Simple Shifts To Turn Average Speakers Into Expert Communicators

0:06Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Janssen. My guest today is Michael Heppner. He is a political communications expert known for his work with Andrew Yang during the 2020 presidential election. And as an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, Heppner has conducted deep dive research on the speaking habits of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Joe Biden, Gretchen Whitmer and others. He's the CEO and president of GK Training and author of a book we're going to talk about today, Don't Say Um, How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. So Michael, welcome to the show.

0:46Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. Okay, I have to start with the big promise. How is this going to help me live a better life? Yeah, well, it will, and I'll tell you why. Because you speak and you communicate so much more than you actually recognize. I know that seems obvious, but we say, depending on the day, between five and 10 ,000 words a day. So if people think of this kind of training as compartmentalized into public speaking, it's a total waste. And it's not even true. I mean, I often joke that every time we're speaking, it is some form of public speaking. If there's an audience, we're speaking and it's theoretically in public.

1:27And actually breaking down that idea, that very false distinction between what is public speaking and what is the rest of your life is an important task because it allows you to recognize how much of your life is actually influenced and determined by how effectively you can talk to other folks. And by the way, if you learn to talk a little bit better too, you're moving your body differently. You're breathing differently. So in a very microscopic way, it's actually a tiny moment of exercise and health and wellness in your day. So those are some of the ways it makes your life better. And I suspect most people, I know I do.

2:04I mean, most people do what we do almost unconsciously sometimes, especially we're having a conversation with a friend one-to-one. It's just like, oh, you know, I'm slouching. I'm saying, um, I'm doing whatever. I'm not. And a lot of it really is intentionality, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Go farther with the metaphor you just talked about. On the one hand, we can kind of have fun with a thought experiment of if I'm talking to my friend, I'm slouching and just being really casual. But there's a different version of that, too, which is think of the really engaging conversation with your friend or even more of the point.

2:38Think of it when your friend's having a hard time and you're trying to help them. And in that situation, how you communicate is entirely because of your ability to be other focused. You're not thinking about your presentation skills and am I moving my hands too much or not enough? You're just thinking about them, which to your point is exactly why we're able to do it so freely, so dynamically, so unconsciously. And then what happens is we cross this very fraught divide when we shift into self-focus, whether that's from giving a speech or being in an interview or any other high stakes communication situation.

3:18And it all becomes really problematic as we fixate on ourselves as opposed to the other person. It's funny. I've done a lot of what you're calling public speaking over the years. And I remember early on, I had a mentor, somebody, you know, kind of helping me. And he said, the minute you realize it's not about you, you know, you will be a better speaker. And it took me a long time to figure that out. It's like that they're not there to see me entertain them. They're there to get some sort of transformation or some sort of message. And boy, it takes a little while. But now I don't even think about, you know, speaking to public.

3:51I'm like, how am I here to serve? Yeah, that service mindset is really powerful. It's really powerful. So let's go to the ums, which thankfully now AI can just edit right out. We don't have to worry about, but we call them filler words, right? And there's a whole list of them I write is another one. What does that tell about somebody's communication habits? Yeah. Well, I call my book Don't Say Um. It's a trick. And the reader will learn that on the first page when you just look at the preface. It's a trick because don't say I'm as the worst advice you can give yourself. It's self-focused. It's thought suppression, which we're terrible at.

4:31But I knew because people really want to address this pain point, I knew it's a way to help them actually recognize I should get this research and I should try to help myself improve in these ways. I often say that I'm not the um police, okay? I'm not saying it's a tin or a commandment that one can never say um. In fact, let's say you say um every, I don't know, 20 seconds, 25 seconds when you're in that situation with your friend we just talked about trying to help them. Fine. You're probably using it in the middle of a free form conversation. You're searching for a word. But what I am very interested in is if when you get into the more self-focused situation, the interview, the big presentation, if the number of ums skyrocket and all of a sudden you're saying one um every three seconds or five seconds those ums actually are worth looking at because what they're coming from is essentially you feeling some kind of pressure to fill silence or speak at a certain rate of speech or strive for some kind of vocabulary to demonstrate how smart you are or something they're coming from a not so useful place so the tool that i often talk about when it comes to um is that what you're really trying to do is develop your linguistic precision, meaning not the ums I'm trying to avoid, but what are all the useful, accurate, potent words instead of the um that I'm actually trying to grab onto.

5:59And I will often even use what's called embodied cognition, learning by using your body, to have people walk their fingers across a desk like this, like I'm doing now on the... You can't see this if you're just listening on audio, but if you're looking at the video, of course, walking your fingers across the desk step by step, forcing yourself with those small little finger steps to actively choose language. So as opposed to policing yourself to never say any filler, my point really is, sure, you're probably going to say some filler, but the real battle and the real joy actually is hunting for those words that you do want to choose as opposed to the little sounds you're trying to avoid.

6:39And a lot of it has to do, well, if it's confidence or comfort level. I mean, a lot of those things, like you said, they come out when people are nervous more so. So a lot of times they naturally come out when somebody who is nervous in front of an audience does it. But do you, and I actually, I was going to go to your exercises and I love the attaching a physical thing to doing that because it really does bring you right there to where you're thinking about the fingers. I had another one up there that I'd love for you to go to the exercise, I can't find it here, the Lego drill again, enhancing kind of memory.

7:14And I love, because I think a lot of people just feel like, oh, I just got to get out there and practice and do it a lot. But there actually are techniques, right? Right practice that gets you there. So talk a little bit about the Lego drill. Yeah, sure. You're a hundred percent right to call that distinction about practice. I mean, you've heard sports coaches talk about this. There's very much a difference between just practicing and then also practicing in the right way. So So if you're listening to this, if you know about yourself, when you're in high stakes speaking situations, you talk a mile a minute, you talk as fast as you possibly can to try to fill out any silence at all.

7:47Just practicing doing more of that is actually not going to help. So the drill works like this and the preferred tools are, in fact, Lego blocks. And the reason is because of that little clicking function where they click together. First of all, it's very satisfying. Second of all, it takes some time. You can't rush it. so it enforces a little tiny bit of time discipline. The way the exercise works is this, is that you're going to share some content, whatever it is. It could be an elevator pitch or the beginning of a presentation or really anything. An essential answer to an interview question, whatever you want.

8:23And as opposed to just opening your mouth and seeing what comes out or trying to remember all the smart stuff you're going to say, no, you're going to say one idea and then you'll say another one and then another one, but you're going to start with a single idea. So you have a number of Lego blocks with you, five, seven, whatever it is. Before you even begin, in silence, you pick up the first Lego block. And then you say the first idea you want to share. You could think of this like the first sentence, but humans, we think in ideas or thoughts, not so much sentences. So anyway, you say the first idea or sentence.

8:56And at the end of it, in silence, kind of like where the period might go at the end of that sentence, you put the Lego block down on a table or a desk. Now you have to remain silent as you pick up the second Lego block. Once you have that second Lego block in the air, then you can share the second idea, whatever that might be. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. At the end of that idea, in silence, you click the second Lego block in place with the first. That's where that moment of clicking takes place. Third idea is the same thing, fourth, fifth, etc. Now, the brilliance in this, and I don't mean to say brilliance meaning I'm brilliant.

9:34I mean that you're brilliant, you who are reusing it. The brilliance in this is that it gives your brain the opportunity to unitask rather than multitask. All you have to do is think of one idea you want to share. Not 25 you're trying to remember to get through as fast as you can so you don't forget them. Confident that at the end of that idea, your brain will do what it's miraculously good at, which is considering a next idea you want to share. And so what this tends to do is A, slow you down. B, structure your thoughts much better. And C, make you oftentimes much briefer too and more concise.

10:12You know, it's funny as I listen to that too. I know that as I've gone from, say, a 30-minute talk to a 90-minute talk, but maybe on the same topic, it does become sort of bits that connect together. And you just have to get to the end of the bit. You know, it's all you have to remember. And then it's like, no, now it's the next bit. And so it really helps for that kind of structure too, doesn't it? For sure. I mean, I would go one further, which I would say the great impromptu speakers of all time, they have mastered this skill. It's what allows someone to speak for 20 minutes, totally free form, but looking as though they have memorized this incredibly polished speech.

10:50They have just built this ability, almost like an athlete, to share one idea. Knowing full well at the end they have a moment to think about what to say next. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere. From self-driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming. fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete with costs spiraling out of control? It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is a blazing fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, plus all your AI and machine learning workloads.

11:37OCI costs 50 % less for compute and 80 % less for networking. So you're saving a pile of money. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to OCI, including MGM Resorts, Specialized Bikes, and Fireworks AI. Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI. For new U.S. customers with minimum financial commitment, offer ends 12-31-24. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com slash duct tape. That's oracle.com slash duct tape. So you actually start out the book talking about people being, that speaking itself is an innate ability pretty much everybody is born with.

12:27How do you, there'd be a lot of people that would disagree with that. So how do you get people back to that sort of, you know, starter state that everybody's born with if they just have this fear, or society has somehow taught them that they're not a good speaker? Yeah. Well, let me tweak a little bit the question, because I actually don't suggest that speech is innate. I would suggest that the ability to learn speech is innate, and that we certainly learn speech over a period of time. Here's the test of it. If you drop any kid in any culture anywhere as a newborn and let them grow up to age five or 10, they will speak the language fairly fluently.

13:07Writing is the proof point. If you don't instruct the kid how to write, they don't learn that. It doesn't just automatically kind of sink in. There's a bunch of processes we go through to learn how to speak by watching each other, by mimicry, things like this. Now, to be clear, audience, I am an expert in many things that I do. I'm very good at what I should say. I like to think I'm very good at what I do, but trust me, I do not do everything. And there's a bunch of stuff I'm bad at, and I'm not an evolutionary biologists, okay? So I'm not saying necessarily what our evolutionary trajectory is.

13:39What I will say, though, is when you listen to a six-month-old kid scream all night long and wake up the next day with vocal cords that are ready to scream for 12 more hours, and you think about a full-grown adult doing that same exercise and knowing how they would be completely hoarse, and if they did that for a few days, it would begin to already develop vocal nodes. There's something going on about how we create sound and language as little kids and how we do it much worse as adults. So to get people back to speaking how they do when they're much younger, which is freely expressing and make it very basic, turning air into sound and sound into words, we have to unlock how people talk when they're at their most other focused.

14:26Last thing I'll say about that, by the way, is we're at this really interesting crucible moment in our society, which is partly because of devices and screens. Some kids aren't learning as much how to communicate face-to-face as in previous generations. So even some of what I just said in that answer might actually change over the next half decade or more. I'm curious, and this kind of touches on that, how much of your coaching, of course, is the words that are said and how they're said, but how much of it is not the words? It's who you are, who you're being, your presence, all those things, which again, comes across different in person than it does across the virtual screen.

15:05Yeah. People who are interested in this, as a preview, the entire book is on delivery. This book doesn't even touch on content at all. So to answer that question based on this book, it would be a hundred and zero actually. But in my actual practice, I would say it's, you know, typically a two thirds, one third. So the majority is on delivery, but more than even just the balance of the two or how much time is spent in either one. The thing I'm really just obsessed by and fascinated about is how, as opposed to fighting about which one matters more, how you can unlock a virtuous cycle in which each one makes the other better.

15:44And that you can enter that cycle really from either side, from content to delivery or delivery to content. And you can enter it from delivery to content. In other words, if you just practice speaking with more breath, more vocal variety, tolerating more silence, your voice sounds better because it has the fuel it needs to actually sound resonant and full. With that breath, with that silence, your brain has what it needs to think of smart stuff to say, which is oxygen and time. So the two things exist in this very complementary dynamic that really can go into a virtuous or also, by the way, bad news, a vicious direction.

16:23You mentioned tolerate silence. And I want to go there for a minute because I find that in my speaking, one of the hardest things to do, let alone learn. When I started speaking, you know, and I had a speaking coach and he was like, you need to give this like three seconds before you say another word. And I was like, when I did it the first time, that was an eternity. And I think that a lot of people struggle, but I've heard more and more folks like yourself talk about how important that is, how impactful that silence can really be. Yeah. I'll give you a few things to frame this. The first is that people get all hung up on rate of speech.

16:59How fast should I talk? And it's incredibly intuitive if you actually think about it. Rate of speech is really just three things that frame it or that anchor it. One, how much time you need to think of smart stuff to say. Number two, how much time you want to give your audience to digest the smart stuff you said. And then number three, how long it takes to enunciate those smart things. That's what determines it. So pauses, when we're at our most other focused, come from this very organic place, which is, I need a moment and think about what I want to say, or powerfully, I've just said something hopefully important to the person I'm talking to and I want to give them a moment to digest it.

17:40And I'm watching them like a hawk to see when they are demonstrating to me comprehension or acknowledgement or recognition. And that cues to me, okay, they're ready to digest the next idea. That's where it comes from. Now, when we're at our most other focus, we do that seamlessly. And then when we feel like it's all about us, to your point, We talk a mile a minute and we never pause. And our perception can be off on this, by the way, dramatically. And if you don't believe me, in some video software tool, run some meeting that you're very nervous about. All right. Lead the meeting, record the whole meeting afterwards, watch it back and tell me how long you thought the longest pause was.

18:18And you're going to see it was like a quarter of a second. And it felt to you like an eternity. So to your point with the speaking coach you work with who made you tolerate this eternity of time that was three seconds, there's a bunch of tools you can do to actually quite quickly build some skill with this. I'll give you one. And this was actually, we had a nice little feature in the Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks back on this, where they use this as one tool that we suggested. On video calls, when you're asking people questions, do this little trick. At the end of the question, draw a question mark on your desk and be completely silent while you do that little activity.

18:56No one can see you're doing it because we have this, you know, as I'm just demonstrating right now, this, what I would call a digital cloak of invisibility. People can't see your hands, but it gives you this physical intervention to force you to actually live through that silence. And it gives you something to occupy your attention, which is drawing the question mark. But here's a second quick idea. Anybody with a smartphone, you can do this. Open your notes, video, you know, not video. What is it called? Oh, the voice memo app. Right, right, right. Record yourself talking and then look back at it and watch the little wave file that has those kind of spikes and valleys.

19:32Now look at what is the longest pause in your whole span of speaking. And you probably felt like three seconds, four seconds. Bet you it was half a second long. And so that's a very quick way to see, wow, these are not nearly as long as I thought. And I actually could afford to have more of them and lengthier. A lot of folks you talk to about speaking, you know, practice, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse is, you know, especially again, talking about public speaking. But I've found that some of the best moments I've had public speaking is when something happened and went off the rails and I reacted spontaneously.

20:06You know, those are always the moment that everybody looks back on. Do you feel like that actually practice makes those happen because you get so confident? Or, you know, I mean, again, what I'm really trying to ask, let me get to the question now, is how do you keep spontaneity when you know that you have to rehearse? Yeah. This comes down to a little bit of actor training, actually, which is people, if you're trying to really become very solid on some content and you do care that it's close to almost word perfect, or I'll give you an example. If you have a three minute pitch, it really does need to be three minutes.

20:42It can't be three and a half as an example. Then your script has to be pretty tight. But people memorize the wrong thing. People memorize the wrong thing. People memorize the wrong thing. People memorize the wrong thing. And no, by the way, don't stop listening, folks. There was not a glitch in the audio. I repeated the thing four times in a row. What they memorize is what actors call a line reading. So they memorize the delivery. They don't just memorize the words. So their pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement, those are the five Ps of vocal variety, their pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement becomes identical every single time they practice saying those words.

21:25So what happens? They stand up or they attend the meeting or whatever it is to do the actual thing and they sound totally robotic because they've beaten all the life out of these words by practicing these kind of relentless line deliveries. So if you want to learn the content, practice the content. But this time, folks, you have to change the delivery every single time to keep that loose and spontaneous. Walk around the room and swing your arms like a big, slow elephant. And then the next time, say it as though you're speaking on the top of a cliff to a giant army of people who are extending way back.

22:01And the next time, talk into a phone as though you're at a library and you're trying not to be overheard by the librarian. I know this sounds extreme, what I'm doing, but you want to break that muscle memory of I'm rigidly clamping down on how I talk for the purpose of making sure I remember every word. It ends up sounding robotic. Now, to your point about spontaneity, then if you rehearse those things in that way with some freedom of delivery, you've ingrained a looser experience of speaking. So it sounds more spontaneous. And the mistakes, we can get to how to deal with that if you want to. That's a second thing.

22:39But that will help come across much less overly rigid and overly polished. I just love those videos of comedians that they'll just be asking people questions and then they'll just go on a whole thing. you know, based on some of that, they build up library, you know, because people ask the same questions, but I always find those really fascinating. You want to talk for a second about how to navigate mistakes? Is that you? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Yeah, sure. Sure. So people often go into these three F's when it comes to mistakes, when they're in an adrenaline response, when public speaking or something.

23:11And of course the three F's are the human threat response, which is, you know, fight, flight, or freeze. And so I will often suggest to clients that they replace those three Fs with these three Fs, which are fake it, feature it, or fix it. And so the fake it means if no one knows, when it's not throwing you off, fine, fake it. You don't need to tell us every time you make a mistake in life. But if it is threatening to throw you off, then you can either fix it, which means you just acknowledge it, address it, and keep going. Or you actually feature it, which I would guess is what you have developed the skill to do.

23:49Because you mentioned sometimes these moments happen and there's some of your favorite moments. And I bet whether it's via humor or kind of rapport building with the audience, that you actually feature those moments in some way. You spin them as a slightly good thing or a positive accident. But I'm just guessing. Does that resonate with you? Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I definitely try to lean towards humor. Yeah. Yeah. Those moments can create as much humanity as anything else, you know, create tremendous moments of spontaneity and also empathy because the audience relates very much to you.

24:23Yeah. Some of them are just as nervous as you, right? About your performance. I've always found that too. They want you to succeed. It's funny on the mistake thing. I had a music teacher early on in life that said, you know, if you make a mistake on this part, just make sure you make it again. The next time we go through, nobody will notice. Well, Michael, I appreciate you taking a few moments to saw by the duct tape marketing podcast. Is there somewhere that you'd invite people to learn about your work and certainly find a copy of don't say um? Yeah, it's really simple. You can just go to don't say um.com.

24:57That's where to find me, where to find the book, where to find all that stuff. And I will say that the site is a great place because we give not just information and access to the book and things like that, but we also have a whole bunch of video drills and exercises. So if the ones I was talking about, the Lego drill or the finger walking, or even the drawing of the question mark, if these are interesting, you actually get guided videos about how to do them. So you can just check them out at dontsayum.com. Yeah, and we'll have that URL in the show notes as well. Again, Michael, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

25:32Sounds good. My pleasure. Have a great day, okay?