How To Not Say Um And How To Communicate Effectively

“How you say something matters more than what you say,” explains Michael Chad Hoeppner, author of the new book, Don’t Say Um: How To Communicate Effectively To Live A Better Life. 

This book will help you with all your daily interactions. It will help you by focusing on perfecting your delivery, one of the two primary buckets of all spoken communication. “Content is what you say, delivery is how you say it,” adds Hoeppner. 

Hoeppner has coached presidential candidates, prominent CEOs, and Ivy League deans on their communication skills. He shares his best practices in the book, which is filled with kinesthetic techniques and hands-on exercises like finger-walking to stop using filler words or silent storytelling to avoid monotone. 

You will learn through a variety of simple-to-master exercises: 

• Four common speaking mistakes that inadvertently impact your message and delivery.
• How the most effective speakers use the 5 Ps of vocal variety—a unique framework based on
• How to use vocal variety to gain attention.
• Tips for maintaining the right level of eye contact to physically connect with your audience.
• How to talk less and say more with the GK Training “Lego Brick Drill,” delivering your content with one block (or idea) at a time.
• Why silence is a powerful tool for boosting your confidence and making your speech more precise.
• Specific tools for communicating well no matter your emotional state.
• How to gracefully recover from a speaking gaffe and use it to your advantage. 

Hoeppner argues we aren’t “bad” at speaking; we’ve just been focusing on the wrong solutions. Don’t Say Um promises to help you undo those bad habits and make you the best advocate for your own ideas. 

Don't Say Um challenges our preconceived notions of good speaking techniques and offers powerful tools to become master communicators.

Michael Chat Hoeppner

Hoeppner shares these additional insights with us: 

Question: Of the various good speaking techniques outlined in the book, which one or two do many people find most challenging to master, and why? 

Michael: This is a difficult question to answer because the entire point of my book Don't Say Um is how to use easy-to-implement exercises to create muscle memory that shifts old habits and addresses communication gaps. 

The reason I organized each chapter based on a specific skill area is to make the content bite-sized and digestible. It is my hope that there is actually nothing in this book that is difficult to master if readers dedicate time to it. However, with that as a caveat, one skill I would highlight is posture. Here’s why:

People often face two significant barriers to improving and adjusting their posture. 

They have built up a lifetime of muscle memory of slouching or contorting.

The corrections they often try to make are counterproductive. These typical corrections sound like “stand up straight” or “pull your shoulders back”—neither of which are accurate in terms of how free, long, released posture actually works. 

But the journey to improve one’s posture—as challenging as it can be—is important. Posture is central to communicating, not just because we create a better impression when we are navigating the world as tall as we actually are (as opposed to two to three inches shorter), but because being that tall allows for freer and easier breath, which is literally the fuel for your communication.

In the chapter on posture, I give people some very simple exercises to unlock what good posture actually looks like, including a page that can be cut out and turned into a crown, a wardrobe intervention of stapling a small piece of paper into the collar of one’s shirt, and exercises that can be practiced while in motion on rapid transit. Each of these are intended to bring posture back to what it should be about—balance, ease, length, and release. But there’s no denying these improvements can only be made with daily practice over a period of months. It takes people years and years to build the negative postural habits they currently have—it will also take some time to release them.

Question: If a reader has time to improve their skills in only a couple of speaking techniques, which are most important to tackle and why?

Michael: I would focus the reader's attention on chapter six, which explains the GK Training "Lego Brick Drill." It's the first tool we use in many of our individual coaching engagements, and that's because it's so foundational.

The profound skill it is teaching is simply tolerating time. Readers learn an exercise where they share one idea at a time, and between each idea, they stack a Lego brick, peel a sticky note, or manipulate some other object in silence. By doing this, they're forced to take a moment to consider what they've just said and what they should say next. And in that silence, some magical improvements take place: 

• First, it's a perfect opportunity to breathe, and gain the air that is required to speak with vocal variety and musicality. 
• Second, it's a pause in which the speaker can do the cognitive work of considering if they've shared sufficient information, or if more is merited. 
• Third, it tends to remove the "ums" and "uhs" that link our endless tangents and run-on sentences, so language becomes more precise and less riddled with filler. And all these improvements tend to reinforce each other. So overall, communication becomes more succinct, better structured, more precise, and more varied—all at the same time.

I actually have a name for that improvement, and I call it the "Virtuous Cycle of Good Communication." The opposite—the vicious cycle—is perhaps better known by us all: those moments in which multiple negative factors compound and lead to agonizing moments of extreme self-consciousness or even out-of-body experiences. The “Lego Brick Drill” is an incredibly simple way to bring speakers back into the present moment and help them share valuable content.

If I had to recommend a second most important speaking technique to tackle, it would be the skill of linguistic precision. I cover that in chapter seven, and I teach readers how to do an exercise called finger walking, in which they use the activity of walking their hand across a desk or table to ingrain the habit of choosing words, as opposed to words choosing them.

The purpose of the exercise is to get people actively thinking about their word choice. This is something we do flawlessly when we're not obsessed with our own presence and manner: we think deliberately about the ideas we should share with...a friend in need, a companion in distress, or a colleague in confusion. That act of choosing language is fundamental and second nature when we're focused on the other person.

When our focus turns inward, however, our linguistic precision collapses as we speak too quickly to strive to mask self-consciousness, rush to fill any silences, and more. When people master this skill—either through practice of the finger walking exercise in chapter seven, or through any of the other intentionality exercises in the book—they begin to feel a liberating and joyous thing: being present in the moment. In this case, they're present to choose one word rather than another, and that simple act of consideration quiets the obsessions about mistakes just made or anxieties about those yet to come.

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With nearly 20 years in the field, Hoeppner has taught at Columbia Business School and coaches thousands of professionals around the world. 

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.