Why is almost all communication coaching worse than useless?
That’s the question Michael Hoeppner answers with neuroscience, not platitudes. Most advice about public speaking makes you more self-conscious, not more confident. It tells you what NOT to do, which is exactly what makes you do it more. Because your brain can’t process negative commands. When someone says “don’t say um,” all your brain hears is “um.”
This conversation goes way beyond surface-level tips into why mental reminders for what’s actually a physical art form keep you trapped in thought suppression cycles.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode
Michael breaks down the three stages of unhelpful communication coaching: thought suppression (don’t talk too fast), general advice (just slow down), and mental reminders for physical activities (remember to breathe). Each one makes you focus on what you’re doing wrong instead of building actual skill.
You’ll discover why speaking takes 120 muscles but gets treated like a mental exercise. We turn air into sound and sound into words with our bodies, yet most coaching acts like it’s happening in your head. That mismatch is what keeps people stuck.
The embodied cognition approach Michael teaches uses physical tools to bypass your analytical brain entirely. Lego blocks, wiffle balls, and yes, even fingers in your mouth. These aren’t silly parlor tricks. They’re how you build muscle memory that lasts when the adrenaline hits and your prefrontal cortex shuts down.
Why This Matters Right Now
We’re living in an era where AI can generate perfect content and deep fakes can deliver it with flawless presentation skills. But that’s exactly why human communication skills matter more than ever. When everyone can outsource thinking to machines, the people who can still speak authentically, breathe through nerves, and connect genuinely will stand out.
There’s another reason this matters. Our kids are growing up speaking to screens instead of each other. Parents are noticing their children have worse interpersonal skills than previous generations. The devices meant to connect us are making us worse at actual connection.
Communication isn’t just a professional skill. It’s how we navigate crisis, repair relationships, and make ourselves understood when stakes are high. You can’t delegate that to AI without losing something essential about being human.
About Michael Hoeppner
Michael Hoeppner coaches presidential candidates, Fortune 500 executives, and anyone who needs to speak when it matters. He’s the founder of GK Training and author of the bestselling book “Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life.”
What makes Michael different is his background. He’s a world-caliber expert in vocal delivery who also understands the neuroscience of why conventional advice backfires. He’s spent decades studying the gap between knowing what you should do and actually being able to do it when your nervous system takes over.
Key Insights From Michael Hoeppner
Why Thought Suppression Always Backfires
When you tell yourself “don’t say um,” you’re engaging in thought suppression. Your brain can’t process the negative. It just hears “um” and makes it more likely you’ll say it. This is the same mechanism behind “don’t think about a white bear.” Now you can’t stop thinking about one.
Most communication coaching is built on thought suppression. Don’t talk too fast. Don’t fidget. Don’t lose your place. Every single one of those commands makes you more self-conscious and more likely to do exactly what you’re trying not to do.
The solution isn’t more mental discipline. It’s giving yourself something positive and specific to focus on instead. Not “don’t say um” but “open my mouth fully and enunciate each word.” That’s a direction your brain can actually follow.
Speaking Is a Physical Art, Not a Mental Exercise
It takes more than 120 muscles to turn air into sound and sound into words. Your vocal cords, your diaphragm, your tongue, your lips, your entire torso. Speaking is deeply physical, yet we treat it like it happens in our heads.
You would never give someone mental advice about other physical skills. You don’t tell a pianist “remember to use your fingers” or a dancer “don’t forget to move your legs.” You give them physical drills that build muscle memory. Communication needs the same approach.
When you speak without sufficient breath, your body thinks it’s drowning. Your nerves aren’t performance anxiety. They’re survival instinct. You can’t think your way out of that. You have to train your body to breathe, pause, and move differently.
Embodied Cognition Bypasses Your Analytical Brain
Embodied cognition means using your body, not just your mind, to learn new things. Michael teaches techniques like stacking Lego blocks to practice sharing one idea at a time, throwing wiffle balls to build tolerance for silence before speaking, and speaking with your fingers in your mouth to improve enunciation.
These aren’t gimmicks. They’re how you bypass the analytical brain that keeps you stuck in self-criticism. When you focus on the physical action, you stop obsessing over whether you sound smart enough or whether people are judging you.
The exercises feel silly at first. That’s the point. You have to get past the embarrassment of looking foolish to access real improvement. Once you try speaking with a starburst candy between your teeth and notice how much clearer you sound afterward, you realize the silliness was just your ego protecting you from growth.
Your Voice Is Your Body, Not Your Identity
People carry massive baggage about the sound of their voice. Too nasal, too gravelly, too quiet, too harsh. Michael’s reframe is liberating: it’s not even your voice. You’re a musical instrument. You take air into your body and let it exit over your vocal cords, creating sound that amplifies through your entire body.
If you don’t like how you sound, you’re not stuck with it. You’ve just habituated yourself to create sound in a certain way. Change how you breathe, where you place the sound in your body, how you open your mouth, and your voice changes dramatically.
You already know this from experience. Your voice sounds completely different after a big yawn, on a late-night call when you’re relaxed, or in the morning before you’ve warmed up. That’s not multiple voices. That’s one instrument played different ways.
The Gap Between Knowing and Doing Requires Muscle Memory
Even experts crash and burn. Michael told the story of presenting at his local school board meeting on Zoom, an audience of maybe two people, and becoming absolutely petrified for no good reason. He’s coached presidential candidates through televised debates, but a random Zoom call triggered fight-or-flight response.
What saved him was muscle memory. He focused on two things: stand as tall as I actually am, and fully enunciate my words. That positive, specific focus got him through the first 30 seconds of intense nerves until he regained command.
You can’t think your way through an adrenaline response. Your prefrontal cortex shuts down. You go into crisis mode. The only thing that works is having practiced physical behaviors so many times that your body can execute them automatically when your brain checks out.
One Brilliant Thing Beats 25 Mediocre Ones
Your job isn’t to say 25 brilliant things. It’s to say one brilliant thing and then tolerate silence so your audience can digest it and you can think of what to say next. Great impromptu speakers have mastered this.
We do this in real life all the time. When you’re giving advice to a friend in crisis, you don’t dump 25 genius solutions on them. You listen, notice, watch, tolerate silence, and say one idea. Then you evaluate what’s next.
The Lego block exercise teaches this physically. Share one idea. Place the block down in silence. Pick up the second block. Share the second idea. Click it into place. The physical action forces you to stop prattling on and actually complete one thought before moving to the next.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Communication Coaching
Most of it is designed to make you aware of your flaws, not to help you build skill. It pathologizes normal nervousness and makes you feel broken when you’re actually boringly typical. Almost everyone freezes or goes blank or says um too much. You’re not special for struggling with this.
The coaching industry profits from keeping you self-conscious. If you felt confident, you wouldn’t need more courses, more feedback, more analysis of everything you’re doing wrong. But confidence doesn’t come from being told you’re amazing. It comes from a proven track record of surviving difficult moments.
That’s what embodied practice builds. Not confidence in yourself necessarily, but confidence in your ability to use specific tools when the stakes are high. You might never feel like an amazing public speaker. But after you’ve navigated five presentations using breath and pauses and enunciation, you trust that you can do it again.
Quotes That Hit Different
“Most of it just makes people think about all the stuff that they’re doing wrong and it’s overly general.” — 0:06
This is why you leave workshops feeling worse than when you arrived. You’re now hyperaware of 47 things you shouldn’t do, with no idea how to actually improve.
“We turn air into sound and then sound into words with our bodies. It takes 120 muscles, more actually, to do this everyday miracle of creating words from just air. It’s physical.” — 0:06
Stop treating speaking like a mental exercise and start treating it like the athletic skill it actually is.
“When you speak without sufficient breath, your body thinks it’s drowning. Your nerves are actually survival instinct.” — Referenced in conversation
How many people are treating anxiety with mindset work when what they actually need is more oxygen?
“Your job is not to say 25 brilliant things. Your job is to say one brilliant thing and then to tolerate silence at the end of that thought.” — 7:22
This applies to presentations, difficult conversations, and every email you’ve ever over-explained.
“Executive presence is not Oprah Winfrey or Superman or Winston Churchill. Executive presence is you when you’re at your most other-focused, thinking the least about yourself.” — 37:11
The paradox of charisma: it happens when you stop performing.
How to Apply This in Your Life
Start with one embodied exercise from this episode. The Lego block drill, the wiffle ball pause practice, or even the fingers-in-mouth enunciation work. Pick whichever one makes you most uncomfortable, because that’s probably where you need it most.
Practice it until it feels automatic. Not once or twice. Dozens of times. Build the muscle memory so that when your nervous system floods with adrenaline and your prefrontal cortex goes offline, your body knows what to do anyway.
The other critical piece is reframing mistakes. Stop treating bobbles, pauses, and course corrections as credibility threats. They’re just your humanity. Practice transparency phrases like “let me go back a minute” or “that wasn’t quite what I meant, let me try again.” Normalize recovering instead of spiraling.
And maybe most importantly: give yourself one positive, specific focus instead of a list of things not to do. Not “don’t forget your points” but “breathe fully between thoughts.” Not “don’t speak too fast” but “enunciate each word clearly.” Your brain needs a direction to move toward, not away from.
Resources & Links From This Episode
- Michael’s book: “Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life”
- Free chapter on Navigating Nerves: dontsayum.com
- GK Training: gktraining.com
- Connect with Michael on LinkedIn
Related Mind Love episodes: [Add internal links to episodes on anxiety, nervous system regulation, embodied practices]
Take This Work Deeper
Ready to practice communication skills with real support? Join the free Mind Love Collective for monthly themed calls and weekly challenge accountability. mindlove.com/join
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