through the sides, making mental notes. Okay, I have a story here.

32:56Okay, this is something that I know in the past has hooked people. And our photographer was in the room and he was like, hey, AJ, I can see you're getting a little bothered. Like, just present to me, just say it out loud. And I actually just walked through the whole talk out loud, made pauses and adjustments. Okay, I actually want to say this, but I verbalized it. And I found that to be so impactful then when I got on stage with bright lights and a huge audience in front of me. And I know you talk about this as well as a strategy that I think many of us don't often employ when we are super analytical as we like to work things out in our head and listen to that internal monologue and no shift this or don't do that.

33:33But it's actually really helpful to verbalize and practice verbalizing what you want to say before you get on stage, before you turn on the camera. Yeah, you're talking about the out loud drafting tool that I teach in the chapter on preparing. And you're exactly right, which is we all make this huge mistake where we spend all of our time typing and designing things by writing it out relentlessly. But you have to remember, you're not giving someone a white paper. You're not handing them a PDF. You're going to be saying words out loud. So it would stand to reason that you should prepare for the situation by getting some of those words in your head and in your body by saying them out loud.

34:14So the tool works like this, essentially, instead of just going right to writing immediately, talk it out first. And then once you've done that, then you can shift and make some notes, but begin by speaking. And I find that this really exactly does what you experience, which is people connect to the material more, they realize they know it better than they thought, They frame it in the way that people actually speak as opposed to how they write, I should say. So it's a very powerful tool and it seems like it's been helpful to you. I wanna ask a different and slightly humorous question for a second.

34:46Do you all teach in your sessions that people should practice presenting in front of a mirror? We don't teach in front of a mirror. Yeah, so I don't either. This is why I'm saying it, okay? I don't think it's good advice, but my question is, where did it come from? Like some of these things that are not that helpful, these sort of conventional wisdom of things, where did they start? Because I never suggest that people practice in front of a mirror, because to your point, what they end up doing is hyper fixating on every little gesture or even worse, like, God, I hate my hair today or this or that.

35:20It puts their focus exactly on who it should not be. So I really wonder where did it come from in the first place? I don't know. I think there's this innate human desire to know how we appear in front of others. And after going through a bootcamp with us, our clients will often ask, hey, can I get that footage from class that you took of me? And we delete it immediately because the value is not in watching the footage over and over and over and over again and being hypercritical. The value is in recognizing the things that are happening internally that you think are impacting your communication, most times are not at all.

35:56And the areas where you can really improve are some simple changes to your posture, your body language that allow you to unlock way more benefit of the communication and improvement, self-improvement in the communication than watching the video over and over and over again. For many of these small things that your audience is never picking up on, only you're picking up on them because you care so much about the way that you look. Yeah, I want to add to that of what a breakthrough that remark of, no, you're not getting that footage and here's why is. because it's only showing that because you're going to fix on this, you're going to drive yourself nuts, and you're going to make yourself worse.

36:38And they're like, oh, so I can't get that. We've gotten what we can gain from it, and we're now progressing. So if that's the case, and it was a natural thing for me to ask for that footage, how many other things have I overanalyzed till I drove myself nuts? And when we've taken that away and we say, no, you can't have that, we deleted it. And here's why. And all of a sudden you can see that, oh, no, like they start to realize that that's the problem or at least one of them. Right. Yeah. You know, it's hilarious about that. I'll go even one step further. OK, so you're saving a whole bunch of people who don't fall into the hyper, you know, obsessing about the same stuff over and over again.

37:26You're saving them from it. But I bet you there's not an insignificant number of people who would leave, ask for the footage and then never get around to watching it because of procrastination or busyness or whatever. And then they would yell at themselves about it. I've got to buckle down and look at that footage. I really got to I got to be better. I got to be better. So you're saving both the people who would watch it and also the people who would not by that simple thing. another eye-opening piece for a lot of our clients is we instruct them to practice their stories because in so many of these situations and you talk about this in the book presentation it's great if i just put charts and graphs and all the data behind it but in all the years we've been doing this and we run into clients we worked with 10 plus years ago what do they remember from the course, they often remember a personal anecdote Johnny and I shared that illuminated a concept that now they use that concept and it's just become a part of their repertoire.

38:28But the reason they grabbed onto it is because of the personal story that Johnny and I shared around the impact that made in our own lives. And it's been fascinating to me. I didn't go in thinking, oh, these stories would be so big of a memory for our clients. We always hope that the concepts and what we're teaching and training on will be that. But stories are just such an important part of being memorable, of allowing the audience to connect with you and retain the information. We find so often our clients just want to come up with stories on the spot and just throw themselves to the wolves and hope that they'll remember that one memory and then put it together in a story arc that actually gets the audience involved and interested.

39:08And it's just such a terrible strategy to think that you can free flow stories in the moment if you haven't really given yourself much of a chance in the past to be a storyteller. And as Johnny was illuminating earlier, so many of our clients are in very analytical jobs where storytelling isn't a part of their day-to-day. A part of their day-to-day is like getting the spreadsheet completed and getting the numbers over and analyzing this and telling their superiors what exactly they found in their analysis. So how do you approach storytelling? I know it's a big part of the content and the delivery piece.

39:40and what can our audience do to strengthen themselves as storytellers? Because practicing and getting more adept at storytelling really is the secret sauce. Yeah, I would just reinforce a bunch of the points you just made in the following way. People do tell stories over and over again. They just don't know it. So I promise you've got whoever is listening or everyone who is listening. Yeah, 100 % of the people who are listening, everybody. You have stories you've told before. And very likely you even have people in your life who've heard you tell them so much so that if you tell them in a group situation, that person's like, oh boy, here's that story again.

40:17And you probably tell it pretty darn similar every single time because in order to get the moral of the story or get the punchline of the story, you're relying on certain aspects or certain components of the story to do that work. So your point is a good one in that people practice it already, but you should practice it for the stories that might be more relevant in the things you're trying to get in your life in terms of goals. So professional success stories, professional failure stories, by the way. People love failure stories so long as you have a way in which you've overcome this or recovered from it or taken a lesson from it.

40:55So build out a sense of, you know, I used to teach a course at Columbia Business School. We would actually have our students build out what was called a story bank. And you would create a whole list of stories that were kind of your go-to ones. Now, people, you already have it informally somewhere in the back of your head. Just make it explicit and then add, you know, whatever timing you want to. Once a month, add a story. In a year, you're going to have 12 more go-to stories than you did before. Well, you brought up a key point, the moral, the lesson, the takeaway. Oftentimes when we find ourselves rambling or getting too caught up in the details and setting the mood and what went on, the audience can actually miss that.

41:34So one of the important ways to practice getting really good at stories is to start with the end in mind. What is the takeaway? What's the lesson here? What do you want someone who heard this story to think about you? What are you delivering or sharing as the punchline first? And then we can build the story arc around it. But so often we find our clients get hung up on the start and setting the mood and the tone and details that really don't lead to the punchline and often can lead you to a place of rambling and weaving and not getting to a conclusion. And those are the worst moments where you're just getting to the great part of the story, but you've already lost the audience because you spent way too much time on the setup.

42:15There's to add to that as well. Not only do we tell the same stories all the time for the same and using to get the same results and effects, a lot of times it's the same triggers that lead us into certain stories. So having an understanding of what those stories are, actually writing them out so that everything is included that you want it to be to get the desired result. But you can even go back to what always triggers this story because it comes up. I've said this story five times in the last month. What was that trigger? Oh, if somebody was talking about their experience in, uh, Facebook ads, oh, I got a Facebook ad story.

43:06Here's how I learned X, Y, and Z about Facebook ads. That might be the trigger. So it just gives you more preparation on why you're telling these stories, the result that you are going for and telling the story and making sure that the correct content is in there to elicit their emotions to get that response. Yeah. To go one step further, this is an essential skill, not just in life, but in politics. I coach at practically every level of political life, from presidential candidates all the way down to city representatives. And the reason to mention that range is that across an entire range, everybody has to get good at exactly what you're just talking about, AJ, which is to make sure that you can get onto the stories that you do want to tell, no matter where the interview goes or where the debate goes.

43:58Politicians who are bad at this, it looks manipulative and it looks like they just said the same thing no matter what. Politicians who are good at this, it looks spontaneous and it looks as though they are getting back to their core values. So you can even think of this like pivoting in a sense. You go into an interview, if you leave a 60 minute interview and you haven't shared your three or five like really key example stories from your life that show why you're a good fit, well, you haven't done a job or haven't done a good job as the interviewee. So you can even practice to your point, looking not just for what those triggers are, but are there questions that you could find ways to lead into that story or into that anecdote and begin to practice the versatility of getting to that anecdote, no matter what the topic is.

44:43And these stories are a great opportunity for you to showcase not just your accomplishments, but your personality and those core values and what is important to you. So the story is not just to, you know, hammer home bullet points on your spreadsheet or your presentation, but it really is an opportunity for you to essentially brag without coming across as braggadocious because you get to illustrate a lot in the way that you tell that story. what's important to you, why that lesson stands out, a bit of your background, how you got here. There's so much opportunity in being adept at storytelling and recognizing those questions that lead to it, those triggers and opportunities then to practice in your day-to-day life.

45:23So you feel really good in those moments where the spotlight is on, the camera's turned on, the Zoom, or you are in the job interview. And now that story is really going to land you that opportunity that you're after. Yeah. I mean, that's, of course, feeds into the adage in the world of communications of show, don't tell. And you're exactly right. If you're in an interview or any situation in which you're trying to make a positive impression on the other person and all of your language is filled with adjectives and adverbs that describe all these qualities about you, but we never see any evidence of them, it doesn't carry nearly as much weight as if there's a specific story, the plot events of which reveal the things that you're to tell us with all those adjectives and adverbs.

46:05Now going along that line of impressing and trying to get across competence, intelligence, accomplishment, one thing that we find clients do is they ramble. So they have a direction they want to take things and now they feel the spotlight is on them and they want to prove that they have the achievements or the skills or exactly what the other person is asking for specifically in a job interview, let's say. And all of a sudden they've wrangled themselves and tangled themselves in a way through rambling that they actually can't get that point across. And one thing that John and I love about the book is there's so many practical exercises in there that you can just take and put into action and very quickly strengthen your communication in these key moments.

46:49What are some very practical exercises that our ramblers in the audience can do to reel it back in and get that message across? Yes. and I'm actually going to credential this tip or this exercise, not because I need to credential the thing, but because I want everyone listening to try it. It's going to sound silly. It's not. So to credential it, it is in a book in which I show up as a fictional character called The Last Election, in which the politician uses Lego blocks to do this thing. The actress Cassandra Freeman as a video in which it went ever so slightly viral of her stacking Lego blocks on a beach vacation.

47:31You should try this exercise because it can change your life when it comes to conciseness. So in chapter six, you just rip it out and tear strips of paper up, make it six pieces. But if you have some Lego blocks at home, that's the best thing. Share some content. Could be a story, could be like an elevator pitch, a bit of a presentation, whatever you want, but share it one idea at a time. Pick up the Lego block, share the first idea, at the end of the idea, in silence, kind of like where the period might go at the end of the sentence, you put the Lego block down. Then you pick up the next one, share the next thought.

48:07At the end, put it down, again in silence. And you go thought by thought by thought, each time being silent as you click that Lego block in place, enforcing silence so you actually have a moment to think about, do I need to keep speaking or not. And this exercise can almost magically create concisence. So much so that this is the first exercise I developed starting my company in 2010. And in many ways, this is the, I can almost draw a point to this exercise and my entire exploration of kinesthetic learning as a way to help people speak better.

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49:49You started that answer with the key phrase that Johnny and I love and we preach to all of our clients and listeners, yes, and a phrase from improv. And we've brought improv into our classes and oftentimes our super analytical participants will be like, why are we doing this? Like, what's the science behind this? How is this so important? But so much of communication through practicing and improv is using those skills of humor and using those skills of involving the other person in the communication as a way to actually improve our own communication. And that's why we love those exercises. And I'd love for you to share a little bit more of your background and how you've incorporated what you've learned in your background to help all these high stakes politicians and leaders become better communicators and orators.

50:37For a second, I'm going to give you all some compliments and then get on a soapbox about this for a second. Because that very idea, like, oh, that comes from improv comedy? That's like a little bit silly. What are we doing? Skeptics, super analytical folks out there, people who have a temptation to say, like, improv comedy, that's wacky. Ask yourself this. The artists that you know, singers, rock and rollers, musicians, actors, singers, writers, how many hours have they spent trying to get better at those things? A lot. There's this myth of flaky artists or flaky actors. It's not true. The successful actors and artists I know are the hardest working people you will ever encounter because they're trying to do something incredibly difficult and doing at an exceptionally high level.

51:29So the point there is like, as opposed to minimizing those artistic tools like yes and no, consider, wow, that is some tremendous wisdom from a specific part of a human discipline. And what can I learn from it? And how can I use it in my life? So yes, and to all of that, I come from a professional acting background. I was a professional actor for about a decade, got my MFA from NYU graduate acting program. And then I worked in Broadway and film and TV a little bit for a number of years. And then I started my own company in 2010, taking some aspects of theatrical training to help folks speak better, but then also diverging a little bit and really moving into kinesthetic learning and how to use that to help people speak better.

52:17So let's unpack kinesthetic learning for our audience members who've heard you mentioned a few times, but might not be familiar with it. Well, the exercise I just walked you through using the Lego blocks as almost like implements or symbols of each idea. And in the book, you'd actually rip out a piece of paper and tear the paper into six strips. That's the objects in the book. That is an example of kinesthetic learning, using physical things to learn some behavioral concept. I'll share another one, which is both kinesthetic learning, it's also resistance training. If you want to make your enunciation better, take a tool that's older than ancient Greece, because the first recorded example is the orator Demosthenes, according to Herodotus, who wrote it down in the histories.

53:07and instead of just thinking of enunciation, do enunciation and do it differently by forcing yourself to have to navigate past an impediment. A very easy one is just stick your pinky finger in between your teeth on the side of your mouth and then navigate around that impediment, making sure your speech is totally clear, even with the impediment. Those of you who are just listening, yes, I was doing that real time and that's why you heard my speech be slightly different. Well, once you practice without a little bit, kind of like a sprinter running with a parachute on, you've made your body have to work harder to build some new muscles.

53:46And that impediment has made your speech better. So that's another example of kinesthetic learning. You also shared another example that I think we could incorporate in our daily life for those of us who are fans of linking habits. And that's actually practicing what you're going to say while brushing your teeth and using the toothbrush as the impediment as you prepare for the job interview or the speech or the presentation or the Zoom call that you're having shortly thereafter. And I found so much of the questions that we get around communication and our experience. and when people listen to the show or get to interact with us in person, it's like, how did you get so good at public speaking, AJ?

54:25You and Johnny don't use filler words and you speak so clearly. And the short answer is practice. Lots of hours doing this. And I'm so glad that you pointed that out. It is honing a craft. And when you come at this with a growth mindset, not saying I'm terrible at public speaking, I'm awful in group settings where there's more than five people and they're all staring at me or I've never been good on a job interview. Look at how can I hone my craft of communication by doing these simple things over and over again, paying close attention to the other person on the other side of the conversation, the other side of the interview, how they're reacting to us.

55:05So much of what Johnny and I have been able to do in front of the classroom and doing this podcast as long as we have is practice. And there's no shortcut to it. I love the strategies in the book to start to recognize, okay, I have this impediment. I have this frustration. What can I do in my practicing to rapidly improve? But you need reps. You need actual opportunities to talk to other people. And I'm really curious what you think about my hypothesis around AI. I believe that in-person communication is actually going to become a sought after skill in a way that we've never seen before. As so many people in my life included, are starting to use AI for text communication, written communication.

55:47Hey, help me with this email. Hey, can you clear my thoughts so that I can present it in this white paper in a more thoughtful manner? But what AI is not doing and is actually shortening our ability to practice is the in-person communication by us defaulting to, well, AI can help me. Much like Google Maps has now shortened our ability or impacted our ability to read a map and just get directions like we used to when we'd go to the gas station. Hey, do you know how to get here. Yeah. It's two rights, four cross streets, et cetera. What are your thoughts on how AI is going to impact our communication?

56:19And maybe you have some interesting use cases currently that can help us improve our communication through AI. Yeah. Well, this is just one person's opinion. So take it for a grain of salt. But I think you're right. I think your hypothesis will be proven right. And in fact, for all of you theater actors out there, I think that theater may make a comeback over the next 100, 200 years as live in the moment human performance becomes almost the only trusted currency there is. There's a tiny chapter I have on AI at the end of the book, of course, and I say something kind of similar to what you were just positing, which is that if delivery were not already important, which it is, AI may make delivery even more important because AI has already made content, great content.

57:13I mean, in fact, superlative content accessible to anybody, anytime, anywhere. So if everyone has brilliant content, almost like, you know, fed into a little babble fish in their ear or something, what's going to set you apart? Your ability to deliver that content in the moment. And I think you're right. I think people may really grow to crave that. I don't want to see the weird spam email that was crafted by OpenAI's trained chatbot that ingested all human knowledge ever and spit it back to me. I want to see someone speak with idiosyncrasy and in the moment agility and spontaneity. So I completely agree.

57:54Now, in terms of use cases, that's a moving target. I gave a talk on this actually last year at a thing called the Hudson Valley Ideas Festival, which is a cool thing, first time ever. So it's a neat thing to Google if people out there are into that kind of thing. The talk was all about how AI may affect our communication. And I think you are really onto something. I think it's going to make immediate, real-time, human-to-human communication the gold standard and everything else may actually fade a little bit in terms of primacy. I want to just comment on this real quick as well. So a while back, for myself, I'm involved in a very fringy music.

58:34I've been in music my whole life. So having access to all the world's music at my fingertips, I find myself looking for very obscure, fringy stuff. And my friends, that's what we do. We trade. Have you seen this? Have you found that? Have you checked this out? What's the weirdest, craziest, far out stuff that we can find? And we trade it. Now, when the AI thing started, there was, I think, a part of all of us that on the surface level thought our stuff is so fringy and so weird that there is no way that AI could penetrate our little world, which in the back of our minds, we all knew it was going to.

59:26That's just how things work. But when was that point? And so I'm starting to hear a lot of AI music, and I've been very impressed by what it can do. Well, it just so happens, I believe it was over the summer, I heard from a new band that had some origins unknown. And they put a whole record together, and it was getting passed around. and it was moving, it was going viral fast. Everyone loved it. And of course, we had found out that this was AI. It was even in the name after we all found out. So many of us, if not all of us, had gotten duped. So we're like, okay, so now it's at our door. It's highly effective and we all fell for it.

1:00:20So what does this mean for our little group and for this music that we love so much that has now been infiltrated by AI. Well, the band that put this together, they discussed, they put out a blog on Substack of why they did it, how they did it, and what they intend to do moving forward now that the secret is out. And it took them, he was saying that just the songs themselves had been through 50 iterations before they got it to exactly where they wanted it because of the fringiness of it and getting it right. So they put a lot of effort into doing this. And of course, when people found out, everyone was pissed off about it.

1:01:12Everyone was upset. How could this happen? And they were mad at the band. Why would you guys do this? Now, for me, knowing how this works, it was only a matter of time before somebody sat down to see if they could infiltrate our world with this music. And so basically, that was what he wanted to do. Could I do it? Is it possible? They generated the whole thing, the band members' stories, everything, and the artwork. And they'd done an incredible job. But at the end, when it talked about what they were going to do moving forward, will there be more records? How are they going to remedy this? Well, he said it got such great response and has gotten so much attention.

1:01:53So now they were going to put an actual band together to go tour and promote this record. And I have to say, I would be buying a ticket to go see this show because I love those songs so much and I was duped. Can you pull? And so I would love to see this live. So now we're discussing about writing and performing as a band it's just a brand new brand new way now i don't think i've completely come to terms with the whole thing yet but i found it utterly fascinating it was only a matter of time before they infiltrated and now that they have and and they're gonna put a band together around this i'm like i'm excited about this project so to go on with what aj was talking about i i see it as just another way of getting things done, a different way of production.

1:02:51But at the end of the day, the human element is what people are going to gravitate towards. Yeah, it's such a fascinating topic. And look, I will say this for sure. I am an expert in what I'm an expert in. And I'm not an expert in a bunch of stuff. And how AI is going to shape the entire world, I am not an expert in. So this is just one person's take on things. But good Lord is the symmetry of what you just talked about fascinating because technology got thrown into music streaming and it broke the revenue model for sure no one makes any money off records anymore musicians only make money on touring so you could no longer sell albums so then you get ai ai makes an album and now you're going to tour the ai album for the musicians musicians to actually have a livelihood make money while doing touring it's it's a bizarre and crazy sort of symmetry you're talking about the people that I read about AI say something similar to what you're saying, that yes, there is very much an existential threat of human annihilation.

1:03:54That's on one side. Those are the doomers. On the other side are the boomers who are like, no, it's going to solve climate change and make life free and solve every disease ever. And then in between is everybody else saying likely it's going to be some version of a productivity tool, but on massive steroids. And so I think you're right. I think the ways in which people learn to surf it and use it in certain ways, it could be pretty fascinating. I use it a lot right now, not because it's that good at writing. I don't actually think it is that good at writing. And I even told my publisher, should we have a declaration in the book that says not a single word was written with AI?

1:04:32And they said like, ah, no, you don't need that. I think maybe we should. I think we should have maybe done that. But anyway, whatever. I don't think it's that useful at writing yet, but it will be useful in some things. And it's certainly useful at like planning and a lot of productivity tools. So that's a fascinating story you share, Johnny. I don't know where it all goes, but that's a cool one. I'm actually curious around role-playing and creating scenarios where you can free flow and actually practice these concepts with AI without the downsides or the negative consequences of doing it with a live audience or another human.

1:05:10So we've seen, interestingly enough, more interest in the show and interest in our coaching, people finding us through AI because they're actually more comfortable sharing their deep down frustrations and fears with AI where there's no judgment associated with it. And I can just spit back the answers or the resources like check out the art of charm or go take a boot camp. So we've been playing with creating some role play scenarios. So things that we would do in class with other students, but do it in a way that they could access it 24-7, 365. So they can do a little role play of the job interview.

1:05:44They could do a little role play of the first date, again, to prepare and practice some of those things that we talked about so that you have the content piece handled. You can really lean into the delivery piece. And that delivery piece, I think, is going to be in such high demand that you're going to see people wanting to take more in-person face-to-face meetings and speed up sales processes like, hey, can we stop having our robots talk to each other? Let's just have this dinner. Let's just meet in person and hammer this out. That's how I see it, sort of the trend line. And it's interesting because, you know, people that I would say I am not categorizing as technologically adept are using AI and telling me, oh, I wrote that text message with AI or I wrote that email.

1:06:24So it's already infiltrated almost all of our text communication. A lot of people don't want to share it openly that they're using it, but they are because as you said, it's a productivity tool to cycle through and speed up a lot of these things that slowed us down productivity wise. So I implore, and obviously if you're listening to the show, you do value in-person communication, but really implore reading the book, checking out your website, which I would love for you to share and using these practice exercises and strategies to become a masterful communicator, because I think it's going to be a very in-demand skill as AI progresses.

1:06:59So where can our audience find out more about the work you do and your website? Happy to. Yeah. The book's website is dontsayum.com, just like it sounds, dontsayum.com. And in fact, we have, and I'm going to keep it this way, the chapter on navigating nerves is totally free there. So you can download that one. Reason I want to keep that one free is because oftentimes that is the single biggest challenge or pain point that people have. And they really sometimes are even in a bit of agony about that. So I want to give that to the world. People can access that anytime. Don'tSayUm.com. You can find me on LinkedIn, Michael Chad Hefner, H-O-E-P-P-N-E-R.

1:07:38And then my company's name is GK Training, and that's just GKTraining.com. Thank you so much for joining us. We thoroughly enjoyed the book, and it's going to be one of our recommendations for our clients as we progress because the exercises are so powerful. Thank you. I appreciate that a lot. And I've enjoyed the conversation a lot too. I'm going to go check out some AI stuff now, by the way, and maybe even listen to some music. Yeah. Johnny, I'll send it over to you. We'll see if you can distinguish the AI band from the real one. Totally. I will. I'll send you back the quiz results. Okay. I'll let you know why I got it right.

1:08:13Thank you so much for joining us. All right. Thanks guys. See you.

1:08:27Fantastic. And now part of the show where we showcase one of our X-Factor Accelerator members. Take it away, Sheldon. Hi, my name is Sheldon. I'm an engineer. Before the X-Factor Accelerator, I struggled with approaching new people as well as procrastinating for fear of saying the wrong thing. I joined the X-Factor Accelerator because I felt like my technical skills were recognized, but my ability to communicate was limiting my career. I thought if I could punch up my communication skills, I'd be much more likely to reach my potential. My favorite thing about the X-Factor Accelerator is working directly with AJ, Johnny, and Michael.

1:09:01While working with them, I've had breakthroughs in my marriage while getting better at my job and having more fun doing it. If you're on the fence, I would definitely encourage you to book a call to explore working with them. Thank you, Sheldon. And it was a pleasure and an honor working with you too and good luck to you and all of your future endeavors. If you've gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts, head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show. It means the world to us and it helps others find the show. All right, before we head out, a huge thank you to our producers, Michael Harold and Eric Montgomery.

1:09:40Till next week, go out there and make it the most epic of weeks. Yeah, I remember you You were the bad boy You threw your love away Like you was just a toy And you sold the world You're a song of a tragedy Cause you had your taste Of black on the yesterday Yeah, but I remember you Oh yeah, I know you You're my man But I'd rather run away