How To Talk Good and Stuff, with Michael Chad Hoeppner (Speaking, Communication, Sales, Training)
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What challenges does Michael Chad Hoeppner face in public speaking?
Half my time on stage was slightly equivalent to torture. Painful, agonizingly self-conscious, hyper-aware of every little thing, and relentlessly self-critical. For many people, public speaking is equivalent to agony. If you give them very concrete things that they can do and succeed at, they can get past this agonizing moment and experience a little tiny brief moment of victory. So it was this really powerful moment of kinesthetic learning.
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Welcome to The Action Catalyst. Today's guest is Michael Chad Hepner, the founder and CEO of GK Training, a firm dedicated to giving individuals, companies, and organizations... the communication skills to reach their highest goals in work and life. He's a coach, a professor, and a curriculum designer at Columbia Business School, as well as the author of the new book, Don't Say Um, How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life. Michael, thank you so much for making the time. I was really looking forward to this conversation for many reasons, one of which is that both my parents were opera singers.
Yeah, I knew that. I mean, of course, I did a little research about you. And that's the coolest thing, because you have already a shorthand vocabulary for a lot of this. And my parents, similar, were both professional cellists.
Wow.
Yeah, similar kind of artistic passion. But yeah, my mom, in fact, is retiring from the Colorado Symphony Orchestra after 63 years. Wow. Wow. Symphony orchestra. Yeah. My dad played more than 50. So together they have something absurd, like 115 years in the symphony or something crazy.
That's amazing. You can tell your parents that I was temporarily dedicated to the cello until we moved to Boone, North Carolina. And my parents decided to relocate our house about a half mile from where the bus would drop you off uphill. And in order for me to practice, I had to slug that thing all the way. home and quickly lost my inspiration. Time to switch to violin, right? Exactly. Or the triangle. The triangle sounded like that would have been a good choice. Well, that's amazing. So yeah, you know, I can relate a lot to what it's like to grow up with music. And there's part of your story I was really curious about, which is, you know, what was your initial inspiration to become one day actor?
Hilariously, nothing of the kind. I come from a blended family, eight of us kids all together, and none pursued professional music. So I don't know if it skips a generation or what that would be, but I actually was focused on, I wanted to be a paleontologist or an archaeologist or a marine biologist, and that obviously is not what has come to pass. So I didn't really get interested in, let's call it, communications of any kind until middle school and high school, and that was when I was getting into theater a little bit. The pivot I'll hone in on is actually fast-forwarding all the way until about 2010 or so, which is I was a professional actor for about 10 years, Broadway, film, and TV. But what I began to discover is that even more interesting than portraying characters on stage, I became totally fascinated by how people learn. to do that activity. And so I started becoming really obsessed about how can you help people be more effective and calmer and more themselves in front of audiences. So this was a somewhat natural evolution into that.
The biggest thing is that we really developed a way in which to use embodied cognition. And by that, I mean getting people to use their bodies to build habits. So, you know, like the adage of learning to ride a bicycle and you never forget. And we developed a whole suite of kinesthetic tools to help people be more effective. So they're a little bit related to theatrical training, but not really, because I kept hiring actors to try to be coaches within our firm. And they looked at me a little bit baffled when I would teach them some of these exercises. I really discovered as an actor, half my time on stage was slightly equivalent to torture.
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