Michael Chad Hoeppner
speaker
93 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Michael Chad Hoeppner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah. You use the tactics to unlock what I call a virtuous cycle of good communication. So you essentially fix the problem. with these kinesthetic tools. They use embodied cognition. They change the pattern dramatically. And then once the pattern is changed, what also tends to change is all those automatic responses that are happening when the pattern is not going well.
There was a person I worked with one time who would always blush very, very intensely. And I mean instantly. She would start public speaking and instantly turn beet red. And she felt terrible about this and very self-conscious. And so the first thing she said to me is, I have to stop turning red. And I said back to her, that's not true. You have to stop moving your feet.
She looked at me rather blankly. And what was going on was that she would begin speaking and totally different than how she would stand or use her body. If she was talking to a friend at the proverbial water cooler, she would begin to relentlessly shift her weight back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, almost like miniature pacing, but very rapid, rapid pacing.
At the same time, she'd be turning beet red and she'd be trying to hide this by continually smoothing back her hair over her face, trying to almost camouflage this activity with this motion of her hands over and over again. So I actually crouched down and I gave her feet some physical feedback to find stillness.
I tapped on the top of her feet and put some books on top of her feet to keep them anchored to the ground. And when she did that, all of a sudden, magically, she actually took a breath in Her diaphragm dropped down, her lungs filled with air, and her entire communication instrument became still. And all of a sudden, she spoke more slowly for a moment. She breathed in. She got a better idea.
She realized she actually has something to say to start the speech off, and she didn't blush.
A hundred percent. If a thousand percent was a thing, I would say a thousand percent. But a hundred percent, yes, precisely. Actors know this as inside out versus outside in approaching of a character. You can see this in other aspects of life too.
I mean, anyone who has become aware of some of the sort of approaches or focuses for health and wellness and mental health, you hear people talk about saying out loud each morning some gratitudes or doing these physical things that are reminding you of some of the mindsets that you want to keep and Yes, absolutely.
I mean, if you want to go religious for a second, think of all the religious traditions in the world and how very often if there's a level of devotion that is trying to be unlocked, they actually do physical rituals, sometimes even regimens. And yes, these ways of acting, and if you want to use sort of philosophical language, acting virtuous can unlock positive feelings too.
Yeah. The first thing I should say is I did not invent vocal variety. Humans use vocal variety. We've been using it as long as we're human. And there's some really important reasons why we use it, which we can get into. But let's cut to your question, which is these five P's. And those five P's are pace, pitch, pause, power, and placement. Probably the first four are instantly familiar.
Let's go through them quickly. Pace is speed. So that's fast and slow. Pitch is the note on a musical clef. High or low. So high or low. Pause is exactly what it sounds like. Silence. and maybe even varied lengths of silence. Power is just another word for volume, so that's loud and soft. And then placement is probably the only one that's not instantly familiar.
Placement means where is the sound placed?
placed in your body a big misconception that people have about speaking is that it's a totally cognitive activity like if i think of smart words i will say smart words but it's actually a physical activity it takes a hundred muscles to do what you and i are doing right now it's a physical activity i mean even just the act of enunciation if you think for a moment even just saying the word enunciation
how deeply physical that is. That final P, a placement, just to be very clear because sometimes people get a little confused about this. That means where the sound is placed in your body. So the easiest example to think about is if you have a friend with a really nasal voice, What's happening technically is the sound is only amplifying in like the nasal passages in the nasal area of the face.
So that's if P placement. And we use these five Ps of vocal variety to do a whole bunch of really important purposes like... Convey meaning, convey emotion, create surprise, and more. But those are the five Ps.
Yeah. Let's talk about kids for a second. So we are actually in the midst of a real crucible moment in which how our kids learn to speak is a little bit under threat because they spend so much time looking at these devices right here. And for those of you who are just listening, of course, I'm holding out my cell phone.
And because they're not actually kind of learning interpersonal behavior and the interpersonal dynamic in the same three-dimensional, 24-7 kind of way that previous generations did, it's fraught. It's in a little bit of danger right now. And I applaud you for taking your one and a half year old's development seriously because it matters. And we take these skills for granted. We should not.
Yeah, for sure. So to answer the question, yes, I've worked with folks on most of the continents of the globe and all kinds of different walks of life. For many years when I lived in New York City, I taught at Columbia Business School in the PhD program. And a lot of the folks who get their PhDs at Columbia speak English as a second or third or fourth language. I coach in the startup world a lot.
And a building companies in the US speak English as a second or third or fourth language and oftentimes hail from somewhere else. And there's two ways I would suggest we think about this. On the one hand, there are the core things that humans do, and we do them all over the world. And that's partly because we are communication instruments. Communication is not a sidecar to being human.
We built this incredible system of spoken language to be able to team up and gain an evolutionary advantage over somebody else or some other creatures or stop the marauding cave bears or whatever it is. So this is just part of being human. But then on top of that core, there is endless complexity with how different languages work.
Showing 41–60 of 93 · page 3 of 5
← Previous
Next →