Stop Saying Um (And Fix the Other Vocal Tics That Are Sabotaging Your Speaking)
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Summary
Michael Chad Heppner, 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, he explains why you need to treat speaking as a sport, and shares in body drills and exercises, from playing with Legos to talking with a wine cork in your mouth, that will fix common delivery problems including eliminating filler words such as um and like, talk too fast, or awkwardly ramble.
Transcript
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We're at McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Think about a time you've had to speak in front of others, maybe during a work presentation,
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a wedding toast, or even on a first date. Did you struggle with using too many filler words
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such as um and like, talk too fast, or awkwardly ramble? Most of us try to fix these saboteurs
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of speech by giving ourselves mental mantras. Slow down. Think about what you want to say.
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But my guest would say that becoming a more engaging and effective speaker comes down to
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realizing it's a very physical act that requires getting out of your head and into your body.
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Michael Chad Heppner, a communication coach who has worked with everyone from presidential
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candidates to business executives, is the author of Don't Say Um, How to Communicate Effectively
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to Live a Better Life. Today on the show, Michael explains why you need to treat speaking as a sport
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and shares in body drills and exercises, from playing with Legos, to talking with a wine cork
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in your mouth, throwing a ball against a wall, that will fix common delivery problems,
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including eliminating ums, enhancing vocal variety, and managing your gestures.
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After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash um.
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All right. Michael Chad Heppner, welcome to the show.
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So you are a communication coach. You help people improve their communication delivery. So you help
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people speak more clearly, more confidently, and with presence. You coached Andrew Yang when he ran
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for president to improve his delivery. You also coach executives. You teach on the subject. I think
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when a lot of people think about public speaking or even just speaking on a first date, you know,
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getting ready for a first date, they're often thinking about what they're going to say. You know,
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they're thinking about the content. But why do you think people should focus on the delivery as well?
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Michael Chad There's a few reasons. The first is every study ever done that looks at what matters
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more in terms of the impression you make on other people, validates delivery as a thing.
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But that's just the first answer. The second answer, which I think is a much better one,
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is that I'm not even interested in debating or trying to weigh one versus the other, content versus
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delivery. What I'm always trying to do with my clients is to help them unlock a virtuous cycle
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in which both things make each other better. And you can remember this for the rest of your life,
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which is the following drill. Hold up your hands as though you're looking through some imaginary
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binoculars. If you hold your hands up like you're looking through binoculars, you will see that your
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left hand looks like the letter C and your right hand like the outer half of a capital D. So your left
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hand stands for content. That's the words you say, the vocabulary. The right hand looks like the outer
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half of a capital D and that stands for delivery. And that's everything besides the words. Now,
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if you put your hands together, you'll see that they create this reinforcing loop. And what many
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people don't know, and they discover coaching with me, is that if you just focus on the delivery and
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make the delivery better, not only do you sound better in all the contexts you just mentioned,
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including first dates, not only do you sound better, but you can actually unlock a virtuous cycle
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in which you think of smarter stuff to say. So the instructive example, of course, is if you build
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the ability to tolerate silence and allow your body to take air in and therefore have the fuel to have
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vocal variety in your voice and also avoid saying um, because in that silence, you can't say um,
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not only does your voice sound better and you come across with more authority, but in that gap,
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you're giving your brain the only two things it needs to think of smart stuff, time and oxygen.
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So this is something that people do not understand about delivery and they ignore it at their peril.
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And it can be like an absolute light bulb moment when they discover it.
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Yeah. I've experienced that in my own life. I know whenever I feel I'm the most fluid and the
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most articulate with my speaking, it feels like I'm saying better stuff compared to when I'm not.
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Exactly. And that's not an accident, by the way. We also get trapped where we think delivery is a
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bunch of stuff we should paste on the outside. And part of the reason that is, is because it gets
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taught typically in a really reductive way. I'll give you an example. We get told to make eye contact
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for eight to 12 seconds. Why? What if your thought is longer than eight seconds or longer than 12
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seconds even, or shorter than eight seconds, I should say, any of those things. And we get this
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coaching that these tools are about things we should almost shellac onto the outside of us.
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But that's an absolute mistake because the outputs of communication are eye contact and gestural ease
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and freedom and posture and enunciation. They are outputs. They come from focusing on the other
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person. And when you do that, both the delivery and the content gets better. So what you've discovered
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when you're kind of in that flow state is exactly right. Speaking of common advice that people get
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when they think about delivery, a lot of it's particularly bad. It's not very helpful. Like
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you said, you gave the example of the one just then, but also there's other advice about, well, just don't
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say, um, or be more confident or don't do this. And a lot of it's just about thought suppression.
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It's about suppressing things. Why is that not a useful approach to improving your speaking delivery?
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Yeah. Well, let's break this down in three ways. The typical guidance that people get about delivery
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is not just not helpful. It's usually counterproductive. And the way it typically works is first,
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they get some thought suppression. Then they get such general feedback that it's utterly
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unactionable. And then they get a suggestion, which is a mental instruction for what is a physical
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activity. And I'll walk you through this step-by-step. Let's do one that's very common,
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which is when people speak at a very fast rate. Now the typical advice they get, first of all,
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is thought suppression, which is don't rush. Okay. Well, as soon as you hear a don't,
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the first thing your brain is obligated to do is to fixate on whatever comes after the don't.
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I titled this book, Don't Say Um, in large part as a trick to get people to pick it up because
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everyone wants to avoid saying um, but the challenge is that's the very worst instruction you can give
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yourself. And I say as much in the preface to the book. So it's a bit of a trick to get the reader
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picking it up and using it and hopefully improving because of it. Thought suppression is
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the pink elephant trick, essentially. It's built off distinction. When you give yourself a don't,
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you're obligating your brain to fixate on the don't versus everything else in the known universe.
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So if someone says to you, don't rush, you are obligated to think about rushing and also even
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more damning, who are you thinking about? You and how bad you are, as opposed to where you should be
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thinking about, which is your audience. So thought suppression comes first. Then what comes second?
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General feedback. And the general feedback usually is like, just slow down. Okay, when? All the time?
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Every word? In between words? In the length of words? When am I supposed to slow down? Utterly vague.
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And then the third thing is a mental instruction for what is a physical activity. So that sounds like
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remember to breathe. But then you're giving the person you're coaching or suggesting this to
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something else they have to remember in their jam-packed brains, when in fact, breathing is a
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totally physical thing. So these are some of the ways in which the feedback goes dramatically wrong.
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And really the problem is this, is that people who are already struggling then tend to blame
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themselves. And they think, oh God, I'm such a failure because I couldn't implement all this
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really smart coaching or advice I got. And it wasn't smart coaching. It wasn't smart advice. And it's not
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even their fault that they were not able to do it. Going to this idea that speaking is a physical act,
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that's one of the main points that you drive home throughout this book, is that we have to remember
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that speaking is a full-bodied physical act. I think oftentimes we think of it as just a mental
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act. Why is remembering that speaking is a physical act, the foundation of improving your delivery?
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Everything I just explained about how feedback gets messed up can be remedied by what you're asking,
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by a physical approach. And particularly for the listeners of your podcast, this metaphor,
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either as a metaphor or even just as a thing that people actually do, will really hit home,
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which is speaking is a sport. So guys out there who are listening, but anybody out there who is
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listening, if you like sports, speaking is that same thing. It is moving. It takes over a hundred
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muscles to do what you and I are doing right now, Brett, which is taking air into our bodies.
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Our diaphragm drops down. Our lungs expand as they fill with air. Our ribs move to accommodate
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those inflating lungs. And then we exhale that air over our vocal cords and it picks up some sound
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there. And then that sound gets amplified and altered and altered with a miraculous act of
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coordination, which is enunciation. I mean, even saying the word enunciation, you can feel how much
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your lips and your tongue and even your soft palate and jaw have to move to accomplish that.
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It is a physical activity. Now, hopefully that's interesting just to hear, but here is the amazing
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liberation and the amazing benefit of this shift. Just like any other physical activity, like any other
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sport or dance or a discipline that is physical, you can build muscle memory and get a lot better at it
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very quickly and break habits that you think have condemned you to bad performance for the rest of
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your life. You can break them almost instantly. Yeah. What you do, and we're going to talk about
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some of these drills, you provide drills for people to help improve their speaking. They're all very
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physical. You're using your whole body oftentimes in these drills. And we're going to talk about that
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here in a bit. Before we got on the interview, you and I were discussing the connection between public
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speaking delivery and manliness. And one of those connections has to do with the improvisational
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nature of speaking. Tell us about that. Men, as a behavior that we're suggested to embrace in our
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lives, and I don't think it's just men, I think it's a good behavior in general, but we're often
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suggested to really embrace decisiveness in our life. Make a decision, take a risk, things like that.
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Well, here's the miraculous thing about speaking. Talking is just a series of decisions. It is literally
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a flow chart of words in which your brain does this miracle of choosing one word after another
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and putting them together in a system that can be meaningful and powerful and persuasive to others
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in your life. So embrace that decision-making that you get to do all day long every day and don't shy
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away from it. I love it. I think improving your speaking can open up new vistas in your life,
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whether romantically, in your career, and just also friendships. And I think if you look at the
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history, we've written a lot about the history of masculinity in different cultures and time.
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Public speaking in a lot of these cultures was a mark of manhood. It's how you proved your manhood
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in ancient Greece, in ancient Rome, in the Viking cultures even. Your ability to tell a good yarn
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was a way you kind of showed yourself as a man. So maybe we can hearken into that today and revive
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that idea that speaking well is a manly thing. So let's get into some of these practices. I thought
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this was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed your book because I'm a guy who makes his living speaking as
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a podcast host. I thought this was very useful. And I loved about it. All your practices are very
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physical. And one practice I thought was really interesting is you have people play with Legos.
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So why are you having people play with Legos while they're public speaking?
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Sure. The Legos are a practice exercise. And the reason I suggest people do it is because
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it helps them learn to do incredibly powerful things like pause, like tolerate silence,
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like be concise, like structure their ideas, like remove filler. And the way it works is this.
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You consider some content you want to speak about. It could be a speech or even an elevator pitch or a
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presentation, whatever it might be. And you get a stack of Lego blocks, but you don't start just
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speaking right away. Instead, you pick up the first Lego block before you begin speaking. And then you
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share just the first idea that you want to. You can also think of this like the first sentence of
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your content. And at the end of that sentence or idea, instead of just powering through and going to
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the next thing, no. In silence, you place down that Lego block and you live through that silence.
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Pick up the next Lego block, still in silence, and then share the second idea that you have,
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or the second sentence. Same thing. At the end of that sentence or thought, you place down the Lego
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block, but this time you click it in place with the previous. So that clicking action even takes a
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moment to complete. So it enforces some silence. Then you pick up the third one, still being silent.
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Once you have it in the air, then you can say your idea out loud. Third thought, blah, blah, blah,
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blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. At the end of that idea, in silence, you click the Lego block in
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place. And you keep doing this. And then you'll probably run out of Legos. Maybe you use six or
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eight or 10 or whatever it might be. And if you have more that you want to say, you simply unstack
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them and continue. But what you'll probably find when you try this exercise is that you can actually
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complete a lot of really powerful thoughts in just six main sentences or six main ideas, or even four
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sometimes. What this is doing is using embodied cognition. So not just thinking about stuff, but
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actually thinking or learning using your body. It is using embodied cognition to teach you how to do
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those remarkable behaviors of pausing, owning silence, sharing your ideas in a deliberate manner.
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And it's a much faster and a much better way to do that than all the thought suppression traps we
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talked about. So if you have a problem with rambling, for example, this is a great drill to do to help
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you not ramble anymore. And I have this problem. Sometimes I'll start a thought and I'll start speaking
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it. And then I'm like, oh yeah, there's another thought I want to get to. And I just go into that
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and it just sounds like a mess. What's interesting about this drill is not only is it going to help
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improve your delivery, you're not going to sound like you're rambling and jumping from thought to
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thought. This is an example of improving your delivery improves your content because you actually
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have to stop and think about what you're going to say before you click on the next Lego.
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Yeah. You know, it's not an exaggeration to say that this drill, I invented this drill in 2010,
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and it's not an exaggeration to say that this drill is one of the foundational things that allowed me
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to have a thriving career in this field. I started teaching at Columbia Business School in 2016 and
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was giving feedback in presidential races soon after that. And that's not to brag about my journey.
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I want the audience to hear this very clearly. That is to emphasize the power of this one single
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exercise. Because to your point, yes, it doesn't just teach you better delivery skills, but it gives
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you an opportunity to actually think of the brilliant, smart, insightful stuff that you have to say
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and help you say those things. Okay. Again, this is a drill. It's not something you're not going to be
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playing with Legos while you're giving your presentation or on your first date. Maybe you can do this
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before so you can get some practice. So yeah, we're not telling people to play with Legos. But you do say
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if you're doing like a Zoom call, for example, you could have the Legos maybe beneath you and you can
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do it then because no one can see your hands. Yeah, it's a great clarification. Thank you for
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bringing it up. This metaphor should really hit home for people as well, which is in sports, we
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understand this. There are practice exercises you do in practice to build a certain technique that you
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would never do in the game. I mean, you know, imagine a soccer player who had like a TheraBand
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around their lower ankles to try to strengthen their legs in some way. Or supposedly Victor Webb
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and Naya, the amazing center for the San Antonio Spurs, would practice dribbling a basketball with
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gloves on. Or you've seen pictures of sprinters running with a parachute that they're dragging behind
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their back. Now, none of those athletes would use those same things in the game. They're essentially
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exercises to build some muscles. And that's exactly what this Lego exercise is. It's a
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preparation practice exercise to build these abilities. And once you practice it enough,
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what happens is you build muscle memory and you can do them without the tools. But to your point,
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one of the gifts of remote communication is, yeah, you have this, what I call a digital cloak of
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invisibility. And so you can do some of the exercises in the book, even real time when you're on
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remote calls. Be versatile. And by that, I mean, okay, maybe if the Lego blocks are a little bit
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too loud on a Zoom call because you hear some clicking, just substitute and use your hand
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instead. Place your hand gently down on the table or desk in front of you. And when you do that,
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your job is to actually pause for a moment and consider what is my next thought or my next idea.
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So something that I struggle with and I'm pretty self-conscious about as a podcast host is
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being articulate. I sometimes have a hard time saying the right word or saying the word I want
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to say. So what I do is I say those filler words, um, I say like more than I'd like to.
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And the thing is we edit a lot of those out before it goes live. There are other filler words that other
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people struggle with. Something I've noticed talking to people on the podcast, a lot of our guests
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will say sort of or kind of a lot, even when what they're saying doesn't need that sort of modifier.
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And it actually doesn't make sense. Like someone will say, yeah, they're sort of pregnant. It's
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like, okay, well you can't be sort of pregnant. You're either pregnant or not. Uh, so this goes
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to the title of your book. Don't say, um, I know a lot of people when they're thinking about delivery,
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they want to be better about not saying, um, or like, so what can people start doing? What are some
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drills people can do to be more precise with their language and stop using filler words?
00:18:57.380
Yeah. So the title of the book is don't say, um, it's a trick. The antidote to that is a chapter
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on linguistic precision. Now by linguistic precision, what I mean is exactly what you said,
00:19:09.280
choosing your words. The exercise, the kinesthetic exercise that I teach in that chapter is one called
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finger walking. And I'll talk you through it right now. And then also talk about what filler is and
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how to think about it slightly differently. The exercise is you take your second and third finger
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of either hand and you, as though your hand were a tiny little person or pedestrian, you walk your
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fingers across the table or desk in front of you. Walk your ideas one thought at a time. So when you've
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completed a thought, bring your hands back to the front of the desk and walk them forward again. And what
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you're trying to do here is you don't have to overthink it like matching syllable by syllable or word by
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word. You're using the activity of walking your fingers to also walk your ideas across the table.
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If you feel yourself saying, um, or a like, or a kind of, or a sorta, or have another non fluency of
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some kind, you pause the fingers and you wait until you've regained your focus. And then you continue.
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Now, if you say an, um, it's not a problem with your brain. It's not a problem with your mouth. Even
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it's a problem with your fingers. You have not been specific enough placing your fingers. This
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is an incredibly powerful drill for people because it's super versatile. You can do this on remote
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calls. No one knows you're doing it. I mean, you and I could be doing it right now, every single
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word if we wanted to. I'm not right now, but I certainly could because this is audio only and it
00:20:38.140
helps people do what linguistic precision is designed to do, which is choose words. I'll give you another
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example. If a kid runs in front of a bus and you have a split second to try to help that kid,
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no one says, uh, there, uh, uh, kind of a, uh, um, kind of sort of like kind of a, um, uh, a bus
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coming because in that moment, we're totally focused on that kid and that message. And in that moment,
00:21:05.820
we choose words. So this exercise helps people unlock that profound and primal skill of choosing words.
00:21:14.080
Yeah. What I love about this drill, I've been practicing it is it gets you out of your head
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because the tendency that I have when I say, Oh, I need to focus on not saying, um, I do what you
00:21:24.040
were talking about. Oh, the pink elephant. I said, don't say, um, don't say, um, and then I just end
00:21:27.520
up, I'm thinking about saying, um, all the time. So I say, um, a ton. So what this drill does, it just
00:21:32.240
gets you out of your head and into your body. And that will just lead to you being more fluid in your
00:21:36.960
speaking. Yeah, exactly. And filler language is a big topic. We can keep going about it if you want to.
00:21:42.140
I don't know. You want to dive deeper on filler? We've got a lot we should get to. So we can also
00:21:46.280
move on if you want. Yeah. A little bit more. What is something else about filler that you think is
00:21:50.360
important for people to understand? Yeah. Well, the first thing is folks be nice to yourself out
00:21:55.560
there. And the reason I say that is because let's break it down with some math for a moment. Let's say
00:22:00.640
you say, um, every five seconds, which probably strikes you as a lot. Um is a single syllable. It's a
00:22:08.040
single sound. Average rate of speech is something like this. I'm speaking very generally here, but
00:22:13.200
it's something like this. Let's call it three words per second. Let's call each word an average of two
00:22:19.980
syllables. So in a single second, you're saying about six syllables. So that means every five seconds,
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you're saying about 30 syllables. I hope everyone stuck with me on that math. Now let's say you say
00:22:32.620
one um every five seconds. That means one out of every 30 syllables is a filler sound. And I'm
00:22:39.880
guessing if in other parts of your life, you had a habit that only affected 3% of a given thing,
00:22:45.660
you wouldn't be that hard on yourself about it. So they may not be as big of a deal as you think.
00:22:51.000
That does not mean it's not worth trying to be better at becoming more linguistically precise and
00:22:56.100
choosing your words, but be nice to yourself while you go on that journey. And as you're going on that
00:23:02.260
journey, I also invite you to broaden your idea of what filler language actually is. I'll give you
00:23:08.200
a couple criteria to think about it. If the answer to both of these questions is no, then this word is
00:23:16.140
a filler word for you. Here's the first question. Is it grammatically necessary? If the answer is no,
00:23:22.760
let's move on to the second one. Are you aware that you're doing it? And if both of those answers are
00:23:28.860
no, then that word is probably filler for you as well. Here's a ridiculous example. I one time
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coached a client who used the word viscerally as filler. I swear every couple sentences viscerally
00:23:41.180
would appear. Didn't make any sense at all. Didn't fit grammatically. And he wasn't even aware he was
00:23:45.800
doing it. So keep in mind, there may be a bunch of words that you're overusing and that are not
00:23:50.500
necessary and that are crutches. Going to that point of being nice to yourself,
00:23:54.940
something that maybe I'll let people know. I've interviewed a lot of people on the podcast,
00:23:59.360
over a thousand. And a lot of those people are in the media. They're on radio. They have their own
00:24:04.520
podcast. They're on television. And even those individuals, they have a hard time with um and
00:24:10.580
like and well and the like. So if even the pros have problems with it sometimes, it's okay if you
00:24:16.420
have problems, but we can make improvements to it. So yeah, don't beat yourself up if you do say
00:24:20.740
I think that's useful because I think beating yourself up just will cause the problem to grow
00:24:26.240
even more. It doesn't solve the problem, just makes it worse. Yeah, this is my exact point.
00:24:30.240
Instead of feeling bad about the same behavior for now years or decades even, if there's something
00:24:36.040
that you feel bad about, stop feeling bad about it by actually doing something about it. So as
00:24:42.200
opposed to obsessing about your ums, no, just practice the finger walking drill and practice it
00:24:46.460
a bunch. And pretty soon what will happen is you will make improvement. And that improvement all
00:24:51.200
of a sudden makes you actually feel great, makes you have an appetite to improve further. And that's
00:24:56.180
the entire point about taking such a physical approach in the book. We're going to take a quick
00:25:01.080
break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. All right. So another delivery issue I
00:25:08.860
have, I'm going to use this as some private, this podcast as some private coaching, but another
00:25:13.360
delivery issue that I've been battling for a while is enunciation and speaking too fast. Sometimes
00:25:18.860
I'm the micro machine guy. Remember the micro machine guy on the advertisements? You're talking
00:25:23.560
my generational language right now. So yes, I do. Yes. You talk about how improving your
00:25:27.840
enunciation can actually help people slow down their speaking. How does that work? And what are some
00:25:32.380
drills for that? Yeah. Well, you don't have to believe me. You can just test it. Say some huge bit of
00:25:40.300
technical jargon or some multi-syllabic phrase. Now notice that in order to enunciate that multi-syllabic
00:25:47.800
phrase, it takes some time. Enunciation takes time. I'll give you a silly example, actually. Only silly
00:25:55.220
because it's a single word. If I don't give a little bit of time on the M in the word time, it could
00:26:02.700
sound like I'm saying tide or tight or type as in typing on a typewriter or a computer. Enunciation
00:26:10.280
takes time to actually make these sounds different from each other. And that's just a single syllable
00:26:14.640
word, time. So you could even think that saying time takes that thing, time. But what about a
00:26:22.780
multi-syllabic word like hypochondria or exceptionalism, things like this? To get through those words with
00:26:32.560
multi-syllables, you actually have to take the time to make all of those precise movements. If you were
00:26:37.280
thinking of a sport, again, in order to do a complex move in basketball or dribbling or something,
00:26:42.520
it does take time. So the very act of learning to enunciate more dynamically and committing to your
00:26:49.900
enunciation actually can slow you down. This is profoundly important to people because part of
00:26:56.700
why language is so incredible is it is onomatopoetic. And by that I mean words often sound like the thing
00:27:04.480
that they are. Slap, bell, snake. These are words that sound like the thing that they are. But if
00:27:12.860
you don't enunciate them, your audience will not feel the emotional impact of these. So the question
00:27:18.800
becomes then, if enunciation is important, which it is, and if focusing on it can actually have the
00:27:24.220
side benefit of slowing you down, if you are a very, very rapid speaker, how do you use or how do you
00:27:30.500
practice drills, I should say, to help enunciation? Now, in this book, everything that you're going to
00:27:36.040
read is things that I've invented. So lots and lots of drills that I've developed working with
00:27:41.580
professionals. But the next one that I'm going to tell you for enunciation has nothing to do with me.
00:27:46.960
I can take no credit for it. I will give a shout out to Andrew Wade. He was a voice and speech teacher
00:27:52.440
I worked with at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, but he's former head of the voice and speech at the
00:27:56.980
Royal Shakespeare Company in London. But even he doesn't get the credit because he learned it from
00:28:01.380
someone who learned it from someone. And the principle goes all the way back to ancient Greece
00:28:06.220
and an orator named Demosthenes. But we only know about this ancient orator named Demosthenes because
00:28:11.880
Herodotus wrote down about what he was doing. So it probably goes back even further than that.
00:28:18.120
So if that does not give it some historical cred and you want to try it, I don't know what will.
00:28:22.780
Anyway, you put an impediment in between your teeth. And if a toothbrush works, end of a pen,
00:28:29.340
your pinky finger, a slice of wine cork is a great one to use because it has a little give.
00:28:34.760
So you have a little cushion there. But people, very important, safety first. If you use the wine
00:28:40.340
cork, do not inhale the cork. That would not be a good outcome for speaking. Okay. But you put the
00:28:45.800
impediment in between your teeth just over to the side. So not right in front where it might block your
00:28:50.820
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
00:28:59.200
practice navigating around that impediment and making sure that every single syllable is totally
00:29:04.560
clear, even with that impediment. And of course, what happens is your enunciation gets supercharged.
00:29:10.040
And of course, your rate of speech slows too, because you have to navigate around that
00:29:15.580
impediment, whatever it is, in order to speak. Yeah, I've done that before. I think it's a very
00:29:21.460
powerful tool. Another tool that actors have used for a long time are tongue twisters. Unique New
00:29:27.800
York, unique New York. Is that something else you have clients do? Yes, absolutely. And by the way,
00:29:34.680
back to the sports metaphor, folks, this is not a wacky thing of like, oh yeah, I saw Ron Burgundy and
00:29:40.540
Anchorman do it. How silly that is. No, people. If you accept this brave idea I'm putting forth that
00:29:48.460
speaking is physical, it is a sport, then you would never do a sport without warming up. You might pull
00:29:54.700
a muscle, it might hurt yourself, or you just might not perform at your peak. Speaking is the same thing.
00:30:00.500
So it stands to reason if you are relying on the muscles of speech to perform well and accomplish
00:30:07.380
whatever goal you have as a communicator, it stands to reason you should warm up. So those tongue
00:30:13.020
twisters, those are a type of warmup. And there's a whole bunch of them. I'll give you the funniest
00:30:17.180
one, which this is not for the faint of heart, folks. Do not try this at home. You might get
00:30:22.020
injured. Here we go. I am a pleasant mother pheasant plucker. I pluck pleasant mother pheasants. I'm the
00:30:27.820
best pleasant mother pheasant plucker. Whoever plucked a pleasant mother pheasant. You can see why that has
00:30:34.120
some pitfalls. Yeah. Would you do that with the cork in your mouth too? Is that something you can
00:30:39.180
do to increase the strenuosity of the drill? Yeah. You all have seen Steph Curry of the Golden
00:30:44.180
State Warriors doing his pregame prep when he dribbles multiple balls and makes the job harder
00:30:49.100
and harder and harder for himself. Yeah. Increase the level of difficulty because you are a communication
00:30:55.340
athlete. And here's another fun thing. If you have a smartphone or even a cell phone, I'm guessing many
00:31:01.420
people listening to this do. That gives you camouflage to do tongue twisters and warm up
00:31:07.660
anywhere in the world, anytime, and no one knows that you're doing it. So memorize some of the
00:31:13.460
tongue twisters you can find in the book or on our website and talk into your phone and just do these
00:31:18.600
tongue twisters like you're having a conversation with someone else. And the reason I say this is
00:31:22.760
because I really want to remove any excuse you have that would prevent you from embracing this life
00:31:28.240
practice because it's a great one. That's what I love about your book and your ideas is that it
00:31:34.500
gives you something to do. Oftentimes when you read public speaking books or how to improve your
00:31:37.900
delivery, they don't give you anything to do. So it's just you read it and you're like, okay,
00:31:42.180
I'll try to remember that next time. We've got stuff to do. I love this. Let's talk about vocal
00:31:48.320
variety. That's another thing people often think about when they're presenting. It's like,
00:31:51.740
am I being too monotone or am I doing too much vocal variety? How should people think about vocal
00:31:59.020
variety in their public speaking or should they not think too much about it? They should think
00:32:04.560
about it for the next two or three minutes when I teach them about it. And then they should forget
00:32:09.000
it for the rest of their lives. And here's a cool reason why you know it, you know how to do it and
00:32:13.500
you know it in your bones because humans use vocal variety for some really important things like
00:32:19.640
communicating the meaning of what they're saying, like communicating the emotion of what they're
00:32:24.660
saying, like framing things with some context or orientation. And also crucially to surprise each
00:32:32.380
other. We use vocal variety to keep people engaged. Monotone voices actually don't use any novelty.
00:32:40.200
When there's no novelty, our brains tend to disengage. Think of this like the white noise of a fan in the
00:32:46.340
background. Soon you hear that pattern will never change. And so now that you know it won't change,
00:32:50.880
you can ignore it forever because it's no longer danger or delight. You hear that? So this is not
00:32:57.020
something you should have to be dramatic. This is a core part of how humans reach each other.
00:33:03.580
How do you improve it then? So here's a quick system and then you can forget it.
00:33:08.320
Vocal variety is something humans have been doing a long time. I just established that. So I didn't invent
00:33:13.060
that at all, but I did invent this naming system. You're about to learn to make it alliterative
00:33:17.580
and therefore hopefully easy. Pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement. Pace is speed. Pitch is high
00:33:26.640
and low. Pause is silence and varied lengths of silence. Power is volume. So that's loud and soft,
00:33:36.620
loud and soft. And then placement means where the sound is placed in your body. We are musical
00:33:45.060
instruments. We have a reed in our throat. That's our vocal cords. They vibrate and they get amplified
00:33:52.340
throughout our whole entire body. So we can have our voice placed differently. If you have a friend
00:33:59.700
with a really nasal voice, what's happening technically is the sound is only amplifying in the
00:34:05.080
mask of the face and the nasal passages. So we all can relate to that. Of course, what we're aiming
00:34:10.560
for here is more vocal variety for the most part. Most people contract their vocal variety when
00:34:16.420
they're nervous or giving a big presentation or public speaking of any kind, or to your point,
00:34:20.660
the example of being on a date, even when we're under pressure, we tend to contract our vocal variety
00:34:25.420
and we should instead be trying to expand it for the most part. You can go too far and we could talk
00:34:31.240
about that if you want to, but that's very, very rare indeed. For most people, the trick is to
00:34:36.940
expand it. And the cool thing is they're very interlocked. So you honestly can expand any one
00:34:42.420
of them. And what they tend to do is bring all the others along for the ride. And I can tell you a
00:34:47.160
couple of exercises to do that if you want to know. Yeah. What are some exercises that people can
00:34:51.740
start doing today to improve their vocal variety? Yeah. Here's a fun one. It's called silent
00:34:56.180
storytelling. I want you to talk, but you don't get to use any sound. So you have to basically
00:35:02.360
mouth the words or lip sync the words. You have to move your face a lot, lots of facial expressions
00:35:08.600
to help an audience know what you were saying. And you have to allow your hands to gesture with
00:35:13.140
freedom and ease because you don't have the advantage of sound. So think of this like lip syncing
00:35:19.200
a little bit. You're not playing charades. Let me be clear about that. You're not acting things out
00:35:23.340
per se. You're just heightening all of the physical aspects of your communication because
00:35:28.480
you don't get to use sound. So you're lip syncing words, but as expressively as you can. Do that for
00:35:35.560
a few minutes and then put sound back into the equation, but you're not allowed to contract
00:35:41.100
everything. Okay. Your enunciation and dynamic lip movement has to be just as big. Your facial
00:35:46.980
expressions, just as big. Your gestural ease and freedom, just as expanded. And what happens?
00:35:53.340
Like magic is all of a sudden your voice has much more vocal variety. I'll teach you a phrase I
00:35:59.880
learned from Ralph Zito who taught at the Juilliard school when I trained with him. And the phrase is,
00:36:05.720
your voice is your body. And I'll say it differently. I'm going to pound my chest for a second. You can
00:36:11.420
hear this. Your voice is your body. And I'll plug my nose now. Your voice is your body. So if you change
00:36:20.100
how your body is operating, your voice changes dramatically too. And the silent storytelling
00:36:26.640
I love that. That's a great one. Okay. So we've talked about things we can do to improve our delivery
00:36:30.980
with our voice, enunciating, slowing down, being more precise with our words. Let's talk about
00:36:37.320
eye contact. I know a lot of people when they're speaking in front of a group or a large audience,
00:36:43.520
they might be thinking, okay, where am I supposed to look? Do I just look at the back? Do I look at a
00:36:47.780
random spotlight? Do I look at a group of people? So how do we do eye contact when we're speaking to
00:36:55.260
a group? And why is it important to even think about eye contact when you're speaking to a whole
00:36:58.560
bunch of people? It's essential to think about it because the way we talk about eye contact,
00:37:04.660
it's a misnomer. I mean, in fact, I don't even like the phrase eye contact because it sounds like
00:37:09.980
it's something you have. Brett has good eye contact, like it's a possession or a trait even.
00:37:16.900
But it's not. Eye contact is an activity. It is an activity of evaluating if your message is
00:37:23.380
reaching your audience or not. That's why we do it. And you can think of a whole bunch of thought
00:37:27.920
experiments, talking to a lost tourist or helping a person who doesn't speak English understand
00:37:32.760
something. You would be looking at them and looking at them directly to learn as much information as
00:37:37.700
you can. So eye contact is crucial. And it's crucial when you're talking to large groups as well. And this
00:37:44.260
is one of the places we hear the worst kind of feedback, which is, again, the reductive make eye
00:37:50.180
contact for 8 to 12 seconds. Okay, why? Why that length of time? People have watched people, they say,
00:37:56.520
well, that's about how long they do it. So I guess we should make that the average. No. Look at
00:38:02.340
individual people and try to elicit some kind of nonverbal response or cue from them to see if your
00:38:08.560
message is resonating. And look at different people around the room. Now, if it's a huge audience,
00:38:12.860
you don't have to look at every single person. If it's an audience of thousands, you will never be
00:38:17.580
able to look at everybody. But if you do reach individuals in various places of the audience,
00:38:23.260
what happens? Because of how we're put together as communication instruments, your communication
00:38:29.440
will improve because of that eye contact. It will unlock a virtuous cycle because as you work harder to
00:38:36.080
reach that person, you're going to gesture, you're going to enunciate more, you're going to use vocal
00:38:40.960
variety and breathe. All of these things will unlock. So look at individual people. Try to
00:38:46.800
elicit some kind of a nonverbal cue from them. You may not win, by the way. You may not get that.
00:38:52.620
That's okay. Even in the act of trying, you'll still get some success. And then throw out all the
00:38:58.120
garbage 8 to 12 seconds, four different quadrants of the room. Look at people's foreheads so you don't
00:39:03.620
get distracted, scan above their heads. All this conventional wisdom that I would posit is not wise
00:39:11.140
at all. Let's talk about one thing that a lot of people maybe think too much about when they're
00:39:16.280
public speaking. They often get like, was it Ricky Bobby and Talladega Nights where they're like,
00:39:20.800
I don't know what to do with my hands. So what are you supposed to do with your hands and gestures
00:39:25.500
when you're speaking? Yeah. Here's a hilarious thing, folks. There's a good reason that you're
00:39:31.020
confused about that because you can probably think on your own of two, three, five, 10 don'ts about
00:39:38.280
gestures. It's like, don't point at your audience. Don't make distracting hand gestures. Don't cross
00:39:44.240
your arms. Don't fidget your fingers. Don't keep your hands in your pockets. Don't jangle the coins
00:39:49.560
in your pockets. Don't put your hands behind your back. That looks like you're hiding something.
00:39:53.360
I mean, it just goes on and on and on. And so soon you have the question like, well, okay,
00:39:57.540
what the heck should I do with them? And all those don'ts back to the idea of thought suppression and
00:40:01.800
the title of the book, of course, just makes people chronically self-focused, which is why you end up
00:40:07.580
with these limbs hanging off your shoulders and you have no idea what to do with. So this goes back to
00:40:13.600
the same idea of other focus. You have to figure out how you use your hands in real life when you're
00:40:19.160
focused on reaching the other person, not thinking about what you're doing with your hands. For most
00:40:23.960
people, that means moving your hands more than you might think. I am not a fan of the don't
00:40:30.460
make distracting hand gestures advice for all of the reasons I just said, but one of the most brutal
00:40:35.500
is this, is that when people tend to constrain their gestures, they tend to constrain everything
00:40:40.820
else too. So their vocal variety vanishes. Their face becomes totally stoic and still. Oftentimes
00:40:47.240
their enunciation even becomes less dynamic and they just look like a more boring version of
00:40:51.620
themselves. Who wants that? So what should you do? Well, you should try to liberate your hands to
00:40:57.820
do what they want to do, to speak with gestural freedom and ease. Now, I'm not saying make just
00:41:03.180
like general hand waving repetitive motions. I'll give you a funny example. I one time was involved
00:41:09.480
somewhere where they had some curriculum that suggested that people think about gestures like
00:41:13.960
keeping a beach ball aloft. Okay. So everyone dutifully stood up and waved their hands like
00:41:21.200
they were keeping a beach ball aloft, but they just kept doing the same gesture over and over again.
00:41:25.240
Now, the idea of course, was to try to get them moving their hands a little bit, which is good,
00:41:29.800
but the image and the activity was so arbitrary that it didn't actually unlock how people speak in
00:41:35.180
real life. So instead, what I would suggest is there's, there's two exercises in the book that I
00:41:39.940
list. One is the silent storytelling drill that I already described for vocal variety. And again,
00:41:47.000
how this drill can work is you speak, but without sound. So you exaggerate your facial expressiveness
00:41:53.460
and yes, use your hands as much as possible to try to illustrate what you're talking about so that
00:41:59.200
an audience watching with no sound could understand your message. And what happens of course, is your
00:42:05.340
hands get liberated to move quite a lot. And then once you've done that a bit, let it go, put sound
00:42:11.340
back into your speech and then enjoy the freedom that your hands have just realized. So that's one.
00:42:18.160
This next one is for you athletes out there. Get a ball, a bouncy ball you can throw against a wall,
00:42:23.560
like a racquetball, tennis ball, something like this. And then practice speaking, whatever content you want
00:42:29.760
to, but throw the ball at the wall and catch it on the rebound. But now this time, try to throw the
00:42:35.640
ball in as big and as wide a range as possible. So you have to really reach to catch the ball on the
00:42:41.740
rebound and then talk while you do this. Now it's going to be difficult because your brain's doing
00:42:48.080
two things, catching the ball and talking. So it'll take some coordination to get it down. But then what
00:42:53.240
you're going to realize is, oh my gosh, my hands have this huge range they can actually occupy.
00:42:57.260
And then hold the ball in your hand, don't throw it anymore, and continue to speak. But allow your
00:43:04.100
hands to tell a story too. All of those tools are to liberate people who tend to constrain their
00:43:09.840
gestures way too much. The rare over-talkers with their hands, it's not that you're over-talking,
00:43:16.880
it's that you're telling the same darn story over and over again. They're just doing the same thing.
00:43:22.400
So instead of giving yourself thought suppression of don't make distracting hand gestures or don't
00:43:27.020
talk with your hands. Instead, challenge yourself to be better. Make your hands tell a better story.
00:43:37.100
I love that. So we've talked about some really concrete drills that people can start doing today
00:43:41.440
in their daily life to improve their delivery. No matter how much you prepare, there's a change
00:43:46.420
you'll still get nervous when you're speaking. Any advice for people to help manage their nerves when
00:43:52.400
they do arise when they're in a public speaking situation? Or even it could be a first date
00:43:56.920
situation. Yeah. I want to answer this with as much generosity as I can. And to prove that point,
00:44:05.220
if you go to the book's website, don'tsayum.com, you get the Navigating Nerves chapter for free.
00:44:11.960
And I call it Navigating Nerves because that should be the goal. Not stopping, not preventing,
00:44:17.660
not battling, navigating. And we're going to keep that chapter free because whether or not people
00:44:24.380
buy this book, I desperately want to help folks who have been stuck in some sort of self-defeating
00:44:30.680
cycle for a long, long time to get some liberation about nerves in their life. So I called it Navigating
00:44:39.460
Nerves because most people make the first mistake by being in opposition to their nerves. So all those
00:44:46.140
combative verbs, battle, suppress, fight, all they do is make the nerves worse. Again, it's back to
00:44:53.360
this idea of thought suppression. So if you're telling yourself, don't be nervous, don't be
00:44:57.200
nervous, stop being nervous. Or even putting some self-judgment on there. Like, why are you always
00:45:02.080
nervous? Why do you get so nervous? Why are you so bad at this? Don't be nervous. Stop being nervous.
00:45:06.640
You can hear the voice. All you're doing is actually amping up your nerves and also amping up
00:45:12.500
your feelings of failure about that. So step number one, you're going to be nervous. And you might in
00:45:17.800
fact be nervous for the rest of your life. And they might even get worse. Why? Because you are
00:45:25.340
going to attain bigger and bigger victories in your life. Your career and your life and your goals and
00:45:30.640
everything about your life will get better and better, folks. Especially if you do all the lessons
00:45:34.880
they're learning on the Art of Manliness podcast, you're going to get better and better, which means
00:45:40.020
you'll attain bigger and bigger heights. And when you do that, guess what? It might feel even more
00:45:45.600
nerve-wracking to be at that new height. That's good. It means that you care. It means that you're
00:45:52.240
invested. It means that your central nervous system, by the way, is very reactive. These are good
00:45:57.040
things. So stop trying to fight them. You will be nervous. Now that you've reset them, your goal is not
00:46:05.260
to distract yourself with something utterly arbitrary, like just imagine your audience in
00:46:10.320
their underwear. Because now your brain has to multitask. Naked people, and what am I trying to
00:46:15.160
say? Naked people, my message. Naked people, my message. Naked people, my message. Naked people, ah.
00:46:21.840
Instead, find something physical and unmistakable and measurable that you can focus on that gives you a
00:46:28.540
positive point of focus. That could be grounding your feet. That could be really being mindful of your tip
00:46:34.320
of tongue sounds in your enunciation. That could be your eye contact and trying to elicit a reaction
00:46:40.580
from various faces in the room. That could be breathing, feeling your backside ribs expand as you
00:46:47.700
allow air to come into your body. It could be any of those things, but put your focus on something
00:46:52.360
physical and then allow that to help you navigate through the nerves. And the better and better you get
00:46:59.880
putting your attention a hundred percent on that thing, what happens is the nerves begin to fade
00:47:06.260
away. But not because you fought them, but because you've put your focus elsewhere and somewhere more
00:47:12.660
productive. Well, Michael, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more
00:47:17.240
about the book and your work? Yeah, for sure. Well, you can follow us on social if you're a social fan.
00:47:22.540
You can just search for GK training and all the various socials you might want to,
00:47:27.520
but more specifically for the book, the book's website is don't say, um, just the same title,
00:47:34.100
don't say, um.com. And my company is GK training. And the URL there is just GK training.com. And that's
00:47:44.340
where you can find all the warmups and tongue twisters and exercises I talked about earlier.
00:47:48.300
Fantastic. Well, Michael Chad Heppner, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:47:54.020
My guest today was Michael Chad Heppner. He's the author of the book, don't say, um,
00:47:57.280
it's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information
00:48:00.600
about the book at the website, don't say, um, .com. Also check out our show notes at
00:48:04.720
aum.is slash um, where you find links to resources, where you delve deeper into this topic.
00:48:08.960
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website
00:48:20.140
at artofmanlies.com where you find our podcast archives and check out our new newsletter.
00:48:24.160
It's called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It's a great way to support the
00:48:28.640
show. As always, thank you for the continued support and 10 likes times. Brett McKay
00:48:32.340
reminding you to not listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.