“How you
say something matters more than what you say,” explains Michael Chad
Hoeppner, author of the new book, Don’t Say Um: How To Communicate Effectively To Live A Better Life.
This book will
help you with all your daily interactions. It will help you by focusing on perfecting
your delivery, one of the two primary buckets of all spoken communication. “Content
is what you say, delivery is how you say it,” adds Hoeppner.
Hoeppner has coached
presidential candidates, prominent CEOs, and Ivy League deans on their
communication skills. He shares his best practices in the book, which is filled
with kinesthetic techniques and hands-on exercises like finger-walking to stop
using filler words or silent storytelling to avoid monotone.
You will learn
through a variety of simple-to-master exercises:
- Four common
speaking mistakes that inadvertently impact your message and delivery. - How the most
effective speakers use the 5 Ps of vocal variety—a unique framework based on - how to use vocal
variety to gain attention. - Tips for
maintaining the right level of eye contact to physically connect with your
audience. - How to talk less
and say more with the GK Training “Lego Brick Drill,” delivering your content
with one block (or idea) at a time. - Why silence is a
powerful tool for boosting your confidence and making your speech more precise. - Specific tools
for communicating well no matter your emotional state. - How to gracefully
recover from a speaking gaffe and use it to your advantage.
Hoeppner argues
we aren’t “bad” at speaking; we’ve just been focusing on the wrong solutions. Don’t Say Um promises to help you undo
those bad habits and make you the best advocate for your own ideas.
Don't
Say Um challenges our preconceived notions of good speaking
techniques and offers powerful tools to become master communicators.
Hoeppner shares these additional insights with us:
Question: Of the various
good speaking techniques outlined in the book, which one or two do many people
find most challenging to master, and why?
Michael:
This is a difficult question to answer because the entire point of my
book Don't Say Um is how to use easy-to-implement exercises to
create muscle memory that shifts old habits and addresses communication gaps.
The
reason I organized each chapter based on a specific skill area is to make the
content bite-sized and digestible. It is my hope that there is actually nothing
in this book that is difficult to master if readers dedicate time to it.
However, with that as a caveat, one skill I would highlight is posture.
Here’s why:
People often face two significant barriers to improving and adjusting their
posture.
They
have built up a lifetime of muscle memory of slouching or contorting.
The
corrections they often try to make are counterproductive. These typical
corrections sound like “stand up straight” or “pull your shoulders back”—neither
of which are accurate in terms of how free, long, released posture actually
works.
But
the journey to improve one’s posture—as challenging as it can be—is important.
Posture is central to communicating, not just because we create a better
impression when we are navigating the world as tall as we actually are (as
opposed to two to three inches shorter), but because being that tall allows for
freer and easier breath, which is literally the fuel for your communication.
In the chapter on posture, I give people some very simple exercises to unlock
what good posture actually looks like, including a page that can be cut out and
turned into a crown, a wardrobe intervention of stapling a small piece of paper
into the collar of one’s shirt, and exercises that can be practiced while in
motion on rapid transit. Each of these are intended to bring posture back to
what it should be about—balance, ease, length, and release. But there’s no
denying these improvements can only be made with daily practice over a period
of months. It takes people years and years to build the negative postural
habits they currently have—it will also take some time to release them.
Question: If a reader has time to improve their skills in only a
couple of speaking techniques, which are most important to tackle and why?
Michael: I would focus the reader's attention on chapter six, which
explains the GK Training “Lego Brick Drill.” It's
the first tool we use in many of our individual coaching engagements, and
that's because it's so foundational.
The profound skill it is teaching is simply tolerating time. Readers
learn an exercise where they share one idea at a time, and between each idea,
they stack a Lego brick, peel a sticky note, or manipulate some other
object in silence. By doing this, they're forced to take a moment to consider
what they've just said and what they should say next. And in that silence, some
magical improvements take place:
- First,
it's a perfect opportunity to breathe, and gain the air that is required
to speak with vocal variety and musicality. - Second,
it's a pause in which the speaker can do the cognitive work of considering if
they've shared sufficient information, or if more is merited. - Third,
it tends to remove the “ums” and “uhs” that link our
endless tangents and run-on sentences, so language becomes more precise and
less riddled with filler. And all these improvements tend to reinforce each
other. So overall, communication becomes more succinct, better structured, more
precise, and more varied—all at the same time.
I actually have a name for that improvement, and I call it
the “Virtuous Cycle
of Good Communication.” The opposite—the vicious cycle—is
perhaps better known by us all: those moments in which multiple negative
factors compound and lead to agonizing moments of extreme self-consciousness or
even out-of-body experiences. The “Lego Brick Drill” is an incredibly
simple way to bring speakers back into the present moment and help them share
valuable content.
If I had to recommend a second most important speaking technique to tackle, it would be the skill of linguistic
precision. I cover that in chapter seven, and I teach readers how
to do an exercise called finger walking, in which they use the activity of
walking their hand across a desk or table to ingrain the habit of choosing
words, as opposed to words choosing them.
The purpose of the exercise is to get people actively thinking about their word
choice. This is something we do flawlessly when we're not obsessed with our own
presence and manner: we think deliberately about the ideas we
should share with…a friend in need, a companion in distress, or a colleague
in confusion. That act of choosing language is fundamental and second nature
when we're focused on the other person.
When our focus turns inward, however, our linguistic precision collapses as
we speak too quickly to strive to mask self-consciousness, rush to fill any
silences, and more. When people master this skill—either through
practice of the finger walking exercise in chapter seven, or through any of the
other intentionality exercises in the book—they begin to feel a liberating and
joyous thing: being present in the moment. In this case, they're present
to choose one word rather than another, and that simple act of consideration
quiets the obsessions about mistakes just made or anxieties about those yet to
come.
___
With
nearly 20 years in the field, Hoeppner has taught at Columbia Business School
and coaches thousands of professionals around the world.
Thank
you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.
