In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Emily Adeyanju chats with Michael Chad Hoeppner, founder and CEO of GK Training, about his book Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life (Balance/Hachette Book Group, Winter 2025). Hoeppner reveals the common mistakes that hinder effective public speaking and provides the steps you can take to enhance your communication skills. An edited version of the conversation follows, and you can also watch the full video at the end of this page.
Why are mumbling and rambling so common?
When are they so common? We are all capable of speaking with precision, and we are also capable of mumbling and rambling. The key distinction here is are we other-focused, or are we self-focused?
When a kid runs in front of a bus, no one says, “Uh, there’s a … the … there’s a … there’s a … you know, a vehicular … incident about to … occur.” When we are other-focused, we reach for language instantly, we grab it, and we shout that language. In that moment, our focus is on the two places it should be: one, our audience—the kid—and two, the message we need to communicate.
When we’re more self-focused, we begin to think all about our own performance. Then our communication crumbles, and we begin to mumble, ramble, or do other things.
How do you deal with this? Approach it physically. In the book, there are a lot of exercises that rely on embodied cognition to change habits. For linguistic precision, I ask people to walk their fingers across a table, desk, or hard surface and choose each word that comes out of their mouth. They’re using that specific finger motion, almost like a small pedestrian walking, to isolate that activity of choosing words, as opposed to just opening their mouths and letting words choose them. They’re literally “walking their ideas” across the table.
When you’re more in command of the words you’re choosing, you have less fillers and less mumbling.
With all the book’s exercises, the aim is to trigger a virtuous cycle where one positive impact unfolds, addressing and triggering another. So an exercise you complete for structure and conciseness actually helps your thinking, too.
You began to actually think of slightly smarter ideas, or better ways to organize your thoughts. This helps with linguistic precision, too, and it helps you not mumble. When you’re more in command of the words you’re choosing, you have less fillers and less mumbling.
Why do people use ineffective fillers, such as ‘kind of,’ ‘like,’ and ‘um’?
I give clients two criteria to think about filler language. Is it grammatically necessary, and are you aware you’re doing it?
If those two criteria have the wrong answer, any word could be categorized as “filler language.” Consider “kind of,” for example. “Kind of” could be absolutely necessary in a sentence: “Tea is a kind of beverage.” But if you say, “I kind of, sort of, kind of feel like a cup of tea,” then it’s filler language. I invite people to broaden their idea of, “What is the filler? What are the words that litter my speech when I’m not even thinking about it?”
People use fillers for a variety of reasons, most of which are bad. One of them is that when we’re feeling self-focused and not other-focused, those pauses come at times that could actually be silence. It feels threatening to have this silence when no one’s talking, so we feel like we have to fill that silence. We tend to put an “um” or a “kind of” or a “sort of” in all of those gaps.
Yet those pauses are important. Our brains are wired to seek novelty. Surprises mean danger or delight. Giving your audience a soundscape that is almost metronomic—constant—where any silence is filled with an “um,” or an “uh,” means inviting listeners to tune out.
How do you reduce fillers? In the chapter on conciseness and structure and reducing filler language, I include a tear-out page that you can divide into six pieces and share one thought at a time. At the end of the thought, in the silence where the period might go at the end of a sentence, you place the “object”—the torn pieces of the page—down.
In silence, you pick up the second object and share your second idea. At the end of that idea, in silence, you place that object down. Again, tolerate silence. You approach the third thought in the same fashion. This activity begins to unleash the power of the brain because the brain has the two things it needs to think of smart stuff: time and oxygen. That’s because you can breathe instead of saying “um” relentlessly. People begin to become more concise and more structured. They have more pauses, fewer “ums,” and they tend to say smarter stuff.
Communication etiquette discourages hand gestures. Yet you promote gestural freedom.
I counsel people to let go of that deeply reductive instruction, “Don’t make distracting hand gestures,” because the results are so bad. Now, there are situations where limiting your gestures can be important. When in front of a camera is a key one: You don’t want to block the lens. Yet most of the time, all that happens when people think about restraining their hand gestures is that they restrain themselves as communicators.
Restrained hand gestures lead to restrained vocal variety. Restrained vocal variety leads to less enunciation. Less enunciation leads to a more static, nonexpressive countenance. More static, nonexpressive faces often lead to stiff posture and lack of movement.
Essentially, the end result is a presentation robot, and the performance is poor. Very often, this result stems from, “Don’t make distracting hand gestures.” What’s much more effective is simply liberating people to speak the way they actually speak in real life. Those folks very frequently use their hands to speak because their hands have a story to tell, too. They’re far better off speaking the way they speak normally.
How does one recover from mistakes made during public speaking?
When people have a mistake or a mishap that really throws them off, even when they’re very well rehearsed, a big cause of it is probably how they prepared. It’s about the memorization or preparation. In those cases, they probably memorized how they were going to say things, in the exact same way, repeatedly. Then, if anything at all goes different from expected, the body says, “Oh, gosh, something different, something unexpected,” and it tends to feel a tremendous mistake or threat.
There’s no shame in memorizing and being accurate with the words you want to say. But, instead of memorizing delivery, practice it in different ways.
Say it at a higher volume one time, with much more delivery, like a little kid in an amusement park. Then, another time, walk around the room, even swinging your arms slowly and methodically. Do anything you can to break out of the physical patterns that are keeping you in a perfectionist lockstep delivery.
How do you handle mistakes? The first thing would be to accept that they are a “when,” not an “if.” They are going to happen. The question is not, “Can you be mistake free?” The question is, “Can you recover from the mistakes that are inevitable?”
To do this, I often suggest that clients replace the “three Fs”—the three evolutionary threat-response Fs of fight, flight, or freeze—with three different Fs. They are “fake it,” “feature it,” or “fix it.”
“Fake it” means that if you’ve made a mistake but no one knows, and it’s not throwing you off, fake it: Keep going.
But if the error is threatening to throw you off, then you have two great options: You can fix it, or you can feature it. “Fix it” means you simply acknowledge it, handle it, and move on. That can sound like: “The PowerPoint slide is not loading, so let’s just have a conversation. I’ll check at the break and see if we can reload it.”
“Feature it” means you spin the mishap as a good event. That could sound like: “The PowerPoint slide is not loading. This is actually a great coincidence because it gives us an opportunity to talk about what we should do when technology fails us—because it will fail us.” In this way, you are simply transparent about the error, and you feature it.
Now, if you want to internalize these three behaviors, I suggest that people use what I call “transparency phrases.” In the chapter on navigating mistakes, I include some tear-outs that contain transparency phrases like, “Let me go back for a moment,” “Let me try that again,” or “Let me clarify that.” Readers can even cut those cards out and put them below the screen, where they can’t be seen virtually—under the “digital cloak of invisibility”—and practice them on remote calls.
How can eye contact help or hinder delivery?
Eye contact does not serve delivery when we’re doing reductive things that are not natural, oftentimes from guidance or coaching that is well meaning but doesn’t work. This coaching sounds like, “Hold eye contact for eight to 12 seconds,” “Hold eye contact through the length of a complete thought,” or “Make sure you look to all four quadrants of the room.”
Now, the background of these guidelines is defensible, as good communicators do tend to execute some of these same behaviors. But they’re not intended to be that prescriptive. People should hold eye contact for the length of a thought—not because they have to for every single thought, but because they should look to their audience to see, “Is my audience digesting what I’ve said or not?”
Eye contact becomes distracting when people are thinking about it as a possession that they have. It’s distracting when they’re trying to demonstrate good eye contact by never looking away, or by looking away at key junctures in the conversation that coincide with the ends of their thoughts.
Eye contact is an activity. You are showing your audience, your listeners, that you care about them. You should look at them not because you’re trying to show how much presence you have. Rather, you should look at your audience to learn about them and see how what you’re saying actually affects them.
Should the approach differ when addressing large groups in person versus in virtual environments?
Every chapter ends with a “What about virtual?” feature. In those features, I write about how things change when we’re remote. Yet they don’t change much, if at all.
There is one big exception: Eye contact is dramatically different depending on the environment. When you’re in a large audience, you should be looking to different people trying to affect different people in the audience, trying to reach them. When you’re remote, that all goes away. There are a lot of challenges with remote communication. But the camera is a tremendous gift because it allows you to beam yourself into the hearts and minds of any number of people anywhere . When you’re giving large presentations, or speaking remotely—or in a hybrid format to large groups—look at the camera as much as you can. You naturally want to look at your audience, of course, so I’ll teach you a tool to do this.
You can move the picture or video box of some person close to the camera on your computer screen, make that person’s video box quite small, and look at them.
The camera is a tremendous gift because it allows you to beam yourself into the hearts and minds of any number of people anywhere.
If I look directly at the camera’s lens and then look just below it to the video box of a viewer placed as I described, functionally, my gaze doesn’t look that different. Yet, if I place the video box far down on the screen, my gaze appears dramatically different. You can still look at some participants to get those great nonverbal cues that you want, as that affects how we all communicate. Yet you can position their video box very near the camera and, therefore, really beam your presence into the brains of your listeners everywhere.
Why is muscle memory such a critical component of public speaking?
For a very important reason, muscle memory is essential when you’re trying to improve as a communicator. We dramatically underestimate how physical speaking actually is. We consider it to be a cognitive activity, thinking, “If I think smart ideas, I will share those smart ideas.”
It takes over 100 muscles to achieve the daily miracle of turning air into sound and sound into words . It’s a physical activity. It’s closer to a sport, or to dancing, than it is to just thinking. Like any other sport or physical discipline, relying on muscle memory to help you improve is the foolproof way to get better at your technique. It is a much better route to improvement than the negative and counterproductive coaching you’ve received in the past. That coaching starts with thought suppression, then goes to general “don’t” instructions, followed by mental instruction for what is a physical activity.
“Thought suppression” means, “Don’t rush.” General “don’t” feedback means, “Don’t talk so fast; just slow down.” A mental adjustment for what is a physical activity sounds like, “Remember to take a breath.” If you put this all together, you hear, “Don’t rush,” “Don’t talk too fast; just slow down,” “Remember to breathe.”
It takes over 100 muscles to achieve the daily miracle of turning air into sound and sound into words.
That feedback is completely inactionable because it ignores the physical component of speaking. Instead, all the exercises in this book are designed to do the same thing: use embodied cognition to build positive muscle memory and break habits that haven’t served you for decades.
What is ‘vocal fry,’ and how can one ‘put air into action’?
“Vocal fry” has gotten utterly tumbled up in our cultural conversation about it. On one side, it’s a career-ender, and on the other side, it’s an unfair attack on someone’s identity. Neither is true.
Vocal fry is a mechanical phenomenon. It’s insufficient air flowing over the vocal folds. Think of this like an internal combustion engine, one that’s trying to eke along with not enough gas, and it’s petering out as it collapses.
To shift that, allow enough air to flow over the vocal chords freely and fluidly to get that vibration to create sound. This is why I use the words “put air into action,” rather than “breathe.”
Breathing is important. But breathing could mean many different things. For most folks, when they hear “breathe,” they automatically take a “reset breath.” It becomes a stress-relief or tension-relief exercise. Yet that has nothing to do with communicating. The air for speaking is the fuel to carry your communication.
If you breathe but let all the air go, you’re not putting air into action. Instead, put the breath that you take into your body into service to accomplish what you want, which is reaching another person. One way to do this is an exercise that actors and singers use, which is called a “yawn/sigh,” or sighing out the sound when you have the maximum amount of breath in your body.
As soon as you might start that exhale after your yawn, you speak, and you use all that air you’ve just taken in to support your voice. That’s putting air into action.
Which personal experiences drove your desire to perfect communication?
I want to home in on that word “perfect.” I don’t actually have a drive or desire to “perfect” communication, because it’s impossible. When I lived in New York City, I coached the faculty at Columbia Business School on their front-of-room presence, ie, how they taught their classes.
Most of the professors who signed up for the optional coaching with me were professors who were already exceptional. They were trying to get even better. But no one is perfect. The goal isn’t that we’re ever going to achieve perfect communication; rather, it’s how we can use a more perfect process to improve communication.
Since the process traditionally has not been that great, it usually activates self-focus. This sounds like, “Don’t make distracting hand gestures,” “Just be yourself,” “Just be authentic,” or “Just command the room.” These guidelines only activate thought suppression and self-focus. I’m very interested in using physical exercises and embodied cognition to teach people how to “do things differently.”
Like anyone, I’ve had my hardships in life: more than some, fewer than many. I’ve discovered that fixating on how I was feeling or trying to control my thoughts wasn’t working. In many cases, it was making things worse. Finding actionable steps that I could take, and take repeatedly, no matter how I’m feeling in a given situation, was deliverance. My book is intended to give that same deliverance—a reminder that there are things that anyone can do, no matter how they’re feeling, to achieve better communication. That’s the point of the book.
You say there are roughly 7.8 billion communicators, but the best speakers tend to remain silent. Why?
Those with the loudest mouths often are not saying the smartest stuff. The folks who sit back and practice wisdom activities of listening and mindfulness might actually have the best ideas.
I’m not the first person to make this observation. The difference here is that I hope my book helps those people recognize how deeply physical communication actually is and begin to treat their lives a little bit more like communication athletes. If they build these muscles, they can get their brilliant ideas out into the world to fight some of the not-so-brilliant ideas out there from people who just like to have their voices heard.
Watch the full interview
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