Social distancing is like sweating because…uhm…it’s uncomfortable.
A police car is like cleaning out the fridge because you try to avoid it?!
Napping is like vulnerability because it’s good for you.
My brain is racing to complete the sentences that pop up every four seconds (!) on the screen. This feels stressful and I can barely keep up.
But then something magical happens…I hear myself say words that (kinda) make sense without having to think first. It just flows…
The game I’m playing is called Rapid Fire Analogies and is meant to trigger our brain’s auto-complete function (more on that later). It’s one of many games we played, thoughtfully designed to practice certain aspects of speaking in a low-stakes environment.
Honestly, I didn’t imagine a course on public speaking to be like this. Ultraspeaking is special!
It’s not about practicing what to do with your hands when you speak or counting your uhms and ahs.
It’s about learning to trust your own intuition, to let go of overthinking, and to make speaking feel like play.
The premise of the course is that we’re all already incredible speakers (don’t we speak every day with confidence when communicating with friends and family?!) We just have to start believing it.
I took Ultraspeaking’s three-week Creator Sprint in May 2023, hoping to topple my belief that I wasn’t meant to speak for an audience with my accent and shaky voice.
Here are my three favorite takeaways from the course that completely changed how I think about public speaking.
1. Always start with a story
Stories are the most powerful way to get a point across. The straight-up answer will bounce off someone’s brain, but a story will stick.
I already knew that…and yet, I still struggled with the whole storytelling concept.
Does my story have to follow the hero’s journey? Shouldn’t I have a “lesson learned”? How many details do I share? ← me overthinking storytelling
The Ultraspeaking answer was: Forget about all that!
Just pick a starting point and share what happened one step after another. Come back to the moment you’re remembering – what it felt like, sounded like, looked like, and smelled like.
You don’t even need to know exactly where you’re going with your story. Trust that your brain will figure it out along the way (it really does).
And the moral of the story? It can be literally anything. Pause for a moment of reflection at the end to extract it for yourself.
Ultraspeaking reframed storytelling for me as a habit to build. Get a question –> think of a story.
We have infinite stories within us. We just need to pay attention and help them bubble to the surface.
2. Use your brain’s auto-complete function
Start speaking a sentence without knowing how to complete it. Your brain will fill in the blank.
This seemed crazy to me at first. But it works! Once I experienced it playing the Ultraspeaking games during the cohort, I started to trust my brain more.
I learned that speaking is really a game of access to your own mind. That access can get cut off when you experience stress. (Ever draw a blank in a high-stakes situation? Yeah, me too!)
But when you take a moment to relax your mind (which means pausing), you can go inward and figure out “What do I really want to say right now?”
Silence is a gift for your audience and for yourself. When speaking, you’re the holder of the context and your listeners are constantly playing catch-up to your train of thought. Pauses help them rejoin you.
Here’s how to pause with confidence:
- Stop talking
- Breathe in and out
- Wait for clarity to arrive (trust that the thought will come)
- Stay in character (more on this next)
Another benefit of pauses is that unhurried people generally come across as more confident and thoughtful.
3. Stay in character
Humans look confident by default unless you point out your anxiety. You don’t have to share everything that’s happening inside of you with your audience.
This aha-moment arrived after I had told a story as part of an Ultraspeaking game and thought I had completely failed. I had paused quite often to collect my thoughts and questioned if I was making sense at all.
The feedback I received suggested otherwise: I apparently came across as calm and collected (the exact opposite of my inner state).
I learned not to judge my speaking while I speak. Embrace whatever happens and stay in character.
Be like a gymnast. No matter how many times they fall and fumble throughout their routine, they keep going and stick the landing.
While I didn’t turn into a world-class public speaker in three weeks of Ultraspeaking, I did make a big leap forward when it comes to my confidence in my own speaking abilities.
The games we played in each session provided a low-stakes environment to experiment. And the direct feedback from the coaches was beyond valuable in recognizing my weak points so I could work on them immediately in the next round of games.
In Ultraspeaking, I proved to myself that I can speak on the spot in front of people with confidence. That’s a huge deal for me!
If you’re speaking regularly in some shape or form in front of others (don’t we all), then I can’t recommend the course enough. It’s hands-down one of the best online courses I’ve ever taken.
Learn more and sign up here: https://ultraspeaking.com/fundamentals
