Enhancing Communication Skills: Insights from Michael Chad Hoeppner

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Essentially, the end result is a presentation robot, and the performance is poor. 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.

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?”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

What is ‘vocal fry,’ and how can one ‘put air into action’?

Vocal fry is a mechanical phenomenon. It’s insufficient air flowing over the vocal folds. 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.”

Which personal experiences drove your desire to perfect communication?

I don’t actually have a drive or desire to “perfect” communication, because it’s impossible. 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.

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. 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

For the full interview with Michael Chad Hoeppner, watch the video below: