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.

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The Action Catalyst · How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training) · 4 Mar 2025 podcast
So yes, there are these changes, these differences all over the place. And then oftentimes what you're trying to do though, no matter what culture, is not unlock how an American would speak or how a German would speak or how a Brit would speak, But you're trying to unlock how that person would speak.
But crucially, when they are not thinking about themselves and how they speak, but thinking about the person they're trying to reach. And all of what we think of as the behaviors of presence or the behaviors of confidence, that means enunciation and eye contact and gestures and all the rest. These come out flawlessly when we're in that activity of really, truly trying to reach the other person.
So no matter the culture that I'm working in, that's what I'm trying to help people unlock.
I'm going to offer a tactical suggestion first because it's so useful and so relevant to selling. And you can do it today and make your life better right away. I teach an exercise and a skill called linguistic... Well, actually, the exercise is called finger walking. The skill is called linguistic precision. which means essentially, are you choosing words or are words just choosing you?
So the exercise is simply when you're practicing asking questions and getting better at doing that, you walk your fingers across a table or desk, choosing each and every single word that comes out of your mouth. The finger steps are the equivalent of the act of choosing words. So in a sense, you're walking your ideas across a table.
Now that's the skill, but the way to apply it if you're in a selling situation is to practice asking single questions with linguistic precision. So there's no filler, no non-fluencies. And then at the end of the question, draw an imaginary question mark. in silence.
Now, this is really powerful for people in a sales role because what you'll see is that oftentimes they're great at chitchat, they're great at the rapport building, they're really good at asking questions to learn more about the person. And then they get to the crucial moment of asking for a next meeting or asking for the business and their communication falls apart.
And they ask like nine questions in a row and they talk really quickly and they have a bunch of stumbles and they go down and they back up and all of it crumbles.
And so you're practicing this very singular skill of asking one question with linguistic precision and then tolerating relaxed silence at the end so that you build the muscle of saying something like, how would you like to move this forward? When would you like to meet again? Is there anyone else that we should loop into this conversation?
And these kind of what we call, you know, closing questions. And very often, sales folks will have a moment or two within interactions that feel really fraught for them. And if they can build that skill, single questions with linguistic precision and relaxed silence at the end, it really helps them.
Yeah, you ask really insightful questions. I don't actually relate to having much of an engineer's mind. I think I have much creative artist's mind or even an inventor's mind. Creativity is a thing that I'm pretty much addicted to. What I would say is that the engineering concept is right in a certain way, which is I became frustrated with how stymied people were by really bad advice.
And I don't mean to say bad advice like they're being sabotaged by people, but bad advice sounds like this. Just be yourself. Just be conversational. Just be natural. These sorts of things are intended to relax the person you're talking to, but they don't because all they do is make the person think more about themselves. And they're not relaxed. They don't feel like themselves.
They don't feel conversational. They feel perhaps rocked with self-consciousness. As I became interested, like, how can you get in there when someone has been really messed up and engineer them for greater success by setting up their physical and their vocal communication instrument for success. I helped set them up for success, but it's them who's doing it.
When they have, like an engineer, set themselves up, set their physical and vocal communication instruments up for success, all of a sudden their brain is dazzling. And it does what it's incredibly good at, which is thinking about ideas. Now that it's not
totally jammed up with anxiety and multitasking of don't be nervous, don't look like an idiot, don't look like a fraud, don't mess up, don't... All of a sudden, brilliant things come out of their mouth. And if we think of part of speaking as this act of being present and being focused on the other person,
You can't be present if you're thinking about all the stuff you forgot or anxious about all the stuff you're about to forget. So very often written materials, although intended to be a support, very often they cannot be that helpful because it puts you in the past or the future endlessly. And the act of speaking is a physical one.
You're not going to be giving someone a PDF with a bunch of bullets on it. You're turning air into sound and then sound into words. You're doing it real time and it's being received real time. So anything you can do to help yourself be in the present as opposed to, you know, those two other time zones that are not that helpful can be really powerful. Because here's the funny thing.
I've actually helped many people experience that, that, wow, I'm better when I'm not quite so anchored to my notes. The hard part is getting them to have the trust and faith to actually try and test it without it and kind of get their sea legs with that because it takes some bravery of letting go.
So you have to promise to interrupt me a lot in this next answer, okay? Because that's a big, juicy question, and we could do a whole separate podcast based on that question, okay? It depends on the version of stage performance. Improv, there's no script. There may be a couple like pretenses or a couple starting points, but then there's no script at all.
That's part of the delight, sort of like watching jazz musicians improvise. You get to watch... people impromptu come up with these hilarious and amazing and heartfelt real-time scripts. It's totally astonishing.
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