Kelly starts the new year talking about effective communication skills with Michael Chad Hoeppner, CEO and founder of GK Training. He teaches his unique approach to communications at Columbia University Business School in the PhD and MBA programs and coaches the faculty. He has a new book, “Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life.”  

There’s an amazing story about Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech – that he improvised portions of it from past stories and phrases he’d used in other talks. 

“Even though you’re not MLK, no one is. But even though you’re not even in that role, right, it’s still your job to continue to see what it is like to put ideas into sound in in the world to try to make an impact. And, by the way, just because you’ve said the same story before does not mean you’re a fraud if you use it again. So, figure out what your biggest ideas are in your life. Practice talking about them, and they’ll probably come in handy at some point, maybe not on the Mall in Washington, DC, but somewhere.” 

It’s pretty unusual for a communication book to start and end with a question of ethics. 

“If it’s not way too audacious and bold to hope for this, the reason I started the book off with these bigger sort of ethical framings at the very beginning and the very end is because, legitimately, I really do hope that that people who read this and listen to this don’t just become better presenters and better public speakers, but that they actually have a better life. Because we say words out loud 5 to 10,000 times a day, depending on the day. So, it stands to reason, if you could do that just a little bit better every single day, it could genuinely make your life better.” 

Because you have a deep background in the arts, you are able to take those skills and adapt them quite nicely to any sort of communication situations. 

“There are parts of this book that blossom out of a foundation of our artistic education, for sure. I’ll give you one very concrete example: the idea of being other focused that sounds so simple, like, okay? Other focused right? I should think about something besides myself. Yes, how actors overcome self-consciousness on stage much of the time is not by inner voice coaching – stop being self-conscious. No. All they do is anchor to whatever they’re trying to achieve with the other person on stage. They get everything off their scene partner. So that example of being other focused – to focus on the other person – that comes exactly from the world of theater.”