NYLP: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod the New York Press Club award winning podcast highlighting new startups business and openigns in the New York City area. I’m Hal Coopersmith This is a very special episode because it marks the 4th year of the podcast, and to celebrate we are bringing back Michael Chad Hoeppner, Founder of GK Training and Communications. But before we get to that, I want to hear from you, the listener. What you think about the podcast? What do like about it? What I could be doing better, so email me at pod@nylaunchpod.com and I would love to hear from you.
If you are a long time listener of the podcast you may remember Michael Chad Hoeppner from Episode 28. Michael is a public speaking and communications coach, and he’s injecting a lot of technology in his business through smartphone apps and an oculus app.
Michael: So what I’m always looking for with the people I’m working is ways to be innovative and fun and dynamic with how we’re teaching them these core skills
NYLP: We catch up with Michael in an episode we call, How You Doin’?.
We first spoke to you in Episode 28, which anyone who has not listened to it should absolutely listen to, because there are some wonderful material there, but you are a phenomenal public speaking coach and you’re a big deal. I don’t want to introduce you, but you have big time clients and I feel like you should pump yourself up a little bit.
Michael: Well, I feel like it’s an intro from Anchorman. Like I’m kind of a big deal.
NYLP: You are a big deal.
Michael: What I would say is that yes, it is in fact true that the clients I have are a big deal. And I say it that way because the heart of communicating well really is focusing on the other person. So the best that I do my job, it makes other people look good and so yeah, I have coached two presidential candidates. We work with two of the four professional American sports leagues, but we also work with high school students on interview technique and I often say that giant range from presidential candidates to high school students because believe it or not, sometimes a high school students are better than the presidential candidates or the managing partners of law firms or things like that because everybody has to communicate and everybody has some degree of talent or not, and everybody can improve.
NYLP: And the high school students can become a presidential candidate.
Michael: Yes they can.
NYLP: Typically, if they’re speaking well. In our last Episode, we covered a lot of techniques. It’s probably about an hour based upon what you’re charging these big time companies. I’d say it’s probably thousands of dollars’ worth of material in there. So again, everyone should listen to it. But what I find fascinating about your business as a public speaking coach is that it’s certainly an in-person business. And we talked about how you started your business in 2009 when it was a terrible time to start your business, but you have integrated technology in something that, a business that is really a person to person business and I found that fascinating in terms of how you’re doing that and why you decided to do that.
Michael: Yeah, there are a couple of reasons I decided why to do that. And for your listeners, what you’re talking about of course, is we have an app now, we have a virtual reality tool, and the reason I did that is because on some level, you really can only help one person at a time if you stick to an end person business and from an entrepreneurial standpoint, we want to scale over time, but just on a more teaching standpoint, we want to help people if they can’t actually be in the room. So you’re right, executives that can afford to pay money for individual executive coaching, of course they benefit. But what about the folks who can’t do that? Or what about the folks who are not in the industries that typically invest in their people to get this kind of training? So that’s one reason. But the other is actually, because I’ve discovered over a decade of doing this, there are a couple of obstacles to people practicing and two of them are these, first, they’re a little bit ashamed of the things that they’re not good at. So for instance, let’s say they do speak in a monotone all the time or they’re bad at eye contact, they actually feel kind of bad about practicing that because they feel self-conscious about the thing and it tends to make them want to practice less, which, as you can imagine, leads right into a vicious cycle of never really improving. So if you give these folks technology tools where there’s not someone hovering over them or watching them or all their colleagues around, it gives them a very consequence-free place to practice.
NYLP: And it’s a great way for someone who doesn’t want to set up an iPhone or their smartphone and videotape themselves to get kind of a jumping off point.
Michael: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.
NYLP: So let’s jump into what the App actually does. It’s called Question Roulette and I’ve played around with it. Talk a little bit more about what it does.
Michael: Yeah, well I guess I could start with the name. Actually, the reason we call it Question Roulette is because the idea is just like being at a roulette table. You are gambling a little bit and having to deal with things as they come to you. So the idea is that it’s all well and good to be good as a communicator when you can prepare stuff and be planned and have all your talking points ready to go. But a lot of life is not like that. A lot of life is answering questions on the fly and oftentimes very challenging or difficult.
NYLP: I feel like all of life is, is on the fly. Am I wrong?
Michael: No, you’re not wrong at all. And for those of you who are entrepreneurs out there, especially start-ups who are listening, very often, if you’re talking to a VC or you’re talking to someone who can really help your business and help it quickly, they probably have one or maybe two key objections or key questions. And if you can answer those, well guess what? You’re halfway home. If you stumble on those, very likely the meeting’s over. So the idea here is that you can actually practice to be more agile and more flexible on things that you can’t prepare for it. And so that’s what the App does. It feeds you a bunch of questions and those can either be questions that you program in or some generic questions we have and then you can practice answering those questions and then you get real time feedback. How quickly you were speaking, how many ums you said, how long you went on for, and then you can also self-grade your answer and self-assessment.
NYLP: And part of this discussion, which is why we first had you on, is that speaking is so important and public speaking, someone once told me all speaking is public speaking. So you, in your Question Roulette, have addressed different categories that kind of highlights that, part of which we talked about is business and you have some business questions, which I kind of understand, but you also go into different categories of life. Cocktail party and one I found fascinating was relationship.
Michael: Yeah, we have some questions that are things like where do you see this relationship headed or are you breaking up with me? And of course it’s supposed to be humorous a little bit that people see this. It lightens them up, but also makes the game even more fun to play the App even more fun to use because you can put yourself in these hypothetical situations, but at the same time, none of us, none of us can say that we haven’t been in some situation, in an interpersonal situation, which we have to have a difficult conversation and we’re walking into it totally blind and incredibly apprehensive. Some of our users actually have used those practice tools to handle these very tricky interpersonal conversations. So we think it makes the tool more fun and lighthearted, but also in a very nuts and bolts way more practical. Now, the funny thing you said though about public speaking, you know, all public speaking or all speaking is public speaking. I often have people practice public speaking in a very humorous way. Let’s say they’re in line at Starbucks or a coffee shop. I tell them, when you make your order, I want you to slide your feet back three inches and I want you then to notice, oh that’s right, I’m on a stage and oh I’m surrounded by dozens and dozens of people and oh, I’m using my voice and my words to try to communicate something. And the idea is you want to break down this very arbitrary distinction that people have between speaking and public speaking. It really is the same animal.
NYLP: And so the way the App works, you can have questions randomly thrown at you or you can select a category and choose the questions. Once you answer the question, your response is recorded and as you talked about, analyzed in terms of how quickly you were speaking. What is a good frequency for someone to speak?
Michael: Sure. It’s a bit of a trick question so I’m going to dodge it ever so slightly, but it’s not a dodge. The answer is there is no such thing. And I once studied with a wonderful acting teacher named Ron van Lieu?? actually, and he had a saying and the saying was, you can make me believe anything you can make me believe. So the point is you can imagine the greatest public speakers of all time taking a two or four or ten second pause as I let some very profound idea, marinate or land on an audience. You get the idea. So that’s the first answer. There is no answer to that question exactly but…
NYLP: But you choose to analyze it.
Michael: But let’s be real for a moment also and talk about what you see the bell curve of people in general thinking about the bell curve, the sweet spot in terms of pace and that’s what we’re talking about. The speed at which you speak is roughly between one word per second and 3.25 words per second. Much faster than that, and it becomes difficult to understand and much slower than that, and it slowly becomes a little bit painful to listen to and comprehend. As I’m doing now of course and we actually worked on this, some colleagues and I at Columbia took a look at this and what we discovered is that these five p’s of vocal variety, which I talked about last time, pace, pause, pitch, power and placement that these five p’s, you can actually look at them and speakers who use a lot of vocal variety are evaluated by audiences as being more authentic. And we actually looked at audiences’ evaluations of politicians. Now the only one that doesn’t quite adhere to that is pace. And the reason is this, if an audience sees someone who can speak very, very quickly, but here’s the key part with zero non- fluencies and that non-fluency means and um, or an ah, stumbling over a word, having to go back again, those sorts of things. If the person can speak very quickly with zero non-fluencies, the audience evaluates them as quote unquote intelligent. But it’s still better to vary your pace. And the reason is this, just because the audience evaluates you as intelligent, it doesn’t mean they actually digested what you said because it went by too quickly.
NYLP: It’s wonderful to rehearse questions that you frequently get and situations, but I do want to play a quote back from when we first spoke in Episode 28 about knowing the answer too well, “the task is not to say the same stuff over and over again. The task is to say the same basic message, but reiterate it repeatedly in slightly different ways and so that it comes across which it actually is as a platform rather than just prepared speech”. So if someone’s using the App, how do they prevent themselves from being too rehearsed?
Michael: Yeah, good question. Well, part of the reason we use the software we do is that once you’ve completed the answer, the App virtually instantly transcribes it and it spits back these metrics to you so you can look down and you can see what you’ve actually said. Now, if you save it a few times and you discover that you’re saying the exact same thing over and over again, it’s a clue to you that, you know what, maybe I don’t need to practice this answer anymore. Or alternatively, if you keep looking at it and even though that’s the same thing word for word each time you don’t like the answer, guess what time to shake it up a little bit. But the other good thing is that the metrics that it shows you how quickly you’re speaking, how long you go on for, and how much filler language you have. If those things tend to shift a lot, guess what, the content tends to shift to. If those things stay the same every single time, it’s usually an indication that you’re stuck somewhat in a rut and saying the same thing over and over again.
NYLP: So we’ll link to the App in the show notes as well. But what’s interesting to me is how you decided to come up with the idea for the App. Obviously you can reach more people through technology, but there are a lot of public speaking coaches out there and I imagine that this App represented a investment for you. It’s a very slick App with the analytics and speech recognition and having the transcriptions right there. How much of an investment was that as a business owner? Why did you decide to do that and then give it away for free also.
Michael: You asking for the budget of the App? You want me to give you the nuts and bolts of dollars and things like that?
NYLP: You could do whatever you want. But I mean, I imagine it’s a pretty significant investment.
Michael: Yeah, go ahead.
NYLP: I mean, and for people in businesses that are looking to grow, you know that story and in deciding to take that plunge I think is pretty meaningful.
Michael: Well, I’m not going to be giving you the exact dollar amount of it, but I will say..
NYLP: Or the developer.
Michael: Yeah, exactly.
NYLP: Okay, well we’ll keep that secret.
Michael: That’s, that’s right. But you know, people know out there apps can cost anywhere from 30 grand to $30 million over the year if you’re the NFL or you’re folks like that. You have these incredibly robust apps or websites or things like that. Ours obviously was on the lower end of that giant range I just gave you. But to answer your question about how do we make this investment, we have a certain degree of luxury, which is that I actually have a business, it’s mature at this point. We’re a decade into things. So we do have money for capital investments. Not every start-up does. Lots of folks are bootstrapping. So every single thing you invest in is a massive risk. And just to be totally frank, we’re not at that point right now, so we can afford to take some risks and some gambles. But in terms of why I decided to go in this direction, one of them was actually just frustration. And I’ll tell you why. A lot of my clients get much, much better. Some clients get somewhat better, but there’s a few sticklers who just don’t get better at all. And you’re talking about, you know, 8% of people, 5% of people that get zero improvement, no matter how long you work.
NYLP: They’re not doing their homework.
Michael: They’re not doing their homework. This is the exact point. What happens? Just like someone learning the piano, you show up for your lesson every week and the teacher says, did you practice and you say no I didn’t really practice. Or you lie and you say, oh yeah, I practice every day. But they didn’t of course. So the idea is I want to make people’s obstacles to practicing as low as possible. So if they have something in their pocket every single day that they can practice with, hopefully that 8% of people goes down to 4% or 3% or even 2% over time.
NYLP: Well, one of the ways in which you’re helping people practice in addition to the iPhone App, which is fun and slick.
Michael: And Android also. I should interject.
NYLP: iPhone and Android is, you have an Oculus App. I don’t know if that’s public, but I played around with it. It’s very cool. You can pretend like you’re in a stadium, you’re a Dojo. All sorts of fun things. That really is transformative I think and really makes the experience fun.
Michael: People love it and they love, as I alluded earlier, to this idea of why did we build these and one was because people feel ashamed to practice. But the other is that people think practice can be kind of drudgery. Like, oh, I got to practice my communication skills. They put on this headset and instantly it’s fun. It’s weird. It’s immersion. Oh my gosh, I’m using VR. And so they can practice these very fundamental skills that everybody needs, like eye contact, like vocal variety, like clarity of speech and it doesn’t feel like they’re practicing. It feels like they’re immersing themselves in this very strange and spontaneous world and they’re getting better by doing this.
NYLP: And one of the things that I thought was absolutely wonderful is you can pretend being in a boardroom and making eye contact, which is very hard to practice if you’re recording yourself.
Michael: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And that one particular environment within the VR tool is the environment that we find that law firms, professional service firms, these sorts of places absolutely love. And they ended up wanting to use it a lot because eye contact, as we all know, is one of the single most profound communication tools that we all have and if people are not comfortable with it, it’s a very sticky thing to try to help people improve because guess what? They don’t want to make eye contact. So if you give them some very dumb basic reductive coaching, like just make sure you look the person in the eye, they actually do it less because all that coaching does is make them aware of two things -themselves and how bad they are at eye contact and the thing they’re not doing, which is looking the person in the eye so that negative focus really sabotages them. If you can put on a headset, practice looking at someone who is a real person in real life but certainly not really in that headset and get input, instant feedback of if you are or are not making eye contact, it’s a totally consequence- free way to practice and to get better at something without any kind of shame.
NYLP: And within the App the people in the board room are actually doing things like they’re shuffling papers or they’re moving around, adjusting their seating a little bit. And if you don’t make eye contact with them, rock music blasts in your ear and that’s a great way of providing feedback. How did you come up with all this stuff?
Michael: Well, let me just add one little tiny thing about that and then I’ll answer that question you just asked. But one of the reasons we did the music stimuli, queue, is a lot of people think they’re making great eye contact. If you have them give a presentation, you say, hey, how much of the time were you looking at your audience, they’ll say, oh, 90% Oh, a hundred percent, 80% and if you actually film it, it’s 20% it’s 30%. So the idea is that they get instant feedback, am I actually looking at the person or not? And so that’s the nuts and bolts reason why we decided to do that. But in terms of how did we come up with that exact thing, I find the entire category of communication fascinating because it’s something that we all have to do all day long, every day. And so in a weird way, we all think we should be experts at it because we’ve been doing it since we came out of the womb and let out a big fat scream. But in reality, a lot of people are not experts at communicating. So what I’m always looking for with the people I work with is ways to be innovative and fun and dynamic with how we’re teaching them these very core skills. People underestimate the power of them. Now as a funny little thing to reference is that Warren Buffett apparently tweeted this last month, that if you want to increase your lifetime net worth by 50% the best place you can put your focus is your written and spoken communication skills. So I saw this tweet and I thought, Warren Buffet, you’re speaking my language right now. But people underestimate how important this particular thing is. So my job is to make as many and as diverse and as dynamic ways as possible to get people practicing and then therefore improving.
NYLP: Well, I’m glad you brought that up because every time I see you, every time I speak with you, I’m always energized and I imagined that your clients are too. I tried the App, I tried the Oculus. One of the challenges is getting people to continuously practice because you can be listening to this or have a session with you and be energized and then a few months later you kind of fall into bad habits. What are some good ways, aside from using your software or you coming up with new software and new tricks for people to say, you know what, this is something you should practice.
Michael: I have 2 actually and you must forgive me because it’s been two years now since I was on the podcast and I honestly don’t remember if I mentioned this, so if I did everyone out there, let this be a reinforcement to you, and if I didn’t, guess what? Here’s a good reminder. The first thing I will say is this. You should make it a practice in your life. And when I say you, I mean the royal you. I mean everyone. You meet everyone listening to physically and vocally warm up every single day in some small way. I’m talking two minutes, three minutes, 90 seconds even. And the reason is because communication is a physical activity. Spoken communication anyway is a physical activity. Even as we’re talking here in the room, breath is going into our lungs, it’s moving over our vocal chords, it’s resonating throughout our body. It’s a physical activity actually, and you have to be physically engaged to be effective at it. Now the reason I see a warm up though is because guess what? It’s not just good for your communication. It’s good for your circulation, it’s good for your alertness, it’s good for just your physical health. Athletes warm up, musicians, actors, dancers, they warm up and we should as well. And for your listeners, if you go to our website, it’s gktraining.com you can see absolutely free, don’t even have to make an account or a username or anything like that, free warm ups, guided physical and vocal warm ups. There’s a 90 second one, a three minute one. But even beyond that, you don’t want to go to the website. Just Google physical or vocal, warm up. Do that single day. And the great thing about cell phones, as it regards to this, is you can now do tongue twisters or warm ups anywhere in the world into your cell phone. And no one knows what you’re saying. So no one knows that you’re being a crazy person. You just look like you’re having an animated conversation with somebody. So that’s one tool. Do you want to hear the second one?
NYLP: Everyone wants to hear the second.
Michael: The second one is this. This will drive your friends crazy, so therefore it’s even more fun to do it. Become fascinated with other people’s communication. Become totally aware of the people that you love to talk to and who you love to see speak. Notice what is it that they do that is so effective. And on the other side, the people who drive you crazy, what is it that they do? And now try to break that down as much as possible and I’ll give you a little kinesthetic tool to do so. If everyone out there, if you raise your two hands in front of your eyes, like you’re holding up a giant pair of imaginary binoculars.
NYLP: Everyone needs to do this right now.
Michael: So hold up.
NYLP: Unless you’re driving.
Michael: That’s true. In which case, just imagine this, but if you’re not driving, hold up both your hands in front of your face like you’re holding a giant pair of imaginary binoculars. Now if you look at your left hand, you will see that it looks like a capital letter c. If you look at your right hand, it looks like the other half of a capital d. Those two letters stand for content on the left hand and delivery on the right hand content is the words that you use. Your vocabulary delivery is how you say those words. So that’s tone of voice, eye contact if you’re in person, vocal variety, those sorts of things. Now these two things are connected in a virtuous and also a vicious cycle both ways. Everyone knows that. The reason I say all that is because when you see commanding or powerful communicators begin to nurture a more sophisticated eye to watch for those two things, do they have amazing content or actually do they just have incredible delivery? And if you dig at it, they’re not really saying anything that profound. And what’s the interplay between these two things? Because as you become more sophisticated in how you observe these things, you will become better yourself actually.
NYLP: And the warm ups, I have to say, actually do work in the Oculus. They’re terrible tongue twisters, but after a few times you’re warmed up, you’re able to speak better.
Michael: Yeah. And that’s exactly right. People think that ums or talking too quickly or stumbling over their words tend to be a reflection on their intelligence or their preparation. And it’s not true. It’s simply that the muscles, the articulators of their mouth, their tongue, their lips, those sorts of things are not actually prepared to be doing the work that they’re doing, which is making sound into words.
NYLP: So if you’re giving a big speech, a big presentation, warm up ahead of time, that’s a great way to at least have some improvement.
Michael: Oh my gosh, yes. But what I would say back to what I started with, no, do it every single day and I’ll just share something with some degree of vulnerability. I’ve been making my living by saying stuff for almost two decades now. I myself warm up every single day when I’m working. If I go on a vacation for a couple of weeks, when I come back I promise you, I’m not as good a trainer, not as good a coach, not as good as speaker because my, the physical muscles of how I do my job have atrophied ever so slightly. It’s just like a professional cellist or violinist who goes away for summer vacation, comes back in August or September and their muscles aren’t as strong as they were, so they have to bring them back up to use. If you want to improve as a communicator, make that a part of your daily ritual every single day.
NYLP: I love the concept of warming up on a daily basis and the c and the d. I can imagine all the New York Launch Pod listeners doing the binoculars on the subway. Any other tips that you want to add that you did not provide in Episode 28 that people can take away from it. And again, there’s so much wonderful content in Episode 28
Michael: I will actually offer one more thing. Our firm is pretty well known for the ways in which we help people work physically and kinesthetically, but I’ll offer something that’s really just a mindset thing so that people can utilize it right away, no matter where they are. There’s a fun metaphor you can think about, which is when you communicate to people and you’re trying to become an uh, you’re trying to bring an even greater laser focus to what you’re doing. You can do a fun little substitution in your head and that is this. Imagine the person you’re speaking to does not speak your language natively. Let’s say they do speak it, but not very well, and your job is to make sure that that person understands every single thing you’re saying, both the meaning and also the content of it and the tone of it, all of that, even though they don’t speak your native tongue. Now the reason to do that is because communication comes from this very core place. Take it back to when we were tribal. Now two tribes that don’t speak the same language, they use gestures, they use grunts in the sounds and onomatopoeia and the physical communication to get across these messages. And then over time, guess what? They learn a common vocabulary and soon they can communicate to each other. It’s still the same thing in 2019 and in many ways you could argue that we’re more tribal now and we actually have a harder time listening and communicating now than we used to. So when you make that tiny substitution in your mind, what happens is your whole body and your brain begins to work harder to reach the other person. You slow down, your enunciation improves, your eye contact improves because you have to see if this foreign speaker understands what you’re saying or not. So it’s a great little mental substitution to bring a very, very high to what you’re saying and how you’re saying it.
NYLP: That’s a wonderful note to wrap things up on. Michael Chad Hoeppner thank you for stepping back onto the New York Launch Pod and sharing your time with us. How do people find out more about you and GK training communications?
Michael: Sure. The easiest thing is 2 things, go to the website, GKtraining.com or download the App, Question Roulette and that’s both Android and Apple.
NYLP: And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can follow us on social media at nylaunchpod or visit us at nylaunchpod.com for transcripts of every episode including this one. And if you are a super fan of the show, Michael, are you a super fan of the New York Launch Pod?
Michael: Oh, are you kidding me? Absolutely.
NYLP: If you are a superfan like Michael, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts in iTunes. It does help people discover the show and it is greatly appreciated.
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