Saying the Right Thing Doesn’t Matter If You Deliver It Wrong – with Communication Expert Michael Hoeppner

Hey, I'm Kwame Christian, and you are about to step into the world of Negotiate Anything, the number one negotiation podcast in the world, where we teach you how to make difficult conversations easier while getting more of what you want in the process. Each episode is packed with practical tips and strategies from the experts. We delve into negotiation, conflict resolution, and leadership skills that are crucial in both business and and in life. Whether you're closing a deal, managing a team, or navigating personal relationships, Negotiate Anything provides you with the tools you need to succeed. Our conversations are real, relatable, and most importantly, rooted in practicality. So if you're ready to transform your conversations and elevate your negotiation skills, join me on Negotiate Anything. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen to. Let's make every conversation a winning negotiation. Michael, thanks for joining us today.

That's my pleasure.

Yes, we're excited to have you, my friend. So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Most of my time is spent helping people speak well when it matters. And so that usually looks like individual coaching with people who are in really high stakes situations, like presidential candidates or deans at Ivy League universities. But it's also high school students who are trying to kind of test the waters of public speaking in a certain situation, everybody in between. And then, of course, most recently, I've been spending my time writing a book to try to take the same tools that I use to help people speak well and put it into something that can be found, you know, literally anywhere. A bookstore, around the world.

Amazing. And what's funny is that you, you set this up in a really simple way, but there is nothing simple about what it is that you teach. There's so much depth to it. But I love how you set this up. You said you help people speak well when it matters because there are some embedded assumptions under this that are really, really meaty that I want to get into. When you say, when you add those last three words when it matters, why is that so important to put in?

Many, many, many of us are very good speakers when we're not thinking about it, when we're just focused on reaching the other person. Helping a friend, diving into a fun discussion with somebody when we're comfortable. But much of your professional life is determined, in fact, by a lot of situations that you may not feel as comfortable. So obvious ones are the big interview or the big boardroom presentation, but there's dozens of these. And for many people Those ones that they would say, that's the one that matters the very most. That's the highest stakes one. That's when their communication can get more challenging or even in bad cases actually crumble and fall apart. And so my job is to help people speak better in those situations when they're not typically at their best, but to come across as well as they do when they're in those other situations that they're much more comfortable.

Oh, this is fantastic. And I agree. And one of the things that might be a good place for us to start is just understanding what it is that makes it so difficult for us to perform under pressure in these really tough situations.

It's that distinction that I just mentioned of being self focused. Meaning when we're at our most comfortable, the most relaxed, by definition, we. We're focused on the other person, we're trying to reach them, and we're not thinking about what are my hands doing? What are my lips doing? What was that word I just said? What is that person over there thinking about me? We're not mired in that sort of chronic self consciousness. And yet when nerves get the best of us or when we're feeling really self conscious, everything falls apart because all we can fixate on is that relentless self focus and self consciousness. What that does is a whole bunch of bad outcomes. It tends to make us contract, stop breathing, talk too quickly, avoid eye contact, all these different behaviors. But it all starts with that first shift to being self focused as opposed to other focused.

I love it. I love this. And this actually could be a good opportunity for a story too, because you've worked with all sorts of people on all sorts of different levels, from everyday professionals all the way up to presidential candidates. Great job with Andrew Yang, by the way. Underrated campaign. Great job with Andrew. Can you tell us a story about somebody who was able to really upskill their ability to communicate just with this differentiation of orientation?

For sure, yeah. We can talk about Andrew in a few minutes if you want to as well. He's a phenomenal communicator and also a phenomenal example of a growth mindset. This is a person who always wants to get better. So transparently, in fact, that not only did he let me write about him in the book, but he actually hosted a launch party for the book in New York because he's not someone who tries to hide the fact of, you know, I've gotten coaching or I don't want people to know that I've done this thing. He's very transparent about that which I think is an awesome model because sometimes people don't actually seek coaching for this because they have a level of, you know, shame or embarrassment or uncomfortability which is just completely unnecessary. Many, many, many people either struggle speaking in high stakes situations or they don't get help because they think they should somehow be flawless or perfect. But anyway, we'll get to Andrew in a second if you want to. I'll give you an example about this. Self focus versus other focus. I one time worked with a woman who relentlessly had a habit of clasping her hands. If you're watching the video of this, you'll see what I'm doing right now. But if you're just listening, trust me, I'm clasping my hands and sort of wringing my fingers together over and over again. Now she would just do this all the time. And I asked her at a certain point I said, have you received some coaching about that or is there a reason that you're clasping your hands in that way? And of course she didn't even know she was doing it. So we watched some video together and sure enough she sees that her hands are relentlessly clasping like this. And what we began to discover was that that was her actually trying to prevent people from seeing that she was there. Almost like her hands could be a shield or a bit of armor to hide the fact that she was even up there at the podium or in front of the boardroom giving this presentation because she was that nervous and that uncomfortable and in that moment all she was thinking about was, I feel exposed, I look uncomfortable, I, I, I, I. Now the amazing thing was as soon as she opened her hands and allowed her hands to actually move and be free to speak and do what they wanted to do, which was to chime in and tell a story too, everything shifted. So the way we actually unlock that is the same tool I have in the chapter on gestures, which, which is I crumpled up a piece of paper and I made her put her hands around the piece of paper and feel the sharp crumpled points of that and said, I want you to imagine this is a puffer fish, you know, one of those spiny fish that have inflated and your hands are getting stabbed and whenever you put your hands together it hurts so you can't do it. We did that for a couple minutes with a paper and soon she had that sense memory, that kinesthetic experience and, and she didn't need the paper anymore. All of a sudden her hands opened and her self consciousness went away entirely. And she was able to put her focus the two places it actually should be, which are her audience and what she was trying to get her audience to understand. So that's an example of that very specific shift from self focus to other focus.

This is incredible. And one of the things I love the most about this is the fact that the. There was minimal coaching on what actually needed to be said. She already knew what needed to be said and how to say it, but there was something subconsciously holding her back.

Yeah, I'm nodding so much chomping at the bit because yes, in fact, the entire book is about delivery, not about content. There's not a single chapter that is about what you say. The entire book is about how you say it. And there's a bunch of reasons why, but one of them is just what you said, which is if you help people unlock what they actually already know how to do, you would be amazed at the dazzling stuff that comes out of their brain. You'd be amazed. But their brains are not free to think because their brains are literally in threat mode. They're in like protective attack threat mode. And they can't think, they can't choose a word, even. So, the first job is to get their bodies operating in a way that actually unlocks their brain to do what it knows how to do. And when you've done that, our brains are incredible. I mean, if you think about the, the number of words we sift through in any given moment, to choose the right one is dazzling. I mean, think of how long large language models have had to get trained to do that same activity. And they, they get it wrong a lot, by the way. Still, it's a dazzling, dazzling activity that our brains are able to do when we get out of the way and let them do it. And how do you get out of the way? By setting your body up for success and doing some of the exercises like the one I described with the pufferfish paper.

This is amazing. And this, I think, for a lot of listeners is going to be a paradigm shift, because when you come to a podcast called Negotiate Anything, you think a lot of times you're just going to be getting tactics and strategies, what to say, what not to say, and focusing on that. And it's going to really wake a lot of people up to just how much their own presence and delivery matters. And I really want to hammer this one home because there might be some intellectual people who are saying, no, it's all about the content. It needs to be perfect. And that's exactly what's holding them back from truly connecting and delivering with maximum efficiency. And so let's talk a bit about the science. Why is it so important to focus more so on delivery rather than necessarily perfecting the message?

So why does delivery matter more? Well, look, every bit of science ever run on this when they evaluate people's impressions of a speaker. Delivery always matters more how you say it versus what you say, even to the point that people will have a more favorable impression of a job applicant if they hear the job applicant speak versus just evaluating the words on the page of their resume. I won't go into every single study, but trust me, lots and lots and lots and lots of studies show us that delivery matters more than content. But crucially, I'm not actually interested in in defining which one matters more and then battling it out. I'm actually interested in delivery for a very profound second reason, which is it's also the fastest way to unlock better content. So I'll give you an example. If you know you speak a mile a minute when you're nervous in a negotiation, if you, using the Lego blocks in the book, the chapter on conciseness, or in using some other kinesthetic tools, develop the physical ability, the muscle memory discipline to actually slow your rate of speech, guess what your brain can do in all that extra time? Think of smarter stuff to say. So delivery can actually unlock content in a really profound way. The other reason delivery matters so much is, I promise you, anyone listening to this, you've probably spent a bunch of time on your content, like a lot. Meaning you have spent probably months, maybe years becoming a subject matter expert and whatever it is that you have to negotiate on. And you've probably put a lot of thought into what you might say in a given situation. And I also bet you you've put very little focus at all on your delivery. So it is literally like an undiscovered country, just potential just waiting to be grabbed. So these are some of the reasons delivery matters so very much. There's one final reason it specifically has to do with negotiations. Those folks out there who get lots of guidance about their content and work very hard on their content, you're missing a critical aspect of communicating. You might currently think that speaking is essentially thinking, if I think of smart stuff, if I can remember to say the really important thing in the negotiation, I'm going to win. But this completely misses the point that speaking is actually a physical activity. Takes more than 120 muscles to do this activity that you and I are doing right now, our diaphragm drops down, our lungs fill with air, the air flows past our vocal cords, and then our mouth moves in this miraculous journey gymnastics act of enunciation to turn that sound into words that are audible. It's a physical activity. So if in a negotiation, you know about yourself that you tend to ask a question and then you get uncomfortable and you ask a next question and a next and a next. And soon you give away everything because you've asked nine questions and not even let the person actually deal with a challenging question. It doesn't do you any good to read one more time, allow for silence, or tolerate silence. And I want to give you an exercise right now. And then I will stop talking on this subject because this is. I could keep going on this one. I'll give you an exercise that the Wall Street Journal featured during our whole book launch because they liked it so much. On remote meetings, when no one can see your hand on the desk when you're asking a question, walk your hand across the table like this, choosing each word that comes out of your mouth. But importantly, at the end of the question, use your finger and in silence, draw an imaginary question mark on your desk. Take as much time as you need to actually draw the question mark and force yourself to be silent as you do and live through that silence. So you're training your body to actually ask a single question and. And then miraculously stop talking.

Hello, my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better, difficult conversations? At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills. Whether it's a keynote for your next event or hands on training for your team, we've got you covered. Don't just negotiate. Master the art with the American Negotiation Institute. Click the link in the description to find out more. Elevate, negotiate, and succeed. Brilliant. Because essentially, and listeners, if you're audio only, he's walking his fingers almost like, you know, with, with kids, getting them to eat at dinner time. Walking across the table. Right? Essentially. And tell me if I'm getting this right, because what we're doing is we're working on pacing, but we're also turning this delivery of the question into a bit of a small m meditation to keep us centered as we're asking the question so our mind doesn't race for other things. Then drawing out the question mark helps us again, to stay grounded and remind us to just stay silent. Am I getting some of these points correct?

Yeah, it goes even further. So let's take the word meditation and even shift it to a fancier one called embodied cognition. And all that means cognition, thinking, using your body, embodied. So the activity of walking the fingers is forcing you to choose your words. Take as much time as you need to choose those words. And again, to narrate what I'm doing, for those who are just listening, I'm walking my fingers step by step across the table. And then to your point, when you finish the question, you actually do the physical activity of drawing the question mark. Because it takes time. You have to be silent while you're drawing it. And that gives you an activity to do to navigate that moment of discomfort that you're so used to just talking right over and keeping going. It forces you to actually have to pause for a moment and let that silence sit. So, yeah, it is meditative in that it gives you something very specific to focus on and to still that kind of mental noise. But it goes even farther into the category of embodied cognition.

Man, this is good. This is really good. Because negotiating online is very difficult when we're in zoom or teams or whatever it happens to be. It. It makes it more challenging for a number of reasons. Less context, harder to read, body language. There's a lot of pressure, a lot of distractions, too. And so if we can use this embodied cognition methodology, this really helps us to slow down and focus on what matters the most in a world where there are so many distractions pulling us in another direction.

Yeah, yeah, I. Look, I appreciate you calling that out, and I really want to encourage folks listening. Yes, there's a lot about being remote that is terrible. I mean, we've all lived through this the last five years or so, some of the challenges. But I encourage you take advantage of what remote can offer you, though, too. And there are some gifts that you know about, but you already know. You know there's some degree of work, life balance that can be different, or you can be in different geographies and that kind of thing. You know all that already. But what you maybe don't know is it. It also does give you an opportunity to dramatically control the space around you in a way that you couldn't if you were in person. And I will often describe to people the border of your camera as a digital cloak of invisibility. So if you know about yourself that you ask 15 questions in a row, as opposed to one, try this exercise because no one can see that you're doing it. Draw a question mark at the end of every single question and be silent while you do it. And if it's hard at first, make the question mark even bigger because it takes more time to do so. You have to really desensitize yourself to that silence and build the muscle of tolerating it.

I love that. Such a powerful exercise. And I am very excited to learn more about the work that you did with Andrew Yang. And so for the folks who don't know, let's just set the stage. Let's not assume that everybody knows. But. But I'd love for you to tell us that story, but also help us to see where he started from, what he struggled with and where he was able to get to.

Yeah, well, I'll do you one better. If people want to, you can click on our website gktraining.com and we actually have a case study of him featured there. So you can actually watch the like before and after footage of debate one versus Debate two. So video is pretty cool to watch sometimes too. Feel free if you want to check it out. He had a debate. Well, let me go back. So Andrew Yang was one of the something like 25 candidates who were running for the Democratic nominee nomination in the 2020 election. By the way, he made it to the fifth candidate to drop out. He was the last candidate of color in the race and he dropped out in February of 2020 just before the likes of Mayor Pete, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, et cetera, et cetera, if my memory serves. I think that's all right. Anyway, he does his first debate, it's in Miami. And by his own assessment, he bombs, and I mean bombs badly. Least amount of speaking time of any candidate on stage and very fastest rate of speech of anyone at any point. 7.2 words per second. Now, you don't have to get a calculator out. Trust me, folks, that is too fast. Officially. Per second per second. Yeah, 7.2 words per second. Little quick guidance, like we tend to speak in the call it two to four words per second kind of range. Four words per second is already fast. He was at 7.2. So his campaign calls me, said, can you fly to Portland tomorrow? Fly to Portland. And we spent 10 days training intensively in the second debate, completely different, broke through, was garnered all kinds of positive praise by the pundits. A bunch of folks declared him the winner of the debate. And his before and after footage, it looks like a different person now that is a little bit due to me. I will take a bit of a victory lap about that. But much more of the credit is due to him. And I'll tell you why. I coach a lot of people and my coaching on a given day, it doesn't vary that much. Some days I'm a little better, some days I'm a little worse. I'm human. That's how it goes. What varies tremendously, though, is how willing people are to learn and if they have a growth mindset and if they're willing to put themselves outside of their comfort zone and try to improve. And Andrew Yang is like the poster child of someone who is willing to learn and willing to get better.

Amazing. And also, here's. Here's one of the things that I want to call out here because when it comes to the growth mindset part, we cannot overlook that because I think there's this belief that a lot of people have where they need to. It's like, hey, I'll have a growth mindset to a certain point, but at a certain point, I got this look at everything that I've accomplished. Okay? So we could, we can shift to fixed because I'm perfect as I am right now. But for somebody at his level to be open to such coaching and actually put in it into action, I mean, that speaks volume to him as a person, his character and his willingness to compete. But then also something that's interesting and this isn't something that you said, but I'd love to see if I'm close on this because it doesn't sound like you're saying, okay, this is what a good presentation looks like. Do this specifically with your body. Do this specifically with your hands. Talk with this type of cadence. It sounds like what you're doing is you're helping the person to reveal their authentic self that is already there. That's been inhibited by. By all of the overthinking or fear that can hold them back and make them play small.

I'm going to snip that part of this interview and I'm going to put it on our website. Yes, that is exactly what we're doing. Exactly. I'm quite proud of the definition that we use at my firm of what is executive presence. And our definition of executive presence is not something some mythical superman or super person or some normative ideal. No, our definition of executive presence is you, whoever you may be, but ironically, you, when you're at your most other focused, not mired in self consciousness, not thinking about every single thing you're doing focusing on reaching the other person. So you're exactly right. I wasn't trying to coach Andrew Yang to sound like every other politician. I was trying to coach him to sound like him, but him when he's at his best. And I'll give you a fun example, one of the ways I helped him to learn how to speak at a more manageable pace so his audience could actually digest what he was sharing was an exercise called silent storytelling. And it is exactly how it sounds. You have to tell a story to someone, but they have to be able to understand it without the benefit of sound. It's essentially like you have been put on mute. Okay, so you're lip syncing, but you have to allow your face to be expressive to tell us how you feel about things. You have to move your hands as much as is necessary to get these ideas across. And you have to move your mouth so emphatically that we could almost read your lips. Now, when people do this exercise, what happens is of course their gestures come alive. That's pretty clear. And also their eye contact improves because they have to look at, at the audience to see if the audience is actually digesting what they're saying. But for Andrew and for other people, what happens is totally magical, is you slow your rate of speech by a lot. Why? In order to mouth words effectively so someone could read your lips, you have to do it more slowly. So it's a very organic way of changing your rate of speech without it feeling like you should talk like politician X, Y or Z. Because they're masterful in their communication and they have gravitas. So do an impersonation of someone else, which makes people look authentic and stiff.

This is brilliant. And, and it's also empowering. It's very empowering because when, when people are on stage, sometimes they feel like they need to be like somebody else. And then also when people are negotiating, they have this really kind of, a lot of times it's old school mentality on what a negotiation should look like and what in in connected to that a negotiator should look and sound like. And then they put themselves at the door, they check their authenticity at the door, and then they try to be some kind of robotic version of themselves and they wonder why they cannot connect or persuade. And so I really want you to hammer this home when it comes to executive presence. As somebody who's having a negotiation or difficult conversation of any type, what are the key elements that they need to keep in mind so they could show.

Up as their best Self, Yeah, work physically. And what I mean by that is figure out what your weakness is as a communicator. In those situations, it undermines you. And for most people, this means you contract. You contract in some way. You breathe less, you take up less space by crunching down your posture, perhaps, or restraining your gestures. You contract by not opening your mouth and not enunciating your words. You probably contract in some way and it's not helping. So instead, find ways to work physically. And if you want to use the book, by all means, use the book. Buy a copy. It's jam packed full of exercises like this. But even if you don't take something you've learned from this podcast and use it and try it physically, because I want you to treat yourself, yourself, like a negotiation athlete. Not like a negotiation thinker or scholar. No, like an athlete. Because remember, a lot of what's going to determine what happens is how you speak. Yes, the terms will matter, but a lot of it is you actually saying these things out loud in connection with somebody else. So if you speak too quickly, try that silent storytelling activity. If you know that you ask 15 questions and can't tolerate silence, try the question mark activity, and I'll give you one more. One of the quickest ways to help people be more concise, and this is brutally important in negotiations is I have them stack Duplo blocks or Lego blocks. They pick up a Lego block, they say the first idea or the first term they want to communicate, and at the end, end, as opposed to racing on to the next idea at the end, kind of like where the period might go at the end of the sentence in silence, they put down the Lego block, then they pick up a second Lego block, say the second idea, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The end of that idea, they put it down, they click it in place with the first third idea, same thing. So they discipline themselves to say one idea at a time, and then tolerate silence at the end of each idea. To consider, do I need to keep talking? Or actually, does that suffice? Am I done? So these are examples of how you can work physically like an athlete to build muscle memory so that you have skills you can rely on even when you're feeling nervous or feeling a little uncomfortable or in that really high stakes negotiation situation that of course, of course you're a bit anxious about.

This is so good. This is really good. And I really appreciate that term negotiation athlete because it does help us to, to focus more on our bodies, our presence. Because I think that's lost. We focus so much on thinking that we get to the point of overthinking and we, you know, get to a point of diminishing returns very quickly and we forget how much our presence can convey.

Executive presence is of kind of a buzzword, but leave off executive for a second and just use the word you said about presence. We talk about presence all the time. We talk about being present. Well, in a negotiation, has there ever been a situation in which it's more important to be present? Think of those negotiations when you're so in your head that you missed a moment, you missed an opportunity, which actually you could have been done, you actually had the thing that you wanted, but you just were so in your head you got all stuck on something else. You were carried away, you were not even noticing. And look at that. You actually lost the opportunity and talked yourself into worse terms. And one of the reasons people are not able to be present is they don't breathe. They hold their breath, they speak a mile a minute, they're highly nervous. And that Lego block activity that I just described, or the silent storytelling one, or the question question mark drawing one, all of these are things that give you a moment to actually tolerate the time to breathe and to be in the now as opposed to in the past, thinking about all the things you screwed up, or in the present about all the things in the negotiation you're about to screw up. No, in the present, where you can actually make real time decisions and do better.

Amazing. Oh, this is great. And now it just unlocked another question for me too, Michael. Now I want you to. This is a book that helps people to build skills. And now I want you to think like you are creating a horror story for me. Okay? I really want you to hammer this home. So let's imagine there's somebody whose content is pristine. Everything they say is golden, but they struggle with presence. And I want you to walk us through what the other person sees, feels, and hears. When they see somebody saying the right things, but when their presence is off, when they're not really focusing on being in the moment and they're not thinking like that negotiation athlete, what do they see that undermines everything that they're saying?

Yeah. Well, here's the brutal truth. If it's an adversarial negotiation, they see a sitting duck. And if it's a collaborative negotiation, they see someone who's beyond their depth and they want to ask to get a different representative of the organization in the room. That's what they see. And what does it look like in terms of behavior, how it manifests normally, it looks like someone using a much reduced bandwidth of themselves. So what do I mean by that? They walk in as one person. Hey, how's it going? Shake hands. Hi, yeah, let's get a cup of coffee. They say, sit down. All of a sudden everything goes away entirely as they shift into what I call presentation mode. Now, some of us have been taught badly. Actually I wasn't, so I shouldn't say some of us, I was taught pretty well. Some of the royal us, meaning our society, gets taught quite badly and they get a bunch of that reductive coaching that you're talking about, like this is what you should always say. These are the three rules. And in communication, that often sounds like silly stuff like hold eye contact for 8 to 12 seconds. Make broad sweeping gestures to emphasize key points. Always speak in the lower third of your voice to exude gravitas and calm. You sound like a robot. Doesn't seem like anyone's home. What people show up as when they're in those situations is they look reduced. So fewer gestures, less facial expressiveness, more monotone, less vocal variety, less dynamic enunciation. Typically like that. Or let's say their nerves or their anxiety is so much, they may not look reduced, they just look nervous, uncomfortable. What does that sound like? They're speaking a mile a minute. Their voice is very shallow and light and quick like that, and maybe even a bunch of gravel in their voice because they're not actually breathing. And their enunciation tends to have a lot of non. Not non fluency, stumble, non fluencies and ums. And because their, their brain is working much faster than their physical communication instrument. So what I was doing right there is throwing in a bunch of non fluencies stumbles and mistakes and things like that. That's what the person who shows up, who's not working effectively, that's what it looks like often, I should say that's.

You've persuaded me, Michael. You persuaded me.

Are you going to read that book? That's it. You to read my book. Are you going to read it?

Yes. This is great. Absolutely. And again, listeners, the. The book is don't say fantastic book. And as you can tell just from this little sample we got from this, this episode, you are going to get a lot out, out of the book. But also, if you have the opportunity to work with Michael, check his firm out. So Michael, before you go, I want you to just give one last closing argument for the book, but also let them know about how they can get in touch and work with you too.

Yeah, sure. So I'll do that in reverse order a little bit. My company's name is GK Training. Just like it sounds, GK Training. And the URL is deadly simple. It's just gktraining.com and if you want to reach out to me personally, LinkedIn is the best place to do that. Michael Chad Hepner and then of course, the book is called don't say how to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. And that URL is very simple too. It's just don'tsay. Com. So that's all the places to find things. Now, in terms of a closing case for why the book here is why. There is a very good chance any of the ways you have tried to improve at communicating in the past have failed, and it's not your fault. It's probably that the ways of trying to improve were terrible and they probably failed in one of these three ways. One, it was a negative. Two, it was general. And three, it was mental. So negative sounds like this to all the fast talkers out there. You know, referencing back to Andrew Yang's first debate, the negative sounds like this. Hey, listen, just don't talk so fast. As soon as I've done that. Now all you're thinking about. Because humans can't do thought suppression, all you're thinking about is yourself and talking too fast. So that's the negative aspect. Thought suppression doesn't work. It's why I titled the book don't say It's Kind of a trick. You realize that's what I hear. It doesn't work. Open the first page, you. You find out that the title was a trick. The second thing is, it's general. That's the other bit of feedback we tend to get. So they say, don't talk too fast. What comes next? Just slow down. Just slow down. Okay, but if just slowed down was going to work, it would have worked the first time you heard it 30 years ago. It's way too general. And then the third thing is you get a mental reminder for what is a physical activity. The mental reminder will be like this. Remember to breathe. But speaking is physical. So would you tell an athlete to remember to do something? Would you tell a musician or a dancer to remember to do something? No. You would train, you would rehearse, you would build that muscle memory. So you add these three things up, and what you typically get is, don't talk so fast. Just slow down. Remember to breathe. And you probably failed to do all of those things. And it's not your fault. It's because the advice was bad. So as opposed to listening to the same bad advice, why not instead try to unleash embodied cognition and use kinesthetic learning to train your body to speak differently and treat yourself as a profound and nuanced and, and rigorous communication athlete that you actually are.

Oh, my gosh, you're so good at this. I know you know this. I know you know this. But just like, just as like, as an aside, the, the fact that you focus on communication and delivery is so clear. And it's. It's funny because it's. It's just striking to me as a podcaster having. We. We hit 1500 episodes today, you know, and you're a. Thank you. Thank you. The way that you communicate and deliver is the best advertisement for your book. I'm telling you, man, that's. You are special. This is great. This is great. I really appreciate you.

Thank you very much. I do hope I have one small hope in terms of what the life of this book is and also if what you say is true. I also hope if there is a small way in which I can be at all inspired, inspiring, or motivating to others. I do have this hope that people can learn how to speak better from this book and from my work. And not just because I like to help people improve, but also because they have stuff to say and we need a world of people who care about the circumstances of the world and want to get their ideas out there. And all too often people feel stymied and stuck. So. So if I can help them do it just a little bit better, that's a very meaningful thing.

Amazing. Oh, listen, I'm here to help, proud to promote, and thanks for coming on the show. And also, I know Simone's probably going to come up, pop in here because he always listens and he always has a couple little follow ups from things that I missed and maybe we stitch it in.

Yeah, sounds good.

Yes. Kwame, I have a question. Thank you for the opportunity. My question is about self consciousness because you say that it's better to forget about ourselves, but I'm trying to do it now and it's very difficult. Actually. I am talking to you and I'm making my biggest effort to forget about myself, but I can't avoid looking at myself at the webcam, so I don't know how to do that properly. It's very difficult.

Right, right. Do you want to just. You can. It depends. It's up to you all. But we could Even use this in the podcast if you want to, as like a little instant, real time coaching diagnostic discussion.

Yes, that'd be great. I'd love that.

All right, so you put your finger on something very profound. This can't happen instantly. That's the first part. And what you're sharing is the exact argument as to why you have to make this muscle memory. So people should not listen to this and have a checklist of like, okay, I have to breathe, I have to pause. I have to make sure I slow down. No, no, no. What you're going to do is build a muscle memory pattern of breathing differently, practice it for a few days, and within days, not even weeks, you will have some greater skill with it. So I'll give you a couple examples. I talked about the LEGO exercise during. During this. You should try that exercise. And what you do is at the end of each thought, you place the Lego down. That placement is your reminder to I can allow air to come into my body. So you actually use the exercise to remind yourself to breathe. That's one example. Another one from the book is a fun activity where you practice blowing up a balloon. And you can even do it pretend. Okay, so you basically blow into the balloon like that, and then the third time you do it, breathe in all that air into your nose, like you're going to blow up the balloon, but then move the imaginary balloon out of the way, and all of a sudden you have this huge surplus of air to use because you've inflamed, inflated your lungs in a very different way than you typically do. So you do these exercises that are akin to an athlete training. And what's going to happen is your body is going to learn this differently. So it's not a mental memory thing or a remembering. So give yourself three days, use the LEGO exercise, use that balloon exercise, and then call me back in three days, and then tell me the questions you have.

Wow, it's great.

It's like, okay, I build the memory and then when I'm about to talk, I forget everything and I just go, right, yes.

Well, here's a perfect. Any athlete out there, anyone who has ever studied a musical instrument, it's the same process, isn't it, learning a musical instrument? You practice the scales, you practice the fingering. You do these things that feel like rote learning, but you do them to change the patterns. And you don't even have to think about that in the performance. Performance. And this is true of us as speakers, because as a speaker, we are essentially a musical instrument. We have a reed in our throat. The reed vibrates and it gets altered and amplified throughout the musical instrument that is our body. So we're training it to speak better. And this is partly because we have developed, all of us bad muscle memory somewhere along the line. Maybe it's we hold our breath too much, maybe we stumble over our words, maybe we restrain our gestures, or maybe our posture is all crumpled over. Modern life has exacted a toll on us, and so we have to use muscle memory to build different habits. And then to your point, you don't even have to think about it. You just do differently, man.

Michael, I appreciate you and. Kudos. Kudos. I know you know this already, but the work is exceptional.

It.

It's exceptional and it stands out. So I'm. I just. I'm really glad that you chose to be on the show, and we're. I'm really excited to share this with the audience because it is top notch.

Well, I'm a big believer in what you're doing, too, so thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it. Thank you for a really fun and lively discussion. I hope people get a lot out of it, but I know whether they get something out of this episode or others, I know they get a lot out of what you do. So thank you for that.

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