3 communication mistakes that hold you back at work 

In a world where meetings multiply and messages pile up through digital channels, the art of spoken communication often gets lost in translation. Many of us fall into the trap of treating speeches or meetings like written reports, focusing on our own delivery instead of forging genuine connections with our peers or audience. We often think that communicating well is all about preparing well. Right? It’s not just that.

People make three frequent mistakes when preparing for a big conversation, meeting, or presentation. They generate their content primarily by writing, not speaking; once they have their content, they fail to practice out loud; and they don’t warm up. Let’s look at each.

Stop creating content primarily by writing, instead of speaking

A speech isn’t a whitepaper to be handed out to an audience; it is made up of spoken words shared by a speaker with listeners. To craft content that sounds more like how people talk instead of how they write, try something I call “Out Loud Drafting.” It is exactly what it sounds like: you draft what you’re going to say by speaking it out loud rather than writing it first. To do this, simply give yourself an open-ended prompt to kick you off. Here are some good ones:

• What am I trying to communicate with this talk?
• What is the main idea I want people to remember from my talk? 

Those are example questions to get you going, but make up others on your own. Use open-ended questions (what, how, and why are good starting words to ensure that). Ask questions out loud, and then actually speak the answers. Do the activity three or four times, getting clearer and clearer on your message. Once you’ve done that, then you can write down some of the ideas you’ve discovered. You can even do the activity while recording or transcribing yourself so technology captures what you say.

“Out Loud Drafting” improves the preparation process for most people in three ways.

1. It leads to content that sounds like speaking rather than writing. Word choice tends to be more vivid, more monosyllabic, and less filled with jargon; grammatical construction tends to feature shorter sentences.

2. It helps speakers internalize—or memorize, if necessary—content more easily and faster. By saying it out loud several times in its embryonic form before ever finalizing the content, speakers memorize the flow of argument and internal logic rather than word-for-word passages.

3. It builds a muscle-memory experience of ease and experimentation rather than adrenaline and performance.

Start practicing out loud

This is a different point from the first. If point one is about figuring out what you want to say by talking it out, this point is about practicing that content—out loud! Speed-reading it under your breath or silently reading it over countless times doesn’t count. You have to say the stuff out loud. This point doesn’t need extrapolation; it just needs execution.

Start warming up . . . physically

Once you know what you’re going to say and you’ve practiced it, do some physical and vocal exercises to get ready. By warming up, I don’t mean “going through your materials a couple times.” I also don’t mean “talking to some people beforehand just to make sure I don’t have morning voice.” What I mean is a physical and vocal warm-up that awakens and primes the human communication instrument for performance. If your body is a musical instrument, it stands to reason that instrument should be warmed up and prepared to play.

The most familiar warm-up exercises most people know are tongue twisters: “Peter Piper picked . . .,” “Red Leather, Yellow Leather,” and so forth. Tongue twisters are an absolutely essential ritual in improving your day-to-day communication skills as well as your performance in high-consequence situations. These nonsensical phrases, poems, and sentences are so well-known in the theatrical and performance community that I don’t even know the original source for many of them.

I want to give you a warning: if you do this right, it will feel silly. Even with the previous paragraph’s emphasis on the importance of warming up, you may be slightly dreading it or ridiculing it in your mind: “I’m going to do a physical and vocal warm-up?! Unlikely.” Go ahead and have that thought fully because humans are bad at thought suppression. Now that you’ve fully indulged that thought, we can move on to the work of embracing the tool and making it part of your daily communication and presence regimen.

Take a lesson from athletes. Speaking is practically a sport. You wouldn’t play a competitive sport without spending at least a little time warming up. Athletes warm up; communicators should too.

The activities of a speaking warm-up versus a sports one are very different. I once was on a panel with a famous news anchor. When asked a question about her prep, she told the audience about the tongue twisters she learned in her undergraduate theater education that she still does to this day.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I warm up every single workday. I’ve been in multiple fields of professional communications for more than two decades; I like to think I’m fairly effective at using my voice and body to say stuff to achieve stuff. Does that mean I can kick back at this point? No. Warming up is a daily way to strive to become a stronger communicator. I don’t do it for nerves—though it’s an excellent way to energize your body and dispel the physical manifestation of nerves. I do it because I know my ability to help others is intimately connected to my ability to say words. Warming up gets my body and voice ready to do that.

And sometimes it’s even more than once every workday. Some days I warm up multiple times. The warm-ups might be lightning quick, just thirty seconds of tongue twisters before a lecture or a quick Sun Salutation to reinvigorate my body before an important call.

For the time being, though, let’s focus on at least once a day. Then over time you might expand it to multiple, brief warm-ups two or even three times a day. When will you find a moment to do a communication warm-up every single day? Perhaps it’s first thing in the morning, when you’re taking a shower; in the restroom once you get to work; in a conference room before the day’s first meeting; at home before logging on to your first remote call—anywhere. If your day-to-day occurs in less business-centric locations, choose places relevant to you.

And now for a cheat! Cell phones make warming up anywhere more feasible. If you have a cell phone, you have camouflage to warm up without looking odd. Just go outside or walk down the hall and sneakily speak some tongue twisters and vocal exercises into your phone as though you were talking to someone on the other end of the line. No one will be the wiser. If you’re feeling even more brazen, do the same thing but just with earbuds.

Go far with the warm-ups. If they don’t feel like you’re “stretching,” like you’re exploring the full range of your communication instrument, the activity is not giving you as much benefit as it could. Do not misinterpret this advice and injure yourself! I’m not talking about pushing your body beyond what it can do. I mean the push more from an intentionality standpoint.

Preparing for effective communication isn’t just about having the right content—it’s about the journey you take to deliver that content authentically and confidently.

Incorporating these strategies into your routine not only enhances your communication skills but also fosters a deeper connection with your audience. Just like athletes need to warm up before a game, communicators must prepare their instruments—both body and voice—to engage effectively.

Excerpted from the book Don’t Say Um: How to Communicate Effectively to Live a Better Life by Michael Chad Hoeppner. Copyright © 2025 by Michael Chad Hoeppner. Reprinted with permission of Balance, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., All rights reserved.