Podcast #1,052: Stop Saying Um (And Fix the Other Vocal Tics That Are Sabotaging Your Speaking)

The Art of Manliness

Think about a time you’ve had to speak in front of others — maybe during a work presentation, a wedding toast, or even on a first date. Did you struggle with using too many filler words, such as “um” and “like,” talk too fast, or awkwardly ramble?

Most of us try to fix these saboteurs of speech by giving ourselves mental mantras: “Slow down”; “Think about what you want to say.”

But my guest would say that becoming a more engaging and effective speaker comes down to realizing that it’s a very physical act that requires getting out of your head and into your body.

Michael Chad Hoeppner, a communication coach who has worked with everyone from presidential candidates to business executives, is the author of Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. Today on the show, Michael explains why you need to treat speaking as a sport and shares embodied drills and exercises — from playing with Legos to talking with a wine cork in your mouth to throwing a ball against a wall — that will fix common delivery problems, including eliminating ums, enhancing vocal variety, and managing your gestures.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: Becoming Well-Spoken — How to Minimize Your Uhs and Ums
• AoM Podcast #698: The Secrets of Public Speaking From History’s Greatest Orators
• AoM Podcast #732: Tips From a Top TED Talker on How to Be Heard

Connect With Michael Chad Hoeppner

• GK Training
• Don’t Say Um website
• Michael on LinkedIn
• Michael on X

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness Podcast. Think about a time you’ve had to speak in front of others, maybe during a work presentation, a wedding toast, or even on a first date. Did you struggle with using too many filler words such as um and like, talk too fast or awkwardly ramble? Most of us try to fix these saboteurs of speech by giving ourselves mental mantras. Slow down, think about what you wanna say. But my guest would say, that becoming a more engaging and effective speaker, comes down to realizing that it’s a very physical act that requires getting out of your head and into your body. Michael Chad Hoeppner, a communication coach who has worked with everyone from presidential candidates to business executives, is the author of, Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. Today on the show, Michael explains why you need to treat speaking as a sport and shares embodied drills and exercises, from playing with Legos to talking with a wine cork in your mouth, throwing a ball against a wall. That’ll fix common delivery problems, including eliminating ums, enhancing vocal variety, and managing your gestures. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/um.

All right. Michael Chad Hoeppner, welcome to the show.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Thank you so much.

Brett McKay: So you are a communication coach. You help people improve their communication delivery. So you help people speak more clearly, more confidently, and with presence. You coached Andrew Yang, when he ran for president to improve his delivery. You also coach executives. You teach on the subject. I think when a lot of people think about public speaking or even just speaking on a first date, they’re getting ready for a first date. They’re often thinking about what they’re gonna say, they’re thinking about the content. But why do you think people should focus on the delivery as well?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: There’s a few reasons. The first is every study ever done that looks at what matters more in terms of the impression you make on other people, validates delivery as the thing. But that’s just the first answer. The second answer, which I think is a much better one, is that I’m not even interested in debating or trying to weigh one versus the other, content versus delivery. What I’m always trying to do with my clients is to help them unlock a virtuous cycle in which both things make each other better. And you can remember this for the rest of your life, which is the following drill. Hold up your hands as though you’re looking through some imaginary binoculars. If you hold your hands up like you’re looking through binoculars, you will see that your left hand looks like the letter C and your right hand like the outer half of a capital D. So your left hand stands for content. That’s the words you say, the vocabulary. The right hand looks like the outer half of a capital D, and that stands for delivery. And that’s everything besides the words. Now, if you put your hands together, you’ll see that they create this reinforcing loop.

And what many people don’t know and they discover coaching with me, is that if you just focus on the delivery and make the delivery better, not only do you sound better in all the context you just mentioned, including first dates. Not only do you sound better, but you can actually unlock a virtuous cycle in which you think of smarter stuff to say. So the instructive example of course, is if you build the ability to tolerate silence and allow your body to take air in, and therefore have the fuel to have vocal variety in your voice. And also avoid saying um, because in that silence you can’t say um, not only does your voice sound better and you come across with more authority. But in that gap, you’re giving your brain the only two things it needs to think of smart stuff, time and oxygen. So this is something that people do not understand about delivery, and they ignore it at their peril. And it can be like an absolute light bulb moment when they discover it.

Brett McKay: I’ve experienced that in my own life. I know whenever I feel I’m the most fluid and the most articulate with my speaking, it feels like I’m saying better stuff compared to when I’m not.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Exactly. And that’s not an accident, by the way. We also get trapped where we think delivery is a bunch of stuff we should paste on the outside. And part of the reason that is, is because it gets taught, typically in a really reductive way. I’ll give you an example. We get told to make eye contact for 8-12 seconds. Why? What if your thought is longer than 8 seconds or longer than 12 seconds even. Or shorter than 8 seconds I should say. Any of those things. And we get this coaching that these tools are about things we should almost shellac onto the outside of us. But that’s an absolute mistake because the outputs of communication or eye contact and gestural ease and freedom and posture and enunciation, they are outputs. They come from focusing on the other person. And when you do that, both the delivery and the content gets better. So what you’ve discovered when you’re kind of in that flow state is exactly right.

Brett McKay: Speaking of common advice that people get when they think about delivery, a lot of it’s particularly bad. It’s not very helpful, like you said, you gave the example of the one just then. But also there’s other advice about, well just don’t say um, or be more confident or don’t do this. And a lot of it’s just about thought suppression. It’s about suppressing things. Why is that not a useful approach to improving your speaking delivery?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. Well, let’s break this down in three ways. The typical guidance that people get about delivery is not just not helpful, it’s usually counterproductive. And the way it typically works is first, they get some thought suppression. Then they get such general feedback that it’s utterly unactionable. And then they get a suggestion which is a mental instruction for what is a physical activity. And I’ll walk you through this step by step. Let’s do one that’s very common, which is when people speak at a very fast rate. Now, the typical advice they get, first of all is thought suppression, which is don’t rush.

Okay, well, as soon as you hear a don’t, the first thing your brain is obligated to do, is to fixate on whatever comes after the don’t. I titled this book, Don’t Say Um, in large part as a trick to get people to pick it up, ’cause everyone wants to avoid saying um. But the challenge is that’s the very worst instruction you can give yourself. And I say as much in the preface to the book. So it’s a bit of a trick to get the reader picking it up and using it and hopefully improving because of it.

Thought suppression is the pink elephant trick essentially, it’s built off distinction. When you give yourself a don’t, you’re obligating your brain to fixate on the don’t versus everything else in the known universe. So if someone says to you, don’t rush, you are obligated to think about rushing. And also, even more damning, who are you thinking about? You and how bad you are, as opposed to where you should be thinking about, which is your audience. So thought suppression comes first, then what comes second? General feedback, and the general feedback usually is like, just slow down. Okay, when? All the time? Every word, in between words, in the length of words? When am I supposed to slow down? Utterly vague. And then the third thing, is a mental instruction for what is a physical activity. So that sounds like remember to breathe, but then you’re giving the person you’re coaching or suggesting this to, something else they have to remember in their jam packed brains, when in fact breathing is a totally physical thing. So these are some of the ways in which the feedback goes dramatically wrong. And really the problem is this. Is it people who are already struggling then tend to blame themselves and they think, “Oh God, I’m such a failure because I couldn’t implement all this really smart coaching or advice I got.”

And it wasn’t smart coaching, it wasn’t smart advice. And it’s not even their fault that they were not able to do it.

Brett McKay: Going to this idea that speaking is a physical act, that’s one of the main points that you drive home throughout this book, is that we have to remember that speaking is a full bodied physical act. I think oftentimes we think of it as just a mental act. Why is remembering that speaking is a physical act the foundation of improving your delivery?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Everything I just explained about how feedback gets messed up can be remedied by what you’re asking. By a physical approach. And particularly for the listeners of your podcast, this metaphor, either as a metaphor or even just as a thing that people actually do, will really hit home, which is speaking is a sport. So guys out there who are listening, but anybody out there who is listening, if you like sports, speaking is that same thing. It is moving. It takes over a hundred muscles to do what you and I are doing right now, Brett, which is taking air into our bodies. Our diaphragm drops down, our lungs expand as they fill with air. Our ribs move to accommodate those inflating lungs. And then we exhale that air over our vocal cords and it picks up some sound there. And then that sound gets amplified and altered and altered with a miraculous act of coordination, which is enunciation. Even saying the word enunciation, you can feel how much your lips and your tongue and even your soft palate and jaw have to move to accomplish that. It is a physical activity. Now, hopefully that’s interesting just to hear, but here is the amazing liberation and the amazing benefit of this shift.

Just like any other physical activity, like any other sport or dance or a discipline that is physical, you can build muscle memory and get a lot better at it very quickly and break habits that you think have condemned you to bad performance for the rest of your life. You can break them almost instantly.

Brett McKay: Yeah. What you do, and we’re gonna talk about some of these drills. You provide drills for people to help improve their speaking. They’re all very physical. You’re using your whole body oftentimes in these drills. And we’re gonna talk about that here in a bit. Before we got on the interview, you and I were discussing the connection between public speaking delivery and manliness. And one of those connections has to do with the improvisational nature of speaking. Tell us about that.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Men, as a behavior that we are suggested to embrace in our lives. And I don’t think it’s just men. I think it’s a good behavior in general. But we’re often suggested to really embrace decisiveness in our life, make a decision, take a risk, things like that. Well, here’s the miraculous thing about speaking. Talking is just a series of decisions. It is literally a flowchart of words in which your brain does as miracle of choosing one word after another and putting them together in a system that can be meaningful and powerful and persuasive to others in your life. So embrace that decision making that you get to do all day long, every day, and don’t shy away from it.

Brett McKay: I love it. I think improving your speaking can open up new vistas in your life, whether romantically, in your career, and just also friendships. And I think if you look at the history we’ve written a lot of about the history of masculinity and different cultures in time, public speaking in a lot of these cultures was a mark of manhood. It’s how you proved your manhood in ancient Greece, in ancient Rome and the Viking cultures, even your ability to tell a good yarn was a way you kind of showed yourself as a man. So maybe we can hearken into that today and revive that idea that speaking well is a manly thing.

So let’s get into some of these practices. I thought this was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed your book because I’m a guy who makes his living speaking as a podcast host. I thought this was very useful. And what I loved about it, all your practices are very physical. And one practice I thought was really interesting is you have people play with LEGOs. So why are you having people play with LEGOs while they’re public speaking?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Sure. The LEGOs are a practice exercise. And the reason I suggest people do it is because it helps them learn to do incredibly powerful things, like pause, like tolerate silence, like be concise, like structure their ideas, like remove filler. And the way it works is this. You consider some content you want to speak about. It could be a speech or even an elevator pitch or a presentation, whatever it might be. And you get a stack of LEGO blocks. But you don’t start just speaking right away. Instead, you pick up the first LEGO block before you begin speaking. And then you share just the first idea that you want to. You can also think of this, the first sentence of your content.

And at the end of that sentence or idea, instead of just powering through and going to the next thing, no, in silence, you place down that LEGO block and you live through that silence, pick up the next LEGO block, still in silence, and then share the second idea that you have, or the second sentence. Same thing at the end of that sentence or thought, you place down the LEGO block, but this time you click it in place with the previous, so that clicking action even takes a moment to complete, so it enforces some silence.

Then you pick up the third one, still being silent. Once you have it in the air, then you can say your idea out loud. Third thought, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. At the end of that idea, in silence, you click the LEGO block in place. And you keep doing this. And then you’ll probably run out of LEGOs. Maybe you use six or eight or 10 or whatever it might be. And if you have more that you want to say, you simply unstack them and continue. But what you’ll probably find when you try this exercise, is that you can actually complete a lot of really powerful thoughts in just six main sentences or six main ideas, or even four sometimes. What this is doing is using embodied cognition. So not just thinking about stuff, but actually thinking or learning using your body. It is using embodied cognition to teach you how to do those remarkable behaviors of pausing, owning silence, sharing your ideas in a deliberate manner. And it’s a much faster and a much better way to do that than all the thought suppression traps we talked about.

Brett McKay: So if you have a problem with rambling for example, this is a great drill to do to help you not ramble anymore? And I have this problem. Sometimes I’ll start a thought and I’ll start speaking it, and then I’m like, oh yeah, there’s another thought I wanna get to. And I just go into that and it just sounds like a mess. What’s interesting about this drill is not only is it gonna help improve your delivery, you’re not gonna sound like you’re rambling and jumping from thought to thought. This is an example of improving your delivery improves your content, because you actually have to stop and think about what you’re gonna say before you click on the next LEGO.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, it’s not an exaggeration to say, that this drill, I invented this drill in 2010, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that this drill is one of the foundational things that allowed me to have a thriving career in this field. I started teaching at Columbia Business School in 2016 and was giving feedback in presidential races soon after that. And that’s not to brag about my journey. I want the audience to hear this very clearly. That is to emphasize the power of this one single exercise. Because to your point, yes, it doesn’t just teach you better delivery skills, but it gives you an opportunity to actually think of the brilliant, smart, insightful stuff that you have to say and helps you say those things.

Brett McKay: Okay, again, this is a drill. It’s not something you’re not gonna be playing with LEGOs while you’re giving your presentation or on your first date. Maybe you can do this before so you can get some practice. So, yeah, we’re not telling people to play with LEGOs. But you do say if you’re doing a zoom call, for example, you could have the LEGOs maybe beneath you and you can do it then ’cause no one can see your hands.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, it’s a great clarification. Thank you for bringing it up. This metaphor should really hit home for people as well, which is, in sports, we understand this. There are practice exercises you do in practice to build a certain technique that you would never do in the game. Imagine a soccer player who had a TheraBand around their lower ankles to try to strengthen their legs in some way. Or supposedly Victor Wembanyama, the amazing center for the San Antonio spurs, would practice dribbling a basketball with gloves on. Or you’ve seen pictures of sprinters running with a parachute that they’re dragging behind their back. Now, none of those athletes would use those same things in the game. They’re essentially exercises to build some muscles. And that’s exactly what this LEGO exercise is. It’s a preparation, practice exercise to build these abilities. And once you practice it enough, what happens is you build muscle memory, and you can do them without the tools. But to your point, one of the gifts of remote communication is, yeah, you have this, what I call a digital cloak of invisibility. And so you can do some of the exercises in the book, even real time, when you’re on remote calls.

Be versatile. And by that I mean, okay, maybe if the LEGO blocks are a little bit too loud on a zoom call, ’cause you hear some clicking, just substitute and use your hand instead. Place your hand gently down on the table or desk in front of you. And when you do that, your job is to actually pause for a moment and consider what is my next thought or my next idea.

Brett McKay: So something that I struggle with and I’m pretty self conscious about as a podcast host, is being articulate. I sometimes have a hard time saying the right word or saying the word I want to say. So what I do is I say those filler words, um. I say like more than I’d like to. And the thing is, we edit a lot of those out. Before it goes live. There are other filler words that other people struggle with. Something I’ve noticed talking to people on the podcast, a lot of our guests will say sort of or kind of a lot, even when what they’re saying doesn’t need that sort of modifier and it actually doesn’t make sense. Someone will say, “Yeah, they’re sort of pregnant.” It’s like okay, well you can’t be sort of pregnant. You’re either pregnant or not. So this goes to the title of your book, Don’t Say Um. I know a lot of people, when they’re thinking about delivery, they want to be better about not saying um or like. So what can people start doing? What are some drills people can do to be more precise with their language and stop using filler words?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, so the title of the book is, Don’t Say Um. It’s a trick. The antidote to that is a chapter on linguistic precision. Now, by linguistic precision, what I mean is exactly what you said, choosing your words. The exercise, the kinesthetic exercise that I teach in that chapter is one called finger walking. And I’ll talk you through it right now and then also talk about what filler is and how to think about it slightly differently. The exercise is you take your second and third finger of either hand, and you as though your hand were a tiny little person or pedestrian, you walk your fingers across the table or desk in front of you. Walk your ideas one thought at a time. So when you’ve completed a thought, bring your hands back to the front of the desk and walk them forward again. And what you’re trying to do here, is you don’t have to overthink it like matching syllable by syllable or word by word, you’re using the activity of walking your fingers to also walk your ideas across the table. If you feel yourself saying um or a like or a kinda or a sorta or have another non-fluency of some kind, you pause the fingers and you wait until you’ve regained your focus and then you continue.

Now if you say an um, it’s not a problem with your brain, it’s not a problem with your mouth even. It’s a problem with your fingers. You have not been specific enough placing your fingers. This is an incredibly powerful drill for people because it’s super versatile. You can do this on remote calls, but no one knows you’re doing it. You and I could be doing it right now, every single word, if we wanted to. I’m not right now, but I certainly could, because this is audio only, and it helps people do what linguistic precision is designed to do, which is choose words. I’ll give you another example. If a kid runs in front of a bus and you have a split second to try to help that kid, no one says, “There is kind of a, it’s kinda sort of like kind of a bus coming.” Because in that moment, we’re totally focused on that kid and that message. And in that moment, we choose words. So this exercise helps people unlock that profound and primal skill of choosing words.

Brett McKay: Yeah. What I love about this drill, I’ve been practicing it, is it gets you out of your head. Because the tendency that I have when I say I need to focus on not saying um, I do what you were talking about other the pink elephant. I said, don’t say um, don’t say um. And then I just end up. I’m thinking about saying um all the time. So I say um a ton. So what this drill does, it just gets you out of your head and into your body, and that will just lead to you being more fluid in your speaking.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, exactly. And filler language is a big topic. We could keep going about it if you want to. I don’t know, you want to dive deeper on filler? We got a lot we should get to, so we can also move on if you want.

Brett McKay: Yeah. A little bit more. What is something else about filler that you think is important for people to understand?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. Well, the first thing is folks, be nice to yourself out there. And the reason I say that is because, let’s break it down with some math for a moment. Let’s say you say um every five seconds, which probably strikes you as a lot. Um is a single syllable. It’s a single sound. Average rate of speech is something like this. I’m speaking very generally here, but it’s something like this. Let’s call it three words per second. Let’s call each word an average of two syllables. So in a single second, you’re saying about six syllables. So that means every five seconds, you’re saying about 30 syllables. I hope everyone stuck with me on that math. Now, let’s say you say one um every five seconds. That means one out of every 30 syllables is a filler sound. And I’m guessing if in other parts of your life, you had a habit that only affected 3% of a given thing, you wouldn’t be that hard on yourself about it. So they may not be as big of a deal as you think. That does not mean, it’s not worth trying to be better at becoming more linguistically precise and choosing your words.

But be nice to yourself while you go on that journey. And as you’re going on that journey, I also invite you to broaden your idea of what filler language actually is. I’ll give you a couple criteria to think about it. If the answer to both of these questions is no, then this word is a filler word for you. Here’s the first question. Is it grammatically necessary? If the answer is no, let’s move on to the second one. Are you aware that you’re doing it? And if both of those answers are no, then that word is probably filler for you as well. Here’s a ridiculous example. I one time coached a client who used the word viscerally as filler. I swear, every couple sentences viscerally would appear, didn’t make any sense at all, didn’t fit grammatically, and he wasn’t even aware he was doing it. So keep in mind, there may be a bunch of words that you’re overusing that are not necessary and that are crutches.

Brett McKay: Going to that point of being nice to yourself. Something that I, maybe I’ll let people know. I’ve interviewed a lot of people on the podcast, over a thousand. And a lot of those people are in the media, they’re on radio, they have their own podcast, they’re on television. And even those individuals, they have a hard time with um and like, and well, and the like. So if even the pros have problems with it sometimes, it’s okay if you have problems, but we can make improvements to it. So yeah, don’t beat yourself up, if you do say um a lot. I think that’s useful ’cause I think beating yourself up just will cause the problem to grow even more. It doesn’t solve the problem, just makes it worse.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, this is my exact point. Instead of feeling bad about the same behavior for now, years or decades even if there’s something that you feel bad about, stop feeling bad about it by actually doing something about it. So as opposed to obsessing about your ums, no, just practice the finger walking drill and practice it a bunch and pretty soon what will happen is you will make improvement. And that improvement all of a sudden makes you actually feel great, makes you have an appetite to improve further. And that’s the entire point about taking such a physical approach in the book.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. All right, so another delivery issue I have. I’m gonna use this as in private, this podcast as some private coaching. But another delivery issue that I’ve been battling for a while is enunciation and speaking too fast. Sometimes I’m the micro machine guy. Do you remember the micro machine guy on the advertisements?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: You’re talking my generational language right now. So yes, I do of course.

Brett McKay: You talk bout how improving your enunciation can actually help people slow down their speaking. How does that work? And what are some drills for that?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, well, you don’t have to believe me. You can just test it. Say some huge bit of technical jargon or some multisyllabic phrase. Now notice that in order to enunciate that multisyllabic phrase, it takes some time. Enunciation takes time. I’ll give you a silly example actually, only silly ’cause it’s a single word. If I don’t give a little bit of time on the M in the word time, it could sound like I’m saying tide or tight, or type, as in typing on a typewriter or a computer. Enunciation takes time to actually make these sounds different from each other. And that’s just a single syllable word, time. So you could even think that saying time takes that thing time. But what about a multisyllabic word like hypochondria or exceptionalism, things like this? To get through those words with multi syllables, you actually have to take the time to make all of those precise movements. If you were thinking of a sport, again in order to do a complex move in basketball or dribbling or something, it does take time. So the very act of learning to enunciate more dynamically and committing to your enunciation actually can slow you down.

This is profoundly important to people, because part of why language is so incredible is it is onomatopoetic. And by that I mean, words often sound like the thing that they are. Slap, bell, snake. These are words that sound like the thing that they are. But if you don’t enunciate them, your audience will not feel the emotional impact of these.

So the question becomes then, if enunciation is important, which it is, and if focusing on it can actually have the side benefit of slowing you down. If you are a very, very rapid speaker, how do you use or how do you practice drills, I should say, to help enunciation? Now, in this book, everything that you’re gonna read is things that I’ve invented. So lots and lots of drills that I’ve developed working with professionals. But the next one that I’m gonna tell you for enunciation has nothing to do with me. I can take no credit for it. I will give a shout out to Andrew Wade. He was a voice and speech teacher I worked with at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. But he’s former head of the voice and speech at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London.

But even he doesn’t get the credit, because he learned it from someone who learned it from someone. And the principle goes all the way back to ancient Greece and an orator named Demosthenes. But we only know about this ancient orator named Demosthenes because Herodotus wrote down about what he was doing. So it probably goes back even further than that. So if that does not give it some historical cred and you don’t want to try it, I don’t know what will. Anyway, you put an impediment in between your teeth. And if a toothbrush works, and if a pen, your pinky finger, a slice of wine cork is a great one to use because it has a little give, so you have a little cushion there. But people, very important, safety first. If you use the wine cork, do not inhale the cork. That would not be a good outcome for speaking, okay? But you put the impediment in between your teeth just over to the side, so not right in front where it might block your tip of tongue sounds. Like T and D and N and L, T, D, N, L. Put it just to the side. And then you practice navigating around that impediment and making sure that every single syllable is totally clear, even with that impediment.

And of course, what happens is your enunciation gets supercharged, and of course, your rate of speech slows too, because you have to navigate around that impediment, whatever it is, in order to speak.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve done that before. I think it’s a very powerful tool. Another tool that actors have used for a long time are tongue twisters. Unique New York, unique New York. Is that something else you have clients do?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yes, absolutely. And by the way, back to the sports metaphor, folks this is not a wacky thing of like, “Oh, yeah, I saw Ron Burgundy and Anchorman do it. How silly that is.” No, people, if you accept this brave idea I’m putting forth that speaking is physical. It is a sport. Then you would never do a sport without warming up. You might pull a muscle, you might hurt yourself, or you just might not perform at your peak. Speaking is the same thing. So it stands to reason, if you are relying on the muscles of speech to perform well and accomplish whatever goal you have as a communicator, it stands to reason you should warm up. So those tongue twisters, those are a type of warmup, and there’s a whole bunch of them. I’ll give you the funniest one, which this is not for the faint of heart, folks. Do not try this at home. You might get injured. Here we go. I am a pleasant mother pheasant plucker, I pluck pleasant mother pheasants. I’m the best pleasant mother pheasant plucker. Whoever plucked a pleasant mother pheasant. You can see why that has some pitfalls.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Would you do that with the cork in your mouth too? Is that something you can do to increase the strenuosity of the drill?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. You all have seen Steph Curry of the Golden State warriors doing his pregame prep when he dribbles multiple balls and makes the job harder and harder and harder for himself. Yeah. Increase the level of difficulty because you are a communication athlete. And here’s another fun thing. If you have a smartphone or even a cell phone, I’m guessing many people listening to this do, that gives you camouflage to do tongue twisters and warm up anywhere in the world, anytime, and no one knows that you’re doing it. So memorize some of the tongue twisters you can find in the book or on our website and talk into your phone and just do these tongue twisters like you’re having a conversation with someone else. And the reason I say this, is because I wanna remove any excuse you have that would prevent you from embracing this life practice, because it’s a great one.

Brett McKay: That’s a great one. That’s what I love about your book and your ideas, is that it gives you something to do. Oftentimes when you read public speaking books or how to improve your delivery, they don’t give you anything to do. So it’s just you read it and you’re like okay, well I’ll try to remember that next time. And we’ve got stuff to do. I love this. Let’s talk about vocal variety. That’s another thing people often think about when they’re presenting, like, “Am I being too monotone or am I doing too much vocal variety.” How should people think about vocal variety in their public speaking? Or should they not think too much about it?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: They should think about it for the next two or three minutes when I teach them about it. And then they should forget it for the rest of their lives. And here’s a cool reason why. You know it, you know how to do it, and you know it in your bones. Because humans use vocal variety for some really important things, like communicating the meaning of what they’re saying, like communicating the emotion of what they’re saying, like framing things with some context or orientation, and also crucially, to surprise each other. We use vocal variety to keep people engaged. Monotone voices actually don’t use any novelty. When there’s novelty, our brains tend to disengage. Think of this like the white noise of a fan in the background. Soon you hear that pattern will never change. And so now that you know it won’t change, you can ignore it forever because it’s no longer danger or delight. You hear that? So this is not something you should have to be dramatic. This is a core part of how humans reach each other. How do you improve it then? So here’s a quick system, and then you can forget it.

Vocal variety is something humans have been doing a long time. I just established that. So I didn’t invent that at all. But I did invent this naming system you’re about to learn to make it alliterative and therefore, hopefully easy. Pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement. Pace is speed. Pitch is high and low. Pause is silence, and varied lengths of silence.

Power is volume. So that’s loud and soft. Loud and soft. And then placement means where the sound is placed in your body. We are musical instruments. We have a reed in our throat. That’s our vocal cords. They vibrate and they get amplified throughout our whole entire body. So we can have our voice placed differently. If you have a friend with a really nasal voice, what’s happening technically is the sound is only amplifying in the mask of the face and the nasal passages. So we all can relate to that, of course. What we’re aiming for here is more vocal variety. For the most part. Most people contract their vocal variety when they’re nervous or giving a big presentation or public speaking of any kind. Or to your point, the example of being on a date even, when we’re under pressure, we tend to contract our vocal variety, and we should instead be trying to expand it. For the most part.

You can go too far, and we could talk about that if you want to, but that’s very, very rare indeed. For most people, the trick is to expand it. And the cool thing is they’re very interlocked, so you honestly can expand any one of them. And what they tend to do is bring all the others along for the ride. And I can tell you a couple exercises to do that, if you want to know.

Brett McKay: Yeah. What are some exercises that people can start doing today to improve their vocal variety?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, here’s a fun one. It’s called silent storytelling. I want you to talk, but you don’t get to use any sound. So you have to basically mouth the words or lip sync the words. You have to move your face a lot. Lots of facial expressions to help an audience know what you were saying. And you have to allow your hand to gesture with freedom and ease because you don’t have the advantage of sound. So think of this like lip syncing a little bit. You’re not playing charades. Let me be clear about that. You’re not acting things out, per se. You’re just heightening all of the physical aspects of your communication, because you don’t get to use sound. So you’re lip syncing words, but as expressively as you can. Do that for a few minutes. And then put sound back into the equation. But you’re not allowed to contract everything. Okay? Your enunciation and dynamic lip movement has to be just as big, your facial expressions just as big, your gestural ease and freedom just as expanded. And what happens, like magic, is all of a sudden your voice has much more vocal variety. I’ll teach you a phrase I learned from Ralph Zito, who taught at the Juilliard School when I trained with him.

And the phrase is your voice is your body. And I’ll say it differently. I’m gonna pound my chest for a second. You can hear this. Your voice is your body. And I’ll plug my nose now. Your voice is your body. So if you change how your body is operating, your voice changes dramatically too. And the silent storytelling exercise does that.

Brett McKay: I love that. That’s a great one. Okay, so we’ve talked about things we can do to improve our delivery with our voice. Enunciating, slowing down, being more precise with our words. Let’s talk about eye contact. I know a lot of people when they’re speaking in front of a group or a large audience, they might be thinking, okay, “Where am I supposed to look?” Do I just look at the back? Do I look at a random spotlight? Do I look at a group of people? So how do we do eye contact when we’re speaking to a group. And why is it important to even think about eye contact when you’re speaking to a whole bunch of people?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: It’s essential to think about it, because the way we talk about eye contact, it’s a misnomer. In fact, I don’t even like the phrase eye contact because it sounds like it’s something you have. Brett has good eye contact, like it’s a possession or a trait even, but it’s not. Eye contact is an activity. It is an activity of evaluating if your message is reaching your audience or not. That’s why we do it. And you can think of a whole bunch of thought experiments, talking to a lost tourist or helping a person who doesn’t speak English understand something. You would be looking at them and looking at them directly to learn as much information as you can. So eye contact is crucial. And it’s crucial when you’re talking to large groups as well. And this is one of the places we hear the worst kind of feedback, which is again, the reductive. Make eye contact for 8-12 seconds. Okay, why? Why that length of time? People have watched people, they say, well, that’s about how long they do it. So I guess we should make that the average. No.

Look at individual people and try to elicit some kind of nonverbal response or cue from them to see if your message is resonating. And look at different people around the room. Now, if it’s a huge audience, you don’t have to look at every single person. If it’s an audience of thousands, you will never be able to look at everybody. But if you do reach individuals in various places of the audience, what happens, because of how we’re put together as communication instruments, your communication will improve because of that eye contact. It will unlock a virtuous cycle because as you work harder to reach that person, you’re gonna gesture, you’re gonna enunciate more, you’re gonna use vocal variety and breathe. All of these things will unlock. So look at individual people. Try to elicit some kind of a nonverbal cue from them. You may not win, by the way. You may not get that. That’s okay. Even in the act of trying, you’ll still get some success. And then throw out all the garbage. 8-12 seconds, four different quadrants of the room. Look at people’s foreheads so you don’t get distracted. Scan above their heads. All this conventional wisdom that I would posit is not wise at all.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about one thing that a lot of people maybe think too much about, when they’re public speaking. They often get like, was it Ricky Bobby and Talladega Nights? Where they’re like, “I don’t know what to do with my hands.” So what are you supposed to do with your hands and gestures when you’re speaking?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, here’s the hilarious thing, folks. There’s a good reason that you’re confused about that, because you can probably think on your own of two, three, five, 10 don’ts about gestures. It’s like, don’t point at your audience, don’t make distracting hand gestures, don’t cross your arms, don’t fidget your fingers, don’t keep your hands in your pockets, don’t jangle the coins in your pockets, don’t put your hands behind your back. That looks like you’re hiding something. It just goes on and on and on. And so soon you have the question like well, okay, what the heck should I do with them? And all those don’ts, back to the idea of thought suppression and the title of the book of course, just makes people chronically self focused. Which is why you end up with these limbs hanging off your shoulders and you have no idea what to do with. So this goes back to the same idea of other focus. You have to figure out how you use your hands in real life when you’re focused on reaching the other person, not thinking about what you’re doing with your hands. For most people, that means moving your hands more than you might think.

I am not a fan of the don’t make distracting hand gestures advice for all of the reasons I just said. But one of the most brutal is this, is that when people tend to constrain their gestures, they tend to constrain everything else too. So their vocal variety vanishes, their face becomes totally stoic, and still oftentimes their enunciation even becomes less dynamic, and they just look like a more boring version of themselves. Who wants that? So what should you do? Well, you should try to liberate your hands to do what they wanna do. To speak with gestural freedom and ease. Now, I’m not saying make just like general hand waving repetitive motions. I’ll give you a funny example. I one time was involved somewhere where they had some curriculum that suggested that people think about gestures, like keeping a beach ball aloft. Okay? So everyone dutifully stood up and waved their hands like they were keeping a beach ball aloft, but they just kept doing the same gesture over and over again. Now, the idea of course, was to try to get them moving their hands a little bit, which is good. But the image and the activity was so arbitrary that it didn’t actually unlock how people speak in real life.

So instead, what I would suggest is there’s two exercises in the book that I list. One is the silent storytelling drill that I already described for vocal variety. And again, how this drill can work is you speak, but without sound. So you exaggerate your facial expressiveness. And yes, use your hands as much as possible to try to illustrate what you’re talking about so that an audience watching with no sound could understand your message. And what happens, of course, is your hands get liberated to move quite a lot. And then once you’ve done that a bit, let it go, put sound back into your speech, and then enjoy the freedom that your hands have just realized.

So that’s one. This next one is for you athletes out there. Get a ball, a bouncy ball you can throw against a wall, like a racquetball, tennis ball, something like this. And then practice speaking whatever content you want to, but throw the ball at the wall and catch it on the rebound. But now, this time, try to throw the ball in as big and as wide a range as possible. So you have to really reach to catch the ball on the rebound.

And then, talk while you do this. Now, it’s gonna be difficult ’cause your brain’s doing two things, catching the ball and talking. So it’ll take some coordination to get it down. But then what you’re gonna realize is, oh my gosh, my hands have this huge range they can actually occupy. And then, hold the ball in your hand, don’t throw it anymore and continue to speak. But allow your hands to tell a story too. All of those tools are to liberate people who tend to constrain their gestures way too much. The rare over talkers with their hands. It’s not that you’re over talking, it’s that you’re telling the same darn story over and over again. They’re just doing the same thing. So instead of giving yourself thought suppression of, don’t make distracting hand gestures or don’t talk with your hands. Instead, challenge yourself to be better. Make your hands tell a better story. And those would be some tools for gestures.

Brett McKay: I love that. So we’ve talked about some really concrete drills that people can start doing today in their daily life to improve their delivery. No matter how much you prepare, there’s a chance you’ll still get nervous when you’re speaking. Any advice for people to help manage their nerves when they do arise, when they’re in a public speaking situation? Or even it could be a first date situation.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah. I want to answer this with as much generosity as I can. And to prove that point, if you go to the book’s website, dontsayum.com, you get the Navigating Nerves chapter for free. And when I call it Navigating Nerves, because that should be the goal. Not stopping, not preventing, not battling, navigating. And we’re gonna keep that chapter free, because whether or not people buy this book. I desperately want to help folks who have been stuck in some sort of self defeating cycle for a long, long time to get some liberation about nerves in their life. So I called it Navigating Nerves, because most people make the first mistake by being in opposition to their nerves. So all those combative verbs, battle, suppress, fight, all they do is make the nerves worse. Again, it’s back to this idea of thought suppression. So if you’re telling yourself, don’t be nervous, don’t be nervous, stop being nervous. Or even putting some self judgment on there, like why are you always nervous? Why do you get so nervous? Why are you so bad at this? Don’t be nervous, stop being nervous. You can hear the voice. All you’re doing is actually amping up your nerves and also amping up your feelings of failure about that.

So step number one, you’re going to be nervous. And you might in fact be nervous for the rest of your life and they might even get worse. Why? Because you are going to attain bigger and bigger victories in your life, your career and your life and your goals and everything about your life will get better and better, folks. Especially if you do all the lessons they’re learning on the Art of Manliness podcast. You’re gonna get better and better, which means you’ll attain bigger and bigger heights. And when you do that, guess what? It might feel even more nerve wracking to be at that new height. That’s good. It means that you care. It means that you’re invested. It means that your central nervous system, by the way, is very reactive. These are good things, so stop trying to fight them. You will be nervous. Now that you’ve reset them, your goal is not to distract yourself with something utterly arbitrary. Just imagine your audience in their underwear, because now your brain has to multitask. Naked people.

And what am I trying to say? Naked people, my message. Naked people, my message. Naked people, my message. Naked people, ah. Instead, find something physical and unmistakable and measurable that you can focus on, that gives you a positive point of focus. That could be grounding your feet. That could be really being mindful of your tip of tongue, sounds in your enunciation. That could be your eye contact and trying to elicit a reaction from various faces in the room. That could be breathing, feeling your backside ribs expand as you allow air to come into your body. It could be any of those things. But put your focus on something physical and then allow that to help you navigate through the nerves. And the better and better you get at putting your attention 100% on that thing. What happens, is the nerves begin to fade away, but not because you fought them, but because you’ve put your focus elsewhere and some are more productive.

Brett McKay: Well Michael, it has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Michael Chad Hoeppner: Yeah, for sure. Well, you can follow us on social if you’re a social fan, you can just search for GK Training and all the various socials you might want to. But more specifically for the book, the book’s website is, Don’t Say Um. Just the same title, dontsayum.com. And my company is GK Training. And the URL there is just gktraining.com and that’s where you can find all the warmups and tongue twisters and exercises I talked about earlier.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Michael Chad Hoeppner, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Michael Chad Hoeppner: My pleasure too. Thank you.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Michael Chad Hoeppner. He’s the author of the book, Don’t Say Um. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website dontsayum.com, also check out our show notes at aom.is/um, where you find links to our resources, we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com. You find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter. It’s called DYING BREED. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net, it’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Remind each other to listen to the AOM podcast. But put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.