LifeHikes Wants You to Reach Your Full Potential, One Filmed Skit At a Time

What is the best way to break the ice between C-suite leaders in black business attire at a cocktail party before a communication training? Put them in ridiculous costumes and wigs to film a 30-second commercial with strangers.

Earlier this week, executives from around the world gathered in New York for a global summit hosted by LifeHikes, a leadership and communications training company that works with Fortune 1000 clients to help executives improve their public speaking and messaging through interactive trainings and one-on-one coaching.

The two-day training ran from December 10 to 12, bringing together executives from various industries at the Penguin Random House and IMB offices.

LifeHikes was founded by Bill Hoogterp, one of the business world’s most sought-after public speaking coaches. He told Newsweek that he runs these trainings because most people don’t feel like they’re using their full potential.

“It’s not just about being more productive, getting more promotions [or] raises, it’s about joy,” he said. “It breaks my heart how many people I’ve coached who are winning life’s game and not enjoying it.”

Hoogterp’s mission, therefore, is to make communication training more accessible for everyone, especially women, people of color, young professionals and other underserved communities, so that as many people as possible can reach more of their potential.

The event kicked off with a cocktail party on Wednesday night, where participants mingled and unlocked a childlike sense of play that will be the key to improving their public speaking and on-camera presence. Hoogterp hosted the event, along with Emmy-nominated actor Giancarlo Esposito, who went through a LifeHikes training himself. Esposito told Newsweek that the training helps people get out of their comfort zones.

“It’s supposed to be fun, you’re supposed to enjoy it," he said. "You’re supposed to leave yourself behind, so when you think that you’re grinding too hard, step back. It doesn’t need to be that hard. It is not work, it is play."

In his own life, Esposito said the training helped him connect with people at speaking college engagements or Comic-Con and taught him to check in and be kinder to himself.

The key to LifeHike's method is active, collaborative and team-based instruction that encourages participants to interact with each other, speak naturally on camera and immediately implement and build upon skills they've learned throughout the training.

The coaching team wasted no time getting participants active and involved with warm-ups as they started learning speaking skills that would help them with the climax of the training: The Two Minute Talks. These professionally filmed and edited presentations allow participants to present on a topic that showcases an industry expertise, a personal journey or a leadership philosophy.

During the first session Thursday morning, the participants engaged in exercises that demonstrated the importance of effective, authentic and appropriate body language, making memorable personal introductions and eliminating filler words in their speech.

To practice avoiding “weak language” and filler words, like "um” and "basically," participants poured a can of Coca-Cola into a cup. That, the coach said, was their message. It was sweet, flavorful and tasty. Everyone added some bottled water to the cup, demonstrating how filler words literally water down one's message. Then, everyone paired up and gave a 30-second pitch. If they uttered any filler words, their partner would interject, telling them to take a drink of their watered-down soda.

Priya Srinivasan, a general manager for IBM Software Products, told Newsweek that she didn't realize how many words and phrases she and others use every day are actually just filler.

"I would start my presentation with, ‘Thank you, everybody, for coming, I’m so glad you’re here,'" she said. "I would probably spend my first sixty seconds saying that. You know why? I’m nervous. It’s not for [the audience], I am just getting myself grounded. I’ve never thought of those as filler. [LifeHikes] helped me realize I'm just wasting their time."

Participants traveled from as far as Saudi Arabia and London, representing top companies in media, finance, beauty, tech, including Revlon, Google, Goldman Sachs, Kimberly-Clark and even some former U.S. Olympians.

Bill Hoogterp hopes that through this training, everyone can be more comfortable speaking in front of a crowd, in a meeting and in a social media video. His main note of encouragement to the crowd was to "stop trying to be great, just get good."

The LifeHikes coaches leading the training demonstrated many of the tools the leaders in the room could take back to their companies-like body polling the group (ranking 1 to 10 using fingers or hand raises), involving the audience in the presentation and using varied types of visual aids.

The formula is effective: the LifeHikes coaches explain the what and why of the concept, they engage the audience, they demonstrate the skill and then they instruct participants to practice what they just learned. That way, the message is reinforced and immediately implemented.

“If you can make it fun, you can learn anything,” Hoogterp said. “And if you can make public speaking fun, you can make anything fun.”

Most leadership communication trainings, he said, cover the core skills to improve communication. But what makes LifeHikes special is the emphasis on mindset as well as the technique. It blends the silly and the serious to help people get out of their own heads, learn a lot of information quickly and understand how to apply what they’ve learned creatively and at the appropriate time.

“We’ve learned you can’t hit people over the head with mindset, but you can sneak it in the side door,” Hoogterp said. “If you sneak it in with a little exercise, a little story just the right way, they get it and then it becomes theirs.”

In addition to filming the Two Minute Talks, participants met one-on-one with executive coaches and moved through smaller breakout groups that worked on topics like giving and receiving feedback, nailing your elevator pitch and the eight steps to navigating change management.

As one coach noted, one of the best parts of the program is that participants are in similar situations and can crowdsource tips and feedback to overcome some of the biggest personal or business obstacles they face.

Sarah Mulligan was going through the training for the first time. As the head of marketing and communication at the Quantum Black AI arm of McKinsey, Mulligan told Newsweek that she delivers a lot of presentations and helps executives with their speaking engagements.

"It's always helpful to learn new tactics to captivate a room and keep people's attention," she said. "It’s not even so much as like convince someone, but it’s just a matter of how do you keep someone’s attention and how do you get someone’s buy-in."

One of the most important traits of an effective speaker instilled at the LifeHikes training, she said, is maintaining authenticity.

"When you are delivering an honest message that you believe in, the rest truly will follow, whether it's your body language, the way you communicate, the way you make eye contact," Mulligan said. "I consider those micro tactics that you can train into people, but ultimately, you have to believe in what you're sharing."

Newsweek

This story was originally published December 13, 2025 at 9:49 AM.