Communication

Pete Mockaitis
Ruth, welcome!

Ruth Milligan
Hello! How are you?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m good. Very good. I’m excited to chat about speaking. I’m very motivated, if you will, to be discussing it.

Ruth Milligan
No pun intended. There we go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to hear, you’ve been in the speaking game for quite a while, coaching, consulting, curating, speaking yourself. Can you tell me, what’s the most surprising and fascinating thing you’ve discovered about us humans and speaking over the course of your career?

Ruth Milligan
The most fascinating is that we don’t want to hear ourselves talk. And that’s a challenge because we want people to want to listen because that is the number one way to improve.

So, if you can get through that threshold and get through that kind of troublesome sticky spot in your head, that you’re not going to die when you listen to yourself, and that no one actually has to know when you do, it can be very, very, very, very helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s speak right into the heart of that. It’s the most effective way to improve, and yet we don’t want to do it. Can you share why don’t we want to do it? And how can we get over that?

Ruth Milligan
I think our perception of ourselves is always different than what we see. So, for instance, I’ll listen back to every podcast, every recording, and I see my sister because we have a lot of similarities. And I think, “Ooh, do I want to be like my sister?” My sister is fine. Don’t get me wrong. But you’re like, “Oh, I want to be me.”

And then sometimes it’s, “Ooh, do I really sound like that?” and we surprise ourselves. And then that’s hard because, at least I believe, we say, “Ooh,” that’s not what we want our audiences to hear. And so, there’s this disconnect that we have to sort of bring together as to, “What do we want to be perceived and seen as? And how are we doing that?” “And are they this far apart or are they this far apart?”

And the best way to do that is habits, practice, watching, listening back. And if you just haven’t done it, it’s a little cringy. Have you listened? I bet when you started your podcast, you started listening back to yourself, right? What did you learn when you started that?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I did. Well, it’s funny, well, from lots of keynote speeches, I listened and watched those recordings as well. And so, I’ve had to go both ways. And at times I think, “Well, this is so fun and entertaining. I wish more speeches were just like this.”

And other times I’m a little disappointed like, “Oh, Pete, I can tell you didn’t actually do your research, your homework, your practice as much here, and the audience suffered as a result.” And so, I feel some guilt, shame there.

Ruth Milligan
Correct, because you’re playing through your head, “Oh, I coulda, shoulda, woulda,” and you can’t dial back time. You can’t have that time back.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Although, of course, if you listened to your recordings before the big audience presentation, you can. You can fix it.

Ruth Milligan
Correct. That’s it. And I think you can’t draw it back, and there is a little bit of regret. I don’t live with a lot of regret, but I think that in those moments you say, “Oh, it could have been…” You have to work through those emotions. And so, that’s what happens when you watch yourself is you’re going through a bunch of emotions that you normally don’t experience. And so, it’s easier just to not do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, now you’re bringing me back to, I think, the most troubling recording ever. I remember I did a whole school assembly. It was at Hayworth High School, if anyone was there. And I was just starting my career as a professional speaker. And I had mostly spoken in the student audience context at leadership conferences where they selected one student from each high school.

And in those contexts, I was crushing it. On the speaker evaluations, I was number one out of 20 plus. So, I thought, “I’m great at speaking. I’m down with the young people.” And then in this different environment of high school students, I bombed. It was really spooky. I asked the principal for an endorsement. And then he told me in a lengthy email how terrible I was and how they wish they could have gotten their money back.

Ruth Milligan
In an email?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Ruth Milligan
Oh, bad practice.

Pete Mockaitis
I was shocked. And so, I shared it with a speaker-mentor friend, Mawi, episode number one. And, really, he’s so good, he said, “Well, Pete, it’s really great that you’re doing this because a lot of people just don’t even ever want to look at it.” And it was very helpful in terms of rewatching it together. And he said, “Well, first of all…” Go ahead.

Ruth Milligan
No, I was going to say together. That’s a very important word.

Pete Mockaitis
Watching it together, it was so useful, he said, “Well, first of all, Pete, we got to take some of what the principal said with a grain of salt, because he said, ‘I heard nothing about bad things.’” This is a direct quote for the email, “And yet I’m seeing multiple occasions of this audience laughing. So, clearly, it was not 100 % bad.” Okay, cool. So, we’ve got some perspective. “And also note…”

And then we really got into it, he was like, “Hey, Pete, they don’t even understand what that word means. It’s, like, you could be speaking gibberish to this audience in this place. Also, tell me about the setup and with the client.” And it’s like, “Yes, no matter what happens, it’s going to be your fault, so you have to grab the context, the information, the goals from them even when they’re being difficult in saying, ‘Oh, I guess that sounds good.’”

And so, it was so useful going through it. And it might have been painful, but, in some ways, I was just so spooked and surprised to have missed the mark so epically, the most ever in my life in the speaking environment that I just had to see what the heck happened here with a pro.

Ruth Milligan
The biggest extra learning that we’ve had, since particularly we wrote the book, was one research study assembled all the other research studies on feedback, like 500, I don’t know, maybe millions, I don’t know. But there was one central thing, and if your listeners are listening to anything about feedback, this is it.

When you speak and someone hears you, you get to go first in giving yourself feedback before they do. Because when they’re giving you feedback, they’re the ones learning. When you are the one first reflecting or giving yourself feedback, you’re learning. And learning is the goal to do better. If I said to you, “Hey, Pete, that really sucked,” like your teacher or your principal, that’s how I feel and that’s my opinion. And you live in choice, like every audience does, to accept or reject it. You can believe it or not.

But if I said, “Hey, Pete, how do you think you did?” You’re forced to think through, “Did I prepare enough? How did that go? What did I feel like?” And I may not have to say anything to you.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So that’s the best practice when giving feedback is to ask first and…

Ruth Milligan
And the person who’s giving feedback actually says, “Tell me how you feel” first. Full stop. It seems kind of silly and rudimentary, but it’s so powerful because 90% of what you’re going to tell me is what I might want to tell you, but because you’ve come to the conclusion, you’re more likely to want to fix it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and if you do discover, “Oh, there’s epic blind spots here,” well, then it’s probably also still effective because then there’s an emotional component of huge surprise like, “Whoa.” And then it’ll probably stick even more, even though you’re sharing the same things.

Ruth Milligan
So, can I tell a quick story?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes.

Ruth Milligan
I gave some feedback to a speaker after a big presentation practice day. We were at dinner. And I’ll call him Tom. I said, “Hey, Tom, do you know what an umm-er is?” And he says, “No, I don’t know what an umm-er is.” And I said, “Well, okay. An umm-er is this, somebody who uses um’s, filler words.” And I said, “Tom, do you know you’re an umm-er?” And he said, “I am?” And I said, “Yeah.” He goes, “Like a few times?” And I was like, “Hmm, like every fourth word.”

And he really wasn’t interested in the feedback. And everyone in the room heard it. Everyone in the room looked at me, and said, “Help him.” So, two days later, we come back for another round and he comes barreling in with the same umming, not even attempting. And I said, “Hey, Tom, do you remember the recording I sent you? Did you have a chance to listen to a minute of it?” Because I’m looking for him to hear himself, right, versus me just telling him.

He’s like, “No, no, I didn’t need to listen to that. I just decided I’m going to be more conversational.” “How’s that working out for you?” He was solving the problem he thought he had, not the problem he had. And I couldn’t, at that point, you say, “Okay, I did my best.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s illustrative, because I think we all do that, or can do that, to some extent, in that, being more conversational is a thing that might be effective, but it’s a different solution to a different thing.

Ruth Milligan
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
But it’s interesting how in our brains, especially if we’re not a master of a thing yet, we can conflate, because I think, in many ways, mastery of something is largely about the capacity to distinguish between nuances. And if you’re not yet mastering, you’re going to think, “Oh, umming means not conversational.” And I’ve done that in other domains in terms of…

Ruth Milligan
So, what would that mean to you if you heard, “I made it more conversational”? Like, you’re a conversationalist for a living. Like, I couldn’t even make the connection to why he thought getting rid of a filler word would be solved by becoming more casual. Anyway, we don’t have to dissect it, but like it is interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, there’s an interesting link there and…

Ruth Milligan
Yeah, I think it’s illustrative of the gap between what we believe we need and what we do. And if we don’t watch ourselves, we’re going to pick the wrong thing.

Pete Mockaitis
I think I’ve come to learn in life, generally speaking, if we want to advance or improve a thing, a domain, we’ll probably require either time and/or money, and/or outside expertise, and/or confronting our own weakness, foibles, mistakes or so.

So, I would just say that, in a way, humility itself is a resource we can deploy to improve on a thing and sometimes it might be unpleasant but it can save you time and money. So, it’s like, “Humble yourself and watch the recording.”

Ruth Milligan
Exactly. And I promise, no one’s ever died. I mean, there are things that we do that are painful in life. That really shouldn’t be one of them, but it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you. Well, right off the bat, that’s great stuff.

Ruth Milligan
There you go. That’s all we got. Are we done? I’m just kidding.

Pete Mockaitis
We could be. But you got a book here, The Motivated Speaker.

Ruth Milligan
We do.

Pete Mockaitis
And you start the book, The Motivated Speaker, by discussing, this is so meta, the concept of a threshold concept. So, what do you mean by this term? And why is that important?

Ruth Milligan
Sure. About 10 years ago, two guys, Meyer and Land, put a label on the thing that is recursive, troublesome, sticky, and when you encounter it, you can’t go back, you don’t unsee it. It’s that transformative kind of liminal space, you have to reach for it. And when you’re on the other side of it, everything else you do becomes better.

So, to the title of your podcast, How to be Awesome at Your Job, there are threshold concepts about business. There are threshold concepts about podcasting. There are threshold concepts that you had to learn certain things in order to be really good at this podcast game. And if you didn’t learn them, you would be average at it.

Our mentor who named the concepts for learning to write, we asked her, we said, “Does anyone ever name the concepts for learning to speak?” And she said, “No.” So, she took us under her wing for the better part of a year, and the only thing we wanted to do was just be better coaches. We wanted to understand, when somebody called us with a problem, we had an anchor to say, “What haven’t you learned yet?” Not just, “What are you doing wrong?” And those are two different things.

“I can hear you say ‘um,’ but what haven’t you learned yet? You haven’t learned that breath is a central character in the story of getting rid of your filler words. You haven’t learned that the habit of working out of that is the threshold concept for replacing your filler words.”

So, we cut the cloth a little differently on this communicator versus communication, the book is about the human as the communicator, not about the thing that you’re doing, like producing. It’s not about presentations. It’s not about script writing. It’s not about slide design. It is about the things that you need to do to be an awesome speaker.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s really an interesting distinction right there. It’s, “Hey, knock off the vocal pauses. Cut it out.” But rather a threshold concept, “What haven’t you learned yet?” Like, the threshold of a door, it’s like, “Oh, once I enter through this, this has been opened up for me.”

Ruth Milligan
It’s a portal. Totally, a portal.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, could you give us an example of a threshold concept, like a there’s a time before we learned it, and then we had to get it, and then we got it, and then it’s transformative?

Ruth Milligan
Sure. These are things that we have encountered forever, but they just haven’t been organized or named in a way that they’re easily accessible. So, we didn’t create them or discover them, but we named them. Very big distinction. And so, here’s an example. If my client, the umm-er, had understood that nobody’s a natural speaker. If he said, “Ruth, you’re a natural speaker,” I’d say that’s BS. I’m actually not a natural speaker. I’m a well-practiced speaker.

Nobody comes out speaking out of the womb. We all have to learn the habits of speaking. If he had appreciated that he has to work out of that habit, like he worked into it, he would have taken the few tips I gave him and walked around saying, “Okay, I have to do this thing.” I gave him a specific thing to do. He didn’t do it. And that’s the habit.

So, the first one is speaking is habitual, not natural. We don’t just become a speaker because our mouth is open. We become a speaker because we practice at our genre with our audiences, to our goals, with our content, with our story.

So, there are six of them. They’re all in the same sort of category of things that you obviously have to encounter. And once you do, things become a lot clearer as to how to become that great speaker you want to become.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So, a threshold concept, speaking is habitual, not natural, that is a threshold concept insofar as prior to internalizing this, you are kind of stuck.

Ruth Milligan
Right. And I might say, “Oh, I can’t be that speaker.” Like, you might say to yourself, “Oh, yeah, that person is such a natural. I could never be that way.” And our argument is that’s a lie. It’s a myth. And with the right practice, like anything, you can become better at it.

And so, to dial down that, like, “I can’t do it” to “How can I do it?” well, the first thing you need to do is realize that if you practice. So, here’s a good example. We did like a practice podcast about five months ago, and I came out with, like, a bunch of ums. I was mortified. This is my business. And I walked around for a week and I just did the trick that I know that I need to do and I’m happy to share it with you.

Every time I spoke, I worked my way out of it. A few days later, it was good. What is it, 21 days to a better habit, generally? But if you don’t know you have the habit, and you don’t know how to get out of it, then you can’t practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that, well, I believe that, that great speaking is habitual and not natural. For those who are skeptical, can you prove it, Ruth? I mean, you’ve got many clients who have improved, but let’s just imagine, who were some of the greatest speakers throughout history, or in our modern era? And did they, in fact, have to build up a lot of habits?

Ruth Milligan
I’ll give you one. Nikki Glaser reported, before she gave her opening monologue at the Golden Globes, she practiced 94 times. I forget how long it was, six or seven minutes. She counted 94 times. She shows up and she doesn’t miss a beat, but she doesn’t want to take any risk.

Even though she might’ve even also been on a teleprompter, she still practiced 94 times because, in comedy, and her genre, this is a genre, us speaking on a podcast, Nikki has got a genre, timing is everything. And if she’s not practicing that timing, she’s not going to land the joke, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Ruth Milligan
Martin Luther King, actually, his talk, most consequential talk, I believe, punctuates with the right timing to make the points, “We’re moving from the heat and oppression of today to the oasis of freedom of tomorrow.” He didn’t say, “We’re moving from the heat and oppression of today to the…” It has intentionality. It has stickiness. It has suspense. It has inflection. I promise you he practiced that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I think comedians are a great example because, in a way, they do seem very natural to us, “Oh, they’re just so funny. That guy, he’s just so funny.” So, how much are they practicing those sets?

Ruth Milligan
Here’s a good example. Last month, I saw Tina Fey and Amy Poehler together in their tour. And at one point, Amy came out on stage and said, “Okay, everybody, this is the point where I’m working out some new content.” And she stopped a few times, and, “Oh, got to work on that. That’s not working out.”

Like, she’s trying to see if what she’s saying will land. She is writing in the moment. So, I think that humor is one of the hardest genres to write or deliver, personally, because there’s so much expectation from the audience to get the joke, to get the context, and to say, like, “I’m smarter because I got it. I feel smarter because I understand the humor and it made me laugh. It me feel a certain way.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ve heard anecdotes that it can, indeed, be well over a hundred times of trying, cutting, refining, refining the material.

Ruth Milligan
Yeah. And so, to think that somebody can show up on a Monday, and say, “Oh, let’s give a talk on a Tuesday and wing it and make it work,” is a little bit of, “Oh, you must be superhuman because I don’t know anybody that can do that,” unless they have been spending, you know. Here’s a good example. We’ve been spending the better part of 20 months with our content. I should be able to, and can if you’d quiz me, I have one line for each of the concepts.

It took us months and months to write and refine, and write and refine, and get to that quick point that you would understand that still gets to the point. So, we can’t shortcut these things, is the bottom line.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so there we have it. First and foremost, habitual not natural. Can we hear the other five concepts?

Ruth Milligan
Sure. And I will do it with one sentence each to see if I’ve got this down. Ready?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ruth Milligan
Speaking is social. Your audience is always making meaning of what you’re saying. You’re rarely ever just talking to yourself, and if you are, it’s probably before coffee and it’s a babble. If your audience speaks Spanish, they don’t want to hear it in French. That goes for jargon. It goes for acronyms. Your audience is also, it’s fleeting, meaning your audience is there and then they’re not, meaning your words are not going to stick. They’re going to fade. Speaking is social.

Speaking is embodied. If I asked you to pick up the book and read a sentence, which I’m not going to, you would be reading the written word, versus embodying it, delivering it, speaking it. My favorite embodiment is, if I said to you these words, you would know who the speaker was because he embodies this pace and tone and rhythm, “Last night, Michelle and I, we went to the movies.” You know who I’m talking about?

Pete Mockaitis
So, Michelle, so I will go with Barack Obama.

Ruth Milligan
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
But what I remember most about Barack Obama is that he’ll go slow and then he speeds it up.

Ruth Milligan
There you go. If somebody had written that script for him, which would have said, like, “Last night, my wife, Michelle, and I went to the Lennox Theatre to see ‘The Terminator’ movie and we had a great time.” That would have been what somebody might have written. See the difference?

So, anyway. So, number three, speaking is embodied. We have to bring our whole, and we have to get it off the page. We can’t just, like, if reading it is not speaking it, so.

Pete Mockaitis
The AI will destroy us all.

Ruth Milligan
Next one. Speaking comes in many genres. This is a genre. Podcasting, keynotes, convention speeches, they’re all different genres, and they have different rules and conventions. And for the most part, the host, you, are setting the rules. So, you tell me how much time we have. You tell me what channel we want to be on. You tell me what topics we want to discuss. Same thing with any conference, any event. So, speaking comes in many genres, and you need to know the conventions to be successful.

Speaking is messy. So, if I ask you, Pete, “What’s your life story?” You might say, “Oh, where should I start?” And the problem is there are many places to start and many places to finish. The iteration of your content, what to get in, what to get out. “How do I take that 100 pounds of information and shove it into a 10-pound bag?” requires the iteration.

Speaking requires feedback, and yours first, mainly first. And if you don’t want to listen to yourself, then you’re going to probably not hit that threshold of true learning.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, each of these are threshold concepts insofar as, if we continue to live in the alternative, the opposite of them, we will stagnate. If we reject that speaking is embodied and we live our lives reading scripts, then we’re stuck.

Ruth Milligan
We are stuck. I think you may be stuck, your ideas will get stuck, your pitches will get stuck, people won’t want to listen to you. I’ll tell you a very quick anecdote. I coached a big tech guy, last month, foreign country, heavy accent. Got him to make some better enunciation so he could be understood.

We worked hard, content, three or four sessions. He did really well. Two weeks later, he gets invited to an internal audience of executives by someone else. He takes none of that practice or habits with him, and he completely fails. And the executive that invited him said, “I’m never inviting him again to anything.”

So, the downside to not really embodying what he had learned and taking it into practice was you don’t even get invited anymore. And, therefore, then your career, “Oh, I can’t put him on stage.” It’s actually what I call a shaded habit. You have something in a small dark room that you do and everyone goes, “Oh, that’s just Pete. He just does that.”

And then you take Pete to a big illuminated stage without support, and Pete’s still doing that, and you say, “Oh, my gosh, didn’t we want to give Pete some coaching before that?” Because now everyone sees it and that’s hard to unsee. And that bridge between sort of the shaded and illuminated is the space that most people don’t appreciate. That’s where you can go through the thresholds, literally, figuratively, and find better practice so that you are invited back and your career doesn’t get thwarted.

I have coached, Pete, many, many, many dozens and dozens of executives whose careers have been largely thwarted because they ignored how hard this is and they didn’t prepare. And they showed up not prepared and embarrassed somebody. Most of the calls I get are from CEOs that say, “That guy didn’t do so well with my client. Can you help?” because the CEO is embarrassed, and they’re feeling a risk for that relationship because that person, who they put in front of that client, true story, the client is very bristly, didn’t like the information, wasn’t a good quarter.

And the executive just keeps throwing more and more and more data at him. And I suggested, “Maybe he just wants to be heard. He doesn’t need any more data. So, can you just maybe stop talking for a minute?” And he’s like, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m supposed to, like…” And you can tell he’s like one of those guys with, like, a briefcase full, decks and decks and decks of data.

And so, he tried it. He said it felt uncomfortable, but the client calmed way down, felt heard, and actually didn’t need anything more. Just needed some space. So, sometimes we don’t read the room right. Sometimes we just need to stop.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, careers thwarted. Well, to the point about, well, I guess now I’m just thinking, like, it’s a little spooky because often we never get the feedback that we need. And so, our career can be thwarted, we don’t even know why. We find ourselves on a performance improvement plan or fired with very vague feedback, which you can’t even call feedback, like, “You know what, it just wasn’t the right fit.” “You know what, we’re trimming costs.” It’s like, “Well, why am I being fired, not the other guy?” “Well, you know, we got to downsize.”

Ruth Milligan
I’ll add this. What about the interview that they give you no feedback on? And they just say, “No, thanks.” And you say, “I got to the third round. Something happened.” I have a son who’s starting to interview for internships, and the first round they gave him no feedback. It’s like, “Well, how are you supposed to learn? You know, you’re 19, how are you supposed to learn?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it could be pretty brutal in that context, if the interviewer is like, “Not my concern. Our concern is picking a winner. We don’t care about you and your life and what happens to you.”

Ruth Milligan
“Even though we just put you through a month of interviews and we just told you, you know, like…” And so, the learning, I think this goes back to, like, “What can we learn in these moments? And are we open to it?” And it’s tricky when you’re really busy and you have a thousand applicants, you don’t want to take time, “Ah, not my problem. Not my monkey. Not my circus. Just don’t want you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just as a side note to that, I would say I’ve been in both sides of the interviewing table and I, well, I’m into learning, so I love it when they ask for feedback because then it’s like, “Oh, well, first of all, I know that you want it, because I can’t just assume that everybody wants it. And it is time consuming.” So, one of my favorite instances, I rejected someone for a role. This was in college. And it was for a student consulting organization, because I’m cool like that.

And he asked me for feedback. I was so glad he asked. I gave him lots of feedback. He returned to get into that group the following year, and then went to consult at McKinsey. It’s like, “There you go. That’s hard to get into those consulting posse.” And it was awesome because he asked and I was glad that he asked. So, I guess that’s a tidbit right there. Go ahead and ask.

Ruth Milligan
And I do think, by the way, just to this point, we actually coach people to say, ask for the feedback you want, “How did I do in that opening? How were my transitions? Did it go too long? Did the story work?” I’ve had to give people feedback, like, “You’re a little tone deaf. Like, that story is not good for this audience. You might want to pick something that’s a little less, I don’t know, privileged or a little less offensive.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Something a little less offensive.”

Ruth Milligan
A little less offensive.

Pete Mockaitis
“Not zero offensive but just a touch.”

Ruth Milligan
Yeah. Like, coaching so many years of TEDx, we’d have people with such good ideas, and every now and then you’d get somebody who’s like, “Oh, you haven’t had a lot of feedback lately, I can tell. Okay, we’ll go there. It’s okay.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s so key to ask. And I think you’re right in terms of being more specific about your request, it’s like, “So, how did I do?” It’s like, “Well, I don’t know if you actually want to know, or if you’re just looking for some affirmation, validation, because you’re nervous.” So, I’ll be like, “Ah, good job.” So, it’s hard to know if that’s even sincerely what they want. But when they ask it specifically, it’s like, “Oh, okay, you’re actually keen to know this, so we can go there.”

Ruth Milligan
So, Pete, here’s a question I’ve asked a few podcast hosts. When you have to edit out, your editor has to do an extra big job of editing out filler words and what we call disfluencies, a fancy term, do you ever want to tell the speaker how many you took out?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, I don’t even think about it now because my editor just does it and we just go.

Ruth Milligan
Well, it’s just a curiosity because you actually have data.

Pete Mockaitis
I do.

Ruth Milligan
You have real data. And then I suggest that maybe you send them both versions. You say, “Here’s your before and here’s your after. If you want to watch, you can.” But at least, that to me, like, the before and after of any recording is the money shot because I can hear what I sounded like here, “Do I want to be in audience A or audience B?” But in these moments that are recorded and you have data, it’s always curious, like, “Does anybody care?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so Ruth, we got our threshold concepts and a top thing is watch, listen to the recording. You’re not going to want to, but that’s the thing that’s going to do it. Can you give us any of your other top dos and don’ts before we shift gears and hear about your favorite things?

Ruth Milligan
Yeah, I guess the other one is, don’t underestimate the power of breath. Everything about breath is what informs pace, suspense, articulation, the ability to finish a sentence strong. If my name is Ruth Milligan, and I run out of breath, I’m going to get really high and then, all of a sudden, I’m going to finish up.

But if my name is Ruth Milligan, and then I get to finish strong because I’m drawing from my diaphragm. So, knowing where to breathe from your diaphragm, not up here. If you breathe from up here, it’s called stacked breathing. I can’t really draw, like, think of it like a crochet hook. I can’t really draw the right volume of breath out.

Breath replaces the filler words. Try to say an um on the count of three while taking a breath. Ready? One, two, three. You cheated.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, but you do got to try. I’m no natural.

Ruth Milligan
So, I walked around for that week and I just took better breaths. I was more conscious about my breaths and my ums went away, the ands, the so’s, whatever. So, that’s the collection of things to draw on whenever you feel as if your speaking isn’t as strong, as confident, as measured or inflection. Look to your breath patterns. Look to your breath habits.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Any other top don’ts?

Ruth Milligan
Don’t think that you write like you speak. I cannot impress upon this one enough. I can tell within about 15 or 20 seconds if someone is reading me what they wrote versus delivering. We don’t ever want to be read to, unless we are like Isabel Allende or one of these great authors who comes to read me a chapter of your book.

I remember going to TED one year and actually Isabel Allende was on stage and she came and read, and I just could not get over, like, how they let her read. They don’t let anyone read anything. There’s no teleprompters, there’s no notes, you know, years and years of being in that genre. And then I thought to myself, “She’s not speaking. She’s actually reading her written words.”

And then John McWhorter was the one who really broke open the threshold concept for me that, like, we write in very long sentences and we speak in very short sentences. And when you are writing to speak, you don’t usually write the right way. And I had a presentation we coached last week, a panel discussion, and someone took, I think, about 10 slides of different, she was working up to talking about jazz in schools, and she was almost poetry.

She kind of showed a progression of what music does, and just used one word per image. It was just this punctuated, like 10 words. And the audience got quiet as a mouse. They were wrapped, because she wasn’t talking on, on, on, on, on. And she grabbed everyone and then she had them for her next four minutes of her presentation. It was really beautiful.

And she used long pauses, very curated imagery, perfect words. She nailed it. So, you don’t always have to be in the prose section. You can pull from things that we’ve learned from poetry, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Ruth Milligan
“Don’t make it about you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Ruth Milligan
Yeah, my most recent one, for sure, is this one, the intersection between speaking, stress, and time.

Pete Mockaitis
What do we know from that study?

Ruth Milligan
We know that when you’re in stress, when your amygdala has a response, actually, time goes like this.

Pete Mockaitis
It expands and contracts.

Ruth Milligan
Correct. And it gets slower, you’re just, like, “Well, I have a lot more time than I think.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Ruth Milligan
It is this one.

Pete Mockaitis
Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg.

Ruth Milligan
I just can’t love it enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Ruth Milligan
My voice memos. Hands down. Full stop.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Ruth Milligan
I actually love to lift weights. It solves so many problems in such a short amount of time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks, they quote it back to you often?

Ruth Milligan
I think the one I said earlier is the one that I think sticks with me, which is when you’re in front of an audience and you’re feeling nervous, stop making it about yourself. Make it about the audience. And a lot of that anxiety can wash away when you say be of service to them. You’re here to support them. And then you’re taking the focus off of yourself. And a lot of that frenetic nervousness doesn’t have a place anymore.

I had to use it 12 years ago in a sticky situation and it really stuck for me. And every time I have a speaker come in that sort of hamster wheel, I say, “Stop making it about yourself.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Ruth Milligan
I would encourage them to start at TheMotivatedSpeaker.com. It takes you to our larger website. There you can find all the links to the books, all of our podcast recordings, including yours soon, all of our blogs, and everything about our training, coaching, and what we do to help support speakers every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ruth Milligan
Go find one thing to work on. Just one. Everyone that we coach, even the most seasoned speakers, have one thing to work on. Listen to yourself. Ask for feedback. Just pick one. We actually can’t do many things at once, improve on many things at once. And it might be that shaded habit, that when it becomes illuminated, it could be the thing that’s keeping you back from being awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ruth, thank you.

Ruth Milligan
Thank you for having me. This was really fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome.

Michael Hoeppner
Hi, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get into some of your wisdom that you’ve packaged in your book, Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. We love all those sorts of things. And it’s funny, as we’re chatting, I’m going to be so self-conscious about saying “um” in this whole conversation.

Michael Hoeppner
You know, I am not the “um” police, to be clear. So, I promise you, I’m turning that off, that awareness right now. But, truthfully, the point of the book, of course, is not that you can never say “um.” The point is, they should not skyrocket when you’re thinking more about yourself and less about your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, I was going to kick us off by asking if you could share a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made from many years of training so many folks on communication. What do us, humans, need to know about communication that we tend to not know?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, it’s a simple idea, which is this, we think, all too often, that talking is all about thinking. Like, if I have smart ideas and I think of smart stuff, I’m going to say smart stuff, and it’s simply not true. Speaking is physical. If you put your hand on your throat, and you say, “Communication is a physical art,” you’ll feel your hand vibrate. If you pound on your chest a little bit, “Communication is a physical art,” your voice changes.

So, the idea communication is all about thinking, messes us up badly. And instead, what we should do is use physical tools and use kinesthetic learning to get better at speaking.

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, I love this idea a lot. And this is a bit of a theme that’s come up a few times in different domains, in that many solutions are not thinking or cognitive-based in order to get to. And here you’re saying that communication is not about thinking but it’s a physical art, like pumping iron, or dancing.

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah. And the thing that’s so liberating is, just like pumping iron or dance or any kind of physical or athletic discipline, you can build muscle memory and get better very, very quickly by doing the right exercises.

Pete Mockaitis
So, with regard to communication is not about thinking, it sounds, maybe if I could distinguish that a little bit, I suppose the formulation of that which we intend to communicate is a thinking activity. Fair enough?

Michael Hoeppner
Totally fair.

Pete Mockaitis
But the actual projection, performance, delivery of those ideas, that prior preparation, is a physical art.

Michael Hoeppner
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Understood.

Michael Hoeppner
I mean, we all can relate to that idea of, if I have all these great ideas and then I open my mouth and they all tumble out in a completely disorganized jumble, and then as they do, I become chronically self-conscious about that, and that self-consciousness actually makes the whole job more difficult.

So, I’m not suggesting we don’t need our cognitive faculties to think of smart stuff to say. What I am suggesting is that if you completely remove the physical part of it and just remain in the cognitive category, you are absolutely shortchanging yourself. And the fastest way to improve is by addressing the physical.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you mentioned fast improvements. Could you tell us a fun story of a client who made some fast improvements and what that before, after, and journey looks like?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, for sure. I’ll mention the one, I actually write about this in my book, I changed a woman’s career in four hours one time. Now, that sounds like I’m bragging and advertising about myself. That’s not the case. What determines if people improve and improve quickly is much more them, what they bring to the situation, more so than what I do, and this woman was ready to learn, and she came in completely brave and ready to jump in with both feet.

Now, “feet” is the operative word there, and I’ll tell you why. She thought that she had a problem with blushing. She had stage fright. She would begin speaking, and instantly she would turn bright red, and this self-consciousness about her blushing was absolutely intolerable. So much so that she would begin to brush her hair back from her face over and over again, putting her hair behind her ears, but what she was really doing was trying to hide from the audience how red her cheeks were.

And so, she would fall into an absolutely compulsive habit of doing this with her hands over and over again. As she did this, she would become so self-conscious, she literally could not even think of the next word in a sentence because all her brain was occupied with was, “Don’t blush, don’t blush, don’t blush, don’t…” You get the idea. But I said feet earlier. The miracle was this. We didn’t focus on blushing. We didn’t even focus on hair smoothing with her fingers.

What I noticed right away was that she constantly shifted her feet back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, almost as though she was looking for somewhere to stand that was solid ground. So instead, I simply put my hands on her feet, and, in fact, I even went further. I tapped the top of her feet as though I were putting little thumbtacks through her feet into the floor. I made her feet anchor into the ground. And, all of a sudden, when she did that, it unlocked a virtuous cycle in which her delivery tools, meaning how you say stuff, not just what you say, her delivery tools totally transformed.

Her breath slowed. Her mouth opened. Her spine got longer. Her hands opened up and got freer, and, all of a sudden, her body began to operate in a way that set her up for success. She calmed down, the cheeks didn’t blush, and she could actually think of a next word to say, and we did this for about four hours. She built a brand-new muscle memory, and she literally got over her stage fright in four hours.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool, the feet. And I recall, when I was nervous with interviews, back in the day, I found that when I planted both my feet firmly on the floor, I just said to myself, “Ground,” or something, that just sort of made me feel solid. And I don’t know, I thought it was maybe a me thing, but maybe you’re finding some universal insights here, Michael. What’s up with the feet?

Michael Hoeppner
Well, your body is evolutionarily designed to do some things. I mean, think about the sacrifices, in terms of evolution, we had to make to be able to stand on two feet rather than four. They’re massive. If you do martial arts, do you stand all crisscrossed and slouched over and constantly move your feet? If you’re learning a dance step, do you constantly shuffle your feet? No. We are built to have a stance in which we’re stacked as tall as we can, anchoring our feet into the floor so we’re balanced, so we can do all kinds of things, like even have our hands free to implement tools, and our voice unlocks very powerfully when we are as tall as we actually are.

And your feet being grounded is the first foundational step of that. So, it’s not just you. In fact, folks out there who are listening, the next time you’re giving a speech or any kind of presentation in which you’re standing, see what unlocks when you just ground your feet into the ground, just like Pete is talking about doing.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think you can even ground your feet to the ground when you’re sitting and it does something.

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, you’re exactly right. But I’ll add a layer to it. Anyone who’s ever taken a yoga class and heard the yoga instructor talk about your “sits” bones, that’s if you sit on your hands and you feel this kind of bony part of your pelvis, that’s the bottom of your kind of hip girdle, would be one way to think about it.

Here’s the sentence, “Those are the feet of your torso.” I’ll say that again, “Those are the feet of your torso.” So, even if you’re seated, you can think about those anchoring into the chair just as your feet would anchor into the ground.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, while we’re talking about tiny adjustments and posture, I think I’ve also noticed the… in college I took one modern dance class just to keep enough credits to keep my scholarship, was actually a really cool experience. And we talked a lot about “pulling up,” which for a while, it took me a while to say, “What are we talking about?” And we had to read a whole article entitled “What does it mean to pull up?” which was actually very useful.

And so, they suggested imagining, like, a rope attached to, I think it might be called the suprasternal notch. Am I using these words right? Like, in the middle of your chest, like above your nipples, like right in the middle, if they were to cleave you in two, by maybe four or five inches above the nipple line, like you could feel a little notch. And I have found, sure enough, that when that area is, like, hunched just a little, versus it’s truly elevated as though a rope were pulling me upward, it’s like night and day in terms of the alertness or the with-it-ness. Michael, can you explain this much better than I’m doing now?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, I’d be happy to try, all right, for sure. Look, yes to that adjustment, and I’m even going to add another one. Imagine you had another string on your back. So, think of yourself almost like a marionette, a puppet, and you have one on both sides, and those strings are gently pulling you up so you almost can feel that full circumference of a circle around that widest part of your chest.

Now go even further, because in the chapter on posture in the book, I actually give a different image, which is imagine your head is a helium balloon and it’s gently floating up to the sky, and your spine is a long string on the end of the helium balloon, and you’re getting taller and taller and taller, not through muscle effort but through ease and release and grace. This is important because the way we learn posture is dead wrong. We hear all these conventional wisdom phrases like, “Sit up straight,” or “Pin your shoulders back,” or “Pull your shoulders back.”

Now, the problem with all of those things is they actually fit in a weightlifting class. Your spine is not straight, so you should not endeavor to sit up straight. Your shoulders should not be pulled back or cranked back because that’s using a bunch of muscles that are about building muscle strength rather than what posture should come from, which is balance and alignment.

Now the reason this feels so miraculous to you when you do it, I mean, first of all, there is a bit of just an endorphin rush from using our body in big physically expansive ways, but as it applies to speaking, if you’re not being as tall as you are, your diaphragm does not have as much room to drop down and push your guts out of the way so you can actually take a full, big, deep, relaxed breath. So, very often when I coach people on posture, the first thing that happens when they begin to be as tall as they actually are is they yawn.

And the reason it’s not because they’re tired, but the exact opposite. Because for the first time in that day, all of a sudden, their diaphragm has a space to actually drop down. What happens? Their lungs begin to inflate with air automatically, and they go into a yawn, and the whole body relaxes and releases a little bit. So that’s a tiny bit of an explanation of some of the things you might be feeling when you allow yourself to have that taller, released posture that your body is craving.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot with regard to the helium balloon floating situation and it’s not a matter of muscles, because I was just about to say, Michael, sometimes it feels like when I’m standing up really straight and my posture is great, I’m getting tired. Is there a certain set of strength training exercises I should be doing in order to improve? And it sounds like you’re saying, absolutely not. Just change the approach to your posture.

Michael Hoeppner
There is no strength training. Who has the best posture in the whole world? Once they’ve learned to sit up, put a baby on the ground, and watch them balance flawlessly. Anyone who’s had a young kid, call it zero to two years old, you plop them on the floor and you cannot believe how they can stay balanced like that the whole time. Here’s another image for it.

Remember holding a broom on the tip of your finger? You put the bottom of the broom there and you keep the thing perfectly aloft by moving your hand around, and the stick is completely straight and the head of the broom, which is much heavier, by the way, stays totally vertical because you’re working to keep it in balance. That’s how our posture works, from balance and ease and release. It does not work from muscle effort.

So, if you’re walking around the world, trying to pin your shoulders back, or essentially treat your day like a physical therapy session, you’re going to get exhausted. The wrong muscles will be recruited. They will get exhausted and fatigued. You will collapse, and then what happens is even worse. Then the voice in your head will kick in and begin to critique you, like, “Ugh, how do you have terrible posture?” “Ugh, why can’t you fix this?” “Ugh, why don’t you stand up straight?” “Ugh, I’m so tired,” “Ugh, it’s not worth trying to change it. Ahh…” then you collapse. So, instead, embrace release, breath, freedom, balance, and see what changes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful. So, are there any other key prompts you recommend in terms of getting our bodies in a comfortable groove that is excellent?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah. Well, here’s another one. Unlock your hands and let them talk. I’m not suggesting that you, need more hand gestures. That’s not my point. My point is, I bet you make more hand gestures in real life than you realize. And then you go into high-stakes presentations or board meetings or client situations and, all of a sudden, you have a bunch of garbage in your head, like, “Don’t make distracting hand gestures,” and you completely restrain your gestures. But in real life, your hands have a story to tell, too, and they want to speak.

Now, the reason this is a problem is not because I actually don’t care all that much about what you’re doing with your hands in terms of gestures, but I do care a lot about how free you’re being with your overall communication instrument. And when I see people constrain their gestures, very often what they do, too, is constrain their breath, constrain their jaw, constrain their enunciation, constrain their vocal variety, and soon they speak like a tremendously diminished version of themselves. So, let your hands actually do what they want to do, which is help to emphasize and tell your story.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. Okay. Well, so we talked about body stuff a fair bit, which I think is warranted given your notion that communication is not about thinking and it’s a physical art. So, tell us, when it comes to the actual words that we’re using, you’ve got some perspectives in terms of conciseness, articulousness, enunciation. Can you work us through approaches to improve these domains?

Michael Hoeppner
So, let’s take conciseness first. If you’re trying to be briefer with your remarks, say better stuff in fewer words, in other words, as opposed to just telling yourself one more time, “Keep it brief,” or “Keep it simple,” or “Take a 30,000-foot view.” Instead, pick up a stack of LEGO blocks, or any other stackable objects, and go through your content, but say one thing at a time.

And at the end of each idea, in silence, place down a LEGO block. Pick up the second LEGO block and say the second sentence, or second idea, and at the end of that idea, in silence, kind of like where the period might go, at the end of the sentence, click the LEGO block into place on the previous. Pick up a third one. Say the third idea. At the end of that idea, in silence, again, kind of like where the period could go, click that one in place with the previous. And slowly but surely, thought by thought, sentence by sentence, create the tower of your communication.

Now the reason this can be so dazzlingly effective for people is that, in that moment when you’re doing the activity of clicking the LEGO in place, something miraculous happens. You’ve given yourself a moment to pause and to think, and maybe even to breathe. So, you’ve given your brain the two things it needs to actually think of smarter, briefer stuff, which is time and oxygen.

This is how great impromptu speakers have built the discipline to speak. They share just one smart idea at a time, and at the end of that smart idea, they consider, “Do I need to say something else, or am I done?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And in the process of actually stacking these LEGO blocks, it sounds like we may come to some realizations, “Oh, I don’t need that at all, or that at all. I guess it’s shorter than I originally planned. How grand.”

Michael Hoeppner
In fact, I can’t say who, but I’m working with a political candidate who is running for office. This particular candidate typically goes on way too long when answering questions. So, we’ve been working with these LEGO blocks relentlessly to get answers down to 30- or 45-second sound bites. It’s a very fast way to do so. Now, you can’t stack LEGOs in real life, but if you practice this, what happens is, very quickly, you build that muscle memory of tolerating thinking time between ideas, and very soon, you don’t need the LEGO blocks or the stackable objects at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Michael, help us out with this muscle memory notion. I think some of us fear silence because of any number of dimensions, but when you mentioned a political context, I’m thinking about, oh, man, when you have multiple guests on a news show or a debate stage, it just feels like, “Oh, if there’s a split second of silence, someone’s going to grab it.” So, how do we think about these environments or even just the mental state and associations and emotions we have with the discomfort of letting there be that gap between our sentences and our thoughts?

Michael Hoeppner
It’s a big question. So, opposite of conciseness, I’m going to give you a thorough answer, okay? Because there’s a bit of a multi-step process I’ll offer here. The first is to recognize what the highest priority is. Most people are not on a Sunday morning political food fight talk show. Most people are living their lives, and the much bigger error they make is not having comfort with silence. So, recognize which the bigger one has in terms of a payoff for you and focus on that.

Next, this is a tool that’s so useful, The Wall Street Journal did a little piece on it. To build some comfort with silence, particularly when asking questions, you can do a simple thing, which is draw an invisible question mark with your finger at the ends of sentences, imperceptibly, where no one can see this, either just gently in a tiny microscopic way on the side of your leg, or if you’re remote, on a video call.

Why? We talk past the ends of questions all the time out of a sense of discomfort, and we don’t want to live through that silence. But if you actually shut up when you ask a question, guess what might happen? The person you’re asking the question might say something useful. I mean, think of that in a sales or a negotiation situation.

So, this idea of tolerating silence is not just crucial for being brief or being concise, it’s crucial even just in the reciprocal activity of having a conversation. Those are thoughts about building that muscle of tolerating the silence. But we can also get into how to avoid being interrupted if you want to. You want to go there?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it, yeah.

Michael Hoeppner
So, the first thing is, throw out that garbage advice of never have it be silent because you might get interrupted, because it might make it more likely you get interrupted. Why? Well, if someone hears that I’m talking to a person who never shuts up, no matter what’s going on, there’s never a single bit of silence, it actually encourages me, “You know what? I better get my voice in the conversation because I’m never going to if I don’t, so I’m just going to interrupt them midstream.” They might feel more inclined to interrupt you because they never see an opening.

And if you’re talking without ever giving yourself a moment to think about what the heck you’re saying, there’s a good chance you’re saying kind of dumb stuff. So, if you say dumb stuff, people are more inclined to interrupt you because they think, “No, I have to contradict what you’re saying.” So, contemplate that it might be making the possibility or pattern of you being interrupted worse.

If you’re afraid of being interrupted, instead, work on what’s called laddering, and, supposedly, Margaret Thatcher studied this to try to figure out how to make sure that her political adversaries would not interrupt her. And what it means is that you build, using all five Ps of vocal variety, not just pace, all five Ps of vocal variety, you build your way through a bit of speaking so that people recognize you’re not done yet, and I’ll do this in one sentence so you can see it.

Laddering would be a tool in which you use ever-accumulating vocal variety to let your listener know that you have not reached the end of your sentence. Now I’m doing it in a very exaggerated, absurd way, but you hear my point. You can show people you’re not done speaking yet with the adamance and forcefulness with your speech, and it doesn’t have to be by talking as fast as humanly possible.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you said there’s five P’s. What are the five P’s?

Michael Hoeppner
Pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, what do you mean by power and placement?

Michael Hoeppner
Power is volume, that’s loud and quiet. And placement means where the sound is placed in the body. So, as an example, if you have a friend with a really nasal voice, the placement of their voice is primarily in their nasal passages, and that’s where the sound is amplifying. Our voice amplifies throughout our body. So where is it placed?

Now the key thing with all of these five P’s is to, for the most part, use more. More variety. Because, typically, when we’re in a fraught communication situation, we contract and use less.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, different placement would probably imply a different pitch, but it’s possible. So many P words. It’s possible to have different pitches in the same placement.

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, you’re right about this. You could disentangle them from each other, but they’re incredibly hard to do so because they work together organically to create emphasis and drama and surprise within what we’re saying. If you don’t believe me, just imagine trying to get a dog interested in a stick that they’re allowed to chew, but not the cell phone that they have found, and imagine yourself comparing those two things for the dog.

You would use all five of your different dynamics of vocal variety to make one thing  seem really cool and exciting, and one seem really boring and silly and uninteresting. They work together, these five pieces.

Pete Mockaitis
I like the dog example. I think you’d also use a small child.

Michael Hoeppner
I have a 10-week-old golden retriever puppy right now, so dog is front of mind. That’s what’s going on. But, yes, it works for kids too, for sure. And, by the way, if you want a quick way to unlock this, try an exercise I call “silent storytelling.” And all that means is you have to speak, but exaggerate every single part of your speaking except for your voice. In fact, put yourself on mute and think of this like lip-syncing.

Mouth the words, move your hands and your gestures like crazy, allow your face to be terrifically expressive, but do it without any sound. It’s as though you’ve been muted on a TV. Do it for a minute or two, and then, all of a sudden, let your voice back into the equation, and you’re going to hear, all of a sudden, so much more expressivity come out of your voice because you’re moving your body in a much more dynamic way. It’s a very quick hack to unlock a lot more vocal variety for people who struggle with at times being more monotone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Well, we talked about conciseness, then we had a fun little detour through some five Ps. How about articulateness and enunciation?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, let’s look at both. Again, I’ll jump right to something very tangible and very practical you can do. There’s an exercise in my chapter on articulateness called finger walking. And in case you’re just listening, what I’m doing is walking my fingers forward, choosing each and every single word that comes out of my mouth.

Now, I invented this exercise originally with a balance beam, or a piece of masking tape stretched along a floor, and would have clients walk along this balance beam choosing every single footstep. But then, of course, I wanted to find a way to make it instant for people, even if they didn’t have room to move around, and you can do the same activity walking your fingers forward.

Do not get hung up on “Am I choosing word by word or syllable by syllable?” Instead, simply focus on walking your ideas across the table. And if you don’t know what to say next, pause your fingers, consider what you do, and then slowly take your time to commit to each word you’re sharing. Now, the reason this can be very powerful for people gets at the title of the book, “Don’t Say ‘Um’.”

The way to be more articulate is not to obsess about all the worthless words you’re saying, like, kind of, sort of, um, but rather to be laser focused on which words you’re trying to choose. So, the exercise of finger walking brings your attention to, “I’m going to actually take the time to choose my words.”

Pete Mockaitis
And the idea, as we do the finger walking, is that each finger-fall, footfall, step, if you will, corresponds to one word that I’m saying.

Michael Hoeppner
Well, listeners, I’m sure you could just hear that Pete was practicing just now. So, thank you for practicing, Pete. It’s not quite that rigid. If you do it for a few minutes, what you’re going to discover is that it doesn’t actually correlate to every single syllable, nor each and every word. What begins to happen is the activity helps you choose words or phrases, but it forces you to actually choose those ideas, as opposed to just opening your mouth and letting words fly out. So, practice it a little bit. You’ll develop your own rhythm, and it doesn’t have to be quite as rigid as you’re talking about.

A different way to think about this is, imagine you were a ballerina, or your hand was, and the ballerina is trying to tiptoe through a field of tulips and not disturb a single flower petal. That’s the kind of specificity I’m talking about with your fingers. And what happens, like magic, is you become that specific with your language, too, and it unlocks what I call linguistic precision.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so we’re sort of physically and visually representing, with our own bodies, a rhythm or groove between speaking and pausing.

Michael Hoeppner
Yes, thank you for that synthesis. Here’s the crucial thing. You won’t have to finger walk for the rest of your life. If you try it right now, by the way, it’s challenging. But it’s challenging on purpose. Because you may right now be very accustomed to just opening your mouth and letting a bunch of words fly out, fully 40% of which are not that useful. So, it forces you to really, almost obsessively, think about, “What the heck am I actually saying?” Well, you don’t have to do this too long, and, all of a sudden, you will have a much greater awareness of choosing words and ideas than just kind of free-form letting them fly out of your mouth all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And in the process, we’d naturally say fewer words and have more silences, is my experience right now, and it sounds like your assertion is that’s totally fine.

Michael Hoeppner
To a point. To a point. It’s going to feel a little bit too rigid at first. A little bit too much. What I’m suggesting is this is a radically different way to learn a behavior. Most people try to get rid of filler and useless words and be more precise and articulate by doing the advice of the title of my book. “Don’t say ‘um.’ Don’t say ‘like.’ Don’t say ‘kinda.’ Don’t say ‘sorta.’ Don’t talk too fast.” A whole bunch of thought suppression. It doesn’t work.

So, this is a different way to learn. You practice this a little bit, you bring a hyper-awareness to which words you’re actually choosing, and this uses what’s called embodied cognition. You’re learning with something besides just your brain. You’re learning with your body. You do this a little bit a few minutes each day, very quickly, you’re going to build some muscle memory with linguistic precision, and you won’t have to walk your fingers at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, this slow, halting, extra pause thing going on, as I’m being more linguistically precise, is almost a bit of an awkward intermediate stage that will, in time, with practice, disappear, and now I’m just artistically fluently precise at a good pace without those awkward silences and pauses.

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, absolutely. Now, in my experience, in 15 years of coaching this exercise, this exercise is like a magic bullet, transformative for about 60% of people. Forty percent, it is legitimately too complex. It’s too much of a cognitive load. It actually kind of throws them off. But I will say something about this book that no author anywhere has ever said. I don’t care if you read the book. I really don’t. I do care if you read one chapter.

So, find the area of communication that has historically been a bugaboo or a challenge for you and get better in that one area. This exercise may not unlock precision or articulateness for every single person, but there’s chapter after chapter, so, yes, practice it. Yes, it may be awkward at first, and even if it doesn’t work, there are other sort of arrows in the quiver, to use a metaphor.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And let’s hear about enunciation.

Michael Hoeppner
Enunciation is the only category in the book that I offer a tool for that I can take no credit, because the tool is something I learned from an amazing voice and speech teacher named Andrew Wade, but he learned it from someone, who learned it from someone, who learned it from someone. And the first historical example of this goes all the way back to ancient Greece and an orator named Demosthenes. So, the principle here is you practice speaking with an impediment. Yeah, go ahead, what?

Pete Mockaitis
Like, do I put pebbles in my mouth, Michael? Isn’t that a choking hazard?

Michael Hoeppner
Hey, look at you, knowing the historical reference.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks.

Michael Hoeppner
Yes, pebbles in the cheeks. Oh, shucks, exactly. No, it is not a choking hazard if you do it correctly. We’re not putting pebbles in the cheeks. You’re using one impediment that you put in between your teeth. A good thing is a slice of wine cork, that’s what I learned from Andrew Wade, but you have to hang on to the wine cork on the side to make sure you don’t inhale it. Easier is the end of a toothbrush, or even your pinky finger, neither of which are choking hazards, obviously.

And all you do, as I’m doing right now, is you put the impediment in between your teeth, and then the task is you have to make every single word totally clear even with the impediment in between your teeth. Now it looks silly. But you know what else looks silly? Basketball players dribbling with ski gloves on. Competitive swimmers swimming with extra baggy, two or three pairs of swim shorts. Sprinters running with a parachute, dragging behind them. Those people look silly, too.

It’s not silly. You’re doing the exact same thing. You’re building stronger muscles by making the physical activity more difficult. And by doing this, all of a sudden, all the muscles of enunciation, because they are muscles, get stronger because they have to fight past an impediment. Then you remove the impediment and, voila, your enunciation is better.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, Michael, this is so much good stuff. Tell me, anything else that’s really good and juicy and powerful you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Michael Hoeppner
I just want to make sure that people get this really clear sense, “Wow, there’s almost a tool for each of these things,” and there is. And the point is, you can treat yourself like the communication athlete that you are and use some of these innovative approaches to build some new muscles.

And with that, I want to just quickly mention the first two that we didn’t get to for posture, in the book, but also in real life, if you don’t have the book, make a paper crown, and imagine you’re walking around with a crown on your head and you’re a regal monarch. And for grounding your feet, in the book, I actually have a page where there’s two silhouettes of footprints. You can stand on the book and keep the pages adhered to the floor.

So, for each of these places, you might feel like you have challenges in your communication life, there are ways to approach it, and physical, innovative ways that can create change very quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Now with the crown on your head, I’m thinking about a recent trip to Burger King with my kids and the Burger King crown, and those things stay on pretty good even when we’re bobbing it all over the place. So, is there some nuance to how I do the crown exercise?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah. Well, the nuance there is there’s a bit of imagination that has to happen. Put it on and then challenge your kids, or whoever you’re with, walk around, allowing the crown to give you the regal bearing of some legendary monarch.

If you’re with kids, make it a game. See who can stand as tall and walk as elegantly and regally as a monarch. And you’re going to notice very quickly what that unlocks is the exact kind of posture we were talking about earlier. Not posture from muscle effort, but posture from ease, grace, height, and balance.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Michael Hoeppner
There’s two quotes, and I’m going to mangle them a little bit, but it’s more important people remember the idea than even the quote. One is Buckminster Fuller, “If you’re trying to change something, don’t try to fix the old model. Invent a new model that makes the old model obsolete.”

And the other quote is from Teddy Roosevelt, which is something like, “The best reward in life by far is doing work worth doing.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Michael Hoeppner
We use that system of five P’s I mentioned to look at politicians’ speeches, and it turns out, pretty straightforward, politicians who use vocal variety are evaluated by their audience as more authentic. Politicians who never use vocal variety are evaluated as inauthentic. And in politics, being labeled inauthentic is like the kiss of death these days.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. And a favorite book?

Michael Hoeppner
I’ll tell you what I’m reading currently that I like the best. I don’t know about favorite book ever, but currently it’s Moby Dick, and part of the reason is it has the most dazzling piece of brevity. The first sentence is three words long, and two of the three words are monosyllabic, “Call me Ishmael.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Michael Hoeppner
My favorite tool, in terms of software, is Otter it’s an app that does a bunch of transcription. And part of the reason I love it so much is it’s really good at notating what you’re saying, and I love to explore the dynamic of how humans speak versus how they write, and how our language is different in those two different sorts of processes. And so, very often, I like to actually write some stuff by first talking it out, and Otter lets me do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, I want to get your hot take on this, there is a real difference between how we speak and how we write. And where I find it most pronounced in my life, hundreds of times over, is in bios because bios are written, and then I speak parts of them. And so, when there is a – what is it called? – a dependent clause, like, “A graduate of Harvard Business School, John does blah blah blah.”

And so, I feel like that was made for writing and not for speaking, so I feel silly speaking it, even though we understand when I’m doing a bio, I’m going to be reading something that’s been kind of provided and edited, but I feel off and I change it. So, it is. Yeah, what’s going on here?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah. First of all, you’re doing your guests a real favor by changing it real time, because if you notice when you just said that, you even took on kind of a game show host voice.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Michael Hoeppner
You said, “A graduate of Harvard Business School.” So, it’s very difficult to read overwrought flowery language that really is made for writing, it’s very difficult to read that without any degree of mockery, because it sounds ridiculous when we say it out loud. So, you’re doing your guests a favor by translating that for them real-time, it sounds like, perhaps, sometimes even.

What is going on here is, of course, they’ve looked at this, is that our brains are even stimulated differently based on how we’re using language, and the activity of writing is fundamentally different than the activity of speaking. And yet we think they’re identical. I’ll give you a quick tool for this. This is, in fact, in the book. It’s called out loud drafting. If you want to get better at writing speeches, things that you’re going to say, come up with content that’s then eventually going to be spoken out loud and make it better, use this tool, out loud draft.

As opposed to picking up a keyboard and tap, tap, tapping away to start. Nope. Stand up, walk around, record yourself so you have the transcript, in case you say something genius, and then talk it out, real time, on the fly. First time might be bad. That’s okay. Do it again. Second time it’s still bad. Do it again. By the third time, it’s going to be better, and then you can go to the keyboard and write some stuff down. But only once you’ve done that, because then the writing is going to sound much more like how people talk anyway.

This is a tool I use in politics all the time so that speeches sound like direct first-person address as opposed to “Recited talking points that cover every single bit of policy that I need to in order to get elected.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I think that’s dead on. I guess you said politics, I’m also thinking about sales copy. I’ve heard a great phrase I liked, which was, “Join the conversation occurring inside your prospect’s head.” Yeah, that is what I find persuasive, at least when I’m thinking about buying something, is that. And if it does sound flowery, elevated, like a grand essay, I’m less persuaded in terms of thinking, “Oh, this is awesome, and I want it, and I need it.”

And then I find, like I was looking at a top strategy consulting firm’s website writing about their experience with different cases, and I was like, “The purpose of this website is to get a C-suite executive to hand over millions of dollars for a consulting project. I don’t think you’re doing it right.” And I feel a little bit arrogant saying that, like, “I mean, who am? I’m not in that business of selling super high-end corporate consulting services.”

But I don’t think even highfalutin executives speak to each other that way and read about your omnichannel solution enablement, and go, “Oh, yeah, that’s what we need. Call the guys at BCG ASAP because I’m fired up by what I’ve read here.”

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think this leveraging omni-channel stuff would just be so much more compelling in terms of, like, “Our clients have seen 30% increases in leads from their websites, apps, and direct mail.” I go, “Oh, those are three different channels and that’s a result I find very intriguing. Maybe I should talk to these consultants.”

Michael Hoeppner
That’s right, “Because I know what a website is, I know what an app is, I know what email is. Okay, great. Sounds brilliant.” Now this is a really important point for your audience, in particular, because this is not just about website copy. I see this all the time. Imagine this scenario. You’re in a board meeting. Someone’s going to present on something, okay? They’re sitting in a chair. They’re being introduced by someone else, or someone else finished up a presentation, and they’re going to hand the baton off to the person who’s going to go speak.

The person sitting in their chair is speaking like a human, chit-chatting with her neighbor, talking about something, diving into the discussion. They stand up. They walk to the front of the room. They even say something else casual and normal to the person who’s handing it off to them like, “Okay, thanks so much. Appreciate that.”

And then instantly they’re going, “We’re going to consider a leverage strategy, multi-part,” and they, all of a sudden, begin speaking like someone completely different as they’re reading off their slides, reading off this overwrought script that they’ve written, and, all of a sudden, the person we’ve seen two seconds before is replaced by a robot.

Communication is communication is communication. Your job is to say words that are meaningful to your audience and to focus on your audience in all these different situations. And it’s why I think, partly, that idea of public speaking is so confusing because whenever you’re speaking, it’s probably in public, unless it’s a private conversation with like a lover or a spouse or something like this.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And so then, I’m thinking about what’s the ideal time and place for flowery language?

Michael Hoeppner
First rule is you have to know your audience. So, I consult and coach in politics a lot. Most of the time we’re trying to find the simplest language there is and speak in monosyllables and even better use vivid language. That means nouns that are images and action verbs. But that’s because the audience and also the channel they’re going to receive this in, very likely they’re going to see a 30-second soundbite and that’s it. So that’s the first rule, know your audience.

But the second is, and now I’ll use a big word to emphasize a point, the platonic ideal, going back to Plato, the platonic ideal would be that you actually do both things. Now I mentioned Moby Dick earlier as the book that I’m reading. I mentioned that first sentence, but if the entire book was three- to five-word sentences, and all the words were monosyllabic, no one would still read Moby Dick.

Two sentences later, after that “Call me Ishmael” deadly simple sentence, Melville writes an 87 word-long sentence that features big words like “methodically” and “hypo” and these sorts of things. So, the ideal is that you can actually do both. Use soaring, big, complex rhetoric that verges on poetry, and also deadly simple blunt messaging.

And, as usual, one of the best at this ever was Martin Luther King Jr. and you can see this all through his speeches. This back and forth and back and forth between complexity and simplicity. The complexity gives your audience the credit that you actually think they’re smart, which you should. Audiences are smart. And on the other side, those simple phrases show them that you are a visionary leader who can identify a simple goal and deliver on that.

Now, that’s a lot to achieve in like a boardroom presentation or something, but people get bad coaching a lot of times too, of like, “Dumb it down. Keep it simple, stupid,” that kind of stuff. The best you can get to is that you actually do both, and those are the speeches that stand the test of time.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Michael Hoeppner
Yeah, well, first, the URL for the book is really simple, DontSayUm.com. If you want to reach out to me, LinkedIn is usually the best. That’s just Michael Chad Hoeppner at LinkedIn. And then the company that I lead is called GK Training, and again, that URL is very straightforward. GKTraining.com.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Michael, do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Michael Hoeppner
If you have the book, read one chapter, the chapter you need. If you don’t, there’s a free chapter at DontSayUm.com. I’m going to keep it free because people need this. It’s called Navigating Nerves. So, a challenge there is read that chapter and discover how actually your approach for navigating nerves might be totally counterproductive, and give yourself a new tool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, this is fun. Thank you. I wish you many meaningful communications.

Michael Hoeppner
Thank you so much, and the same to you.