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Why most public speaking advice is wrong—and how to finally overcome anxiety | Tristan de Montebello

Lenny's Podcast · 1h 56m · transcribed 1d ago
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Section Insights

# 0:00

Introduction to Public Speaking

What is the importance of speaking conversationally in public speaking?

The speaker emphasizes that many people shift into a 'public speaking voice' that feels unnatural. Instead, speaking conversationally is more freeing, powerful, and effective. The introduction also highlights the guest, Tristan deont Bello, and the value of his public speaking workshop.

  • Speaking conversationally enhances connection and effectiveness.
  • Tristan deont Bello is a notable figure in public speaking training.
  • Improving public speaking skills can significantly impact professional life.
# 14:33

Overcoming Monotony in Speaking

How can speakers overcome the fear of spontaneity?

The discussion revolves around the need to upgrade one's speaking habits to avoid monotony. By understanding that pauses and gathering thoughts can be beneficial, speakers can find freedom in their delivery.

  • Fear of spontaneity can lead to monotonous speaking.
  • Pausing to gather thoughts can enhance delivery.
  • Upgrading speaking habits is essential for effective communication.
# 29:07

The Role of Games in Learning to Speak

Why are games used in public speaking training?

Tristan explains that games are integral to learning because they provide a low-stakes environment for practice. Just as cooking requires hands-on experience, speaking requires active participation to improve.

  • Active practice is crucial for improving speaking skills.
  • Games create a fun and engaging learning environment.
  • Traditional methods of learning about speaking are often insufficient.
# 43:41

Confidence in Spontaneous Speaking

What is the significance of recovering from mistakes in speaking?

The ability to recover gracefully from mistakes builds confidence in spontaneous speaking scenarios, which are common in public speaking.

  • Confidence in speaking is built through practice and recovery from mistakes.
  • Most speaking scenarios are spontaneous and unprepared.
  • Learning to handle mistakes can enhance overall speaking ability.
# 58:15

Physical Comfort in Speaking

How does physical comfort affect communication?

Feeling comfortable and at ease physically allows speakers to communicate more effectively. Movement and body language play a significant role in enhancing communication.

  • Physical comfort is key to effective communication.
  • Movement can enhance a speaker's ability to express themselves.
  • Tapping into different skill sets can improve public speaking.
# 72:49

The Power of Focus in Speaking

How does focusing on fewer ideas improve speaking?

Focusing on a limited number of ideas allows speakers to communicate more clearly and effectively. This approach leads to greater clarity and impact in their message.

  • Reducing the number of ideas can enhance clarity in communication.
  • A focused message is more memorable for the audience.
  • Simplicity in speaking can lead to more effective delivery.
# 87:23

The Accordion Method in Speaking

What is the Accordion Method and how does it help in speaking?

The Accordion Method involves speaking for set time intervals, gradually refining ideas. This technique encourages speakers to express their thoughts without worrying about perfection, leading to improved clarity and confidence.

  • The Accordion Method helps in structuring thoughts and ideas.
  • Practicing in time intervals reduces pressure on the speaker.
  • This method encourages spontaneity and creativity in speaking.
# 101:57

The Importance of a Key Message

What should speakers focus on to ensure their message is remembered?

Speakers should identify a single key message they want the audience to remember and support it with relevant details. This clarity helps prevent overwhelming the audience with too much information.

  • Identifying a key message enhances audience retention.
  • Supporting details should reinforce the main idea.
  • Clarity in presentation reduces audience confusion.

Transcript

0:00 people tend to get into a public speaking voice we'll be in a class and they'll be chatting normally and and look super normal and then we'll say okay now just a timer I'm just going to give you a speech just speak for 60 seconds so we get a Baseline and I click play and suddenly they say the important part about doing this and they enter into a different version of themselves a professional version whatever that would

0:22 mean it's so much more freeing powerful connecting and effective to speak conversationally the cue I often give people is today my guest is Tristan deont Bello Tristan is the co-creator of ultra speaking which is the best public speaking Workshop I have ever come across in 2017 Tristan became the fastest competitor to reach the finals of the world championship of public speaking and based on that experience

0:54 built a very unique course that helps you quickly build the skills to become better and to become more comfortable speaking in public and especially speaking on the spot I like to spend time on this topic on this podcast because becoming a better speaker is such an accelerant of your professional life and in this episode we delve into a bunch of tactics and also misconceptions about how to become a better speaker and to make it even more fun and interesting

1:20 we go through a few of the exercises that Tristan and his team have developed live on the podcast he goes through them I go through them it was a lot of fun I'm excited to hear what you think if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you Tristan deont

1:44 Bello Tristan thank you so much for joining me and welcome to the podcast thanks so much for having me so I took a an Abridged version of this speaking course that you teach called ultr speaking and it immediately made me feel more comfor public speaking which I never felt doing any other course public speaking is something I just like is very scary to me as it is for a lot of people but it's just something I

2:10 really dread like even doing these podcast episodes every time I get nervous before doing these things as much as it may not seem that way so this is not my natural habitat speaking being in public like it may not seem that way to people but it's it's true and the way you approach this stuff is so unique and worked for me and because of that I thought it'd be awesome to just bring you on this podcast and basically try to

2:33 teach people the stuff that you've learned about how to become a better public speaker I know we're not going to do your course here but just like what are some very tactical things people can immediately start to apply and also I want to make this super interactive so actually and do some of the exercises that you use in your class so so that's where we're here for how does that sound that sounds exciting I'm in great this episode is brought to you by

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3:56 the AB testing flywheel EPO Powers experimentation across every use case including product growth machine learning monetization and email marketing check out EPO at geo.com Lenny and 10x your experiment velocity that's get eo.com Lenny today's episode is brought to you by command AI if you're like me and most users that I've built product for you're probably used to chat Bots at the bottom right of websites where you ask a

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5:26 sign up at command. a/ Lenny and experience a custom demo of how it works in your app that's command. a/ Lenny okay so let me first ask just kind of a broad question what do most people get wrong about public speaking what are some of what's maybe the biggest misconception about how to become a better public speaker and how to be good at it I actually think that the biggest misconception with tackling your speaking is that people grossly

5:58 underestimate just how transformative it could be to your life and the reason it's so transformative is because speaking is not a specialized skill it's a meta skill that means that the better you get at speaking the better your life gets so an example of a meta skill is Fitness for example if you were to start saying okay I'm going to transform my fitness and you start lifting RS and you start going on runs obviously your muscles are going to get bigger you're

6:28 going to get more in shape and your cardiovascular system is going to improve but that's actually only a sliver of the impact it's going to have on your life because you're going to start feeling more energy and you're going to start having these nice hormones these endorphins flowing through your body and you're going to feel better about yourself and when you walk in front of the mirror suddenly you're going to have a boost in confidence so naturally everything else

6:53 in your life is going to start to improve as a result of you focusing on your Fitness and for speaking it's the it's the same thing this blew my mind when I went on my own speaking journey is when I started making breakthroughs in speaking other things started to feel different so as you get breakthroughs how you feel at work feels different how you feel in your group of friends feels different how you feel in a group of

7:18 strangers especially how you feel in your family can even be impacted so this seeps into everything else in your life but the thing is because there's so much self-consciousness that goes with speaking we often feel kind of constrains under the layers of overthinking and anxiety that come with speaking so it can be hard to realize that underneath these layers you actually have this

7:48 extraordinary superpower because as humans we're evolved to speak this is what we are so you need to teach a baby how to speak it will learn by itself with no formal education so what that means is we all have this incredible Hardware the thing is over the course of our life because of all these little situations that happen we start getting bugs in the

8:20 software and we're not really upgrading our software the moment you get the bugs and things start working we not working we start avoiding and suddenly it's like we're not upgrading our software anymore so we're stuck on Old buggy software but the reality is let's not forget that we have incredible software that we're evolved for this so all we need to do is some debugging and some upgrading of the software and suddenly your entire life can change so that's really what I want

8:49 to impart on anybody listening like you have it in you you already have what it takes okay so kind of building on what you just talked about some of the kind of this Insight of your life can improve and how you kind of have to un unlearn stuff one of my favorite maybe core insights and tenants of the way you approach teaching people to speak is you talk about how if you don't enjoy speaking you're doing it wrong and

9:16 that really helped me because you kind of encourage you kind of remind people try to have fun as you're doing can just talk about that insight and why that's important and how that helps people become better well you I think that's very tied to what you were saying I see in enjoyment as a barometer like if I'm doing things right I'm probably enjoying myself if I'm doing things wrong particularly with speaking because again this is something we're naturally

9:41 evolved to do so if we're naturally evolved to do to do it it's not something that is that we dislike doing it has to be something that rewards us so as soon as things start not feeling enjoyable it's a sign hey I'm probably doing this wrong there's something here that I'm doing that is making this unenjoyable that's probably not helping me and I think you mentioned that you know in those people who are who can hold an audience who are really good

10:08 communicators in business it looks like they feel very comfortable it looks like they feel like themselves yeah and if you think about speaking when you're talking with your kids or with your partner or with your best friend your childhood friend your parents every we all have environments where we feel completely like ourselves and when we do communication is extraordinarily enjoyable it's just a means to connect with other people a means to share what we have on our mind

10:38 and it's very very empowering and it feels very good then I take the same person with the same skill set and the same ability and I bring him in a business setting and suddenly I don't feel like myself anymore and because of the pressure I start trying to speak differently so people start having I'm going to try to think really hard of what I need to say and I want to control the words that are going to come out of my mouth before

11:03 they come out of my mouth so I make sure I don't make a mistake and you basically Loop in this thing that is so counter what communication is which is just a natural subconscious skill so using speaking as a barometer of hey if this is not feeling good I'm probably overthinking I probably need to relax and try to just feel a little bit more like myself but this also applies to practice where in your practice because this is not an overnight thing

11:35 you can't just snap your fingers read a book and be a better speaker well your practice has to be enjoyable as well because otherwise two weeks in you're going to quit just like a a shitty fitness journey or Diet right you have to find joy in it it has to be structured in a way where it rewards you as well so that you get more energy and you get more enjoyment while you do it awesome and we're going to show people

12:00 how you do that you do these games there are like games that you play that help you actually learn these skills so before that and also I want to get into like actual tactics that we can just give people to become better public speakers but right before we get there are there any other core insights or principles or lessons that are fundamental to the way you found that it works to become a better public speaker that kind of inform a lot of the stuff

12:23 we're going to be talking about the day I understood that speaking was a subconscious flow oriented process and not a conscious process completely changed the way I approached it so instead of thinking tactics and Frameworks and adding more to the outside of the things I need to think about when I realized when I speak best I'm actually not

12:54 thinking about speaking it's the last thing I think about is the speaking part I'm completely in tune with whatever it is I'm trying to convey to my audience or the person in front of me and the goal is to get into a flow State and stay in that flow State all the way through the Finish Line that's what really really changed my mindset about speaking because then it changes all of the exercise the exercises you want to

13:21 do it changes how you can think about speaking and one of the ways that changed my how I practice was instead of focusing on the symptoms of speaking I started to try and figure out well what are the root causes that create these symptoms and can I address those so instead of counting my filler words if that's something that's annoying to me I'm going to go back and try to figure out well what's the root cause of that

13:48 well the root cause of having lots of filler words or racing in your speaking is that you probably struggle to feel comfortable slowing down relax in or even pausing when your mind is racing and you feel pressure solve that and not only do the filler words take care of themselves but the racing takes care of itself and you suddenly have more mind space and you feel super if you feel super constrained in your speaking very monotonous then maybe you're you feel

14:18 boxed in and you're struggling to allow yourself to feel to be all of what you are under pressure because there's probably a lack of certainty a lack of trust in hey if I let myself be more intense or if I let sudden of these emotions pop out or if I take a time time to gather my thoughts is everything going to unravel or is that going to work for me and if you haven't proven that to yourself then you're just going

14:46 to go for safety and so you're going to be very monotonous and constrained and that's what creates monotony but if I can solve that suddenly I have freedom so thinking through this and understanding that the goal here is upgrading the software and it's really layering taking all the bad habits away and putting in new habits that I can just stay in this Flow State without getting pulled out that really changes the game that was a really interesting

15:15 insight and I love that you actually demoed that in the way you answered this question where you took time to get into that state and not just get you know it's just like pause pause yeah yeah that was a really beautiful example of that okay let's get into a few tactics just to give people something they can actually change about the way they speak this week what are two or three things that you can recommend people tweak in the way that

15:42 they do public speaking the way they speak in meetings and presentations whatever I actually thought about this because once you think about speaking being much more about the root causes like play the games that are going to change you at the root don't Focus on the symptoms then you find yourself sharing much less purely tactical advice and Frameworks because it's we're trying to get out of our brain into our subconscious so when I thought about it

16:11 I thought of three things I wanted to share one makes you sound better or look better one makes you sound better and one makes you feel better so the first makes you look better now this is super basic and very crunchy but it's a a bad habit that a lot of people have that when I am trying to gather my thoughts or think people tend to look down and if you're looking down on Zoom it's three times as bad

16:37 because it looks like you're looking at your phone or looking at notes if you had any but even when you're in person it doesn't look very confident and so that's you're suddenly giving off of that Vibe of O this person feels a little bit uncertain here and maybe you it's going to look like you stopped speaking and you might get more interrupted If instead you switch that up and you start thinking up I think up and to the right but you can think in

17:02 any direction you want but as long as you're looking up you actually look thoughtful by default so suddenly you're looking thoughtful that means you look more confident because anybody who'd be willing to pause and in their speaking as somebody who's confident and as a result you're much less likely to bet to get interrupted so it's a small tweak but makes a real difference the only thing is if you're not used to doing this if this is not your habit then it's

17:29 going to be feel a little bit awkward the first time you do it and you probably won't think about doing it so I recommend writing think up on a poit and putting it on your computer so that it's there for you and then once you've done it a few times this will become the new normal and by default you'll look more confident I'm gonna do this as you talk I have a poster right here think up oh

17:49 nice think up okay great what else look more confident now how to sound more confident this is a really important one and this concept is called ends strong and it's we had to bring this up because most people tend to end weak and why is that it's they they put freestyle rappers in an fmri and what they found out is freestyle rappers have to enter a deep Flow State so if you're

18:19 freestyle rapping you have a beat you don't have any lyrics and you have to get into the beak and invent the lyrics and the melody and everything on the fly so there's no choice being completely present what happens is you can see their brain and it's lit up in a very specific place that shows that they're in flow and when they get to the very end the brain just blows up before they finish they start getting pulled out of

18:41 flow and this is the same feeling of like you're you're you're running at at school and you see the finish line and just a few yards before you start slowing down it's just I don't know we're built that way and in speaking it's the same thing people tend to give a great answer and then either they kind of take off at the end which doesn't leave you with a good impression or they actively say the doubts that are coming

19:05 up in their mind of maybe they'll be giving a great answer and then suddenly they say I don't I don't really know if that makes sense I do that all the time that's very relatable yeah and but what the thing is what happens when you do that when you do that it's like you're forcing this lens on your audience where now they even if they had the best of experiences with your answer now they're looking at everything you said through

19:29 the lens of oh this person was kind of Uncertain so it's like you had a a very smooth flight across the Atlantic and your Landing was absolutely horrible it was you were bumpy when you're coming up and then when you hit the landing you bounced three times and you thought you were going to die you're not going to remember the smooth flight you're going to remember the ending so a simple tactic here is anticipate that as you

19:56 get to the end of anything you're saying you're going to naturally start regaining Consciousness and you're going to start being a little bit more self-aware and some of those uncertainties are going to pop up know that it's coming and make sure you land the plane so what that looks like is either you just make your ending sound like an ending and then leave it at that or you can prompt your brain you can use summary prompts this is incredibly

20:27 powerful it just means you say the beginning of a sentence or the beginning of yeah the beginning of a sentence and your brain's going to fill in the The Gap it's going to you're prompting your brain and your brain will always deliver so you get to the end you're like okay I got to wrap up now and so you'll say so to wrap up and your brain's going to fill in the gap or in summary so my

20:46 point here is so what I want you to remember and you just Place those words and your brain's naturally going to do the work of closing it for you but make sure you don't let go of the gas pedal at the very last moment you you need to land that plane awesome I I could definitely get better at this great tip yeah nice I'm going to try to do that as we talk and what else we got I'll be

21:09 paying attention to that okay the third one pressure is a the third one is staying in character and these go hand in hand and what's really powerful is when you start doing these there's a beautiful feedback loop that happens that gives you a lot of confidence so staying in character I said is the one that's going to make you feel more confident what's staying in character so it's related to endong in some sense in that people tend to self-sabotage a lot

21:41 I'm speaking and obviously as I'm speaking my my all of my senses are really really heightened so I'm aware of everything if a word comes out a little bit weird or if it's not the word that I was expecting to hear come out of my mouth I'm going to be very aware of that because I was expecting something and something different happens but that happens all the time when speaking I'm starting to not make as much sense or I feel like I'm

22:06 rambling going a little bit too long all of these create insane noise in the back of my mind the insecurities and you have a choice there because I can tell you right now nobody can tell people cannot see what you feel even though it feels that way when you feel really really strongly but people can't see it you're just looking like a normal speaker competent and confident but internally it feels like everybody can see so you're feeling all

22:35 this insecurity and it feels like there's an elephant in the room so what most people do is they self-sabotage they start leaking and they break character and they'll say man I'm not making sense right now or they'll laugh nervously after saying a word that came out weird oh I ALS which is kind of saying like oh I also noticed that this word came out weird and it's okay right or they'll they'll keep a a letting all

22:59 of the insecurities and doubts come out when people didn't see it in the first place so again it's like I'm forcing these filters onto my audience and now they can only see me through that light so one analogy I love for this is again a flying analogy you're on the plane everything's smooth you're having a great time watching your movie and suddenly you're interrupted by the pilot who picks up the intercom and says ladies and gentlemen so I just had a

23:29 red light start blinking here in the cockpit and I'm not sure what this is it could be really bad honestly but I don't know so don't worry please I'll get back to you soon first thing that's going to happen if you experience that is you're going to think I wasn't worrying in the first place but then you start thinking wait something probably is going wrong and now the smallest noise the tiny little bit of turbulence a creek on the right

24:01 you're going to start thinking oh no we're going to die every time so you're going to make any little mistake any little imperfection you're going to turn that into something big that's what happens when you speak if you start leaking and letting the insecurities come out people are going to start thinking this person doesn't really know what they're talking about it's like a leader who who who isn't clear in their Direction suddenly I'm thinking wait I

24:27 think I have to second guess everything here because I'm not sure about this guy or this this person and the good news is the solution is very very simple the solution is that is just don't share your insecurities put your best foot forward and stay in it the whole time stay in character from beginning all the way through past the ending because you go all the way through your speech then you got to end strong which is a form of

24:57 staying in character and then let it be and that's so important just let it be and you're going to notice something incredible if you're the type of person who would break character a lot start staying in character and the Q I use for myself is stay in it and the worse it gets the more I'll I'll say just stay in it and what happens is you stay in it and you expect everybody at the end to

25:23 say oh my God you looked hor so uncomfortable what was happening but people can't see that that you look confident so they're just going to give you the reaction that a confident person would get and you're going to notice oh wow I am coming off as confident and that's going to make you feel more confident and so it's going to it's a very reinforcing cycle if you start staying in character and ending strong naturally you're going to be reinforced

25:46 by this behavior and you're going to this oh I didn't need to break character I didn't need to hedge every time I spoke and that's going to give you much more confident and you're going to start realizing people just look Confident by default this is a crazy thing I want everybody to walk around the world and look at people and think most of the people I'm looking at are actually nervous right now you're going to look at them and

26:13 you're I can't tell most people speaking up in meetings are feeling a level of nervousness but you can't tell unless it's through the roof I love this and it's it's something I'm extremely guilty of and I think the reason like I do this and the reason I I think a lot of people leak which I love that term of just like don't leak that you know some you feel something's not going right like the reason I do it is I

26:36 feel like me being clear like upfront I know this isn't great exactly makes it okay but in reality that's hurting you because I like I think what it's like when I watch standup comedy when the comedian's like oh sorry that that bombed like if he didn't say that or she didn't say that I just forget about it and we move on to the next thing and it brings all this attention to oh I see okay it's not going great otherwise

27:00 you're just like all right whatever I didn't like that joke and so so yeah I guess any thoughts on just that why people do this well I think that's exactly that it's a it's because you're convinced that everybody can tell and so two things will happen either they could tell because it was a big thing and everybody could tell but you Shining Light on it is literally that it's like hey everybody you're driving a train everybody's in the train you're the

27:26 driver as the speaker everybody's going with you so if there's a crash on the side of the road you can keep going and they'll not be looking at the crash a second later and they'll be looking at the next landscape or you can stop the train and tell everybody hey let's look at this crash here real quick I'm so sorry about it when you keep going people will forget it in a second and they're not going to pay attention to

27:47 you and with the peak end rule what we were saying people remember the end of experiences more than they remember the beginning of experiences so you're going to be left with that feeling at the end the other piece is because most people won't notice it in the first place they'll be in their own minds so when you share this you're popping their bubble and so I see people speaking all the time where I'm super in tune with

28:16 the feeling I'm getting when they're speaking I'm just I'm listening to the energy I'm listening to everything that's happening so I can try to understand like what state are they in right now so when I get woken up from that state of somebody's saying oh man can I go again right now I that really sucked it's even more visible for me and I'll often have to say hey man I was so into what you were saying

28:43 and I I pull the audience is anyone surprised and everybody every time is like no I thought that you were doing great I was completely with you so that's the case most of the time but because we're convinced that people can tell we want to break that fourth wall or because something happened and we know people can tell we want to acknowledge it so we don't it doesn't feel like I'm the only one in the room

29:03 who can't tell that something went wrong here but this habit of saying no I'm going to be confident I'm leading I'm going to keep us going in a certain direction is extremely powerful and very self-reinforcing okay so let's actually show people what this looks like by actually doing some live games I know one of your principles for Ultra speaking is you can't learn to speak by not speaking like you need to practice speaking to get better at speaking and

29:32 these games are a way to actually do that in a really fun way so maybe first of all just why why games like when I you know I did this course I was just like huh because a bunch of games with I thought this was a public speaking course so maybe talk about just like why you approach it through games everything you do is a game in this in this course yeah well the first piece of

29:51 the puzzle is what you were saying that you you can't get better at speaking without speaking and it's intuitively you could think you you everybody knows that if you want to become a great cook you can't just read a 100 cookbooks you actually have to spend most of your time in the kitchen refining your intuition testing things experimenting learning new recipes and and building your timing and everything that goes with it but the in speaking we tend to do the opposite

30:19 probably because it's a little bit scary and because there aren't that many options out there to practice the the speaking itself there aren't that many environments where you can do it right now so we're kind of left with nothing so okay I'll just go read an article or watch a YouTube short or and hope that's going to make a difference but the maybe the bad news is you you have to do it if you're if you have to ask yourself am i

30:43 g to be serious about taking on speaking and and making a difference here and if you are then you're going to have to do the thing you have to practice speaking but the good news is it's it's only the outside that's scary as soon as you get started you're going to get rewarded and then the better you get at it the more enjoyable it becomes so why games then well games number one are fun to play and as

31:09 I was saying earlier if your practice is not fun you're going to stop so you need intrinsic reward with what you're doing but what all of the ultr speaking games have in common is that it's short deliberate practice like short reps followed by feedback followed by another rep so that was more important than the idea that it was a game at first when we started coaching with Michael gendler my co-founder it was just him and me in my

31:42 backyard with somebody in front of us testing things out and we would say we would give them a speech title just to get a baseline okay what's the most incredible invention in the world and we'd watch this person go into their mind and start like freaking out okay and they think the iPhone and then like I don't know the iPhone that's pretty recent maybe it's fire is it fire though was there a bigger maybe communication I

32:06 don't know wait maybe we evolved for communication and the longer they spent thinking the worse their answer tended to be and the more their confidence tended to go down as they were speaking so then we said well we got to get this person speaking right away so we'd say I'm going to ask you another question but just start speaking and so I'd ask them another question and they couldn't start speaking right away so we just tried compress it more and more and more

32:29 to turn it into something where then it was like I'm just going to say a word and you have to say something about it so horses horseback riding is fun because you can go places cats cats are crazy because if they were bigger they would eat you and I just like almost like word association let's get words out then we started developing different games for everything every root cause we were seeing every symptom we were seeing we'd

32:52 figure out the root cause and we create some sort of a way to get the person into it as quickly as possible and it's just one day six Monon in that we realized hey did we just create a game like this is this feels like a board game and then we created we even I have this we created speak before you think a game for people who think too much and this is a bunch of cards with all of

33:18 our games and then Co hit and we turned it into online games oh I know the magic of games yeah the magic of games is short reps immediate feedback practice feedback practice feedback and it's enjoyable you get rewarded you get to adjust as you go and what's changing is the your internal feeling as you're going so you're learning lessons but you're internalizing all of the practice is happening through speaking to reinforce what you just

33:48 shared I haven't shared this with you but I after I took this the course the mini course I went to see my family in La we visited for a few days and I I was talking about this course and just like how fun it was and interesting and how much I learned from it and I pulled up the games because I have access to the things online and we just started I was just like hey you guys want to try this

34:06 and we started playing some of these games that we're gonna we're about to get into and it was just like we spent like an hour just doing this and everyone loved it everyone just felt so much better about their public speaking afterwards my mom was like Hey how do I do that on my own later wow my sister's like I want to start doing Open Mic nights because that was like really fun just to like talk

34:27 nice were were you actually coaching them like how were you walking them through the different games I we just pulled them up and played them and then I shared some of the tips that I learned in the class that we took just like try it this way or try not to focus on being correct just focus on confidence and not leaking that you're not doing great all these things we're gon to talk about yeah so was a lot of

34:50 fun so let's get into some of these games so we're going to try two or three which one do you want to start with conductor maybe sweet I love conductor that one was really insightful to me okay so I got conductor the way this game works is that when I click Start training I'm going to have a random title that's going to appear and for those of you who are just listening and not watching this Lenny will say the

35:14 title out loud so you can hear that what you won't see or what you'll see if you're watching is in front of me all I'm going to see are a series of random numbers it's going to start with five and five is just my natural rate of speaking like I'm speaking right now but then I might see a number from 1 to 10 and each one of these numbers represents an intensity or a state that I have to

35:39 tap into so if I see a seven I automatically have to raise my voice and get into that kind of an energy and if I see a 10 you could only imagine what that is but it's also true for the lower ones if suddenly I see a three I have to find a way to Cal my energy down and match the three and go all the way down to one and then there might be a slide

36:01 that says breathe which is just an indication to pause and when I see that slide breathe if I just go silent that's because I'm in front of the breathe slide and I'm not allowed to speak and in that moment my goal is just to relax myself and calm myself and then see what happens where I'm at when that slide moves on to the next one and we're going to do this this is going to be 70

36:24 seconds so it's going to be super quick ready I'm going to yeah so I'll read the title as soon as you as soon as it pops up perfect when I grow up when I grow up I want to have taken on all of my weaknesses or all of the emotional things that are holding me back because it's kind of annoying for me that I'm 40 years old and there's still things that are holding me back that man I've been I've had these when I

36:56 was a kid I I was like this when I was 10 and it drives me crazy because aren't I supposed to be an adult aren't I supposed to be mature and have my life together I mean I have two kids I have this incredible responsibility and I have to teach them I have to show them the way

37:28 so I've decided I'm going to hire a coach and I talked to him just a couple days ago so this is perfect timing because I want to unwrap unravel in untwine every single one of these emotional blockers so that when I grow up I'm completely free that was so fun to watch and I'm seeing the numbers if you're on YouTube you can see what's going on there if you're not basically there's different numbers that give give Tristan the

37:53 different energies to be at and that was masterful I think we saw what did we see we saw like a six it went up first 6 seven then it went down a three then we saw I think a two a one then a breathe and then it went back to a five how about you give it a go and then we chat let's do it what do you think ladies and Gentlemen let's see this here we go the

38:16 title is the greatest puzzle the greatest puzzle that I think that I've had in my life and I think just for most people is trying to figure out what to do with their life and I just had to spend so much time thinking actually no let me change I'm changing direction I actually actually known from very early on what I wanted to do with my life I've actually found it to be not of a not much of a

38:44 puzzle I knew from pretty early that I wanted to be a software engineer and interestingly as I and I became a software engineer and as I think about the puzzle that that created around my life the f I ended up so my life actually started to look like a puzzle instead of what I always thought I'd be so I turned into so I ended up having a bunch of different careers and I look back at my

39:18 life and it started with one piece and each piece led to all these other careers nailed it that was funny at the end you were like you didn't even see there was a six that came up and then you when you looked up it had already gone away that's a good warmup yeah yeah it's funny because what it what it looked like to me is that well you just you just didn't let

39:50 yourself play the game you wanted to you were more focused on I want to make sure this is this works well this looks good or I don't make a fool of myself then let me just play the game so switch your mindset from that like back in conductor in sorry in the Creator cohort you didn't really care because if you failed it didn't matter so you just played the game and this is the same idea just

40:11 don't try just let yourself play the game the game will will do good but that was actually really interesting I feel kind of similar which is which is cool except I didn't know where it going but that feeling of all of these puzzle pieces and suddenly when I hit Ultra speak it's like oh wow every single there's no more there are no more gaps that's really cool okay here we go L you ready ready here we go integrating new

40:47 cultures it's interesting having a kid so we just had a kid about a year ago he's a year and a half and there's an interesting interesting new experience where there's my family in their culture there's my wife and her culture and I never it was never a big deal for us these different backgrounds that we have because we could do our own thing we have our families they're doing their thing but now that we have a kid it's

41:14 now that we have a kid I have to really think about this I have to constantly wonder is he getting both experiences is he being pushed in One Direction or another is he going to get the full benefit of both of these cultures and I find if I don't actually think about it too deeply and just let him have fun and hang out with our different family members he gets everything that I want him to get that he experiences my wife's

41:44 family's culture my family's culture and then the combination of my wife and I's new kind of culture and family that we're building and so I'm really excited about the future for for us all yeah that was awesome I'm practicing not leaking I am all I think about is how much better it could have been but but now I'm leaking as I say that see yeah hedging soing the point of all of these games is to create turbulence this

42:17 is going to be the theme of this podcast I'm going to share only flight analogies but if you think about a a pilot a flight simulator you can you can think about these games the the flight simulator you don't put a pilot in the flight simulator and waste those precious hours having them just cruise at 30,000 ft in Clear Skies you're gonna say okay you're going and now hey you're you've lost your your captain and you

42:41 have to do something or hey you're your motor just broke or you're going into crazy turbulence so the game here is always every one of these games have in common that we're creating turbulence for you so it's on purpose that like oo that's interesting how I can to want to leak to want to break character wow it's interesting how at the end I the ending strong is not just a an automatic habit that I've built for

43:07 myself so what we want with the turbulence is that it highlights areas that we want to work on and you can go again and see immediately because you have that same pressure every time there's no way you can prepare for conductor you can you can do just a ton of reps and get to become the person who can just navigate the turbulence really really gracefully which reminds me of a a Kevin Kelly quote that I love where he

43:33 says Pros are just amateurs who've learned to recover gracefully from their mistakes and this is what we're trying to do here if you know that you can recover from any mistake gracefully then you're going to have confidence in any speaking scenario and most of the scenarios you're going to be in are spontaneous are ones you can't prepare for so it's that much more important so tell me what what do you remember from going through conductor in the Creator cohort

44:04 or specifically here like what was coming up and what were some of the things that pop into your mind there's two things that I really took away from it and it's it's like different doing it now like on camera with this whole podcast thing yeah but the things that I really took away that have stuck with me from this exercise is one is you have this kind of metaphor of these file folders that you have kind of in your

44:24 head where every energy level like a one when you go low and a 10 or even a five you access when you're at that energy level you access different insights and memories and stories so it's not just like now I'm going to say the same thing at a 10 or I'm going to say the same thing at a one it's when you let your body just slow down and relax till one new thoughts come up because you're making it up as you go

44:51 along and you're just trying to figure it out as you go and that was a really that really happens when you're like forced to go from five to like okay and you let your body settle into like a one you're like oh okay here's a new thought that comes to mind so that was really powerful for me because I never realized that and then the other is just this idea of doing these really hard things that with very

45:16 low stakes like you know like it's higher Stak so maybe that's why it's different like how it feels different doing here it's like yeah this is extremely high stakes for yeah relatively but yeah there's like a couple people you're you're like just don't worry about failing so you don't have to worry about apologizing or fleeking it's just like yeah I did I did what I did so those are two really powerful ones I just like practicing

45:40 this and knowing you'll be okay at low stakes builds confidence they like okay that's like like making up a minute of talk about the most random thing on the spot not something that I would feel I'd want to do but then you realize okay it's fine I could do that the common theme for me the more and I've been on this journey for S years now I still am blown away every week by the lessons I've learned over the course of the

46:08 seven years which all come down to your brain your subconscious is so incredibly powerful so your Hardware is magical and because I've spent seven years kind of getting rid of the bad habits getting rid of the gunk and trusting myself more I allow myself to take many more risks so I'm jumping into these games still with the same doubts in some sense but they've just everything's tapered down

46:39 way way way into the background so I get to be much more present and you know I talked about the summary prompts earlier in the podcast saying the beginning of a sentence and trusting that your brain's going to fill in the Gap is something that's initially hard to do but when you've done it a thousand 2,000 10,000 times you start believing hey maybe my brain will deliver every single time so you can start saying the beginning of

47:04 sentences that the direction you want to go into and your brain fills in the Gap and we're going to do a game on that in a second but the one the conductor one is so beautiful because well the way we describe it so I I I that folder one when it came into my mind was my favorite ever but the the original one was when you tap into a certain energy that creates emotion and if you tap into that

47:33 emotion the words come as a natural consequence so it's energy leads emotions follow and words fill in the Gap and when you experience this for yourself if you go into conductor and you play you realize okay if I want more conviction I can raise my energy or get into a state of conviction and the words that are going to come out the ideas the stories the

48:04 anecdotes the examples everything is going to fit into that if I feel frustrated I can dive into that state and stay in that state and naturally the content is going to follow it's a very very powerful game it's a very exciting game and it's a it's a game that if you when you're playing with low stakes you can you you very quickly feel the effect of oh I can see the potential of what it

48:36 could be if I could just be like this anywhere maybe you taper out a little bit of the extremes but this is you can access this for free on ultr speaking or you can just the way we did this at first you just go to Google and type in random series of nine numbers and then just have a friend say each number one after the next and you just match it I used to just put my hand out and go up

48:58 and down so it's in essence it's very very simple to apply it and it's it's just like a lot of fun to just get an excuse to just go wild and high and then just like Get Low I love that part of it and let's get into the next game but just one other Insight I had is that you shared with me when I did it the first time is just people have a strength they're either yes correct me for wrong

49:18 they're like they're strong at the highs and just like very uncomfortable at the lows or the opposite and for me I thought I was going to oh obviously I'll be more natural at the lows because that's like introvert world and you're like no you're actually like super energized at this high end and then it's hard for you to access the low and thought that was really insightful for me yeah you'll you'll notice it pretty quickly once you jump in especially with

49:44 with with with a friend it's cool it's cool because when you can when you get to see oh I'm much more comfortable going up that I'm I'm going down or vice versa or I'm stuck in the middle and I I'm only comfortable when I'm not in the extremes it's just telling you something this is what we want we want a mirror in front of us so I can know like okay what's happening here I'm not very much

50:06 a fan of actually watching yourself on camera on video because again this is an inner game not an outer game so when I watch myself on video I see the outside which can be useful for certain things but the fundamentals are inside but so getting a mirror of I play this game and I feel a certain way oh interesting it was easy to go up so I can muster energy pretty quickly and I'm willing to take risks of

50:32 jumping into a different energy stage which might mean changing the direction of where I'm going but slowing down means I need to be willing to to take up space I need to be willing to just be while everybody's looking at me and I'm using up their time but I'm going to take up space and I'm going to take a moment to go inside and be introspective and really ask myself okay okay what do I want to say here and so

50:58 that's a reflection of well what does that mean if I struggle to do that that's why this is speaking such an an interesting skill set all right let's do another game this next game is called triple step and triple step is a game for people who people who tend to be to struggle to stay on a single thought or get very easily put off their game or distracted if you're the type of person where you're speaking and suddenly somebody

51:27 yawns and you just start freaking out thinking I'm so boring and things are horrible I must be terrible not they probably have a baby and they didn't sleep last night pen drops and you start losing your ability to stay on track this is a game for you also a very fun one the principle of the game is pretty simple similarly to conductor we're going to start with a random speech title so I have no idea what's going to

51:53 show up then as I'm speaking in this setting here I'm going to speak for a minute there will be six random words or series of words that are going to pop up as I'm going through my speech and my goal is to integrate the words into the speech as seamlessly as I can as if they were part of the speech the whole time so in theory if I do a perfect job if you're listening you should struggle to

52:21 pick out which words were actually the words that were popped up the likelihood in one minute of me being able to do that is low but let's see if you can do it so if you're listening you're not going to see the words we'll tell you afterwards what they were see if you can pick up on them but otherwise my goal is just to choose a strong Direction and stay on that direction as naturally as I

52:41 can here we go the title is how would your friends describe you I've been described as a labrador by my friends and I think the reason people describe me as a labrador is because I am so easy to excite it's like if you give me a box of french fries I'm gonna go nuts and it's gonna be the best french fries I've ever tasted in my life but if the next day I get a massage I'll be completely

53:08 in that experience and the massage is going to be the best massage and then I'm GNA think I need to get a massage every day I'm G to start daydreaming about massage as my natural daytoday but the problem with being a labrador is that Labradors get kind of excited so I may be doing cartwheels one second and the next second I'm supposed to be working and so I'll be on my computer but then I hear the microwave Ding and I

53:33 think oh maybe I should go get some food next and so there's a beautiful trait to being the the labrador that allows me to like explore all of what it's like to be human like I always have access to the internet inside me but there definitely some drawbacks as well okay so the words that you had to integrate are french fries getting them massage daydreaming cartwheels a microwave and the

54:04 internet yeah and so you might notice that some of the words I'm integrating literally and some I might integrate more metaphorically like the internet of my mind it's like I have access to the internet so you can you can give yourself as much leeway as possible the whole point here with triple step is you want to be that tree in the storm that is not so rigid that if the wind is too strong it's going to break in half but

54:34 not so flexible that it's going to swing every which direction as soon as there's a gust so you want that firm solid grounding which is in choosing a clear direction that one thing off the bat and then you want to make the words work for you so stay focused on that one thing and as the words comes come in the more focused are you are on that Groove you've created for yourself the easier it will be to let the words work for you

55:03 okay and again the skin the skill this builds is to be less be more comfortable with things not going perfectly and being distracted it's I would say this one can be used for two other things number one is resiliency right because this one this one will make your brain go crazy and if you can stay composed within it with all of these things happen it really it builds this this ability to say well man if I can do triple step on hard mode I

55:33 can do anything like why would anything else scare why would an interview question scare me when I can throw these kinds of things I can always navigate my way through right we're trying to lower the likelihood of a mistake really hurting you and then the other piece is this is a a game this one and a game called rapid fire analogies are games that are really really nice to use as a way to warm your brain up so you

55:57 could use it before a podcast you could use it before a job interview before a meeting when you want to be on do a few reps of this and your brain's just going to be completely lit up because it's pulling on so many different parts of your brain that are necessary for communication and one last thought just before we dive into it I think it's just to zoom out again the reason that you've found this is a better way to learn to

56:20 become better public speaking is my sense is just if you were to just do the standard thing of just give give more talks find more opportunities to do presentations it's like such a it's like too broad of a brush to build these different skills and which you've kind of identified is there's these very specific skills that add up to a great presenter and these games pick like a specific skill and help you just focus on that again and again and again if

56:51 you're already practicing you're already leagues ahead of everyone because most people aren't practicing they're trying you know you're trying to learn from a video or a YouTube short or an article you can only go so far with that but if you are practicing there kind of two suboptimal ways that might show up one is what you're saying you're just you're doing talks and you're you're speaking up more but you're not really practicing what you're it's kind of as you're

57:15 saying it's broad broad Strokes the other one is you're in a choreography and all so it's like learning how to dance but you only learn choreography well that's all you know how to do so if I ask you to do like say okay now just I'm going to put music on Just Dance you're kind of stuck because you only know how to do the moves you were doing so we're trying to get people outside of I have to be in

57:42 my mind or I have to do things that I've memorized how to do and come back to real to trusting your natural ability to communicate so that's what we're doing here you can feel like when you don't speak when you struggle with speaking stuck in this box and everything around you is Tiny and you can feel the sides of the box and we're expanding the range we're playing around with all kinds of different different things different

58:06 tools and all of them have specific meaning but even if they didn't that much you still would be able to oh wow you're pushing back the sides of the box and now suddenly hey I can move around I I feel comfortable moving my arms and moving my legs and going to the right and the left and up and down and just that is g that act of making you feel more comfortable and more at ease is going to unlock your

58:32 ability to communicate because you already know how to do a lot of this so we're tapping into these different skill sets and we're doing both at the same time this episode is brought to you by Brave search Brave search is the private independent search engine that doesn't bias or sensor results Brave search and its answers with AI feature are available for free to all users on desktop and mobile devices with brave search you get real answers faster

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59:29 links it's time to try Brave search visit brave.com Lenny to get started that's brave.com Lenny all right let's do this I'm energized I'm pumped I'm gonna no I'm not gonna I'm like I was gonna say I'm gonna nail it but no just have fun let's have fun yeah we go it goes how it goes indeed here we go okay and I'll say the title the best thing thing about pain so this is something I recently shared in a in a in another talk is just

60:02 this quote that I always think of the cave you fear contains the treasure you seek that the thing that is hardest often points you in the direction you want to go like I like I hate blue cheese but sometimes I find that if I eat the blue cheese and add it to a salad it ends up being the best salad I've had having kids is another amazing example where just kids are there's so much pain but it's also there's no that

60:26 is more joyous than having a kid and sometimes even like growing a beard I grow this beard and I have to maintain this beard for the rest of my life and and I and I know people would look at me without a beard and be like what the hell well you look so different now and so young sometimes I think about just like having a sibling and the pain that if I had a brother if he just like hit

60:50 me the pain that would come from that but just then having the brother would be so much worth it even if he's is hitting me all this time and and there we go I ran out of time but that okay I realize this is your first time playing triple step it's kind of mean to give you six words so I'm gonna give you four words okay okay but here's what I noticed yeah what I noticed is you were letting the word the word

61:20 was the beginning of a new thought right so you say another thing is beers another thing is right so you're kind of you're finishing your thought and then you're moving on to the next one try to hold on to One Direction that the one the one direction is like approach your fears headon and then so then when you see a puzzle it's like look this doesn't have to be a hard puzzle because now I know that I just if it's scary I do it

61:49 and it's like having kids which I I thought was so scary I just jumped in and now I'm moving forward and it could and right and so it's like I'm growing my beard without caring what other people think just because it might be scary or maybe I cut my beard because that would be something scary right so you're you're holding on to the line got it with four it's going to be a little bit easier to okay to integrate

62:12 them ready let's do it social social distancing it's interesting that social distancing was such a thing that we all had to do for so long long and then all of a sudden we look back at that time we like was that actually necessary did we actually have to stay far from each other do that actually have any impact there's all these things we had to learn like sometimes we look at the stock market and we wonder should I be paying

62:44 attention to the stock market should I be distancing myself from it should I be investing more often should I be reading every newspaper that comes out every day to stay on top of what's Happening in the world like should I get closer to this information or should I distance myself is what's better for me and sometimes it feels like you're running this marathon where sometimes you go back and forth sometimes it's let's all be together let's pay attention to all the news

63:12 let's hang out and it kind of feels like I just want to just want to go go to the toilet and and peace out amazing that works that's really good okay that's really good well well well tell me what because again right the the games are meant to put you in a state of turbulence and find out what was easy what was hard what am I noticing and now you know what you want to work on right it's yeah if you did a

63:45 rep and you got it if and it went perfectly then you're learning nothing a really good a really easy rep is not worth much the only reps that are worth something are the ones where you feel an edge yeah and by the way we should say the words right that I had oh yeah the first one was the first one was the stock marget then a newspaper which you brought in really really well then running a marathon and then toilet

64:11 yeah yeah okay great yeah just the fact that I'm like okay doing this is like a big milestone for me of just like whatever because you know before doing this thing I'm like oh my God I never want to sit there and come up with a talk for a minute on the the most random subject and there's a lot of power in just feeling comfortable just doing it you know just like sure let's do it whatever something something will come

64:33 out that's interesting enough that's why taking on this journey of speaking is so empowering because speaking is a high performance skill so taking on a high performance skill and starting to tackle it and getting kind of good at it is very addictive it feels really really good if get good at tennis if you get good at golf if you get good at anything you know product management it's addicting it's exciting and as soon as

65:04 you get good there's Nuance to it and that it's energizing in and of itself and because we have such awesome Hardware as humans we've been speaking all of our life a lot of us have a pretty decent level to start out with so you really quickly you're getting to like oh I'm getting some results here this actually feels good so there's something there's something really energizing about jumping into it it's the thinking about doing the exercise

65:28 that's scary but as soon as you're into in it it's it's energizing and empowering and also just like doing like this is a very hard exercise just like giving a madeup talk in a for minute with words you have to integrate in Concepts and I think just doing that makes a regular talk so much easier also because you don't have to do that so there's something there about just doing it on hard mode learning things and then

65:53 oh okay I just have to talk like about a thing I already know about that I had planned much easier anything else around this game that is worth sharing before we do our final game we have a whole series of games and you could probably even invent other games but some people will play triple step and we'll say wow that's so hard and then they'll go and play conductor and think wow this is my game this is so easy but other people

66:22 will play conductor and think it's impossible and then come play triple step and they'll be like man This Is My Jam I can get this one very very easily so it again it's just a mirror of where you're at and it's it's what's beautiful about this is you start playing around with these games you're very very quickly going to see okay this is my Edge here's and where your Edge is as you were saying with your cro is often

66:45 where the gold lies so that's when you if you can spend some time there and learn what it is underneath the the struggle what's actually holding you back when you unlock that whatever's holding you back in triple step or in conductor or in any other game is holding you back elsewhere in your life so when you unlock it there it kind of unlocks the other things which is really nice like a set of gears and it's

67:12 interesting like as we were talking like where my mind keeps going is like I just want to say how I didn't feel good about my performance but I'm internalizing the lesson of don't leak how you feel and that's a really powerful lesson is just like it's like really hard not to just like oh that was not good like I really wanted to say that after every time I tried this and I am I'm making myself not and there's and I imagine from your

67:37 perspective you're like no it's fine it's like whatever yeah absolutely I I was actually thinking I I bet a lot of people watching you do that would think wow I don't think I could do that that would be their first thought so absolutely and and again and this is a habit and the the noise doesn't completely disappear but it goes down to being almost imperceptible so what we're trying to do is we're trying to internalize all of

68:06 these habits to the point where I don't need to consciously think about them so it's like a a gymnast who's doing their tumbling routine and jumps into the air as they're flipping they're not consciously trying to think of how to do a flip they've done it a thousand times they know how to do a flip the only thing they have that they may be thinking of every all of their attention is on being completely present to what's

68:30 happening relying on your body and your subconscious knowing what to do is they have kind of like listeners like in programming keyboard listeners you have something that's there that is just listening for anything out of the ordinary and it's very very fine- tune so as I'm speaking for example I might think to myself oh I may be rambling right now maybe I'm going a little bit too long and it's a little listener that's going to just gently nicely say

68:59 hey warning I don't know if you're aware of this and as I hear that I might say oh okay let me wrap it up or maybe it's saying I'm not sure if you're being clear or can you be more precise here whatever it is I'm gonna I it's just a gentle listener in the background so as you get into the habit of staying in character and if you had an audience here we could have asked them right away

69:22 well how do you feel about this you would probably would have gotten really good feedback really positive which would have kind of Jarred that feeling of wow I didn't think I did that good of a job and people are saying hey I thought that was pretty good so as you get that reinforcing pattern The Voice starts going down more and more awesome I I need that voice to go down that'd be great okay let's do a another game does

69:49 cool let's do a last game last one of these practical games so this is actually a from one of our courses that I'm pulling out it's not a standalone game it's one that's inside of the courses but again if you want to replicate this yourself you can very easily do it so what we're going to do here is we're going to work on conviction prompts so this comes back to this idea of entering a state or

70:16 changing your your energy to impact the words that are coming out of your mouth so what's going to happen here is similarly to Triple step I'm also going to get a random topic that I just have to start speaking about but now instead of getting a word that I have to integrate into my speech naturally I'm going to get a prompt so it's going to be the beginning of a sentence that I have to say out loud and

70:40 my I have to find a way for my brain to just complete the sentence and the sentences are specifically chosen because they're going to put you in a state of more conviction so it's going to force me to care more about what I'm saying basically and this is a game for executive presence if you think about somebody who you feel has like great gravitas or great executive presence they usually have there's something about them that's saying this person

71:10 really believes in what they're saying and what this game is showing you is that hey there's a way to Fast Track myself to that place if I want to be have more executive presence let me bring a little bit more conviction to what I'm saying most there's caveat small caveat maybe 10% of people in the workforce need the opposite they need hey you need to maybe question what you're what you're saying here but the reality is the vast majority of people

71:43 actually are not truly standing behind their words and their ideas and what that does is that the people who speak a lot and feel a lot of conviction their ideas go through more often than the others and you'd want ideas to stand for themselves but that's just not reality so for most people listening to this if you can bring more conviction to your words then your ideas are going to have a better chance of being seen equally to

72:10 those who are already doing that so this is what this game's about awesome okay okay here we go the title is saying no I've had to learn this the hard way as an entrepreneur that saying no is one of the most important things I can do but saying no is not saying no to a meeting because that can be easy and what I'm going to say now matters a ton this is saying no to doing

72:41 all of the exciting projects that I want to do so as I said earlier I'm a labrador I get excited about everything and I genuinely believe that every idea is awesome but that doesn't mean I can do everything idea I need to choose a very clear focus and stick to that focus and this is a GameChanger when you start reducing the amount of things you're doing to a painful amount of a painful few amount then when you get there

73:13 suddenly everything else changed and it astonishes me when I do that just how much more I can get done even though I'm doing fewer things love it that was great these words are tough they were yeah this was not an easy one this was not good good good thing that I get a I get a tough one well deserved let me read the phrases real quick just so folks know so the phrases you have to integrate is

73:38 this matters a ton I genuinely believe that every idea is awesome game changer it was I genuinely it was just I genuinely believe that yeah oh got it okay I generally believe that and then Game Changer and then it astonishes me when it's I'm I'm so eager for you to go through this and for anybody listening to try this for themselves even if you know what's coming like if you want to do this for yourself right now write the words the

74:07 the prompts that Lenny just shared and choose any title and just speak for a minute and see if you can integrate those in because you're going to notice how if you bring conviction these words naturally bring that out of you and so interesting to watch the content change as a result of the state you get into and what you say so it's really it's really powerful to discover just how incredible your brain is so

74:38 same same intention for you I think is choose a strong direction from the beginning this is always in speaking in general the stronger the direction you choose in the beginning the more ideas you're going to have the more everything gets easier when you choose a strong Direction okay let's try it but the goal here is as it says advocate for an important idea related to the speech title ready yeah let's do Ito the title is space

75:07 exploration I think it's hard to imagine anything more important to the human race than space exploration I know there's a lot of talk about people wasting time trying to get us to Mars or trying to not think about what is happening on Earth but I feel like there's there's nothing more powerful and important in spiring in fact the entire world needs to focus more on the value of space exploration there's so many things we can discover so many

75:34 things that can help us on Earth and we could just we cannot forget how much potential exists outside of our little Earth that we think our whole existence and everything that's ever existed on this one planet when really we this tile tiny pale blue dot and it just astonishes me when people don't think about this don't think it matters don't think they should spend any time getting getting us into space investing money in space and just hearing stories if

76:03 nothing else of people that have gone into space and how life-changing that was for them should tell us that space exploration is incredibly powerful and important yes that was awesome that was so cool so you had the title was space exploration and the words were in fact the ENT entire world then we cannot forget that then it astonishes me when and

76:33 finally lifechanging so what was that like what what did it feel like getting yeah there's a lot of it like really helps just like here's the thing you're going to believe and I don't know if I got lucky with stuff but it just felt like okay I have something comes up that you know I'm not going to leak but anyway it was like oh yeah cool something interesting happens and that's one of my other actual just like going a little

77:00 quick tangent insights from the lessons you guys teach is that as you are forced to talk you have new insights emerge and you almost figure out what you think and know by being forced to get out of your head and these prompts help you along that but I think that's really interesting of just like this will help you develop things and insights that in from and take them out of your head yeah well that's we're going to hopefully we get to talk

77:29 about the accordion method one of the most powerful methods I have and which is which is very close to this but this is often a prompt I I tell people when they're speaking I say because people tend to get into a public speaking voice right so they'll we'll be in a class and they'll be chatting normally and and look super normal and then we'll say okay now just a timer I'm just going to give you a speech just speak for 60

77:52 seconds so we get a Baseline and I click play and suddenly they say the important part about doing this and they enter into a different version of themselves a a very like a professional version whatever that would mean it's so much more freeing powerful connecting and effective to speak conversationally and so the cue I often give people is don't think about us just think out

78:24 loud and that's really what we're doing we can most people have a skill set that's up here and a mindset that's down here and so if you can just change the mindset to match the skill set you've already made a giant leap and you do that by reducing the stakes in your mind and by just speaking and as you do that when you're thinking out loud you have these moments of connecting things in

78:57 your mind and then naturally it pops out and if you're doing it well and I love there's a really cool Naval ravikant interview on The Joe Rogan podcast from many years ago that's phenomenal and at one point he talks about communication if I'm not mistaken I think it's on that podcast but he says something along the lines of one should discover the words they are saying at the same time their audiences and this comes back to

79:25 Thinking Out Loud Like if I'm really in my mind I'm making connections and suddenly the words are are the consequence of it so using prompts poking your brain giving these cues naturally creates things that you couldn't have anticipated otherwise it's like putting constraints on a creative project I love that before we segue to a couple these methods the according method as one example I want to ask about when people hear this they may feel like you're just

79:56 you're helping people more just like make up and why why do we want that talk about just how this isn't just like you're not going to actually give talks like this necessarily this is and like I guess I'm answering the question but I'm curious if that's how you think about it this is building a skill so that when you actually want to give a real talk with prepared they you've prepared you better at it but yeah just

80:19 thoughts on just like that potential element yeah I think that's an important question and it's a question I hear a lot MH because we all know we all know a bullshitter and that's the person who Masters the skill of communication but doesn't have anything to show for it and so this thing happens is that I see a bullshitter and I think to

80:51 myself I really really don't want want to become that person and what happens is it becomes an immune response or like an immune response where I the the desire not to be that person and the feeling being around that person gives you is so strong that now if I put take even the smallest step in that direction of speaking freely sharing my thoughts out loud bringing more conviction or

81:22 confidence to what I'm saying not leaking then there's this immediate response like an immune response in my body that's just too strong that's saying oh you're becoming the you're becoming the bullshitter alarm Bells alarm Bells go back to that safe little corner you were in but the reality is if you're thinking that then you have no chance of becoming a bullshitter because if that thought is even popping into your mind then you're the type of person who has developed a

81:54 very cute skill set of noticing when people and you have that same skill set for yourself so it's just going to be now it's just too loud so as we go through this practice we want to match hey I want to match that bullshitter level of communication except I'm G to have the ideas to back it up I'm going to really put effort into my craft so but I'm going to give them I'm G to be

82:19 able to show them in the best possible light and what we want to be able to do is notice okay if this is a big thing for you the bullshitting and you're noticing a big reaction just even listening to us not even playing the games yourself then you definitely benefit from calming that voice down so spending time learning these skill sets because you're most likely atrophied because you're staying away from it and you're going to have this very powerful

82:47 listener in the back of your mind that's going to ping you it's like hey you're at the limit right now stay stay true to what you know and it's going to be very a very good compass for yourself it's going to be there and you can trust it because you developed this capacity awesome that's really helpful okay so so far we've shared a bunch of techniques things that you could just start doing today we've done all these fun games that you could play

83:13 online if nothing else just learning from the techniques these games teach you I think is really helpful you've shared a bunch of principles of just like here's how you actually get better public speaking not and not this way but that way I know you have a couple also methods just like that people can Implement that help them develop talks that I found really helpful so maybe just as a closing we talk about these two methods the accordion method and I

83:38 think it's the bow and arrow method awesome let's talk about the accordion method we did this in the class briefly and it was really helpful and I've been explaining it to people just like a really cool way of coming of making your talk better so talk about how that works and how people might be able to implement it when they're trying develop a talk now I'm I'm biased when I'm going to say this so take this with

83:58 a ping of salt but I think the accordion method the accordion method might be one of the thing I'm the most proud of in my entire life because it's almost revolutionizing the way we should I think we should prepare speaking so up until now we've talked about spontaneous speaking mostly and that's going to be the vast majority of your speaking probably 80% of your speaking is stuff that you can't prepare for but there are going to be situations

84:31 where you know you have a deadline and you're going to have to speak and either you have to speak because it's a a job interview or you're talking to your CEO or maybe you're presenting to your whole team or an audience of a thousand the old way I think is shitty I think it's broken and I haven't found anything out there that is innovating on this and it drove us crazy with Michael and that's what gave birth

84:59 to the accordion method what's the old way the old way is I have a talk coming up so I'm going to dump all of my ideas on a piece of paper or multiple pieces of paper then I'm going to try rearranging those ideas and as I'm rearranging the ideas and trying to make them in a talk I have more inspiration and I'm thinking oh maybe I could say it this way and I don't want to lose that

85:20 other thing that I said in the beginning because maybe I would use it and you start just creating this alien stack of paper with all of your ideas of what your talk might be and then you're left with 10 15 pieces of paper and now as the data line comes closer what do you have to do well you have to go through the excruciating pain of turning 10 pages into a script so that you don't forget all of those brilliant lines that

85:45 you spend so many hours editing and they're still in writing mode they're not in your mind so now that I've created that script that I spent a lot of time editing now I have to memorize it and memorization is a is pretty shitty we're not good at memorization robots are good at memorization humans are not and memorization is like a chain where you just have all of these links very linearly and everybody knows the feeling of going through you know reciting a

86:14 poem as a kid and suddenly you miss one verse and you're lost and now you're a deer in the headlights so what we're doing with the with the accordion method is instead of preparing our talk by writing we're going to prepare our talk by speaking and we're going to do so in a very specific way where we're going down the accordion to create extreme Clarity and to understand what the essence of our talk is and then back up the accordion

86:43 to bring back in intentionally just the right pieces so I was thinking of an analogy for this and one that I really like is imagine you're redecorating your living room the old way the like writing 10 pages and memorizing it is I'm going to look at my living room and I'm going to rearrange things and like put stuff in a corner that I might need later and then I'm going to bring some new things that I thought I could re be really nice and

87:10 I'm going to struggle to like make something work the accordion method is saying and imagine this were easy to do with Furniture I'm going to take everything out of my living room except the most essential pieces that make my living room so I might be left with that one couch that I really love a pillow a beautiful light that I bought three years ago and one or two other small things and as I look at that I'm going

87:39 to have Clarity on the vision I want for my living room and then very slowly very intentionally I'm going to go take certain elements that were already there that I might want to bring back in and I'm going to bring new elements that now I see make sense and so by the time you finish with your beautiful living room it's going to be this beautiful minimalistic room that has a very clear design choice and every element there is there because

88:10 you chose it it's there because you did it very intentionally so how does that work with the accordion method what we do is you can go through the first step with if you want you can write all of those ideas on paper just to get them out of your head that's totally fine but from this moment on there's no more script and I'm just going to give an example of of times but you can change these time constraints slightly we're

88:39 going down the accordion by using time constraints so for example you would say I'm going to speak for three minutes so you're going to put a timer and you have two rules I have to stay in character the whole time and I have to end strong so you must make it to the end of the 3 minutes and it doesn't matter how bad it sounds how many mistakes you make the only Point here is I'm trying to get my

89:01 ideas out into in into spoken word right so I'm starting to like populate my mind with everything and seeing what where am I actually at then after the three minutes you think of okay what did I like what didn't I like then you go to two minutes and you put a timer and you do two minutes again and you're very strict with those two minutes because we're just trying to learn something every time doesn't need to be perfect so at

89:27 the two-minute Mark you do the same thing but now you had to take a shave a whole minute out of that content and as you do that well that means getting rid of the noise getting rid of anything that doesn't feel right then you go down to one minute and you're going to go down all the way to 30 seconds so you start it at a three minute speech and you make your way down to 30 seconds by

89:47 the time you make it to 30 seconds you're going to have only the essential pieces like that couch and that lamp in the living room when you have the essential pieces you're going to have a clear sense of what your talk is about and it might have changed as you were going down the accordion and then from that place on we're going to do another 30 second rep and then we're going to go back up the accordion so you do another

90:11 30 seconds and then you do one minute two minute and all the way back up to three minute and every step of the way you go from 30 seconds to a minute initially a minute felt hard now that's double the time you just had so you can intentionally bring in something that's aligned with the talk you want to you want to share and then two minutes same and then when you get to three minutes one of my clients once said that

90:35 it felt like he had a football field in his mind so much space and now whatever talk you have left there is a very clear intentional talk and not only that and this is why this is such an incredible method your talk is now inter Jed so you're at the stage of I've written a script that I've painfully edited in the old way that you now still have to memorize and it's a written speech that you're going to have to

91:04 pretend to give in a spoken way in this case you're there but it's already completely internalized not even memorized it's internalized because you have these pillars you know where you're going and by the time you make it through the accordion method you're basically ready to go give it on stage but you could even give it in you could give it now in one minutes two minutes 3 minutes five minutes you're going to it's very plastic you're going to be

91:28 able to navigate different time frames it's not going to really matter if you make a mistake because you're G to you have a deep sense of what your speech is it's not memorized it's internalized so not only have you getting Clarity and built out your speech in a in a very intentional way but by the time you get to the end of it you also actually know it and you're ready to to perform it that example of the three minute when

91:53 you back up the accordion that's exactly how I felt when I did this is just like wow so much time now because you essentially the way I think about is you concentrate it to the best most important nuggets and then you have time to build on those nuggets and you cut out all the stuff that no one really cares about which is usually a long introduction just like now just get to the good stuff and then you expand the

92:13 good stuff and it really worked for for me and it was it was a really Illuminating experience for someone that wants to actually use this say they have a speech coming up they say they're doing like an all hands presentation in like a week do you do this like a week ahead of time do you do you do this like a few days before I guess how do you where do you fit this in the workflow so that you

92:33 actually remember what you want to say when it comes time I can't say do it exactly a week or two weeks or it really depends how well you know your how familiar you are with the content if you have an all hands and this is something that you've been hashing with your executive team over the past you know two months you probably know it really really well and you have a lot of clarity and now it's just about

92:56 organizing it nicely so in that case maybe you you want to do the rough a rough go through the accordion a week ahead of time so you have a clear sense of what is it that I want to that I want my audience to remember and what are the the pillars that I know I like to hit that that feel really good so you can think about these as like the foundational pillars that support that one thing that you're sharing or

93:21 bookmarks that I know I have to hit then what I would like to do and so that's what I would write down I wouldn't write a script I'd write those down and then before the All Hands maybe the day before maybe even the morning of depending on how important this is or how comfortable you feel then you might go through just one or two reps of it but now you you already know it so it should come back very very quickly in

93:42 your mind and it sounds like it's okay to have some bullet points at the end like it's hard for me to imagine going on stage with a bunch of people watching not have any slide Point speaker not speaker notes any problems just having like a couple of the bullet points of like core points next to me before a talk I might have four things written down my one thing and we'll talk about this in the bow and arrow my one thing

94:08 the one thing I want people to remember and then the three bookmarks or pillars that I want to hit and these are kind of like cues or reminders that are going to send me into that part of the speech so for example if I'm talking about the accordion method like what I just said if I go back and I think through the pillars of this one well my my my one thing would be you know the

94:31 accordion method is more powerful than memorizing and than doing it the old way and then my bookmarks might be number one describe the old way or like the old way number two the new way or the accordion method and then number three might be like internalize don't memorize that'll be kind of the takeaway and if have that in my mind if I have 30 seconds I can say the old way sucks because you have to work so hard

95:01 and memorize everything and you're memorizing written stuff the accordion method is much more powerful because you are going to compress it and go down and then open it up and then I'll say and then I'll explain that in a second and then I'll say so you're internalized not memorized what I realize right now is actually funny enough though those were the bookmarks there so that sent me down that path but I would say bookmark number two is probably the living room

95:28 analogy so it would be the old way sucks the living room analogy and then describe the accordia method that's cool that was an awesome example of you just the insights that appear by forcing yourself through this exercise yeah and I it sounds like maybe the best use of this method is if you have a talk all of a sudden short term like it's coming all of a sudden you have to give a talk somewhere this a really powerful method

95:51 to come up with a great talk like that's maybe tomorrow which you expect I when I say I I I I love this I use this for myself I use this with every single client I work with for regardless of if it's a a five minute talk a 20 minute keyote we're using the accordion method and you can use this at the macro level or at the micro level so you can use it for the whole talk but you can also say

96:17 hey let's hone in on this this part one that you're struggling with or part two and let's use the Accord to like get clarity there so you can use the accordion as a like almost like a brainstorming way like I just want to see where I end up here and it takes maybe 15 minutes or something to go through a full accordion it depends the the time constraints you gives yourself sometimes I'll just do two minute one minute 30 seconds that's even

96:43 shorter but I'll go through it for one piece of the puzzle or it's like hey we're almost there let's really internalize it let's clarify this let's get it really really tight and and then I might say okay now let's do the whole thing through the accordion so your 20-minute talk I want to hear it in three minutes that gets really really interesting amazing okay anything else along the according method before we talk about the final technique before we

97:09 wrap up we have a full self-paced course on ultr speaking on the accordion I think it costs like 30 bucks or something like that to to access all of the games and all the platform a bunch of them are free but I think this ones behind the pay wall but we also have we put together a resource where you we like go all the way we describe all of the accordion method the bow and arrow staying character ending trong on a

97:36 free email course that we we put together that's ultraspin so this is Shameless self-promotion but if you wanted to go grab it there you can grab it there and then the bow and arrow is going to tie into the the accordion method as well awesome I'm glad you mentioned all that and we'll Point people to that you're all in the show notes okay final topic is the bone a technique let's talk about what that is and how folks can use that

98:02 to give better talks the bow and arrow starts with a a mind it's really a mindset shift that most of us are in the weeds so we're very sensitive and familiar to all of the content that we're working on if you're in data then you're you you have all of the data if you're sharing ideas you still have all of the ideas and the mistake that most people do when they're preparing a talk a presentation

98:33 in all hands a meeting whatever it is is we tend to focus more on what we want to say than what we want our audience to remember so the mindset shift here is stop focusing as much on what you want to say and focus more on what you want your audience to remember what we found out is if you think about your last all hands the last big meeting the last talk you saw on YouTube or in

98:58 person you probably don't remember much in fact i' wager you might only remember one thing from that talk and that's what this is all based on we call it the bow and arrow technique because we think you can only remember one thing out of a talk and that it's very powerful to go through that framework or that kind of thinking when you're building a talk and the one thing is your arrow and so when you have that one thing to me I say it's

99:28 literally a single sentence that is the only sentence your people would remember if they left your talk would you be satisfied with that sentence it takes some sometimes to get to a good one but if you have a good one it unlocks everything it's like you're having a North star or a compass in your pocket you can always pull it out you always know where you're going it's it's it gives you a lot of clarity it's also

99:51 giving a lot of clarity to your audience obviously but you can't just throw an arrow at somebody's face you need to notch it in the bow and pull the bow back and so to pull the bow back you need to add in weight to that sentence and that often comes in the form of an interesting anecdote or a DAT a data point that's going to support that or a story that's going to add emotion or illustrate it so

100:20 you want to find ways in which you can give weight or pull back the bow so that your arrow has that much more impact so when usually the process of clarifying what your arrow is is a back and forth between the bow and the arrows so if you're going down the accordion method like after the first one you might write or before the first one you might write a tentative Arrow here's my one thing and then the next one you say

100:51 okay actually my one thing might be a refined version of that so you might rewrite it a little bit and then you might tentatively put in what you think the bow is I like the anecdote I used here I like this this data point that I thought was powerful and maybe I can end on this story or this call to action then you'll put that in and then you go back in and you give that a try and

101:14 that's starting to simplify in your mind and as you go usually one informs the other by the time you finish the accordion for example you should have a very clear arrow and those clear bookmarks which is the bow but really the thing to remember with the bow and arrow if you could only remember one thing is switch your mindset from what I want to say to what I want people to remember and limit whatever that is you

101:42 want them to remember as much as possible that's going to give you an extreme Clarity that is really helpful like I'm preparing my talk for the summit and so yeah I'm I'm going to use both of these exercises and like what I take away from this last piece is as much as you may want to say a lot of things really all someone's going to remember as you said as one thing if anything but hopefully they remember that one thing

102:06 so it's essentially what's the one thing you want people to remember and then what are the pieces of support that will convince them that that's right and that's something that'll stick with them exactly and again similar to the accordion method this works in the macro and the micro m so if you have a talk where you're using slides use it for the whole talk but then for every single slide ask yourself what is my one thing and you might have a some support

102:36 there as well but if you don't have a one thing for each slide either the slide shouldn't exist or it should be multiple slides right the the symptom of not having a one thing is usually having a slide that says way too many things like I don't know what data point I want you to remember so I'm going to put all of it on that slide I'm not sure which piece of information is more important so I'm going to write down all of my

103:01 thoughts and I'm going to go through all of them or hope that you go through all of them and extract what you think is is interesting but the reality is people are just going to zone out if you do that so if you if you do that slide by slide it's you're going to gain incredible Clarity and again you're going to need less preparation and less memorization and to build on that Pro tip is to make the title of that slide

103:25 exactly that one thing you want them to take away just put it there and tell them exactly what you want them to learn I love that sweet Tristan we've been on a journey this was a really unique experimental episode I had a good time even though it's I've done I did some hard things you made me do hard things that are good for me is there anything else you want to share before we get to our very exciting letting around is

103:47 there anything else you want to leave listeners with or a nugget you want to I hope people found value I really I mean we did this was really a group effort and I I really appreciate you working on the the agend like really bringing in the games and trying to make this as as practical as possible I think the only thing I want to I want to leave people with is again this idea of how how

104:11 transformational tackling speaking can be and the more constrained you feel with your speaking the more transformational it will be to your life so I just want to give this encouragement it's much much much more enjoyable than you think it will be it can actually be exhilarating and energizing and you feel like you can take over the world once you're on this journey it's beautiful and so I just encourage everybody take the first step and start practicing your

104:44 speaking awesome and I definitely felt that after doing the the workshop of just like I feel energized I want to just talk all the time but then I'm like I need more work I need more practice Tristan with that we' reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready let's do this lightning room here we go here we go first question what are two or three books that you have recommended most to other people I was given a a book by my

105:14 first coach Nathan sewer seven years ago called the big leap by gay Hendrick that I've recom mended so many times and it's based on this idea that we tend to self-sabotage ourselves when we experience too much success or too much happiness and that that's linked to I think five things that would happen to us when we're growing up like one of them is the wild the what is it the pop wild wild poppy syndrome or something

105:45 like that like the tallest poppy is the one that's cut first so if you shine in in a family of siblings then anytime you shine too much we're going to say hey that's not cool for the others so that's going to be internalized and hardwired in your body and as an adult as soon as you start shining a little bit too much you're going to do the same thing to yourself so the idea is going from

106:07 having this this point above which you can't be happy to turning it into he calls it an upward-facing spiral with no upper limit but it's a really exciting and empowering book do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed enjoyed I haven't watched much very recently but I'll say my TV show my favorite TV show one of my favorite TV shows of all time is the peaky blinders an English show with h

106:36 Killian Murphy I'm absolutely obsessed with that movie that show I think it's a true Masterpiece and I recently rewatched so I called I I'll qualify this as recent I recently rewatched the nice guys with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crow and I think it's just brilliant comedy brilliant like another Masterpiece I thought do you have a favorite recent product that you have discovered that you really love could be an app could be something physical I have a physical product actually right

107:07 in front of me that was gifted to me by my business partner Michael gandler co-founder of ulture speaking this is called an ember mug and this keeps whatever you have in it warm and it's extraordinary whether you have you're a coffee drinker or a tea drinker you know the feeling of pouring this and wanting and sipping it and by the fifth sip it's cold this keeps it at whatever temperature you want it to H for however

107:32 long you want and I absolutely love it I've been using it basically every day I have one of those I find myself you can actually control it through the app right you can control the temperature through an app which I love I haven't been using mine but I love the idea I know a lot of friends love them two more questions do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to share with friends friends or family find

107:53 useful in work or in life I think we we're we're too future focused as a as a species or as a society and as a result we're always looking for the next thing so the motto I share with my friends and my business partners and my family the most I think is these are the good old days and I remind myself and like I'll tell you right now for you and for whoever is listening like I mean think

108:21 about the podcast it's never going to be this young it's never going to feel like it feels right now and it always feels like these things are Eternal but truly you're one day you're going to look back and you're think man those were really the good old days and so I say it right now enjoy because these are the good old days I love that and it's so relevant with a young kid because you're always going to think about they little I love

108:47 that final question you were the fastest person to reach the finals of the world championship of public speaking I imagine that was quite a journey I'm curious if there's like a story from that experience that comes to mind that's like a wild part of that Journey or something that might surprise people yeah well The Journey lasted almost seven months and it was the craziest journey of my life because I went into that with no experience

109:18 whatsoever speaking and so really just just a a random amateur and I just climbed the ladder by outworking everybody sto the story that came to mind right away was six days before the semifinals so I'm six days before the semifinals and I've qualified for the semi-finals two and a half months ago so I'm nobody now I'm going to the semi-finals of the World Championships

109:49 of public speaking so my mind really is struggling to compute and I had finally unlocked a speech that I thought was worthy of giving on the final stage because you have to show up there for the semi-finals with one speech and then the next day if ever you win you're going to the finals and you have to have a brand new speech a completely different speech that you're going to give on that stage so you need two

110:13 speeches ready to go and both of those speeches have to be in theory world class I'm six days before I was struggling at that really really struggling to get that speech together I finally got something and Michael managed to get me I was flying the I think two days later to Vancouver for the F for the semis and Michael managed to unlock this one opportunity to speak in front of 50 people to give it a try

110:39 and so I I ran there I give the speech and as usual we we film I filmed every single speech I gave more than a hundred speeches over those seven months and I filmed every single speech and we get home we'd ask everybody for feedback and I I get home and I'm I'm thinking man something is wrong something is wrong I was so pumped I could I wept I genuinely wept as I wrote the speech because I was it was so moving it

111:05 was all about my life it was something that I was so connected to I don't know probably the emotion of the pressure as well but that's how much I believed in that speech we get home we put the speech on the computer and as I get to the most important part of the speech I see two things happen so this is the moment where like I'm expecting people to pull out their their tissues one person pulls up their pulls

111:31 up the the the agenda for the event that they're at and is starting to look at the agenda another person like pulls out their phone another person starts going through their their their purse and I'm looking at this and suddenly I realize oh this speech nobody cares about this this is not a good speech this is terrible and then I go through all of these feed I have 50 pieces of feedback and all I'm getting is like good luck for the semifinals

111:59 it's going to go great I thought it was good and I'm like this is I'm going to humiliate myself this is terrible so I had waves of anxiety I threw my speech away and in five days from the ground up I rebuilt a completely new speech that was basically the best of everything I'd explored everything I'd experimented with over the course of the three months leading up to that like the jokes that that worked the best that

112:30 like a standup comic wood I built my special and I focused on different different areas like the all of the Transitions and right before the the the semifinals I gave the speech to one person like I was in Vancouver trying to to internalize my speech and memorizing it like in a plaza where I imated the the size of the stage and I'm just giving my speech out loud to get over the nerve so I'm ready for

112:58 the pressure to see if my brain will remember it and everything anyways I gave it in front of one person who was our our district director at Toast Masters and this is a speech meant for 500 to a thousand people not one person so I was scared it would flop but in the middle of the speech which is a completely different one like I saw a tear roll down her cheek and then she just just hugged me and said you got it you did it

113:25 you did it and I walked out on that stage and I made it and I I won the semi finals with that speech I think to me that was really the it showed me that everything I done was worth something that it actually worked if I was able to do to build a speech in five days that could get me a win at the semi-finals of the World Championships that was kind of the ultimate wow won so when I walked into

113:53 the to the finals to me I I felt like I had already won wow that is a story what an arc amazing I'm so happy to asked that question now I just want to watch that speech and I want to learn more about this whole championship of public speaking which I have no said into that could be its own podcast interview but Tristan thank you so much for being here this was incredible one of the most interesting episodes I've

114:18 done two final questions where can folks learn more about Ultra speaking I know you built a page where they could experiment with some of the stuff so share that and then how can listeners be useful to you if you go to Ultras speaking.com Lenny so Ultra like UL l t r a Ultras speaking.com Lenny we put together you have a five emails that go deep into a bunch of the things that we've talked here you can also just go to Ultras

114:44 speake docomo the games for free and you can check out everything else that we do if you want to follow me or hit me up or ask me questions about this podcast you can do that on Twitter Montebello m o n TB l l o and how can be how can listeners be useful to me well first of all if you made it to here then I really appreciate you thank you thank you for being here with us

115:12 and what I would love for you to do is to apply this you we said in the beginning you can't get better at speaking without speaking and another piece of that puzzle is you want to do the thing that you're trying to get better at so if you're nervous speaking in front of people you want to speak in front of people as part of your practice so the way you could be useful to me is introduce these games to somebody else

115:40 try them for yourself practice them with somebody else go through the accordion method with a friend try conductor and when you succeed and when you have an awesome experience then you can tell world that ultr speaking helped you do that and that would be huge awesome Tristan thank you so much for being here thanks an it was an honor it was my honor Tristan bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can

116:10 subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode

Summary

Tristan Deont Bello, co-creator of Ultra Speaking, discusses effective public speaking techniques and the transformative power of speaking skills. He emphasizes the importance of speaking conversationally, the value of practice through games, and the need to focus on what the audience will remember rather than just what the speaker wants to say.

- Public speaking should feel natural and enjoyable; self-consciousness can hinder effective communication.
- Speaking is a meta-skill that enhances various aspects of life, including confidence and connection with others.
- The Ultra Speaking approach includes interactive games that help build speaking skills in a fun, low-stakes environment.
- The Accordion Method helps speakers clarify their message by starting broad and narrowing down to essential points.
- The Bow and Arrow technique emphasizes determining a key takeaway for the audience and supporting it with engaging anecdotes or data.
- Practice is crucial; the more you speak, the more comfortable and effective you become.
- Focus on what you want your audience to remember, and structure your content around that core message.
- Engaging in spontaneous speaking exercises can enhance confidence and reduce anxiety in formal speaking situations.

Questions Answered

What is the importance of speaking conversationally in public speaking?

The speaker emphasizes that many people shift into a 'public speaking voice' that feels unnatural. Instead, speaking conversationally is more freeing, powerful, and effective. The introduction also highlights the guest, Tristan deont Bello, and the value of his public speaking workshop.

How can speakers overcome the fear of spontaneity?

The discussion revolves around the need to upgrade one's speaking habits to avoid monotony. By understanding that pauses and gathering thoughts can be beneficial, speakers can find freedom in their delivery.

Why are games used in public speaking training?

Tristan explains that games are integral to learning because they provide a low-stakes environment for practice. Just as cooking requires hands-on experience, speaking requires active participation to improve.

What is the significance of recovering from mistakes in speaking?

The ability to recover gracefully from mistakes builds confidence in spontaneous speaking scenarios, which are common in public speaking.

How does physical comfort affect communication?

Feeling comfortable and at ease physically allows speakers to communicate more effectively. Movement and body language play a significant role in enhancing communication.

How does focusing on fewer ideas improve speaking?

Focusing on a limited number of ideas allows speakers to communicate more clearly and effectively. This approach leads to greater clarity and impact in their message.

What is the Accordion Method and how does it help in speaking?

The Accordion Method involves speaking for set time intervals, gradually refining ideas. This technique encourages speakers to express their thoughts without worrying about perfection, leading to improved clarity and confidence.

What should speakers focus on to ensure their message is remembered?

Speakers should identify a single key message they want the audience to remember and support it with relevant details. This clarity helps prevent overwhelming the audience with too much information.

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