SPI 889: Ultraspeaking with Tristan de Montebello

SPI 889: Ultraspeaking with Tristan de Montebello

Tristan de Montebello: I was trying to learn how to be a better speaker, but I wanted to be a better speaker everywhere. I wanted to feel comfortable in any scenario, whether I was asked to give a toast or hanging out with a group of strangers. And what I found out was most of what was taught out there is not really helping us with spontaneous speaking. Like, if you have the time to think if you’re writing your texts as you’re dating, you can think for three hours before you get the witty text out. But when you’re at a coffee shop or on a walk with someone, they say something, you have to speak right away, and that’s when things become problematic.

So If you’re fully living your life and you’re fully able to communicate, you’re filling up your bubble completely, people around you feel more comfortable, you are more influential, more impactful, more connecting. And what I find is that so many people, are walking around the world, just filling up this tiny little portion of that bubble. But if you realize that no, no, no. Communication is a skill just like any other, the more you lean into it, the more you start learning it, the more fun it becomes, the more easeful life in general becomes. And as a result, all of the other ventures, when you add everything in, this is the superpower. It’s the superpower that allows you to flow in anything, whether you’re doing videos or meeting people or connecting in your local community.

Pat Flynn: Imagine this. You just finished an epic presentation. You were up on stage in front of hundreds of people, and you delivered the perfect presentation. In fact, you’ve prepared for it so much that you knew this was gonna happen. Great job, you killed it.

And then you go into the green room, which is where the other speakers go, some of the speakers that are coming up next, and people who are just kind of chilling there away from the crowds of the event, and you strike up a conversation with somebody who you look up to. They are there in the same room with you except there’s one problem. You fumble your words, you don’t know exactly what to say. And you think about that moment later on the drive home and you realize that you completely dropped the ball.

What is the benefit of being a prepared speaker when you can’t even communicate in real life, in situations that probably matter more? Imagine how much more opportunity you’d have if you learned to become a better communicator. Not just presenter, but a person who can hold a conversation, who could capture attention at a dinner table, at a networking event, in a crowd amongst your peers at work with your coworkers.

Well, today we’re speaking with Tristan de Montebello, who is a world champion, or he has at least gotten to the finals of the World Speaking Championships and has learned his way into how to become a better communicator. And he has a very incredible story, and he’s over at Ultraspeaking, which helps you become a better communicator.

You can check him out at Ultraspeaking.com, but don’t go there yet. Because we have a conversation and a game to play as well in the middle of this conversation. Yes, games are a part of the way that you can learn your way into becoming a better communicator. You’ll see exactly what we’re talking about in just a second, so let’s not wait any further.

This is episode 889 of the SPI Podcast with Tristan de Montebello from Ultraspeaking. Here we go.

Tristan, welcome to the SPI Podcast. Thanks for being here, man.

Tristan de Montebello: Thank you, pat. I’m so happy to be here.

Pat Flynn: I was super impressed from your work very recently. In fact, many people know I was a keynote speaker at Crafting Commerce in Boise, and a little thing that Nathan does is he brings a lot of the speakers and a lot of the top creators together before the show even begins to sort of mastermind with each other and anybody who’s there that can provide value, Nathan often brings up.

And there’s a lot of different topics that are discussed. And it was you that really impressed me the most because of the way you taught what you teach. What is it that you teach and how do you teach that that’s different?

Tristan de Montebello: First of all, yeah, shout out to Nathan. ’cause that, yeah, craft and commerce was amazing and the Mastermind was such a incredible group. It was, it was really a, a pleasure to be there.

So what do I teach? We like to say that we’re creating the communication school of the future because the way I learned communication, which first of all, I didn’t learn anything, and as I went through school, nobody taught me. And then I did my engineering school where you really need it and nobody taught us.

And one day I jumped on this crazy journey, maybe we’ll jump into that, but I started learning. In a way that strangely didn’t serve me, so I was trying to learn how to be a better speaker, but I wanted to be a better speaker everywhere. I wanted to feel comfortable in any scenario, whether I was asked to give a toast or hanging out with a group of strangers, talking to my team, I wanted to to feel it everywhere. And what I found out was most of what was taught out there is not really helping us with spontaneous speaking in the moment. Speaking how do I feel? Ease. So we teach people how to feel comfortable, how to feel confident speaking and if you can achieve that, then naturally we can add in, sprinkle in all of their, how do you become more effective?

How do you become more concise? How do you become more influential, impactful? How do you improve your storytelling, et cetera? And the way we do it mirrors a lot of what you teach in Lean Learning, actually, which is lots and lots of reps with other human beings. It has to be fun, but also you need to be able to apply what you learn immediately in the moment. This was my biggest frustration, learning from presentations and then just having in my mind thinking I got it. And you go out into the world and nothing happens. So we give you very small exercises. Very pointed feedback, and immediately you apply it and you apply it in a way that’s very gamified.

So it’s fun, it’s enjoyable, so you want to come back every day. You learn one piece of information, you try it out, you test it out, you get feedback, and you just keep that loop going over and over. And so we do it through a bunch of different courses and programs, but everything is very gamified in the way we approach it.

Pat Flynn: I have a lot of things to say about this before we dive in, and I do wanna collect your story because it leads into why this is important to you. Number one, just the method of teaching. I saw it happen in real time. It was amazing to see the immediate progress people in the room who were brave enough to sort of demonstrate and be a Guinea pig for this.

It was amazing, Ultraspeaking, like I highly can vouch for it already. Number two, just the importance of this skill now where we’re at in the world with AI and everything, and information just becoming so planned. It is the communication and the human to human interactions that are gonna be so important.

Yet, I was talking to somebody about this yesterday. I was talking to somebody about how it was dating out there. I’m a happily married man, but this person was still on the dating street over there, and it’s very difficult because people just don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. It feels like everybody’s been so absorbed with the internet and behind the screen talking.

They type well, like the messages, they’re flirty. Everything is great on text message. But when they get together in person, like they’re just like, they don’t even know how to talk to each other anymore. So if you can learn the skill of communication, it’s great. And thirdly, I love that we’re talking about communication everywhere, not just on stage. I know there’s certain things like for example, Toastmasters, which sure you can learn how to speak better in front of an audience and learn how to prep a talk and great. Maybe when you get hired to speak on a stage, you’ll be awesome. But then you go backstage in the green room and you’re talking to people and you’re like, blah.

And then there go all the opportunities that you could have had if you were good at communicating just in general. So I just wanted to highlight that ’cause those are things that really spoke to me and really stood out when I was diving into kind of what it is that you teach. But how did you even get into this in the first place?

Where did this all come from? It sounds like there was a, some sort of journey or adventure you went on.

Tristan de Montebello: Definitely an adventure. And it was very much by accident. Before lean learning, there was a Ultralearning and this guy, Scott Young, was writing this book. He had done a lot of incredible rapid learning feats, and I had just created a guitar course online, and I had two choices.

Either I dive in to the guitar thing and I become the guitar guide teaching advanced guitar, which was not something I wanted to do. I, I enjoy bringing people to a level of independence and then letting them flourish, letting them go. That’s my specialty, and I wanted to learn a new skill. I thought, okay, I’m gonna learn something different and I’m gonna append it to this guitar course.

That’s not at all what the future had in mind for me. I ended up talking to Scott, asking him, Hey, are you looking for Guinea pigs? I wanted some, some forcing function, some accountability there to push me into this project and. Long story short, a friend suggested I take on speaking, public speaking because it’s a meta skill.

So it’s something that the better you get at it, the, the more everything else in your life tends to get better. And so I chose this and. I randomly stumble into the world championships of public speaking and I thought, perfect forcing function. It’s 30,000 people across the world. 140 countries run by Toastmasters.

And I signed up two hours before the qualifiers ’cause I didn’t even have enough speeches to qualify, but I ended up going through this as a forcing function. But I just started winning and I met Michael Gendler. Who now is the co-founder of Ultraspeaking and we started working together on this and I made it to the finals of the World Championships over the course of the most insane six months of my life where I gave probably more than a hundred speeches as part of my training.

And the crazy thing is I finished this thing and I’m asked very soon after to give an impromptu speech in a small group that I was a part of, a small mastermind, and I felt terrified. I felt like I had no skills, although I had just spent seven months beating a lot of the best speakers in the world in this prepared speaking environment.

And so what I found out was, or what struck me was, oh man, I spent all of my time doing the prepared speaking stuff, just like you were saying, but that’s 10% of what life actually looks like. So then we set out and said, okay, we’re gonna figure out, Michael was kind of already on this journey, but we joined forces and we thought we are gonna figure out what are the fundamental pieces, the fundamental habits of speaking that impact everything so that if I can get better at this one thing everything else in my life is gonna get better. My ease is gonna go up everywhere. Yeah. Craziest project of my life by far. That’s wild. I mean, I guess Ultraspeaking, close second.

Pat Flynn: I think a lot of people don’t even realize there is such a thing as a world championships of speaking and I, and I have. I’ve been familiar with that in my journey of learning how to be a public speaker and be on stage and I, I kinda ran across some speeches that was run by this event and they, they have a certain style to them.

There’s a certain like tone, yes. And a performance aspect to it. That is great. It’s intriguing. However, it’s not how we talk in real life. It’s not how you and I are talking now and you know, or on a podcast or, or things like that, or with your friends, right at a dinner table. So what, what would you say are the main differences between learning how to be a pro speaker on stage in a Toastmasters type situation versus being a pro communicator in in life?

Tristan de Montebello: Yeah. I think it’s changed a lot. I think this organization, the reason why they are the way they are was a reaction to something a hundred years ago, but we’re in a very, very different time. So that’s exactly how I, I now have an allergic reaction to anything that even resembles the type of talks I would give during the competition because it’s.

Hyper overact and it’s a, and it’s a competition. So I’m looking at what the judging ballot is, and I’m looking at every piece of it, and I’m trying to turn every knob to 10 so that the, the judges see that I’m using all of the stage and that my vocal variety is, and all of my gestures, everything is huge and overact, and it just feels remarkably artificial. And it is reassuring to feel like you have control over those components. So naturally people tend towards that. They wanna be in control of everything because it’s very reassuring. And when you have a lot of anxiety around speaking, you want as much control as possible. But what happens is you are no longer a human being.

Human beings are connected to themselves when they’re speaking are in a state of flow. So it’s a much more of a subconscious act than a conscious one. And there’s very, very little editing that happens in the moment. So the way prepared speaking, or the old way of speaking looks like is I have to stand a certain way.

I need a certain posture. I need to do something very specific with my hands. I need to look at people a certain amount of time. All of that is very, very conscious thinking. What we believe effective communication is, is one in which I feel so confident in my skillset, my ability to just feel like myself in the moment that I don’t have to think about it, and I can just feel connected to what’s going through my body and connected to the people or the person I’m speaking with. And everything kind of happens naturally. And the vocabulary I build in my capacity to recover from mistakes to improvise is right there for the taking. So I’ll have, oh, I’m going a little bit long. How do I wrap this up? Can I use a summary prompt to bring myself back in, oh, I’m losing my train of thought, or I’m going too fast.

How can I, can I stop myself and just, ah, take a pause. And so there’s a lot of components that go into it, but really it’s about developing a vocabulary of skills that allow you to stop thinking about speaking and just being.

Pat Flynn: If the old ways speaking, had a scorecard with judges who are marking off ticks for communicating like we’re talking about, like we wanna do to a person on the other end of the table to a, a small audience to our team, for example, what is their version of that scorecard? They’re not thinking like, oh, I’m going to make sure that you start with a story, or, you know, there’s, there’s no scorecard per se, but what makes a great communicator?

Tristan de Montebello: The first thing is a great communicator is one that makes people feel the way they want them to feel.

So what does that mean? A counter example might be more illustrative. A lot of people who lack self-confidence in their ability to communicate will consistently leak their insecurities. So you’ll start speaking and you say something wrong and you say, ah, sorry, that that’s, I’m totally messing this up. Or, I don’t know if this is making sense right now, or am I losing you?

And you’re basically just leaking all of the thoughts that are going through your mind that are negative because in your mind, it feels like it’s the elephant in the room. It feels like everybody else can notice what’s happening inside, just the way you can. A great communicator, a person who has ease the what the naturals feel like are people who are basically never leaking.

They’re staying composed. So that means even if I think, oh, I’m losing them, instead of saying, sorry, I’m losing you. This is not making sense. I’ll take a breath or use a prompt, bring myself back on the the right path and just keep on speaking. And what’s gonna happen is I’m gonna convey confidence.

Because if I pause, only confident speakers, pause. If I use a summary prompt and bring myself back or a conviction prompt, which is basically starting the beginning of a sentence in a way that portrays conviction, and then my brain will just fill in the gap, then I’m gonna come off as confident. If I come off as confident, my audience will feel that confidence and reflect it back to me, and it becomes this very virtuous cycle.

Pat Flynn: You had used an interesting phrase, how the naturals do it, and I wanna make sure people realize this because I thought. That it was the case that you had to be born this way. You had to be born, yeah, a great communicator.

And I remember before I was learning how to speak and learning how to communicate, I would listen to somebody speak even in a conversation I was having with them, and I’d be so jealous of just how well everything flowed. How did you know to say those exact words in that exact order, in that right tone?

I would always overanalyze it, but I’ve learned over time that this is something that you can learn and this is why you and Ultraspeaking and your crew there teach this. And like I said, I think this is gonna be one of the most important skills. So if you can learn it, how do you learn it?

Tristan de Montebello: Yeah, the naturals. It used to be something that made me mad. This, this word made me mad because when you’re saying the naturals, you’re immediately saying there’s one group that have something that you don’t, and that was my whole keynote at Craft and Commerce was it started out by saying, you know, we all know about the naturals and then there’s us.

And the, the whole premise is saying there is nothing that the naturals have, that you don’t have, that everybody listening to this episode does not have. It’s just that the naturals have a series of great habits that allow them to come off as naturals, whereas all of the others have a series of bad habits that are preventing them from expressing this thing that we are all born to do. You don’t have to teach a kid how to speak. You just put in with other humans that speak and they’ll learn the language and all of the subtle mannerisms that come with any different language or culture without you needing to say anything to them.

And that’s not true for reading or spelling or math or an anything else. We are genuinely born to speak. So how do you do that? Well, you have to identify what the bad habits are. And then one by one, you have to replace them with something more empowering. So, for example, I mean, leaking is one of the most common bad habits, but another one will be rambling, for example.

Or feeling like your words turn into a runaway train that you just can’t stop. A lot of people have this, particularly people with anxiety. I feel like I’m losing my audience, so I just add more words, more words, more words, and a more, and I just keep trying, trying, trying, trying, trying to bring them back.

But in doing so, you’re, you’re just making your case worse. That’s a bad habit. So I need to be able to identify that and bring awareness to it. The way we do it, but you can self-diagnose as well, but the way we do it is we have a series of games and all of the games are made to make you fumble. And when you fumble, oftentimes we’ll highlight one of those bad habits and then we’ll teach you, Hey, how do you overcome that with a better habit?

And then you learn how to master the game. And in doing so, you’re kind of anchoring this right habit, but the root cause of going too fast rambling, not being able to stop yourself is a fear of not speaking, a fear of what happens if I slow down? What happens if I stop? Will I be interrupted? Will people think I am blanking?

What will it feel like if you never do it? It will create a lot in your body that you’re not used to this state, this nervous system state, but if you can teach people to feel comfortable in silence, in slowing down and in different ranges than naturally, everything else takes care of itself.

Pat Flynn: I’m guessing people wanna know what some of these games are. We’ve talked about gamification. Games are fun, and I love that you’re making this fun. Again, I saw in person, which was incredible to see in almost immediate transformations, but it is something that. We will put you on the spot. It challenges you, it shows you where your faults are.

And this is a hard thing for a lot of people, especially people like me who grew up perfectionist. I don’t want to highlight that I’m bad at certain things, and so therefore, I often used to avoid those things so I could just go back to the things I was good at and therefore never really improve on these skills that I should improve.

And it was only through reps, things started to really lay themselves forward in, in terms of where things were going for me. So what are some of these games like? Can you or are you willing to share and maybe even demonstrate some of them?

Tristan de Montebello: Sure. You willing to play with me?

Pat Flynn: Oh gosh. I knew that was gonna happen. Sure.

Tristan de Montebello: I love it. Yeah, I, I’m happy to show the games. A lot of these games are accessible for free as well.

Pat Flynn: There may be some people who are gonna be listening, so we’ll wanna make sure we explain kind of what we’re doing, who may not be able to see this on video at the moment, if that’s possible.

Tristan de Montebello: It is definitely possible.

Pat Flynn: Okay. Can you see my screen? See a screen, it looks like course, with certain classes, cohorts, and we’re on the games tab now, and there’s a lot of them. Okay, cool.

Tristan de Montebello: And there’s a bunch of games. Yeah. And so each game tends to address a series of habits or a series of symptoms that people tend to fall into and then kind of help teach the root cause and what you can do about it.

So one that we tend to love to start with is this one, it’s rapid fire analogies, and I love it because it’s so incredibly simple and basic. Yet it, there’s, there’s so much to it. So how does it work? I’ll demonstrate right away it looks like this. So you see one word. Is like another word because dot, dot, dot.

That’s what if you’re not seeing the screen. This one says expired pickles are like honesty, because math is like cleaning out the fridge because, and the goal here is to read this out loud and continue speaking. So you wanna let your brain auto complete, just like Google. If you just keep speaking and you don’t interrupt yourself, you don’t think, and you just let the words come out, then you’re naturally going to fill in the blank and it doesn’t really matter that you make sense.

Pat Flynn: I was gonna ask, because my, my brain is like, well, how are those two things connected? How is DNA like a pillow? And there’s this timer and I only have, I mean, you could set the timer to different, different lengths. I think you had put like five seconds or something.

This is fast.

Tristan de Montebello: It’s very fast. Yeah. Five seconds is I mean this is what interesting. If I give you a lot of time, it’s not necessarily easier. Because what are we trying to do? Where here we’re trying to learn how to speak before we overthink. Which is a fundamental skill in speaking, and if you’re preparing edited content, like if you have the time to think if you’re writing your texts as you’re dating, to use your example, you can think for three hours before you get the witty text out.

But when you’re at a coffee shop or having dinner or on a walk with someone, they say something, you have to speak right away, and we tend to censor ourselves, and that’s when things become problematic. So it doesn’t matter in this game if you say something that makes sense, but what we tend to find out is that the less you think, the more you tend to make sense.

So just allow yourself to say whatever comes to mind and then we’ll see what happens. So I’ll do a rep, then you’ll do one.

Pat Flynn: Okay, great. We’re gonna start with the pro first and, and then compare it to, okay. Do you wanna go first?

Tristan de Montebello: I’m happy to let you go first.

Pat Flynn: No, no, you go first. You go first. You go first and you will read the whole prompt too.

So everybody listening will be able to understand as well.

Tristan de Montebello: Yes. Should I zoom in or do you feel like this is big enough?

Pat Flynn: I think we’re good. We could zoom in on post, said if we’re gonna use the video.

Tristan de Montebello: Okay. Here we go.

Pat Flynn: Ready, set, go.

Tristan de Montebello: Unicorns are like a police car ’cause you only see them every once in a while.

Hitting your brother is like marriage because I guess it’s something a lot of people have to go through. Skydiving is like DNA, because once you do it or once you realize it, you’re changed forever. Scuba diving is like composting because it’s something everybody should do at least once in their lives.

A podcast is like a lion because it’ll open up something deep within you. Chocolate is like online dating because could be delicious, but also could hurt you.

Pat Flynn: Nice dude. Well done. Well done.

Tristan de Montebello: So what we’re trying to do here is we’re trying to counter the desire to leak. So there were 30 times in there where I wanted to laugh something off, or I wanted to say, ah, this one didn’t come out the way I hoped it would come out.

And what we’re trying to train is this habit of, no, I’m gonna project confidence. I’m gonna stay in it all the way through. So that’s the intention I’m giving you.

Pat Flynn: Got it. So even if it doesn’t make sense, you don’t Yes. Call it out. You don’t leak it.

Tristan de Montebello: Especially if it doesn’t.

Pat Flynn: Okay.

Tristan de Montebello: Here it goes.

Pat Flynn: I’m ready.

Tristan de Montebello: Ready, set, go.

Pat Flynn: Buying coffee is like rocket science because there are way too many options to try to make it work. Headphones are like paper because it’s something you need when you’re creating music. Blue cheese is like the horizon because you see it, but you can’t really touch it. Running is like a treasure map because no matter what, it’ll get you to your destination.

Rap music is like Christmas because you’re wrapping. Skydiving is like math because you’re calculating the amount of time until you die.

Tristan de Montebello: Yeah. Yes. Let’s go.

Pat Flynn: Let’s go. You know what it feels like Tristan? Tell me, it feels like, ’cause I’ve done some freestyle rapping before. Yes. And I’ve done this just because it’s fun.

And I’m inspired by people like Harry Mack who can make up just bars on bars, on bars. And it’s insane. He’s so impressive. When I am live in front of my Pokemon audience on Monday in front of thousands of people, I’ve been playing some background music and every once in a while I’ll kind of drop a flow in and it’s typically pretty bad.

And oftentimes I’ll stop myself ’cause it just is not making any sense. But. I have that same feeling because I know when I’m live, ’cause I have practice. If I tell myself wait, no, that’s not what I meant, then like, it’s never gonna be as entertaining. And even though like it literally feels the same as that.

I feel like I’m rapping

Tristan de Montebello: 100%. Michael, my co-founder is also a freestyle rapper.

Pat Flynn: Oh yeah.

Tristan de Montebello: So I know there’s some of this that’s infused in it. And basically freestyle wrapping is the extreme version of this, but it’s very, very similar. It’s well, freestyle wrapping is the extreme version of what elite communication looks like.

It’s like you’re, you’re just doing it in very hard mode because the, even the slightest fumble is, is so much harder to recover from.

Pat Flynn: Oh man, that was fun. I was actually pretty surprised that some of the connections I was able to make on the fly.

Tristan de Montebello: Yeah. And so notice a few things. There’s what I love, there was one, I think it was the wrapping one where you, it kind of took a moment ’cause it like whatever wanted to come out didn’t come out. And then you said, because you’re rapping, but you said it with such conviction. And that’s what I love about this game. That’s the exact habit that we’re training is every time you do that, you’re reinforcing this neural pathway that I don’t need to feel confident inside to look confident on the outside, but internally there’s a storm brewing. So when you were watching the natural speaking and you’re thinking, how are they always getting the right word at the right time? The reality is that’s probably not what they’re thinking. In that very moment. That person you were looking at might have been thinking, oh man, that wasn’t the word I was looking for. But you have no idea as long as they’re not showing you.

Pat Flynn: Right. Or, and I learned this from Harry Mack. He says that the performances that he does on video or when he is on stage, he is so smooth only because he has had so many opportunities to mess up and try and get up again and fail and get all those reps in, and you’re just seeing the sort of tail end of all the work that he is done.

And so again, to your point, we gotta get the reps in. You gotta have something to do this with. And I really liked doing it with you on the other side, I would imagine that maybe it’s harder if you’re kind of on your own. Is there, like how do you help with that sort of drive of like, oh, I don’t want to do this in front of everybody.

I’m gonna try it on my own. And I would imagine a lot of people wouldn’t perform as well or do as well in their progress.

Tristan de Montebello: Yeah, it’s really interesting because pressure really, really helps you in this. So if you’re watching somebody else play and you’re trying to play at the same time, or you’re just watching them go through, like when I was explaining it, you’re probably looking at this and you’re thinking, my brain’s not coming up with any connections, but the moment I put you under pressure in the spotlight and you just have to do it, something magical happens. And I remember watching a video from Eric Clapton, the God of Rock. He was asked a question about improvisation, and similarly, he’s talking about having all of this vocabulary, like all of these things. He knows that he’s done probably in one way or another, but every time it’s his turn to go into a solo, he says it’s like being thrust through a door.

And once he’s thrust through the door, there’s just something that happens. As long as he dives into the door, right? So you, it’s very similarly here. When you’re put under pressure, if you’re willing to trust yourself, which happens as a result of having had many, many reps, then you’re gonna find a way to look very graceful.

And Kevin Kelly said that pros are just amateurs who’ve learned to recover gracefully, which I love that quote.

Pat Flynn: Geez, I love that a lot.

Tristan de Montebello: Yeah. And so the easiest answer to that is we created cohort based courses for Ultraspeaking because the first thing we did when we put all the games online was we created a membership and we said, Hey, now you guys can all have access to these games, and people took it.

And then we realized, oh, very few people are using it. So we asked them why. And they’re like, well, it’s, I feel like I need somebody. It’s not the same when I’m not with a person. So that kind of naturally led us to say, okay, well let’s get together and let’s train together. So all of our courses, we put people into small groups of three people and you’re just doing reps with other humans all the time.

’cause this game is a rapid fire game. But a lot of the other games are. Still very, very short, but a little bit longer. You’re giving thirty seconds, 45 seconds. 1, 2, 3 minute speeches, and having a person there allows you to train the, the very feeling that you’re looking for in any situation where you’re communicating, which is I want to feel like myself while other people are looking at me and while it matters.

Pat Flynn: You had actually at Craft and Commerce done a group activity where you needed to find a partner and do something in, in this segment of the presentation, it really transformed a lot of people, pretty much the entire room. Can you relive that exercise for us and maybe even speak to why it worked so well.

This is something that a person could potentially take home or even try with somebody around them, I would imagine. So if, if you wouldn’t mind, that would be amazing.

Tristan de Montebello: Yeah. With pleasure. I love this one. This, so we call this the accordion method, and the reason why we call the the accordion method is because we are compressing time and then we’re opening time and we’re using time constraints as a way to clarify your thinking, get close to your one thing so you know exactly what it is you want to convey, and then opening up time again so that you can fill it back in but very intentionally. So this applies to anything that is prepared. If you have a presentation, you’re giving a talk, you know that you’re gonna give a a speech or it could be a video, it could be a short, we have a lot of clients that use this specifically for YouTube and shorts as a way to clarify their thinking.

How does it work? It’s very simple and that’s why I love it. You just choose a topic, A topic that you. Have not yet completely digested, and that’s why this is really interesting. You could also take something that you thought about. Maybe you have a 3000 word post, but you want to turn it into a one minute short.

How do I compress it? What you do is you throw away your notes, you don’t look at anything. It’s now we’re starting speaking exclusively, and you put a timer. The timer could be, say two minutes or three minutes. Let’s give an example at two minutes. I tend to keep ’em short, so even if you’re doing a five or six, 10 minute video, you might wanna do a three minute timer.

If you’re doing a one minute short, maybe you start a little bit lower, but you’re gonna start by two minutes. And as you go down the accordion, you’re gonna go two minutes, one minute, 30 seconds, maybe even down to 15 seconds. And every time you do a rep, you’re going to, you’re just getting a draft out. So as you’re going down the accordion, you’re just getting rid of all of the noise so you don’t edit yourself.

You just when the timer goes off, you start speaking and you stay in character. So no leaking, no stopping, no restarting. ’cause the whole point is to find out when I’m under pressure, when I have these time constraints, what comes out. And as long as one thing interesting came out, you’re gonna keep that and you’re gonna bring it to the next rep.

So you do your two minute rep. Then you ask yourself, or ideally if you’re doing it with a partner, that you ask them or they, they give you feedback and they say, oh, I loved when you did that. And this part was confusing. And if you’re just by yourself, you ask yourself the same question. What did I like?

What do I wanna keep? And what do I wanna get rid of? And then you divide the time by two, and now you have to give the same amount of content or the same message. But you have 50% of the time. How do you do so without speaking faster? Well, you have to just throw a bunch away, and then you do it again, and you divide it by two, and now you’re at 30 seconds.

And then finally, you may be at I sometimes you stop at 30. Sometimes you go down to 15 seconds depending on the length of your content. When you’re there, you’re just left with the very, very, very essence of what it is that you’re trying to convey. And then you go back up the accordion and that’s a delightful feeling.

I’d love to hear what your experience was of going back up, but usually, yeah, what I’ve heard is people will say, oh, it feels like I have a football field in front of me, and I have all of this spaciousness now, and I know what’s important. I know my one thing and I know the one or two like that story I want to tell, and I know what the intro’s supposed to be and the conclusion, but I have all the space to express it, and you go back up 30 seconds, then one minute and then two minutes. And usually by the time you get to the top, to the top to those two minutes, you’re 10 times more clear and it feels like a completely different world, but I’m curious to hear your experience of that.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. This was so much fun with my partner because we had no idea where this was gonna go. And for the first three minutes, I think we did three, two, and then one, it was just rambling and the topic was showing up on video and I didn’t know where this was gonna go, but really what it was doing, and I kind of compare it to, to writing books, it’s you’re getting a whole bunch of sand and then you’re gonna carve out all the things that aren’t necessary to find this beautiful sandcastle that’s underneath all of it. And then that’s what we did. By the time I got to like 12 or, or 15 seconds or 30 seconds, how whatever the lowest amount was, there was this core message of that you can only succeed on video if you show up fully as yourself.

And that was like so powerful. And so when we went back up, it was like, okay. Now I can have some time to tell a story that supports that. Now I can go a little bit more into the details of that story that then drives that message home even more, and then lands on that after two minutes and it just became this more powerful message.

Matt on on our team calls it divergent thinking. It’s like we started out divergent and then we went convergently. We kind of like found where we wanted to land and then kind of we can kind of just surround ourselves around there. It was really, really, really fun. And again, to do it with another person who was like, oh, I loved when you said this.

I was like, really? If that stood out to you? Yeah, like it made me feel like I was there with you. Oh, okay. I’ll make sure to include that when I do this on video or when I write about it in my email or whatever the case may be. So again, this again, the power of just doing it and experimenting and seeing what happens, something that most of us tend to be afraid of doing because we wanna be perfect or we’re too afraid of how a person might think or respond, which is why a safe space like our mastermind group, or in your case the cohorts inside of Ultraspeaking, it just makes so much sense. As we wrap up here, Tristan, I wanna say this has been an absolute pleasure.

It’s been great to relive a lot of the games with you and even play one today, and I would highly recommend everybody check out Ultraspeaking. Where can people go to find out more about what you and the team have to offer over there?

Tristan de Montebello: Yeah, so Ultraspeaking.com, you get, you can find everything, but we set something up specifically for you guys.

So Ultraspeaking.com/spi. You’ll have access to our playbook in which I think, so it’s a five email course, and if I’m not mistaken, email number two is the accordion method. So you have the whole detail of what I just described, but it also walks you through some of the other games and some of the fundamental principles behind effortless communication.

And we’re also offering your audience members access to a free tester of the game we’re running one, I think it’s in two weeks or so. I, please don’t quote me and I’m not, I don’t know when it’s coming out actually, but it will be coming out and it’ll be in those emails as well where you can actually test out day one of the course.

Pat Flynn: Ultraspeaking.com/spi. Tristan, thanks so much. What would you say to finish off here, in terms of encouraging people to focus on communication? Why is it important? Why is it the skill that we need to be focusing on today?

Tristan de Montebello: I think it’s the skill. ’cause if you take everything out, what’s left, take all, even all of our businesses out, everything that’s happening in the world as a human, there’s not much that we need.

We need our family. We need food and a roof, and then we need connection. And connection happens through communication. And what we’ve found out is that, say your, your potential as a human. You can imagine it as this big bubble around you. If you’re fully living your life and you’re fully able to communicate, you’re filling up your bubble completely, and that’s taking up space. You’re not taking anyone else’s space. You’re taking up all of your space, and when you take up all of your space, people around you feel more comfortable, you are more influential, more impactful, more connecting. And what I find. Is that so many people, that’s how I was before Ultraspeaking, are walking around the world, just filling up this tiny little portion of that bubble.

And a lot of that stems from this idea that there are naturals and, and. us. But if you realize that no, no, no. Communication is a skill just like any other, and it’s one that you’re born to do, which means that just like any other skill, but especially this one, the more you lean into it, the more you start learning it, the more fun it becomes, the more comfortable you become, the more easeful life in general becomes.

And as a result, all of the other ventures, when you add everything in, this is the superpower. It’s the superpower that allows you to flow in anything, whether you’re doing videos or meeting people or connecting in your local community.

Pat Flynn: Or wrapping.

Tristan de Montebello: Or wrapping. Yes sir.

Pat Flynn: Tristan, this has been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you so much for this Ultraspeaking.com/spi for the playbook and the access and some of the other games in there too with the email that will come through. But Tristan, thank you so much.

Tristan de Montebello: Thank you, Pat.

Pat Flynn: Appreciate you. This was a blessing. Thank you.

Tristan de Montebello: My pleasure.

Pat Flynn: I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Tristan.

I knew this was gonna be a fire episode, but oh man. Being able to play that game and have you understand exactly how this can work and the importance of just giving it a shot and failing forward. This is what we’re talking about in my book, Lean Learning, and I love that it’s being talked about in the world of communication as well.

So definitely check out Ultraspeaking.com/spi. Again, that’s Ultraspeaking.com/spi to get the playbook and everything that Tristan has to offer there. And big shout out and thanks to the crew from Ultraspeaking for doing what you do, because this is changing stuff right here. So definitely check ’em out.

If you were thinking about something like Toastmasters or something like that, well, I would highly recommend starting with Ultraspeaking. Thank you so much. I appreciate you and if you wanna get all the links and everything mentioned in this episode, head on over to SmartPassiveIncome.com/session889.

You can get all the links there too. So thank you so much. Hit that subscribe button. We got a lot more coming your way. Cheers.