为什么大多数公开演讲建议都是错的——以及如何最终克服焦虑 | Tristan de Montebello
Why most public speaking advice is wrong—and how to finally overcome anxiety | Tristan de Montebello
Tristan de Montebello: People tend to get into a public speaking voice. We’ll be in a class and they’ll be chatting normally 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 I say, “The important part about doing this,” and they enter into a different version of themselves, a professional version, whatever that would mean. It’s so much more freeing, powerful, connecting, and effective to speak conversation. So the cue I often give people is-
Enjoying Speaking and Core Logic
Lenny Rachitsky: Today my guest is Tristan de Montebello. Tristan is the co-Creator of Ultraspeaking, 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, 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’d 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, 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 de Montebello.
Tristan, thank you so much for joining me and welcome to the podcast.
Boosting Presence and Vocal Delivery
Tristan de Montebello: Thanks so much for having me.
Lenny Rachitsky: So I took an abridged version of this speaking course that you teach called Ultraspeaking, and it immediately made me feel more comfortable public speaking, which I’ve never felt doing any other course. Public speaking is something it’s just is very scary to me as it is for a lot of people, but it’s just something I really dread. 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. It may not seem that way to people, but 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 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, what are some very tactical things people can immediately start to apply? And also, I want to make the super interactive, so we’re actually going to do some of the exercises that you use in your class. So that’s what we’re here for. How does that sound?
Staying in Character
Tristan de Montebello: That sounds exciting. I’m in.
Why We Show Insecurity
Lenny Rachitsky: Great.
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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?
Game Demo: Conductor
Tristan de Montebello: I actually think that the biggest misconception with tackling your speaking is that people grossly 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 weights and you start going on runs, obviously your muscles are going to get bigger, you’re 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 in your life is going to start to improve as a result of you focusing on your fitness. And for speaking, 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 strangers, especially, how you feel and your family can even be impacted. 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 constraints 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 extraordinary superpower, because as humans we’re evolved to speak, this is what we are. So you don’t 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 software and we’re not really upgrading our software. The moment you get the bugs and things start working, 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 were 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 one I want to impart on anybody listening. You have it in, you already have what it takes.
Host Tries the Conductor Game
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. So kind of building on what you just talked about, some of this insight of, your life can improve and how you kind of always have to unlearn stuff. One of my favorite maybe core insights and tenets 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 that really helped me because you kind of encourage, you kind of remind people, try to have fun as you’re doing. Can you just talk about that insight and why that’s important and how that helps people become better?
Avoiding Discouragement and Core Logic
Tristan de Montebello: Well, I think that’s very tied to what you were saying. I see enjoyment as a barometer, 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 evolved to do. So if we’re naturally evolved to do it, it’s not something 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, guy. 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 in those people who can hold an audience who are really good communicators in business, it looks like they feel very comfortable, it looks like they feel like themselves. 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, ever, 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 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 them 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 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 scale. 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, 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 shitty fitness journey or diet. Right? You have to find joy in it and 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome, and we’re going to show people how you do that. You do these games, they’re games that you play that help you actually learn these skills. So before that, and also I want to get into 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 we’re going to be talking about?
Takeaways from the Game
Tristan de Montebello: 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 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 do. It changes how you can think about speaking.
And one of the ways that changed how I practiced 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? 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, relaxing, 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 if you feel super constrained in your speaking, very monotonous, then maybe you feel 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 some of these emotions pop out, or if I take a 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 to go for safety and so you’re going to be very monotonous and constrained, and that’s 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: That is a really interesting 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, um… It’s just like, pause.
Energy, Emotion, and Filler Words
Tristan de Montebello: Pause.
Personal Energy Tendencies and Inner Game
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, that was a really beautiful example of that. Okay, let’s get into a few tactics just to give people something they can-
Tristan de Montebello: Sure.
The Triple Step Game
Lenny Rachitsky: … 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 they do public speaking, in the way they speak in meetings and presentations, whatever?
Triple Step Game Demo
Tristan de Montebello: 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 we’re trying to get out of our brain into our subconscious.
So when I thought about it, 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 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 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 you’re suddenly giving off of that vibe of, oh, this person feels a little bit uncertain here, and maybe 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 into the right, but you can think in 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 in their speaking is somebody who’s confident. And as a result, you’re much less likely 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 going to 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 post-it 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’m going to do this as we talk. I have a poster right here. Think up.,
Philosophy Behind the Game
Tristan de Montebello: Oh, nice. Think up.
Why Games Beat Traditional Practice
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, great. What else?
Triple Step Practice Feedback
Tristan de Montebello: Look more confident. Now how to sound more confident. This is a really important one, and this concept is called end strong. And it’s, we had to bring this up because most people tend to end weak. And why is that? They put freestyle rappers in an fMRI, and what they found out is freestyle rappers have to enter a deep flow state. If you’re freestyle rapping, you have a beat, you don’t have any lyrics, and you have to get into the beat and invent the lyrics and the melody and everything on the fly. So there’s no choice but 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 flow. And this is the same feeling of you’re running 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 taper off at the end, which doesn’t leave you with a good impression, or they’ll actively say the doubts that are coming up in their mind of maybe they’ll be giving a great answer and then suddenly they say, “I don’t really know if that makes sense.”
Lenny Rachitsky: I do that all the time. That’s very relatable.
Game Reflections and Pushing Boundaries
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah, 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 even if they had the best of experiences with your answer, now they’re looking at everything you said through the lens of, oh, this person was kind of uncertain. So it’s like you had a very smooth flight across the Atlantic and your landing was absolutely horrible. You were bumpy when you were 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 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 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 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 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 need to land that plane.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. I could definitely get better at this, great tip.
Expression as a High-Performance Skill
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah, thanks.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’m going to try to do that as we talk.
Finding the Edge and Unlocking Potential
Tristan de Montebello: Yes.
Using Conviction Prompts
Lenny Rachitsky: And what else we got?
Space Exploration Exercise
Tristan de Montebello: I’ll be paying attention to that.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, pressure.
Conversational Speaking and Generating Insights
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah. 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 end strong in some sense, in that people tend to self-sabotage a lot. I’m speaking, and obviously as I’m speaking, 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 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 this insecurity and it feels like there’s an elephant in the room. And so what most people do is they start leaking and they break character. And they’ll say, “Oh, man, I’m not making sense right now,” or they’ll laugh nervously after saying a word that came out weird, which is kind of saying like, “Oh, I also noticed that this word came out weird and it’s okay.” Right? Or they’ll keep letting all 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.
And 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, “Oh, ladies and gentlemen, so I just had a 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 creak on the right, 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 isn’t clear in their direction. Suddenly I’m thinking, wait, I think I have to second guess everything here because I’m not sure about this guy or 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 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 cue use for myself is, stay in it. And the worse it gets, the more I’ll say, just stay in it. And what happens is, you stay in it.
And you expect everybody at the end to say, “Oh my God, you looked 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 a very reinforcing cycle. If you start staying in character and ending strong, naturally, you’re going to be reinforced by this behavior and you’re going to realize, 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 you’re like, 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.
Avoiding the BS Immune Response
Lenny Rachitsky: I love this, and it’s something I’m extremely guilty of. And I think the reason I do this and the reason I think a lot of people leak, which I love that term of just I don’t leak, that you know, feel something’s not going right. The reason I do it is I feel like me being upfront, I know this isn’t great-
Tristan de Montebello: Exactly.
Actionable Techniques for You
Lenny Rachitsky: … makes it okay, but in reality, that’s hurting you because it’s like when I watch standup comedy. When the comedian’s like, “Oh, sorry, that bombed,” if he didn’t say that or she didn’t say that, I’d just forget about it, and we’d move on to the next thing. And it brings all this attention to, oh, I see, okay, it’s not going great. Otherwise, you’re just like, all right, whatever, I didn’t like that joke. And so, yeah, I guess any thoughts on just that, why people do this?
The Accordion Method
Tristan de Montebello: Well, I think that’s exactly that. 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 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 you. And with the peak end rule, what we we’re seeing, 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 the feeling I’m getting when they’re speaking. I’m listening to the energy, I’m listening to everything that’s happening, so I can try to understand, what state are they in right now? So when I get woken up from that state of somebody saying, “Oh man, can I go again right now? 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,” and I’ll poll 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 it doesn’t feel like I’m the only one in the room 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, so let’s actually show people what this looks like by actually doing some live games. I know one of your principles for Ultraspeaking is you can’t learn to speak by not speaking. You need to practice speaking to get better at speaking, and these games are a way to actually do that in a really fun way. So maybe first of all, just why games? When I did this course, I was just like, huh, because it’s a bunch of games. I thought this was a public speaking course. So maybe talk about just why you approach it through games, everything you do is a game in this course.
Speaking Over Writing
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah. Well, the first piece of the puzzle is what you were saying, that you can’t get better at speaking without speaking. And it’s, intuitively you could think, everybody knows that if you want to become a great cook, you can’t just read 100-
Everybody knows that if you want to become a great cook, you can’t just read a hundred cookbooks. You actually have to spend most of your time in the kitchen refining your intuition, testing things, experimenting, learning new recipes, and building your timing and everything that goes with it. But in speaking, we tend to do the opposite, probably because it’s a little bit scary and because there aren’t that many options out there to practice 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 and hope that’s going to make a difference.”
But maybe the bad news is, you have to do it. You have to ask yourself, “Am I going to be serious about taking on speaking 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 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 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 Ultraspeaking games have in common is that it’s short, deliberate practice, 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 backyard with somebody in front of us testing things out. And we would say, we would give him 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 freaking out. And they’d think, ” The iPhone,” and then, “I don’t know the iPhone. That’s pretty recent. So maybe it’s fire. Is it fire though? Was there a bigger maybe communication? I don’t know. Wait. Maybe we’ve 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’ve 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 to compress it more and more and more 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, 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 figure out the root cause and we’d create some sort of a way to get the person into it as quickly as possible. And it’s just one day, six months in that we realized, “Hey, did we just create a game? This feels like a board game.” And then we created, I have this, we created Speak Before You Think, the game for people who think too much, and this is a bunch of cards with all of our games. And then, Covid hit and we turned it into online games.
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Step-by-Step Instructions
Tristan de Montebello: 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 your internal feeling as you’re going. So you’re learning lessons, but you’re internalizing. All of the practice is happening through speaking.
Lenny Rachitsky: To reinforce what you just shared, I haven’t shared this with you, but after I took the course, the mini course, I went to see my family in L.A. We visited for a few days, and I was talking about this course and just 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. I was just like, “Hey, you guys want to try this?” and we started playing some of these games that we’re about to get into. And it was just, we spent like an hour just doing this and everyone loved it.
Your Pre-Speech Workflow
Tristan de Montebello: Wow.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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, that’s cool.
Key Takeaways and Bookmarks
Tristan de Montebello: My sister’s like, “I want to start doing open mic nights because that was really fun just to talk.”
Insights from Practice
Lenny Rachitsky: Nice.
Tristan de Montebello: So were you actually coaching them? How were you walking them through the different games?
Accordion Method Resources
Lenny Rachitsky: 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 going to talk about. Yeah. So it was a lot of 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?
Tristan de Montebello: Conductor maybe.
The Bow and Arrow Method
Lenny Rachitsky: Sweet. I love Conductor. That one was really insightful to me.
Tristan de Montebello: Okay, so I’ve 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 title out loud so you can hear. And then, 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 one to 10, and each one of these numbers represents an intensity or a state that I have to 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 calm my energy and match the three and go all the way down to one.
And then, there might be a slide 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 now we’re going to do this. This is going to be 70 seconds, so it’s going to be super quick. Ready?
Conclusion and Lightning Round
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. So I’ll read the title as soon as it pops up.
Journey to the World Championship
Tristan de Montebello: Perfect.
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
Lenny Rachitsky: “When I grow up.”
Tristan de Montebello: 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 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 had these when I was a kid. 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 have two kids. I have this incredible responsibility. And I have to teach them, I have to show them the way. So I’ve decided I’m going to hire a coach, and I talked to him just a couple of days ago, so this is perfect timing because I want to unwrap, unravel, and untwine every single one of these emotional blockers so that when I grow up, I’m completely free.
Lenny Rachitsky: That was so fun to watch. 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 Tristan the different energies to be at, and that was masterful.
Tristan de Montebello: I think we saw, what did we see? We saw a six. It went up first, six, seven, then it went down to 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s do it. What do you think?
Tristan de Montebello: Ladies and gentlemen, let’s see this. Here we go. The title is The Greatest Puzzle.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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 have known from very early on what I wanted to do with my life. I’ve actually found it to be not much of a puzzle. I knew from pretty early that I wanted to be a software engineer. And interestingly, I became a software. And as I think about the puzzle that created around my life, I ended up… So my life actually started to look like a puzzle instead of what I’d always thought I’d be. So I ended up having a bunch of different careers. And I look back at my life and it started with one piece, and each piece led to all these other careers. Nailed it.
Tristan de Montebello: It’s funny. At the end you were like, you didn’t even see there was a six that came up and then when you looked up, it had already gone away. That’s a good warm-up.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, yeah. Let’s do it.
Tristan de Montebello: It’s funny, because what it looked like to me is that, well, you just didn’t let yourself play the game. You wanted to… You were more focused on, “I want to make sure this works well, this looks good, or I don’t make a fool of myself” than “Let me just play the game.” So switch your mindset from that. Back 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 don’t try. Just let yourself play the game.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay.
Tristan de Montebello: The game will do good. But that was actually really interesting. I feel kind of similar, which is cool, except I didn’t know where it was going. But that feeling of all of these puzzle pieces, and suddenly when I hit Ultraspeaking, it’s like, “Oh wow, every single… There’s no more. There are no more gaps.” That’s really cool. Okay.
Lenny Rachitsky: Here we go.
Tristan de Montebello: You ready?
Lenny Rachitsky: Ready.
Tristan de Montebello: Here we go. “Integrating new cultures.”
Lenny Rachitsky: It’s interesting having a kid. So we just had a kid about a year ago, he is a year and a half. And there’s an interesting new experience where there’s my family and their culture, there’s my wife and her culture. And 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, 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 benefits 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 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 us all.
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah, that was awesome.
Lenny Rachitsky: I’m practicing not leaking. All I think about is how much better it could have been, but now I’m leaking as I say that. See?
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: It’s hard.
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah. You’re hedging.
Lenny Rachitsky: Hedging.
Tristan de Montebello: So the point of all of these games is to create turbulence. This is going to be the theme of this podcast. I’m going to share only flight analogies. But if you think about a pilot, a flight simulator, you can think about these games as the flight simulator. You don’t put a pilot in a flight simulator and waste those precious hours having them just cruise at 30,000 feet in clear skies. You’re going to say, “Okay, you’re going and now hey, you’ve lost your captain and you have to do something” or “Hey, your motor just broke” or “You’re going into crazy turbulence.”
So the gain 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, “Ooh, that’s interesting how I tend to want to leak, to want to break character. Wow. It’s interesting how at the end, the ending strong is not just an automatic habit that I’ve built for 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 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 Kevin Kelly quote that I love where he 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 do you remember from going through Conductor and the Creator Cohort, or specifically here, what was coming up and what were some of the things that pop into your mind?
Lenny Rachitsky: There’s two things that I really took away from it, and it’s different doing it now on camera with this whole podcast thing.
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: But the things that I really took away that have stuck with me from this exercise is one, is that you have this kind of metaphor of these file folders that you have kind of in your head where every energy level, like a one when you go low and a 10 or even a five, 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 to a one, new thoughts come up, because making it up as you go along and you’re just trying to figure it out as you go. And that really happens when you’re forced to go from five to, “Okay,” and you let your body settle into 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 had realized that.
And then, the other is just this idea of doing these really hard things with very low stakes. It’s higher stakes, so maybe that’s why it’s different, how it feels different doing it here where it’s like, “Oh, this is-”
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah. Yeah, this is extremely high stakes for you.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, relatively. But yeah, there it’s a couple people and you’re like, just don’t worry about failing so you don’t even have to worry about apologizing or fleaking. It’s just like, “Yeah, I did what I did.” So those are two really powerful ones. I just like practicing this. And knowing you’ll be okay at low stakes builds confidence. I’m like, “Okay.” It’s 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 can do that.”
Tristan de Montebello: The common theme for me, and I’ve been on this journey for seven years now, I still am blown away every week by the lessons I’ve learned over the course of the 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 way, way, way into the background. So I get to be much more present.
And 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 1,000, 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 sentences 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 Conductor one is so beautiful because the way we describe it, so that folder one when it came into my mind was my favorite ever. But the original one was when you tap into a certain energy, that creates emotion. And if you tap into that 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 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 game that, especially when you’re playing with low stakes, you very quickly feel the effect of, “Oh, I can see the potential of what it could be if I could just be like this anywhere.” Maybe you taper out a little bit of the extremes.
But you can access this for free on Ultraspeaking or the way we did this at first, you just go to Google and type in a 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 and down. So in essence, it’s very, very simple to apply it.
Lenny Rachitsky: And it’s just like a lot of fun to just get an excuse to just go wild and high and then just get low. I love that part of it. And let’s get into the next theme. But just one other insight I had that you shared with me when I did it the first time is just people have a strength.
Tristan de Montebello: Yes.
Lenny Rachitsky: They’re either, correct me if I’m wrong, they’re strong at the highs and just 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 like introvert world.” And you’re like, “No, you’re actually super energized at this high end, and then it’s hard for you to access the low.” And I thought that was really insightful for me.
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah. You’ll notice it pretty quickly once you jump in, especially with a friend. It’s cool because when you get to see, “Oh, I’m much more comfortable going up than I am going down or vice versa, or I’m stuck in the middle and I am only comfortable when I’m not in the extremes.” It’s just telling you something.
This is what we want. We want to a mirror in front of us so I can know, “Okay, what’s happening here?” I’m not very much 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. 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 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 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, what do I want to say here?” And so, that’s a reflection of, “Well, what does that mean if I struggle to do that?” And that’s why speaking such an interesting skill set.
Lenny Rachitsky: All right, let’s do another game.
Tristan de Montebello: This next game is called Triple Step. And Triple step is a game for people who 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 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. A 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 show up. Then as I’m speaking, in this setting here, I’m going to speak for a minute. There will 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 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 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 going to go nuts and it’s going to 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 in that experience and the massage is going to be the best massage. And then, I’m going to think, “I need to get a massage every day.” I’m going to start daydreaming about massage as my natural day to day.
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 think, “Oh, maybe I should go get some food next.” And so, there’s a beautiful trait to being the Labrador that allows me to explore all of what it’s like to be human. I always have access to the internet inside me, but there are definitely some drawbacks as well.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. So the words that you had to integrate are french fries, getting a massage, daydreaming, cartwheels, a microwave, and the internet.
Tristan de Montebello: 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 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 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 come in, the more focused you are on that groove you’ve created for yourself, the easier it will be to let the words work for you. Okay?
Lenny Rachitsky: And again, the skill this builds is to be more comfortable with things not going perfectly and being distracted.
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah. I would say this one can be used for two other things. Number one is resiliency, right? Because this one will make your brain go crazy. And if you can stay composed within it, with all of these things happening, it really builds this ability to say, “Well, man, if I can do Triple Step on hard mode, I can do anything. Why would anything else scary? 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 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 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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 become better at public speaking, my sense is just if you were to just do the standard thing of just give more talks, find more opportunities to do presentations, it’s too broad of a brush to build these different skills, and which you’ve identified is there’s these very specific skills that add up to a great presenter. And these games pick a specific skill and help you just focus on that again and again and again.
Tristan de Montebello: If you’re already practicing, you’re already leagues ahead of everyone, because most people aren’t practicing. They’re 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 are kind of two suboptimal ways that might show up. One is what you’re saying. You’re doing talks and you’re speaking up more, but you’re not really practicing. It’s kind of, as you were saying, it’s broad, broad strokes.
The other one is you are in a choreography, 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, I say, “Okay, now 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 my mind, or I have to do things that I’ve memorized how to do” and come back 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, you’re 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 things, different 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 feel comfortable moving my arms and moving my legs and going to the right and the left and up and down.” And just that act of making you feel more comfortable and more at ease is going to unlock your 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.
Lenny Rachitsky:
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All right, let’s do this. I’m energized. I’m pumped.
Tristan de Montebello: Let’s do this.
Lenny Rachitsky: No, I’m not going to… I was going to say I’m going to nail it, but no, let’s just have fun. Let’s have fun.
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: It goes how it goes.
Tristan de Montebello: Indeed. Here we go.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. And I’ll say the title. The best thing about pain. So this is something I recently shared in another talk is just this quote that I always think of.
In another talk is just 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 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 nothing that is more joyous than having a kid.
And sometimes even growing a beard. I grow this beard and I have to maintain this beard for the rest of my life. 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 having a sibling and the pain that if I had a brother, if he just hit me, the pain that would come from that, but just then having the brother would be so much worth it, even if he’s hitting me all this time.
And there, I ran out of time, but that was solid.
Tristan de Montebello: Okay, I realize this is your first time playing Triple Step. It’s kind of mean of me if you [inaudible 01:01:09]-
Lenny Rachitsky: I have to go faster.
Tristan de Montebello: … Give you six words. So I’m going to give you four words.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. Okay.
Tristan de Montebello: But here’s what I noticed. What I noticed is you were letting the word… The word was the beginning of a new thought. Right, so you say, “Another thing is beers. Another thing is…”. So you’re finishing your thought and then you’re moving on to the next one. Try to hold onto one direction. The one direction is approach your fears head on. And then, so when you see a puzzle, it’s like, look, this doesn’t have to be a hard puzzle because now I know that if it’s scary, I do it. And it’s like having kids, which I thought was so scary, I just jumped in and now I’m moving forward. 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. So you’re holding onto the line.
With four, it’s going to be a little bit easier to integrate them. Ready?
Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s do it.
Tristan de Montebello: Social-
Lenny Rachitsky: Social distancing. It’s interesting that social distancing was such a thing that we all had to do for so long. And then all of a sudden we look back at that time we’re like, “Was that actually necessary? Did we actually have to stay far from each other? Did that actually have any impact?”.
There’s all these things we have to learn, like sometimes we look at the stock market and we wonder, “Should I be paying 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? Should I get closer to this information or should I distance myself? 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. Let’s hang out.” And it kind of feels like I just want to just want to go to the toilet and peace out.
Tristan de Montebello: Amazing. That works. That’s really good.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay.
Tristan de Montebello: That’s really good. Well, tell me what, because again, 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. If you did a rep and you got it and it went perfectly, then you’re learning nothing. A really easy rep is not worth much. The only reps that are worth something are the ones where you feel an edge.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. And by the way, we should say the words right, that I had.
Tristan de Montebello: Oh, yeah. The first one was the stock market, then a newspaper, which you brought in really, really well, then running a marathon, and then toilet.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. Okay, great. Yeah, just the fact that I’m okay doing this is a big milestone for me of just like, ah, whatever. Because 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 most random subject, and there’s a lot of power in just feeling comfortable just doing it, just like, sure, let’s do it. Whatever. Something will come out that’s interesting enough.
Tristan de Montebello: 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 you get good at tennis, if you get good at golf, if you get good at anything, product management, it’s a addicting, it’s exciting. And as soon as you get good, there’s nuance to it, and 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 really energizing about jumping into it. It’s the thinking about doing the exercise that’s scary, but as soon as you’re in it, it’s energizing and empowering.
Lenny Rachitsky: And also just doing it, this is a very hard exercise. Just giving a made up talk for a minute with words you have to integrate, and 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, oh, okay, I just have to talk about a thing that I already know about, that I have planned, much easier. Anything else around this game that is worth sharing before we do our final game?
Tristan de Montebello: We have a whole series of games, and you could probably even invent other games, but some people will play Triple Step and will 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 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 easy.”
So again, it’s just a mirror of where you’re at. And 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. And where your edge is, as you were saying with your quote, is often where the gold lies. So if you can spend some time there and learn what it is underneath the struggle, what’s actually holding you back. When you unlock that, whatever’s holding you back in Triple Step, or in Conductor, 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: And it’s interesting, as we were talking, where my mind keeps going is 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. It’s really hard not to just to be like, “Oh, that was not good.” I really wanted to say that after every time I tried this and I am making myself not. And I imagine from your perspective you’re like, “No, it’s fine. It’s like whatever.”
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah, absolutely. I was actually thinking, 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 again, and this is a habit. And 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 these habits to the point where I don’t need to consciously think about them.
So it’s like 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, all of their attention is on being completely present to what’s 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-tuned.
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, “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, 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, “Well, how do you feel about this?”. You probably would’ve gotten really good feedback, really positive, which would’ve kind of jarred that feeling of, wow, I didn’t think I did it 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. I need that voice to go down. That’d be great.
Tristan de Montebello: [inaudible 01:09:46].
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, let’s do another game.
Tristan de Montebello: Always does.
Cool. Let’s do last game. Last one of these practical games. So this is actually a game 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 wanted 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 changing 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 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 great gravitas or great executive presence, they usually have, there’s something about them that’s saying, this person 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 have more executive presence, let me bring a little bit more conviction to what I’m saying.
There’s a caveat, small caveat. Maybe 10% of people in the workforce need the opposite. They need, “Hey, you need to maybe question what you’re saying here.” But the reality is the vast majority of people 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 those who are already doing that. So this is what this game’s about.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Okay.
Tristan de Montebello: 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 all of the exciting projects that I want to do. So as I said earlier, I’m Labrador. I get excited about everything, and I genuinely believe that every idea is awesome, but that doesn’t mean I can do every idea. I need to choose a very clear focus and stick to that focus.
And this is a game changer. When you start reducing the amount of things you’re doing to a painful amount, a painful few amount, then when you get there, 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love it. That was great. These words are tough.
Tristan de Montebello: They were, yeah. This was not an easy one. This was not a… Good thing that I get a tough one. Well deserved.
Lenny Rachitsky: Let me read the phrases real quick, just so folks know. So the phrases you had to integrate is, “This matters a ton. I genuinely believe that every idea is awesome. Game changer.”
Tristan de Montebello: It was just, “I genuinely believe that.” Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, got it. Okay. “I generally believe that.” And then, “game changer”. And then, “It astonishes me when.”
Tristan de Montebello: And 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 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 it’s so interesting to watch the content change as a result of the state you get into and what you say. So it’s really powerful to discover just how incredible your brain is.
So 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. Everything gets easier when you choose a strong direction.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay, let’s try it.
Tristan de Montebello: But the goal here, is as it says, advocate for an important idea related to the speech title. Ready?
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, let’s do it.
Tristan de Montebello: Here we go.
Lenny Rachitsky: YOLO.
Tristan de Montebello: The title is Space Exploration.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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 nothing more powerful, and important, and inspiring. 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 things that can help us on earth, and 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’re this 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 us into space, investing money in space. And just hearing stories, if 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.
Tristan de Montebello: Yes, that was awesome. That was so cool. So you had, the title was Space Exploration, and the words were, “in fact”, “the entire world”, then, “We cannot forget that,” then, “It astonishes me when,” and finally “life changing”. So what was that like? What did it feel like getting…
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, there’s a lot of… It 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 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 going on a little quick tangent, insights from the lessons that 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 problems help you along that. But I think that’s really interesting, of just like, this will help you develop things, and insights, and take them out of your head.
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah. Well, hopefully we get to talk about the Accordion Method, one of the most powerful methods I have, which is very close to this.
But this is often a prompt I tell people when they’re speaking. I say, because people tend to get into a public speaking voice, so we’ll be in a class, and they’ll be chatting normally, 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 I say, “The important part about doing this,” and they enter into a different version of themselves, a very 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 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 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 audience is.” And this comes back to thinking out loud, like if I’m really in my mind, I’m making connections, and suddenly the words 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that. Before we segue to a couple of these methods, the Accordion Method is one example, I want to ask about, when people hear this, they may feel like you’re helping people more, just like make shit up, and why, why would 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 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 that you’ve prepared, you are better at it. But yeah, just thoughts on just that potential element.
Tristan de Montebello: Yeah, I think that’s an important question, and it’s a question I hear a lot because 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 bullshitter and I think to myself, I really, really don’t want to become that person. And what happens is it becomes an immune response or like an immune response where the desire not to be that person and the feeling being around that person gives you is so strong that now if I take even the smallest step in that direction of speaking freely, sharing my thoughts out loud, bringing more conviction or 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, “Uh oh, 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 very acute skill set of noticing when people bullshit. 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’s level of communication, except I’m going to have the ideas to back it up. I’m going to really put effort into my craft, but I’m going to be 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 listener in the back of your mind that’s going to ping you, and it’s like, “Hey, you’re at the limit right now. Stay true to what you know.” And it’s going to be a very good compass for yourself. It’s going to be there and you can trust it because you developed this capacity.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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 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 at public speaking, and not this way, but that way.
I know you have a couple also methods just like that people can implement that helps 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 think it’s the Bow and Arrow Method?
Tristan de Montebello: Uh-huh.
Lenny Rachitsky: 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 of just like a really cool way of making your talk better. So talk about how that works and how people might be able to implement it when they’re trying to develop the talk.
Tristan de Montebello: Now, I’m biased when I’m going to say this, so take this with a pinch of salt, but I think the Accordion Method, the Accordion Method might be one of the things I’m the most proud of in my entire life because it’s almost revolutionizing the way 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 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 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 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 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 deadline 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 you spent 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 pretty. 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, reciting a 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 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 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 writing 10 pages and memorizing it is I’m going to look at my living room and I’m going to rearrange things and put stuff in a corner that I might need later. And then I’m going to bring some new things that I thought could be really nice and I’m going to struggle to 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 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 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. 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 times, but you can change these time constraints slightly. We’re 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 three 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 ideas out into spoken word. So I’m starting to populate my mind with everything and seeing 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. It doesn’t need to be perfect. So at the two-minute mark, you do the same thing, but now you had to 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 way to 30 seconds. So you started at a three-minute speech and you make your way down to 30 seconds. By 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’ve changed as you-
Sense of what your talk is about and it might’ve 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 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 bring in something that’s aligned with the talk you want to share, and then two minutes, same. And then when you get to three minutes, one of my clients once said that 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 internalized. 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 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. 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 give it now in one minutes, two minutes, three minutes, five minutes. It’s very plastic. You’re going to be able to navigate different time frames. It’s not going to really matter if you make a mistake because you’re going to have a deep sense of what your speech is. It’s not memorized, it’s internalized. So not only have you gotten clarity and built out your speech 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 perform it.
Lenny Rachitsky: That example of the three minute when you come back up the accordion, that’s exactly how it felt when I did this is just like, “Wow, so much time now” because you essentially, the way I think about it 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 good stuff. And it really worked for me and it was a really illuminating experience.
For someone that wants to actually use this. Say they have a speech coming up, say they’re doing an all hands presentation in a week. Do you do this a week ahead of time? Do you do this a few days before? I guess where do you fit this in the workflow so that you actually remember what you want to say when it comes time?
Tristan de Montebello: I can’t say do it exactly a week or two weeks or it really depends how well 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 two months, you probably know it really, really well and you have a lot of clarity and now it’s just about organizing it nicely. So in that case, maybe you want to do a rough go through the accordion a week ahead of time so you have a clear sense of, “What is it that I want my audience to remember and what are the pillars that I know I like to hit that feel really good?”
So you can think about these as the foundational pillars that support that one thing that you’re sharing or bookmarks that I know I have to hit and 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 already know it, so it should come back very, very quickly in your mind.
Lenny Rachitsky: And it sounds like it’s okay to have some bullet points at the end. It’s hard for me to imagine going on stage with a bunch of people watching, not have any slide, bullet point, speaker notes. Any problems just having a couple of the bullet points of core points next to me?
Tristan de Montebello: 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, 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 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 one thing would be the accordion method is more powerful than memorizing and then doing it the old way.
And then my bookmarks might be number one, describe the old way or the old way. Number two, the new way or the accordion method. And then number three might be internalize, don’t memorize, and that’ll be kind of the takeaway.
And if I have that in my mind, if I have 30 seconds, I can say the old way sucks because you have to work so hard 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 explain that in a second and then I’ll say, so you’re internalized not memorized. What I realized right now is actually, it’s funny enough though, those were the bookmarks there, so that sent me down that path. But actually I would say bookmark number two is probably the living room analogy. So it would be the old way sucks, the living room analogy, and then describe the accordion method.
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s cool. That was an awesome example of just the insights that appear by forcing yourself through this exercise. And it sounds like maybe the best use of this method is if you have a talk all of a sudden short term it’s coming, all of a sudden you have to give a talk somewhere. There’s a really powerful method to come up with a great talk that’s maybe tomorrow, which you didn’t expect.
Tristan de Montebello: When I say I love this, I use this for myself, I use this with every single client I work with regardless of if it’s a five-minute talk, a 20-minute keynote, 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, “Hey, let’s hone in on this part one that you’re struggling with or part two and let’s use the accordion to get clarity there.”
So you can use the accordion as almost like a brainstorming way. 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 time constraints you give yourself. Sometimes I’ll just do two minute, one minute 30 seconds, that’s even 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 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. Okay. Anything else along the accordion method before we talk about the final technique before we wrap up?
Tristan de Montebello: We have a full self-paced course on ultra speaking on the accordion. I think it costs like 30 bucks or something like that to access all of the games and all the platforms. A bunch of them are free, but I think this one’s behind the paywall. But we also put together a resource where we go all the way, we describe all of the accordion method, the bow and arrow, staying character ending strong on a free email course that we put together. That’s ultraspeaking.com/Lenny. So this is shameless self-promotion, but if you want it to go grab it there, you can grab it there and then the bow and arrow is going to tie into the accordion method as well.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. I’m glad you mentioned all that and we’ll point people to that URL in the show notes. Okay, final topic is the bow and arrow technique. Let’s talk about what that is and how folks can use that to give better talks.
Tristan de Montebello: The bow and arrow starts with a, 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 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, an all hands a meeting, whatever it 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 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 literally a single sentence that is the only sentence people would remember if they left your talk. Would you be satisfied with that sentence?
It takes some times 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 gives you a lot of clarity. It’s also 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 data point that’s going to support that or a story that’s going to add emotion or illustrate it. So 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 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 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, “Okay, actually my one thing might be a refined version of that.”
And 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 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 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 can 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 want them to remember as much as possible and that’s going to give you extreme clarity.
Lenny Rachitsky: That is really helpful. I’m preparing my talk for the summit, and so I’m going to use both of these exercises and 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 is one thing, if anything, but hopefully they remember that one thing.
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?
Tristan de Montebello: Exactly. And again, similar to the accordion method, this works in the macro and the micro. 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 some support 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.
The symptom of not having a one thing is usually having a slide that says way too many things. 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 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 interesting. But the reality is people are just going to zone out if you do that. So if you do that slide by slide, you’re going to gain incredible clarity and again, you’re going to need less preparation and less memorization.
Lenny Rachitsky: And to build on that, a pro-tip is to make that title of that slide exactly that one thing you want them to take away. Just put it there and tell them exactly what you want them to learn.
Tristan de Montebello: Yes. I love that.
Lenny Rachitsky: Sweet. Tristan, we’ve been on a journey. This was a really unique experimental episode. I had a good time even though 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 lightning round? Is there anything else you want to leave listeners with or a nugget you want to?
Tristan de Montebello: I hope people found value. I mean, we did. This was really a group effort and I really appreciate you working on the agenda, really bringing in the games and trying to make this as practical as possible. I think the only thing I want to leave people with is again, this idea of how 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 speaking.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. And I definitely felt that after doing the workshop of just I feel energized, I want to just talk all time, but then I’m like, I need more work. I need more practice. Tristan, with that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?
Tristan de Montebello: Let’s do this lightning round. Here we go.
Lenny Rachitsky: Here we go. First question, what are two or three books that you have recommended most to other people?
Tristan de Montebello: I was given a book by my first coach, Nathan Seward seven years ago called The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks that I’ve recommended 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. One of them is the… What is it, the wild poppy syndrome or something like that. Like the tallest poppy is the one that’s cut first. So if you shine in a family of siblings, then anytime you shine too much we’re going to say, “Hey, hey, 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 having this point above which you can’t be happy to turning it into, he calls it an upward-facing spiral with no upper limit. It’s a really exciting and empowering book.
Lenny Rachitsky: Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?
Tristan de Montebello: I haven’t watched much very recently, but I’ll say one of my favorite TV shows of all time is the Peaky Blinders, English show with Cillian Murphy. I’m absolutely obsessed with that movie that show. I think it’s a true masterpiece. And I’ve recently rewatched, so I’ll qualify this as recent. I recently rewatched The Nice Guys with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, and I think it’s just a brilliant comedy. Brilliant. Another masterpiece, I thought.
Lenny Rachitsky: Do you have a favorite recent product that you have discovered that you really love. Could be an app, it could be something physical.
Tristan de Montebello: I have a physical product actually right in front of me that was gifted to me by my business partner Michael Gendler, co-founder of Ultraspeaking. This is called an Ember Mug, and this keeps whatever you have in it, warm and it’s extraordinary, whether you are a coffee drinker or a tea drinker, you know the feeling of pouring this and sipping it and by the fifth sip, it’s cold. This keeps it at whatever temperature you want it to for however long you want. And I absolutely love it. I’ve been using it basically every day.
Lenny Rachitsky: I have one of those. I find myself, you could actually control it through the app. 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 or family, find useful in work or in life?
Tristan de Montebello: I think we are too future focused 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, I’ll tell you right now for you and for whoever’s listening. I mean think 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 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.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that. And it’s so relevant with a young kid, you’re always going to think about, “Oh, they’re little.” I love 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 a story from that experience that comes to mind that’s like a wild part of that journey or something that might surprise people.
Tristan de Montebello: Well, the journey lasted almost seven months, and it was the craziest journey of my life. I went into that with no experience whatsoever speaking, so really just a random amateur, and I just climbed the ladder by outworking everybody. 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 semifinals two and a half months ago. So I’m nobody, now I’m going to the semifinals of the world championships 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. You have to show up there for the semifinals 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 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 I think two days later to Vancouver for the semis, and Michael managed to unlock this one opportunity to speak in front of 50 people to give it a try. And so I ran there. I give the speech, and as usual, we film. I film every single speech. I gave more than a hundred speeches over seven months, and I filmed every single speech. And we’d get home, we’d ask everybody for feedback, and I get home and I’m thinking, “Man, something is wrong. Something is wrong.” I was so pumped. I wept. I genuinely wept as I wrote the speech because it was so moving. It 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 I’m expecting people to pull out their tissues. One person pulls up the agenda for the event that they’re at and is starting to look at the agenda. Another person pulls out their phone, another person starts going through their purse, and I’m looking at this, and suddenly I realized, “Oh, this speech, nobody cares about this. This is not a good speech. This is terrible.” And then I go through all of these feedbacks.
I have 50 pieces of feedback, and all I’m getting is, “Good luck for the semi-finals. It’s going to go great. I thought it was good”, and I’m like, “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, the jokes that worked the best, like a stand-up comic would. I built my special and I focused on different areas like all of the transitions.
And right before the semi-finals, I gave the speech to one person. I was in Vancouver trying to internalize my speech and memorizing it in a plaza where I delimited the size of the stage and I’m just giving my speech out loud to get over the nerves, so I’m ready for the pressure to see if my brain will remember it and everything.
Anyways, I gave it in front of one person who was our district director at Toastmasters, 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, I saw a tear roll down her cheek, and then she just hugged me and said, “You got it. You did it. You did it.” I walked out on that stage and I made it, and I won the semi-finals with that speech.
I think to me, that was really the, it showed me that everything I’d done was worth something, that it actually worked. If I was able 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, I won.” So when I walked into the finals, to me, I felt like I had already won.
Lenny Rachitsky: Wow, that is a story. What an arc. Amazing. I’m so happy you 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 insight 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 done. Two final questions. Where can folks learn more about Ultraspeaking? I know you built a page where they could experiment with some of this stuff, so share that. And then how can listeners be useful to you?
Tristan de Montebello: If you go to ultraspeaking. com/Lenny, so ultra like U-L-T-R-A ultraspeaking.com/Lenny, we put together, you have five emails that go deep into a bunch of the things that we’ve talked here. You can also just go to Ultraspeaking.com where you’ll get access to a bunch of 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-T-E-B-E-L-L-O. And 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, and what I would love for you to do is to apply this. 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. 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 the world that Ultraspeaking helped you do that, and that would be huge.
Lenny Rachitsky: Awesome. Tristan, thank you so much for being here.
Tristan de Montebello: Thanks, Lenny. It was an honor.
Lenny Rachitsky: It was my honor, Tristan. Bye everyone.
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, 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 LennysPodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Glossary
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| Accordion Method | 手风琴法(Accordion Method) |
| Bow and Arrow Method | 弓箭法(Bow and Arrow Method) |
| Cillian Murphy | Cillian Murphy |
| Conductor | Conductor |
| conviction prompts | 信念提示(conviction prompts) |
| Creator Cohort | Creator Cohort |
| end strong | 强有力地结尾(end strong) |
| executive presence | 高管风范(executive presence) |
| fMRI | 功能性磁共振成像(fMRI) |
| freestyle rappers | 即兴说唱歌手(freestyle rappers) |
| Gay Hendricks | Gay Hendricks |
| Kevin Kelly | 凯文·凯利 |
| Lenny Rachitsky | Lenny Rachitsky |
| meta skill | 元技能(meta skill) |
| Michael Gendler | Michael Gendler |
| Nathan Seward | Nathan Seward |
| peak end rule | 峰终定律(peak end rule) |
| Russell Crowe | Russell Crowe |
| Ryan Gosling | Ryan Gosling |
| Speak Before You Think | Speak Before You Think |
| staying in character | 保持角色状态(staying in character) |
| summary prompts | 总结提示(summary prompts) |
| Triple Step | Triple Step |
| Tristan de Montebello | Tristan de Montebello |
| Ultraspeaking | Ultraspeaking |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
面对公开演讲,许多人会不自觉地切换到一种僵硬的“专业腔调”,随之而来的是焦虑与失真。Tristan de Montebello指出,大多数演讲建议之所以失效,是因为它们违背了沟通的自然本质。他认为,演讲并非单纯的专业技能,而是一项能全方位提升个人生活质量的“元技能”。人类天生具备表达的硬件,恐惧与怯场不过是后天经历导致的心理“软件”出现漏洞。在这篇文章中,Tristan提供了一个极具启发性的视角:将“享受感”作为检验演讲状态的晴雨表。当你不再过度控制,像日常对话一样去表达时,便是在进行一次深度的自我调试。本文将带你打破对演讲的固有认知,卸下包袱,以更真实、轻盈的姿态实现表达自由。
为什么大多数公开演讲建议都是错的——以及如何最终克服焦虑 | Tristan de Montebello
Tristan de Montebello: 人们往往会不自觉地切换到一种公开演讲的腔调。我们在课堂上,他们正常聊天时看起来都非常自然。然后我们会说:“好,现在设一个计时器,我只需要你做一段演讲。讲60秒就行,我们摸个底”,我按下播放键,突然间他们就会说:“做这件事最重要的一点是”,接着他们就进入了另一个版本的自己,一个所谓专业版本的自己,不管那到底意味着什么。像对话一样去表达,会让人感到自由得多、有力量得多、有连接感得多,也有效得多。所以我经常给人们的一个提示是——
嘉宾简介与播客开场
Lenny Rachitsky: 今天的嘉宾是 Tristan de Montebello。Tristan 是 Ultraspeaking 的联合创始人,这是我遇到过的最好的公开演讲工作坊。2017年,Tristan 成为世界演讲锦标赛中最快进入决赛的选手。基于那次经历,他打造了一门非常独特的课程,能帮助你快速建立技巧,变得更好,并在公开演讲时感到更自在,尤其是在即兴发言时。我想在这个播客上花些时间探讨这个话题,因为成为更好的演讲者对职业生涯是极大的加速器。在这一期中,我们深入探讨了许多策略,以及关于如何成为更好的演讲者的误解。为了让节目更有趣,我们在播客中现场体验了 Tristan 和他的团队开发的几个练习。他做了,我也做了,非常有趣。我很期待听到你们的想法。如果你喜欢这个播客,别忘了在你最喜欢的播客应用或 YouTube 上订阅和关注。这是避免错过未来剧集的最佳方式,也对播客大有帮助。话不多说,有请 Tristan de Montebello。Tristan,非常感谢你来做客,欢迎来到播客。
Tristan de Montebello: 非常感谢你的邀请。
个人体验与互动计划
Lenny Rachitsky: 我上了你教的这个叫做 Ultraspeaking 的演讲课的精简版,它立刻让我在公开演讲时感到更自在了,这是我上其他任何课都不曾有过的感觉。公开演讲对我来说是一件非常可怕的事,对很多人也是如此,这真的是我非常畏惧的事情。甚至在做这些播客节目时,每次做之前我都会紧张,尽管可能看不出来。所以在公开场合讲话并不是我的天然栖息地。人们可能不这么觉得,但这是真的。你处理这些事情的方式非常独特,而且对我很有效。正因为如此,我觉得把你请到播客上来,基本上向大家传授你学到的关于如何成为更好的公开演讲者的知识,这一定会非常棒。我知道我们在这里不会上你的完整课程,但是,有哪些非常实用的技巧是人们可以立刻开始应用的?另外,我想让这期节目超级互动,所以我们实际上会做几个你在课堂上使用的练习。这就是我们今天的目的。听起来怎么样?
Tristan de Montebello: 听起来很令人兴奋。我准备好了。
最大的误解:演讲是一项元技能
Lenny Rachitsky: 太好了。好,那么让我先问一个比较宽泛的问题。大多数人在公开演讲上哪里做错了?关于如何成为更好的演讲者、如何把演讲做好,最大的误解可能是什么?
Tristan de Montebello: 我其实认为,在解决演讲问题时最大的误解是,人们严重低估了它对生活的改变能有多大。它之所以如此具有改变力,是因为演讲不是一项专业技能,而是一项元技能(meta skill)。这意味着你演讲能力越强,你的生活就越好。举个例子,健身就是一项元技能。如果你开始说:“好,我要改变我的健身状态”,然后你开始举重,开始跑步,显然你的肌肉会变大,身体状态会更好,心血管系统也会改善。但这实际上只是它对你生活影响的一小部分,因为你会开始感到更有精力,你会开始有这些美妙的激素、这些内啡肽在你的身体里流动,你会对自己感觉更好。当你走到镜子前,你会突然感到自信心大增。所以很自然地,由于你专注于健身,你生活中的其他一切都会开始改善。对于演讲来说,也是一样的道理。
当我踏上自己的演讲之旅时,有一件事让我感到震撼:当我在演讲上取得突破时,其他事情也开始感觉不一样了。随着你取得突破,你在工作中的感受会不同,在朋友圈子里的感受会不同,在陌生人群体中的感受也会不同,尤其是你甚至会影响你和家人的感受。这会渗透到你生活中的方方面面。但问题在于,由于演讲伴随着强烈的自我意识,我们经常会感到被过度思考和焦虑的重重包裹所束缚。因此,很难意识到在这些层层包裹之下,你其实拥有这种非凡的超能力。因为作为人类,我们进化出了演讲的能力,这就是我们的本性。你不需要教婴儿如何说话,在没有正规教育的情况下,它也会自己学会。这意味着,我们所有人都拥有这种不可思议的硬件。
问题在于,在我们的一生中,由于经历的各种小状况,我们的软件开始出现漏洞,而我们并没有真正去升级它。一旦出现漏洞,运转开始失灵,我们就会开始逃避,突然之间就好像我们不再升级软件了。所以我们被困在了陈旧且漏洞百出的软件中。但现实是,别忘了我们拥有为此进化而来的、令人难以置信的软件。所以我们需要做的只是一些调试和软件升级,然后你的整个生活就可能突然改变。这真的是我想传达给所有听众的一点。你内在具备,你已经拥有了所需的一切。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。那么接着你刚才谈到的话题,关于生活如何得到改善,以及你总是必须去忘掉一些东西。在你教人演讲的方法中,我最喜欢的核心见解和原则之一,就是你提到过:如果你不享受演讲,那就是你做错了。这真的对我很有帮助,因为你某种程度上是在鼓励人们,在提醒人们,在做的时候试着去寻找乐趣。你能谈谈这个见解吗,为什么它很重要,以及它是如何帮助人们变得更好的?
Tristan de Montebello: 嗯,我认为这与你刚才说的紧密相连。我把享受感视为一个晴雨表,如果我做对了,我大概很享受。如果我做错了,特别是在演讲方面,因为再说一次,这是我们天生进化出来要做的事情。既然我们天生进化来做这件事,它就不是我们会讨厌做的事。它必定是一件能给我们带来回报的事。所以一旦事情开始让人感觉不到享受,这就是一个信号:嘿,我可能做错了。我在这里做的一些事情让这件事变得不享受,而这些事可能对我没有帮助。
我想你提到过,在那些能够吸引观众的人、在商业中真正优秀的沟通者之中,他们看起来感觉非常自在,看起来感觉像他们真实的自己。想想演讲,当你和你的孩子、伴侣、最好的朋友、发小或是父母交谈时,我们都有那种让自己感觉完全像自己的环境。当我们处于那种状态时,沟通是极其令人享受的。它仅仅是与他人建立联系的一种方式,是分享我们脑海中所想的一种方式,它非常、非常赋予权力,感觉非常好。
然后我把同一个人,带着同样的技能组合和同样的能力,带入一个商业环境中,突然之间我就不再感觉像自己了。因为压力,我开始试图用不同的方式说话。于是人们开始陷入这样一种状态:我要非常努力地思考我需要说什么,我想在话语出口之前就控制好将要说出的话,以确保我不犯错。而你基本上陷入了一种与沟通本质完全相悖的循环中,因为沟通本质上只是一种自然的潜意识流动。所以把演讲当作一个晴雨表:嘿,如果感觉不好,我可能想太多了。我可能需要放松下来,试着让自己感觉更像自己一点。
但这同样适用于练习,因为这并非一蹴而就的事,你不能只是打个响指、读一本书,就能成为一个更好的演讲者。你的练习也必须是令人享受的,否则两周后,你就会放弃,就像糟糕的健身计划或节食一样。对吧?你必须从中找到乐趣,而且它的结构必须设计成能给你带来回报,这样你在练习时就能获得更多的能量和更多的享受。
享受演讲与底层逻辑
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了,我们稍后会向人们展示你是怎么做的。你会用到一些游戏,这些你可以玩的游戏能帮你真正学到这些技能。那么在此之前,我也想深入探讨一些我们可以直接教给人们、让他们成为更好演讲者的实际战术。但在进入正题之前,对于你发现的能让人成为更好演讲者的有效方法,是否还有其他核心见解、原则或经验?它们是基础性的,并且很大程度上启发了我们接下来要谈论的很多内容?
Tristan de Montebello: 当我理解到演讲是一个潜意识中流动导向的过程,而非有意识的过程时,那彻底改变了我对待演讲的方式。所以,与其去想战术和框架,在需要思考的事情之外增加更多负担,当我意识到我在讲得最好时,我其实并没有在思考演讲。我最不会去想的就是演讲本身。我完全与我试图向观众或面前的人传达的内容同频。目标就是进入心流状态,并一直保持这种心流状态直到结束。这才是真正、真正改变了我对演讲心态的东西,因为它随之改变了你想要做的所有练习,改变了你思考演讲的方式。
改变我练习方式的其中一个方面是,我不再关注演讲的症状,而是开始试图弄清楚:产生这些症状的根本原因是什么,我能解决这些根本原因吗?所以,如果口头禅让我感到烦恼,我不再去数我用了多少个口头禅,而是会回过头去试着弄清楚,好吧,它的根本原因是什么?拥有大量口头禅或说话急促的根本原因,在于你可能很难在感到压力、大脑飞速运转时,从容地放慢速度、放松下来,甚至敢于停顿。解决了这个问题,不仅口头禅会自行消失,急促感也会自行消失,你突然就有了更多的思维空间。
如果你在演讲时感到极度受限、非常单调,那么也许你感到被束缚住了,你在压力下很难允许自己展现全部的真实自我,因为这可能源于缺乏确定性。缺乏一种信任:嘿,如果我让自己表现得更有激情,或者如果我让某些情绪流露出来,又或者如果我花点时间整理思绪,一切会土崩瓦解吗,还是这会对我有所帮助?如果你还没有向自己证明过这一点,那么你只会选择安全感,因此你会变得非常单调且受限,而这又进一步导致了单调。但如果我能解决这个问题,我就会突然获得自由。所以通过这些思考,并理解这里的目标是升级软件,这实际上是一个层层递进的过程,剥离所有坏习惯并植入新习惯,让我能够直接停留在这个心流状态中而不被拽出来,这真的改变了游戏规则。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这是一个非常有趣的洞察,我很喜欢你回答这个问题时实际上示范了这一点,你花时间进入了那种状态,而不是仅仅去……就像是停顿。
Tristan de Montebello: 停顿。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对,那是一个很好的示范。好吧,让我们讲几个战术,给人们一些他们能——
Tristan de Montebello: 当然。
Lenny Rachitsky: ——实际上在这个星期就能改变他们说话方式的东西。你可以推荐人们在公开演讲、在会议和演讲中说话的方式上微调的两三件事是什么,随便什么?
Tristan de Montebello: 我确实思考过这件事,因为一旦你认识到演讲更多是关于根本原因,比如玩那些能在根源上改变你的游戏,不要关注症状,那么你会发现你自己分享的纯粹战术性建议和框架变少了,因为我们正试图跳出我们的大脑,进入我们的潜意识。
提升外在气场与声音表达
所以当我思考这件事时,我想到了三个想分享的东西。一个让你听起来更好或看起来更好,一个让你听起来更好,一个让你感觉更好。所以第一个让你看起来更好。这非常基础,也是十足的干货,但这是很多人有的一个坏习惯。那就是当我在试图整理思绪或思考时,人们倾向于向下看。如果你在 Zoom 上向下看,情况会糟三倍,因为看起来就像你在看手机,或者在看你可能有的笔记,但即使你面对面,这看起来也不是很自信。于是你突然散发出那种氛围,哦,这个人在这里感觉有点不确定,而且看起来可能像你停止了说话,你可能会被打断更多次。
如果你反过来,开始向上思考。我习惯向右上方看,但你可以向任何你想的方向看,只要你是向上看的,你实际上默认看起来很有思想。于是你突然看起来很有思想。这意味着你看起来更自信,因为任何愿意在说话时停顿的人都是一个自信的人。结果,你被打断的可能性要小得多。这是一个微小的调整,但会产生真正的改变。
唯一的问题是如果你不习惯这样做,如果这不是你的习惯,那么你第一次做时会感觉有点尴尬,而且你可能根本想不到要这样做。所以我建议在便利贴上写上“向上思考”,贴在你的电脑上,这样它就在那里陪着你。然后一旦你这样做了几次,这就会成为新的常态,默认情况下,你会看起来更自信。
Lenny Rachitsky: 在我们交谈时我也要这么做。我这正好有一张海报。“向上思考”。
Tristan de Montebello: 噢,不错。“向上思考”。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,太棒了。还有什么?
Tristan de Montebello: 看起来更自信。现在如何听起来更自信。这非常重要,这个概念叫做强有力地结尾(end strong)。我们不得不提出这一点,因为大多数人倾向于弱结尾。为什么会这样?他们把即兴说唱歌手(freestyle rappers)放进了功能性磁共振成像(fMRI)中,他们发现即兴说唱歌手必须进入一种深层心流状态。如果你在进行即兴说唱,你有一个节拍,你没有任何歌词,你必须进入节拍并即兴发明歌词、旋律和一切。所以除了完全活在当下,别无选择。发生的情况是,你可以看到他们的大脑,在非常特定的位置亮起,表明他们处于心流中,而当他们到达最后时,大脑活动就爆发了。在完成之前,他们开始被拽出心流。这就像你在学校跑步,你看到了终点线,就在几码之前你开始减速。这,我不知道,我们就是这样构造的。
在说话中也是一样。人们倾向于给出一个很好的回答,然后在最后要么有点渐弱,这不会给你留下好印象,要么他们会主动说出脑海中出现的疑虑,也许他们给出了一个很棒的回答,然后突然他们说,“我不知道这是否说得通。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 我总是这样。这太有共鸣了。
Tristan de Montebello: 对,但问题在于,当你这样做时会发生什么?当你这样做时,就像你在强迫你的观众戴上某种滤镜,现在即使他们对你的回答有最好的体验,现在他们也在透过这种滤镜看你说的一切,哦,这个人有点不确定。这就像你飞越大西洋的飞行非常平稳,而你的降落 absolutely horrible。你在爬升时很颠簸,然后当你着陆时,你弹跳了三次,你以为你要死了。你不会记得平稳的飞行,你会记得结局。所以这里的一个简单战术是,预见到当你在任何你说的话接近尾声时,你自然会开始恢复意识,你会开始变得更有自我意识,一些不确定性会冒出来。知道它要来了,并确保你让飞机平稳着陆。
所以这看起来是,要么你只是让你的结尾听起来像个结尾,然后就到此为止,或者你可以提示你的大脑。你可以使用总结提示(summary prompts),这极其强大。这只意味着你说出一个句子的开头或者,对,一个句子的开头,你的大脑就会填补空白。它会填补的。你在提示你的大脑,你的大脑总是会交付的。所以你到了最后,你会想,好吧,我现在得收尾了。然后你会说,“所以总结一下……”你的大脑就会填补空白。或者,“总而言之,所以我这里的重点是,所以我想要你们记住的是”,你只需放置这些词,你的大脑自然会为你做收尾的工作。但一定要确保你不在最后一刻松开油门,你需要降落那架飞机。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。我肯定能在这一点上做得更好,非常棒的提示。
Tristan de Montebello: 是的,谢谢。
Lenny Rachitsky: 在我们交谈时我会尝试这么做。
Tristan de Montebello: 好的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我们还有什么?
Tristan de Montebello: 我会注意这一点的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,压力。
保持角色状态
Tristan de Montebello: 对。第三个是保持角色状态(staying in character)。这些是相辅相成的。真正强大的是,当你开始做这些时,会产生一个美妙的反馈循环,给你带来很多自信。所以我说的保持角色状态,是那个会让你感觉更自信的东西。
Tristan de Montebello: 什么是保持角色状态?在某种意义上,它与强有力地结尾(end strong)相关,因为人们往往会进行很多自我破坏。当我讲话时,显然我的所有感官都处于极度敏锐的状态。所以我察觉着一切,如果某个词说出口时有点奇怪,或者不是我预期会从嘴里说出的词,我会非常敏锐地察觉到,因为我预期的是一样东西,发生的却是另一样。但在说话时这种情况总是发生。我开始变得不那么有条理,或者感觉自己在漫无边际地扯,说得有点太长了。所有这些都在我脑海深处制造了疯狂的心理噪音,也就是那些不安全感。在那你是有选择的,因为我现在就可以告诉你,没人能看出来。人们看不到你的感受,即使你感受非常强烈时觉得似乎是那样,但人们其实看不到。你看起来就像一个正常的演讲者,能干且自信。但在内心,感觉就像所有人都能看到一样。
所以你感受着所有这些不安全感,感觉就像房间里有一头显而易见的大象。因此大多数人会开始流露出情绪并打破角色状态。他们会说:“哦,天哪,我现在说得毫无逻辑,”或者在一个词说得很奇怪之后紧张地笑,这有点像是在说:“哦,我也注意到这个词说得奇怪,没关系。”对吧?或者他们会不断让所有的不安和怀疑流露出来,而人们一开始根本没察觉到。所以再说一次,这就像是我把这些滤镜强加给我的观众,现在他们只能透过这种眼光来看我。
所以我喜欢用另一个飞行的比喻来解释这一点。你在飞机上,一切都很平稳,你正开心地看着电影,突然飞行员打断了你,他拿起对讲机说:“哦,女士们先生们,我刚看到驾驶舱里有一个红灯开始闪烁,我不确定这是什么。老实说,这可能非常糟糕,但我不知道。所以请不要担心,我很快会给大家回复。”如果你遇到那种情况,第一反应肯定是,我本来就没在担心。但接着你开始想,等等,可能真的出问题了。而现在,哪怕是最微小的噪音、一点点极轻微的颠簸、右侧的一丝嘎吱声,每次你都会开始想,哦不,我们要坠毁了。
所以你会犯下任何微小的错误,任何微小的瑕疵,你都会把它放大成一件大事。这就是你讲话时发生的情况。如果你开始流露情绪,让不安全感暴露出来,人们就会开始觉得,这个人其实并不知道自己在说什么。就像一个方向不明确的领导者。听众会突然想,等等,我觉得我必须对这里的一切产生怀疑,因为我对这个人不太确定。
好消息是,解决方案非常非常简单。解决方案就是,不要分享你的不安全感。展现你最好的一面,并始终保持在状态中。从一开始就保持角色状态,一直保持到结束之后,因为你一路讲完了你的演讲,然后你必须强有力地结尾(end strong),这是一种保持角色状态的形式,然后顺其自然。这非常重要,就是顺其自然,你会注意到一件不可思议的事情。如果你是那种经常打破角色状态的人,开始尝试保持角色状态吧,我给自己用的提示语是,保持在状态中。情况越糟,我就越会说,就保持在状态中。而结果就是,你保持了状态。
你原本以为最后大家都会说:“哦天哪,你看起来太不自在了,刚才发生什么了?”但人们根本看不出来,你看起来很自信。所以他们只会给出一个自信者通常会得到的反应,然后你会注意到,哦哇,我表现得还挺自信的,这会让你感觉更自信。因此这是一个非常具有强化作用的循环。如果你开始保持角色状态并强有力地结尾(end strong),自然而然地,你会从这种行为中获得正向反馈,你会意识到,哦,我原本不需要打破角色状态的。我原本不需要每次说话都闪烁其词,这会给你带来多得多自信,你会开始认识到,人们只是默认看起来很自信而已。这是一件很疯狂的事。我希望每个人都能在世界各地走一走,看着周围的人然后想,我看到的大多数人此刻其实都很紧张。你会看着他们然后觉得,我看不出来。大多数在会议上发言的人都带有某种程度的紧张感,但除非紧张到极点,否则你根本看不出来。
为什么我们倾向于流露不安全感
Lenny Rachitsky: 我太喜欢这个观点了,这正是我极度容易犯的毛病。我想我之所以这么做,以及我认为很多人会流露情绪的原因——我很喜欢你用的“流露”这个词,就是不去流露,你知道,感觉有些不对劲。我这么做的原因是,我觉得如果我坦白说,我知道这不太好——
Tristan de Montebello: 没错。
Lenny Rachitsky: ——会让这事变得没关系,但实际上,这反而会伤害你,因为就像我看单口喜剧时一样。当喜剧演员说:“哦,抱歉,这个笑话砸了,”如果他或她没说那句话,我就会直接忘掉它,然后我们继续下一件事。这就把所有的注意力都吸引到了“哦,我明白了,好吧,进展得不顺利”上面。否则,你只会想,好吧,无所谓,我不喜欢那个笑话而已。所以,是的,我想关于这一点你有什么看法,为什么人们会这样做?
Tristan de Montebello: 嗯,我认为完全就是这样。因为你确信每个人都能看出来。所以会有两种情况。要么他们能看出来,因为这是一件很明显的事,大家都看到了,但你把焦点对准它,字面意思上就是在做这件事。这就像,嘿,大家,你在开一列火车,每个人都在车上,作为演讲者你是司机,所有人都跟着你走。所以如果路边发生了一起车祸,你可以继续开,一秒钟后他们就不会再看那场车祸了,而是去看下一处风景;或者你可以停下来告诉所有人:“嘿,我们快点来看看这起车祸。我对此非常抱歉。”当你继续开时,人们会在一秒钟内忘记它,不会把注意力放在那上面。而且根据峰终定律(peak end rule),我们看到的情况是,人们对体验结尾的记忆要深于对体验开头的记忆。所以最终留在他们脑海里的,会是结尾时的那种感受。
另一方面是,因为大多数人一开始根本不会注意到,他们正沉浸在自己的思绪中。所以当你主动挑明时,你戳破了他们的气泡。我经常观察别人讲话,此时我会非常敏锐地捕捉他们讲话时传递给我的感受。我在感受他们的能量,在倾听发生的一切,所以我试图去理解,他们现在处于什么状态?所以当我从那种状态中被某个人一句“哦天哪,我现在能重说一遍吗?刚才实在太糟了”给惊醒时,这对我来说反而更加显眼。我经常不得不说:“嘿,伙计,我刚才完全沉浸在你讲的内容里,”然后我会询问观众,“有人觉得意外吗?”而每次大家的反应都是:“没有啊,我觉得你讲得非常好。我完全跟上了你的思路。”大多数情况都是这样,但因为我们确信人们能看出来,我们就想打破这第四面墙;或者因为确实发生了什么,我们知道大家看出来了,我们就想承认这一点,以免显得好像整个房间里只有我一个人没察觉到这里出了问题。但是,保持“不,我会保持自信,我是主导者,我要带领大家继续沿着某个方向前进”这种习惯,是极其强大的,并且能产生很强的自我强化作用。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,那么让我们通过实际进行一些现场游戏,来向人们展示这到底是怎么回事。我知道 Ultraspeaking 的原则之一是,你不能通过不说话来学习说话。你需要通过练习说话来提高说话能力,而这些游戏就是一种非常有趣的实际操作方式。那么首先,为什么是游戏呢?当我上这门课时,我就在想,咦,因为全都是游戏。我以为这是一门公开演讲课。所以也许你可以谈谈为什么通过游戏来切入,你在课程里做的所有事情都是游戏。
Tristan de Montebello: 是的。嗯,拼图的第一块就是你刚才说的,不说话就无法提高说话能力。直觉上你会觉得,大家都知道如果你想成为一名伟大的厨师,你不能只读一百本烹饪书。你实际上必须把大部分时间花在厨房里,磨炼直觉,测试事物,做实验,学习新食谱,以及培养你的时机感和与之相关的一切。但在说话方面,我们往往做相反的事,可能是因为这有点可怕,而且没有那么多练习说话本身的选择。现在没有那么多你可以这样做的环境。所以我们有点无从下手,于是想,“好吧,那我就去读一篇文章或者看一个 YouTube 短视频,希望能有所改变。”
但坏消息可能是,你必须去做。你必须问自己:“我要认真对待说话这件事并在这里做出改变吗?”如果你是认真的,那你就必须去做这件事。你必须练习说话。但好消息是,只有外在是可怕的。一旦你开始,你就会得到回报。然后,你越擅长它,它就会变得越有趣。
那么为什么是游戏呢?嗯,首先,游戏玩起来很有趣。正如我早些时候说的,如果你的练习没有趣,你就会停下来。所以你需要从你正在做的事情中获得内在奖励。但所有 Ultraspeaking 游戏的共同点是,它是短暂的、刻意的练习,短时间的重复之后是反馈,然后是下一次重复。所以一开始,这比它是一个游戏这个想法更重要。
当我们和我的联合创始人 Michael Gendler 一起开始教练工作时,就是他和我在我家的后院,面前有个人在测试这些东西。我们会说,我们会给他一个演讲标题,只是为了得到一个基线。“好的,世界上最不可思议的发明是什么?”然后我们会看着这个人陷入思考并开始慌乱。他们会想,“iPhone”,然后,“我不了解 iPhone。那太近了。所以也许是火。是火吗?有没有更大的可能是交流?我不知道。等等。也许我们是为了交流而进化的。”他们思考的时间越长,他们的回答往往越糟糕,而且在说话时他们的信心往往下降得越多。所以然后我们说,“嗯,我们必须让这个人立刻开口说话。”所以我们会说,“我要问你另一个问题,但直接开始说就行。”于是,我问他们另一个问题,但他们无法立刻开始说话。所以我们只是试图把它压缩得越来越短,把它变成这样的一种形式:“我就说一个词,你必须针对它说点什么,比如马。”“骑马很有趣,因为你可以去不同的地方。”“猫。”“猫很疯狂,因为如果它们更大,它们会吃掉你。”我就,几乎像词汇联想,让我们把词说出来。
然后我们开始为所有情况开发不同的游戏。我们看到的每一个根本原因,每一个症状,我们都会找出根本原因,然后创造某种方式让这个人尽可能快地进入状态。直到六个月后的某一天,我们才意识到,“嘿,我们刚才是不是创造了一个游戏?这感觉就像一个桌游。”然后我们创造了,我有这个,我们创造了 Speak Before You Think,这个给想太多的人的游戏,这是一叠包含我们所有游戏的卡片。然后,新冠疫情来了,我们把它变成了在线游戏。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哦,我之前不知道这些。
Tristan de Montebello: 是的。游戏的魔力在于短时间的重复、即时的反馈、练习反馈、练习反馈。而且它很令人愉快,你会得到回报,你可以在过程中进行调整。在前进的过程中,改变的是你的内在感受。所以你在学习经验,但你在内化它们。所有的练习都是通过说话发生的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 为了强化你刚才分享的内容,我没跟你说过,但在我上完这门迷你课程后,我去了洛杉矶看我的家人。我们拜访了几天,我一直在谈论这门课,谈论它多么有趣、多么吸引人,以及我从中学到了多少东西。然后我调出了这些游戏,因为我在网上有权限访问这些东西。我就像,“嘿,你们想试试吗?”然后我们开始玩我们即将进入的一些游戏。结果就是,我们大概花了一个小时做这件事,所有人都很喜欢。
Tristan de Montebello: 哇。
Lenny Rachitsky: 每个人都对自己的公开演讲感觉好多了。之后,我妈妈说:“嘿,我之后怎么自己练习这个?”
Tristan de Montebello: 哇,太酷了。我妹妹说:“我想开始去参加开放麦之夜,因为仅仅那样说话就真的很有趣。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 不错。
Tristan de Montebello: 所以你当时实际上在指导他们吗?你是如何引导他们玩这些不同的游戏的?
Lenny Rachitsky: 我们只是把它们调出来玩。然后,我分享了一些我们在课上 学到的技巧,比如,“试着这样做”或者“试着不要把注意力放在正确性上。只关注自信,不要泄露你表现得不好。”所有这些我们稍后要谈论的东西。是的。所以非常有趣。那么让我们进入其中一些游戏吧。我们打算尝试两三个。你想从哪一个开始?
Tristan de Montebello: 也许是 Conductor。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。我喜欢 Conductor。那个游戏让我非常有启发。
游戏演示:Conductor
Tristan de Montebello: 好的,我已经准备好了 Conductor。这个游戏的玩法是,当我点击“开始训练”时,会出现一个随机的标题。对于那些只听音频而没有看视频的人,Lenny 会大声说出标题,这样你们就能听到了。然后,你们看不到的(或者看视频的人能看到的)是,在我面前,我看到的只会是一系列随机数字。它会从五开始,五只是我自然的语速,就像我现在说话一样。但然后,我可能会看到一个一到十之间的数字,这些数字中的每一个都代表我必须进入的一种强度或状态。所以如果我看到七,我必须自动提高音量并进入那种能量状态。如果我看到十,你只能想象那是什么样子。但这也适用于较低的数字。如果我突然看到一个三,我必须找到一种方法来平静我的能量,匹配三,并一直降到一。
然后,可能会出现一张写着“呼吸”的幻灯片,这只是一个暂停的提示。当我看到那张“呼吸”的幻灯片时,如果我突然沉默,那是因为我面对着“呼吸”的幻灯片,并且我不被允许说话。在那一刻,我的目标只是放松自己、平静自己,然后看看当那张幻灯片切换到下一张时,我处于什么状态。现在我们要开始做这个练习了。这将是70秒,所以会非常快。准备好了吗?
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。标题一弹出我就会读出来。
Tristan de Montebello: 完美。
Lenny Rachitsky: “当我长大后。”
Tristan de Montebello: 当我长大后,我希望能克服我所有的弱点,或者所有阻碍我的情感包袱。因为让我有点烦恼的是,我已经40岁了,但仍然有一些东西在阻碍我,天哪,这些是我小时候就有的。我10岁的时候就是这样。这让我发疯,因为我难道不应该是个成年人了吗?我难道不应该成熟并且把生活打理好吗?我有两个孩子。我肩负着令人难以置信的责任。我必须教导他们,我必须为他们指明方向。所以我决定我要聘请一位教练,就在几天前我和他谈过,所以时机非常完美,因为我想要解开、理清、化解这些情感阻碍中的每一个,以便当我长大后,我是完全自由的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 看着太有意思了。我看到了那些数字。如果你在YouTube上,你能看到那里发生了什么。如果你不在YouTube上,基本上就是有不同的数字,要求Tristan进入不同的能量状态,而且那真是太绝了。
Tristan de Montebello: 我想我们看到了,我们看到了什么?我们看到了一个六。首先升到了六,然后七,接着降到了三。然后我们看到了,我想是一个二,一个一,然后是呼吸,之后它回到了五。不如你来试一下,然后我们再聊。
主持人尝试 Conductor
Lenny Rachitsky: 来吧。你觉得呢?
Tristan de Montebello: 女士们先生们,让我们来看看。开始。标题是最大的谜题。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我认为我一生中面临的最大谜题,我想对大多数人来说也是,就是试图弄清楚这辈子要做什么。而且我不得不花大量时间去思考……实际上,不,让我换一下。我正在改变方向。其实我很早的时候就知道我这辈子想做什么。我其实发现这并不算什么谜题。我很早以前就知道我想成为一名软件工程师。有趣的是,我真的成为了一名软件工程师。而当我思考围绕我生活展开的这个谜题时,我最终……所以我的生活实际上开始变得像一个谜题,而不是我一直以为我会成为的样子。所以我最终从事了许多不同的职业。我回顾我的生活,它始于一块碎片,每一块碎片都引出了所有这些其他的职业。搞定了。
Tristan de Montebello: 很有趣。在最后,你就像,你甚至没看到出现了一个六,然后当你抬头看时,它已经消失了。这是一个很好的热身。
Lenny Rachitsky: 是的,是的。我们再来一次。
Tristan de Montebello: 很有趣,因为在我看来的情况是,好吧,你只是没有让自己去玩这个游戏。你想……你更专注于“我想确保这效果很好,这看起来不错,或者我不会出丑”,而不是“让我只管玩这个游戏”。所以从那种心态中切换出来。回到 Creator Cohort 的时候,你其实并不在意,因为如果你失败了,也无所谓。所以你只是玩了游戏。这也是同样的道理。别那么用力。就让自己去玩这个游戏。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。
Tristan de Montebello: 这游戏会起作用的。但那其实真的很有趣。我有一种类似的感觉,这很酷,只不过我当时不知道它会走向哪里。但是那种所有这些拼图碎片的感觉,然后当我接触 Ultraspeaking 时,就像是,“哦哇,每一个……再也没有了。再也没有空隙了。”这真的很酷。好的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 来吧。
Tristan de Montebello: 准备好了吗?
Lenny Rachitsky: 准备好了。
Tristan de Montebello: 开始。“融入新文化。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 有孩子是一件有趣的事。所以我们大约一年前有了一个孩子,他现在一岁半了。有一种有趣的新体验,那就是有我的家庭和他们的文化,有我妻子和她的文化。对我们来说,我们这些不同的背景从来都不是什么大问题,因为我们可以做我们自己的事,我们有我们的家庭,他们做他们的事。但现在我们有了孩子,我真的必须考虑这件事了。我必须不断地想,“他是否获得了两种体验?他是否被推向了这个或那个方向?他是否能从这两种文化中获得全部的好处?”我发现,如果我真的不去想得太深,只是让他玩得开心,和我们不同的家庭成员待在一起,他就能得到我想要他得到的一切;他体验到了我妻子家庭的文化,我家庭的文化,然后是我和妻子正在构建的一种新型的文化和家庭的结合。因此,我对我们所有人的未来感到非常兴奋。
避免泄气与游戏的核心逻辑
Tristan de Montebello: 是的,那太棒了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我在练习不泄气。我满脑子想的都是这本来可以有多好,但现在当我说这话时我又在泄气了。看到了吗?
Tristan de Montebello: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这很难。
Tristan de Montebello: 是的。你在犹豫。
Lenny Rachitsky: 犹豫。
Tristan de Montebello: 所以所有这些游戏的目的就是为了制造颠簸。这将是这期播客的主题。我只会分享飞行方面的比喻。但如果你想到一个飞行员,一个飞行模拟器,你可以把这些游戏看作是飞行模拟器。你不会把一个飞行员放进飞行模拟器里,浪费那些宝贵的时间让他们只在晴空万里的三万英尺高空巡航。你会说,“好的,你正在飞,现在嘿,你的机长失去行动能力了,你必须做点什么”或者“嘿,你的引擎刚刚坏了”或者“你正在进入疯狂的颠簸气流中。”
所以这里的收获永远是,这些游戏都有一个共同点,那就是我们在为你制造颠簸。所以这是故意的,比如,“哦,真有趣,我总是倾向于想要泄气,想要打破角色状态。哇。有趣的是,在最后,强有力地结尾(end strong)并不只是我为自己建立的一种自动习惯。”所以我们想要通过颠簸达到的目的是,它突出了我们想要努力的领域。你可以再来一次并立刻看到效果,因为你每次都有相同的压力。你无法为 Conductor 做准备。你可以做大量的重复训练,从而成为那个能够非常非常优雅地驾驭颠簸的人。
这让我想起了一句我很喜欢的凯文·凯利的话,他说:“专业人士只是那些学会了从错误中优雅恢复的业余爱好者。”这就是我们在这里试图做的。如果你知道你可以从任何错误中优雅地恢复,那么你将在任何演讲场景中都有信心。而你会遇到的大多数场景都是自发性的,都是你无法准备的。所以这就更加重要了。
从游戏中的收获
Tristan de Montebello: 那么告诉我,从经历 Conductor 和 Creator Cohort 中你记住了什么,或者具体到这里,浮现出了什么,你脑海中想到了些什么?
Lenny Rachitsky: 我真正从中得到了两样东西,而且现在在镜头前,带着这整个播客的设定来做这件事,感觉是不一样的。
Tristan de Montebello: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 但我从这个练习中真正带走并且一直留在心里的东西,首先是你脑海中会有这些文件夹的隐喻,每一个能量等级,比如当你低到1,或者是10,甚至是5,当你处于那个能量等级时,你会获取不同的洞察、记忆和故事。所以这不只是“现在我要以10的能量说同样的话,或者以1的能量说同样的话”。而是当你让身体慢下来放松到1时,新的想法就会出现,因为你是在边走边编,边走边想。当你被迫从5降到“好吧”,并让你的身体沉淀到1时,这种情况真的会发生。你会觉得,“哦,好吧,脑海里出现了一个新想法”。这对我来说非常强大,因为我以前从来没有意识到这一点。
另一个就是这种在极低风险下做非常困难的事情的理念。这里的利益风险更高,所以也许这就是为什么感觉不同,在这里做感觉不一样,就像“哦,这是——”
Tristan de Montebello: 是的,是的,这对你来说风险极高。
Lenny Rachitsky: 是的,相对而言。但在那里只有几个人,你会觉得,不用担心失败,所以你甚至不需要担心道歉或者出丑。就像“是的,我做了我做的”。所以这两个是非常强大的收获。我就是喜欢练习这个。知道在低风险下你会没事的,这能建立信心。我就像,“好吧”。当场编造一分钟关于最随机的事情的谈话,这不是我觉得我想做的事,但后来你意识到,“好吧,没关系。我能做到。”
能量、情绪与词句的填补
Tristan de Montebello: 对我来说共同的主题是,我已经在这段旅程中走了七年了,我每周依然会被这七年里学到的经验所震撼,这些都归结于你的大脑,你的潜意识是如此不可思议地强大。所以你的硬件是神奇的。因为花了七年时间去摆脱坏习惯,清除杂质,并更信任我自己,我允许自己去承担更多的风险。所以我跳进这些游戏时,在某种意义上仍然带着同样的疑虑,但它们只是,一切都大幅度地退到了背景里。所以我能够更加活在当下。
我在播客前面提到了总结提示(summary prompts),说出一个句子的开头并相信你的大脑会填补空白,这最初是很难做到的。但当你做了1000次,2000次,10000次后,你开始相信,“嘿,也许我的大脑每次都能做到。”所以你可以开始说出你想去的方向的句子开头,然后你的大脑填补空白,我们马上就要做一个关于这个的游戏。
但 Conductor 这个游戏非常美妙,因为我们的描述方式,所以那个当进入我脑海的文件夹1是我一直以来最喜欢的。但最初的说法是,当你接入某种能量时,那会创造情绪。如果你接入那种情绪,词语就会作为自然结果出现。所以是能量领先,情绪跟随,词语填补空白。
当你亲自体验这个时,如果你进入 Conductor 并玩这个游戏,你会意识到,“好吧,如果我想要更多的信念感,我可以提高我的能量或者进入一种有信念的状态,而将要出来的话语、想法、故事、轶事、例子,一切都会与之契合。如果我感到沮丧,我可以潜入那种状态并保持那种状态,内容自然就会跟上。这是一个非常非常强大的游戏。这是一个非常令人兴奋的游戏,特别是当你在低风险下玩时,你很快就会感受到这种效果,“哦,我能看到如果我能在任何地方都像这样,它会有多大的潜力。”也许你会稍微减弱一点极端程度。
但你可以在 Ultraspeaking 上免费体验这个,或者像我们最初做的那样,你只需去谷歌输入一串随机的九个数字,然后让一个朋友一个接一个地说出每个数字,你只需匹配它。我以前就是伸出手上下比划。所以本质上,应用它非常非常简单。
个体的能量倾向与内在游戏
Lenny Rachitsky: 而且这真的很有趣,有个借口可以让自己疯狂和高昂,然后再降下来。我喜欢它这部分。让我们进入下一个主题。但我有的另一个洞察是你第一次做的时候和我分享的,就是人们都有一种优势。
Tristan de Montebello: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 如果我说错了请纠正我,他们要么在高点很强,在低点非常不舒服,要么相反。对我来说,我以为我会,“哦,显然我在低点会更自然,因为像是内向者的世界。”然后你说,“不,你实际上在高端非常充满能量,然后对你来说很难进入低点。”我觉得这对我来说非常有洞察力。
Tristan de Montebello: 是的。一旦你跳进去,尤其是和一个朋友一起,你会很快注意到这一点。这很酷,因为当你看到,“哦,我向上走比向下走舒服得多,或者反过来,或者我卡在中间,只有在不极端的时候才舒服。”它只是在告诉你一些事情。
这就是我们想要的。我们想要面前有一面镜子,这样我就能知道,“好吧,这里发生了什么?”我不是很喜欢在视频里看自己在镜头上的样子,因为再说一次,这是一个内在游戏,而不是外在游戏。所以当我在视频里看自己时,我看到的是外面,这对某些事情可能有用,但基础在里面。所以得到一面镜子,我玩这个游戏,我感觉到了某种方式,“哦,有趣。向上走很容易。”所以我可以很快聚集能量,而且我愿意冒风险跳入一个不同的能量阶段,这可能意味着改变我要去的方向。
但慢下来意味着我需要愿意占据空间。我需要愿意在大家看着我并且我在占用他们时间的时候仅仅是存在。但我就是要占据空间,我要花一点时间进入内心,变得内省,真正问自己,“好吧,我在这里想说什么?”所以,这是对“好吧,如果我挣扎着做不到那意味着什么?”的一种反映。这就是为什么说话是这样一个有趣的技能组合。
Triple Step 游戏
Lenny Rachitsky: 好吧,我们再来做另一个游戏。
Tristan de Montebello: 下一个游戏叫 Triple Step。而 Triple Step 是一个为那些难以停留在单一想法上,或者很容易被搞乱或分心的人准备的游戏。如果你是那种在说话时突然有人打哈欠,你就开始崩溃,觉得“我太无聊了,情况很糟,我一定很糟糕”的人。不,他们可能有个婴儿昨晚没睡。一支笔掉下来,你就开始失去保持在正轨上的能力,这就是为你准备的游戏。同时,它也非常有趣。
Triple Step 游戏演示
Tristan de Montebello: 这个游戏的原则非常简单。和 Conductor 类似,我们会从一个随机的演讲题目开始。所以我完全不知道会出现什么。然后在我演讲时,在这个设定下,我会说一分钟。在我演讲的过程中,会弹出六个随机的单词或词组。我的目标是尽可能无缝地将这些词融入到演讲中,就好像它们一直都是演讲的一部分一样。所以理论上,如果我做得完美,如果你在听,你应该很难分辨出哪些词是弹出来的。在一分钟内我能做到这一点的可能性很低,但看看你能不能做到。所以如果你在听,你是看不到这些词的。我们之后会告诉你它们是什么,看看你能不能听出来。除此之外,我的目标只是选择一个强有力的方向,并尽可能自然地保持在这个方向上。
开始了。题目是,你的朋友会怎么形容你?我的朋友们形容我像一只拉布拉多犬。我认为人们这样形容我的原因,是因为我太容易被点燃了。就像如果你给我一盒薯条,我会发疯,那会是我这辈子吃过最好吃的薯条。但如果第二天我做个按摩,我会完全沉浸在那个体验中,而那个按摩会是最好的按摩。然后,我会想,“我每天都需要做个按摩。”我开始把做按摩当作我日常的白日梦。但是做拉布拉多犬的问题在于,拉布拉多犬容易过度兴奋。所以我可能前一秒还在翻跟头,下一秒就应该工作了。于是,我坐在电脑前,但随后我听到微波炉叮的一声响,我就想,“哦,也许我接下来应该去弄点吃的。”所以,做拉布拉多犬有一个美好的特质,它让我能够探索作为人类的所有体验。我总是能访问我内心的互联网,但肯定也有一些缺点。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。所以你需要融入的词是:薯条、做按摩、做白日梦、翻跟头、微波炉和互联网。
游戏背后的理念
Tristan de Montebello: 是的。你可能注意到,有些词我是字面融入的,有些我可能更隐喻地融入,比如我内心的互联网。就好像我能访问互联网一样。所以你可以给自己尽可能多的余地。Triple Step 的全部意义在于,你想成为风暴中的那棵树,它不能太僵硬,否则如果风太大就会被折成两半,也不能太柔韧,否则一有阵风就会向各个方向摇摆。所以你需要那种坚定稳固的扎根,也就是一开始就选择一个清晰的方向,然后你要让这些词为你所用。所以保持专注在那一件事情上。随着词语的出现,你越专注于为自己创造的那个节奏,就越容易让这些词为你所用。明白吗?
Lenny Rachitsky: 同样,这个游戏培养的技能是让你对事情不完美和被分心感到更自在。
Tristan de Montebello: 是的。我想说这个游戏还可以用于另外两件事。第一是抗挫折力,对吧?因为这个游戏会让你的大脑发疯。如果你能在这一切发生时保持镇定,它真的能培养这种能力,让你觉得,“天哪,如果我能在困难模式下玩 Triple Step,我就能做任何事。还有什么可怕的呢?既然我能应付这些事情,为什么一个面试问题会吓到我?我总能找到出路。”对吧?我们是在努力降低错误真正伤害你的可能性。另一方面,这是一个游戏,这个游戏和另一个叫 Rapid Fire Analogies 的游戏,是非常非常好的大脑热身方式。所以你可以在播客前使用它。你可以在求职面试前、会议前使用它。当你想进入最佳状态时,做几次这个练习,你的大脑就会完全被点亮,因为它调动了沟通所需的许多不同的大脑区域。
为什么游戏优于传统练习
Lenny Rachitsky: 在我们深入之前,最后再说一点。我觉得还是再次拉远视角来看,你发现这是学习提升公众演讲能力的更好方法,我认为原因在于,如果你只是做标准的事情,比如做更多的演讲,找更多的机会做演示,这把构建这些不同技能的刷子弄得太宽泛了,而你指出了存在这些非常具体的技能,它们加起来造就了一个出色的演讲者。而这些游戏挑选了一个特定的技能,帮助你一次又一次地只专注于它。
Tristan de Montebello: 如果你已经在练习了,你已经远远领先于所有人了,因为大多数人并没有在练习。他们试图从视频、YouTube 短视频或文章中学习。那样你只能走这么远。但如果你在练习,可能会出现两种次优的方式。一种就是你说的。你在做演讲,你在更多地发言,但你并没有真正在练习。就像你说的,那只是很宽泛的几笔。另一种是你在跳编舞,就像学跳舞,但你只学了编舞。好吧,那是你唯一会做的事。所以如果我要你做,我说,“好的,现在我要放音乐。随便跳。”你会有点卡住,因为你只会做你学过的动作。所以我们试图让人们走出“我必须呆在脑子里”或者“我必须做我记住怎么做的事情”的状态,回到信任你自然的沟通能力上来。
所以这就是我们在这里做的。当你不说话时,当你挣扎着说话时,你可以感觉到自己被困在这个盒子里,你周围的一切都很微小,你能感觉到盒子的边缘。而我们正在扩展这个范围。我们在尝试各种不同的东西,不同的工具。它们都有特定的意义,但即使没有那么多意义,你仍然能够,“哦,哇,”你在把盒子的边缘向外推。然后突然间,“嘿,我可以到处走动了。我感觉很舒服地移动我的手臂和腿,向右、向左、向上、向下。”仅仅是让你感到更自在、更放松的这个行为,就会解锁你的沟通能力,因为你已经知道如何做这其中很多事了。所以我们正在挖掘这些不同的技能集,我们同时在做这两件事。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,我们开始吧。我充满能量。我热血沸腾。
Tristan de Montebello: 开始吧。
Lenny Rachitsky: 不,我不打算……我本来想说我要表现得完美,但算了吧,我们就玩得开心点。玩得开心就好。顺其自然吧。
Tristan de Montebello: 确实。开始吧。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。我要说一下标题:痛苦最棒的地方。这是我不久前在另一次演讲中分享过的,就是这句我一直想着的话:“你恐惧的洞穴里藏着你寻找的宝藏”,最难的事情往往指向你想去的方向。比如我讨厌蓝纹奶酪,但有时候我发现如果吃了蓝纹奶酪并把它加进沙拉里,那会是我吃过最棒的沙拉。生孩子是另一个绝佳的例子,孩子会带来……有很多痛苦,但同时,没有什么比拥有一个孩子更让人快乐了。甚至有时候是留胡子。我留了这把胡子,我就得在余生中一直打理它。我知道人们看到我没胡子时会想:“搞什么?你现在看起来太不一样了,好年轻啊。”有时候我会想有个兄弟姐妹,那种痛苦,如果我有个哥哥,如果他打我,那种随之而来的痛苦,但仅仅是有个哥哥就太值得了,就算他一直打我。然后,时间到了,但这还挺扎实的。
Triple Step 练习反馈
Tristan de Montebello: 好的,我意识到这是你第一次玩 Triple Step。如果让你……有点太坑了,所以我给你四个词。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我必须说得更快。
Tristan de Montebello: 但我注意到的是,你让那个词……那个词成了一个新想法的开头。对吧,所以你会说,“另一件事是啤酒。另一件事是……”。所以你是在结束一个想法,然后转向下一个。试着坚持一个方向。这个方向就是直面恐惧。然后,所以当你看到一个难题时,就像,看,这不一定是个难题,因为现在我知道如果它很可怕,我就去做。就像生孩子一样,我觉得这太可怕了,但我直接跳进去了,现在我在向前走。所以就像我留胡子,不在乎别人怎么想,只是因为这可能很可怕,或者也许我剃掉胡子,因为那会是一件可怕的事。这样你就抓住了主线。如果是四个词,把它们融合起来会稍微容易一点。准备好了吗?
Lenny Rachitsky: 开始吧。
Tristan de Montebello: 社交——
Lenny Rachitsky: 社交隔离。有趣的是,社交隔离曾是我们所有人都必须做很长时间的一件事。然后突然我们回顾那个时期,就会想:“那真的是必要的吗?我们真的必须彼此保持距离吗?那真的有什么影响吗?”我们要学的东西有这么多,比如有时候我们看着股市会想:“我应该关注股市吗?我应该与它保持距离吗?我应该更频繁地投资吗?我应该阅读每天出版的每一份报纸以了解世界上正在发生的事情吗?我应该靠近这些信息还是远离它们?什么对我来说更好?”有时候感觉就像你在跑一场马拉松,有时你来回折返。有时候是,“我们大家都聚在一起吧。让我们关注所有的新闻吧。我们出去玩吧。”然后感觉就像我只想上个厕所然后溜走。
游戏反思与突破边界
Tristan de Montebello: 太棒了。这很管用。真的很好。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。
Tristan de Montebello: 真的很好。那么告诉我,因为再说一遍,这些游戏是为了让你进入一种动荡的状态,并找出什么容易,什么难,我注意到了什么?现在你知道你想练习什么了。如果你做了一次练习,你完成了,而且进行得很完美,那么你什么也没学到。一次非常容易的练习值不了多少钱。唯一有价值的练习是那些让你感到边界感的练习。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对。顺便说一句,我们还是把刚才给我的词复述一遍吧。
Tristan de Montebello: 哦,对。第一个是股市,然后是报纸,这个你融合得非常非常好,接着是跑马拉松,然后是厕所。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对。好的,太棒了。是的,仅仅是能接受做这件事,对我来说就是一个巨大的里程碑,就像是,啊,随便吧。因为在做这件事之前,我会想,天哪,我永远不想坐在那里,就最随机的主题编一分钟的演讲,而在做这件事时感到舒服有着巨大的力量,就像,当然,我们做吧。随便。总会说出些足够有趣的东西的。
表达作为高性能技能
Tristan de Montebello: 这就是为什么踏上表达这趟旅程如此让人充满力量,因为表达是一项高性能技能。所以接受一项高性能技能,开始应对它,并变得有点擅长,是非常让人上瘾的。感觉真的非常非常好。如果你擅长网球,如果你擅长高尔夫,如果你擅长任何事,比如产品管理,它都是令人上瘾的,令人兴奋的。一旦你变得擅长,它就会产生细微的差别,它本身就让人充满能量。而且因为我们作为人类拥有如此出色的硬件,我们一生都在说话,我们很多人一开始就有一个相当不错的水平。所以你很快就会达到那种,“哦,我在这取得了一些成果。这感觉确实很好。”所以投入其中真的有某种让人充满能量的感觉。是想象着去做这个练习让人害怕,但一旦你身在其中,它就是赋能的、让人充满能量的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 而且仅仅是做这件事,这是一个非常难的练习。只是一分钟内用你必须融合进去的词和概念,发表一段编造的演讲。我认为仅仅是做这件事也会让常规演讲变得容易得多,因为你不需要做那些事。所以这里有一点是关于在困难模式下做这件事,学习东西,然后,哦,好吧,我只需要谈论一个我已经知道的、我已经计划好的事情,那容易多了。在我们做最后一个游戏之前,关于这个游戏还有什么值得分享的吗?
寻找边缘与解锁潜能
Tristan de Montebello: 我们有一整套游戏,你甚至可能自己发明其他游戏,但有些人玩 Triple Step 会说,“哇,这太难了。”然后他们去玩 Conductor 会想,“哇,这是我的游戏。这太简单了。”但另一些人玩 Conductor 会觉得不可能,然后来玩 Triple Step 就会说,“伙计,这是我的菜。这个我非常非常容易上手。”所以再说一次,它只是你当前状态的一面镜子。而它美妙的地方在于,你开始尝试这些游戏时,你会非常非常快地看到,好吧,这就是我的边界。而你的边界在哪里,正如你引用的那句话所说,往往就是金子所在的地方。所以如果你能在那里花些时间,弄清楚挣扎之下是什么,到底是什么在阻碍你。当你解锁了那个东西时,无论在 Triple Step,还是在 Conductor,或任何其他游戏中阻碍你的东西,也在你生活中的其他地方阻碍着你。所以当你在那里解锁了它,它就会顺带解锁其他东西,这真的很棒,就像一组齿轮一样。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有趣的是,在我们交谈时,我脑子里一直想的,就是我只想说我觉得自己表现不好,但我正在内化一个教训:不要泄露你的感受。这是一个非常有力的教训。真的很难忍住不说,“哦,那表现不好。”每次我尝试完之后我都非常想说这句话,而我正在克制自己不说。我想象从你的角度来看,你会觉得,“不,这挺好。无所谓啦。”
Tristan de Montebello: 是的,完全正确。我其实在想,我打赌很多看你做这个练习的人会想,哇,我觉得我做不到。那会是他们的第一反应。所以确实如此。再说一次,这是一种习惯。噪音不会完全消失,但会降到几乎察觉不到的程度。所以我们试图做的,就是内化所有这些习惯,直到我不需要有意识地去想它们。这就像体操运动员在做翻腾动作并跃入空中时。当他们在翻转时,他们并没有有意识地试图思考如何翻跟头。他们做过一千次了。他们知道怎么翻。他们可能唯一在想的,就是将全部注意力放在完全专注于当下正在发生的事情上,依靠你的身体和潜意识知道该怎么做,是他们有点像监听器,就像编程里的键盘监听器。你有一个东西在那里,只是监听着任何异常情况。而且它非常非常灵敏。
所以举个例子,当我在说话时,我可能会对自己说,“哦,我可能现在在漫无边际地扯。也许我说的有点太长了。”然后就是一个小的监听器,会非常温和、善意地说,“嘿,警告,我不知道你有没有意识到这一点。”当我听到这个时,我可能会说,“哦,好吧,让我收个尾。”或者它可能在说,“我不确定你是否说清楚了,”或者,“你能在这里更精确一点吗?”不管是什么,它只是一个在后台温和运行的监听器。所以当你养成保持角色状态(staying in character)的习惯时,如果你这里有一群观众,我们可以立刻问他们,“嗯,你们觉得这个怎么样?”你很可能会得到非常好的反馈,非常积极,这会在某种程度上打破那种“哇,我没想到我做得这么好”的感觉。而人们会说,“嘿,我觉得那相当不错。”所以当你获得这种强化模式时,那个声音就会越来越弱。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。我需要那个声音变小。那就太好了。
Tristan de Montebello: [听不清]。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,我们再来玩一个游戏。
Tristan de Montebello: 总是会变小的。酷。我们来做最后一个游戏。这些实用游戏中的最后一个。这其实是我从我们的一门课程里拿出来的游戏。它不是一个独立的游戏,而是课程里的一个。但再说一次,如果你想自己复现这个,你可以很轻松地做到。
信念提示(conviction prompts)
所以我们在这里要做的是练习信念提示(conviction prompts)。这就回到了进入一种状态或改变你的能量来影响你嘴里说出来的话这个理念。所以接下来会发生的是,和 Triple Step 类似,我也会得到一个随机话题,我就必须开始谈论它。但现在,我得到的不是一个必须自然融入我演讲的词,而是一个提示。它会是一个我必须大声说出来的句子的开头,我必须想办法让我的大脑直接把句子补充完整。而这些句子是经过专门挑选的,因为它们会让你处于一种更有信念的状态。所以这基本上会迫使我更在乎我说的话。
这是一个针对高管风范(executive presence)的游戏。如果你想想那些你觉得具有很大威望或极佳高管风范的人,他们通常身上都有某种特质在说,这个人真的相信他所说的话。而这个游戏向你展示的是,嘿,有一条捷径可以让我快速达到那个境界。如果我想要拥有更多的高管风范,让我在我说的话中带入多一点信念。有一个注意事项,一个小小的警告。也许职场中百分之十的人需要相反的做法。他们需要的是,“嘿,你可能需要质疑一下你在这里说的话。”但现实是,绝大多数人实际上并没有真正在为他们的言辞和想法背书。而结果是,那些经常发言且充满信念的人,他们的想法比其他人更容易被采纳。你可能希望想法本身能说明问题,但那不是现实。所以对于大多数听这个的人来说,如果你能在你的话语中带入更多信念,那么你的想法就会有更好的机会获得与那些已经做到这一点的人同等的看待。所以这就是这个游戏的意义所在。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。好的。
Tristan de Montebello: 好的,开始了。标题是学会说不。作为一名创业者,我是吃了苦头才学到这一点的,学会说不是我能做的最重要的事情之一。但学会说不不是对一场会议说不,因为那可能很容易。而我现在要说的至关重要。这是对做所有我想做的令人兴奋的项目说不。所以正如我早些时候说的,我是一只拉布拉多。我对一切都感到兴奋,我真心相信每一个想法都很棒,但这并不意味着我能做每一个想法。我需要选择一个非常明确的焦点,并坚持那个焦点。而这是一个改变游戏规则的事物。当你开始把你正在做的事情减少到一个痛苦的数量,痛苦的一点点数量,然后当你达到那个点时,突然间其他一切都改变了。当我这样做时,即使我在做的事情变少了,我能完成的事情之多令我惊讶。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我喜欢。太棒了。这些词真难。
Tristan de Montebello: 是的,确实。这可不是个容易的。这不是一个……我拿到个难的挺好的。实至名归。
Lenny Rachitsky: 让我快速读一下这些短语,好让大家知道。你必须融入的短语是,“这至关重要。我真心相信每一个想法都很棒。改变游戏规则的事物。”
Tristan de Montebello: 只是,“我真心相信”。是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哦,明白了。好的。“我真心相信”。然后,“改变游戏规则的事物”。接着,“当我……时令我惊讶”。
Tristan de Montebello: 而我非常渴望你去经历一下这个,也非常渴望任何听的人自己试一试,即使你已经知道接下来是什么。比如,如果你想现在就为自己做这个练习,写下 Lenny 刚才分享的那些词,那些提示,随便选一个标题,然后就说一分钟,看看你能不能把它们融入进去。因为你会注意到,如果你带入信念,这些词会自然而然地把那一点激发出来。而且看着内容因为你进入的状态以及你说的话而改变,真的非常有趣。所以去发现你的大脑有多么不可思议,真的非常有力量。所以我认为对你来说同样的意图是,从一开始就选择一个强烈的方向。在一般的演讲中总是这样,你在开始时选择的方向越强烈,你就会有越多的想法。当你选择了一个强烈的方向时,一切都会变得更容易。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的,我们试试。
Tristan de Montebello: 但这里的目标,正如它所说,倡导一个与演讲标题相关的重要想法。准备好了吗?
Lenny Rachitsky: 是的,开始吧。
Tristan de Montebello: 开始。
Lenny Rachitsky: YOLO。
太空探索演练
Tristan de Montebello: 标题是太空探索。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我认为很难想象还有什么事比太空探索对人类更重要。我知道有很多说法,认为人们把时间浪费在试图把我们送上火星上,或者试图不去想地球上正在发生的事情。但我觉得没有什么比这更有力量、更重要、更鼓舞人心的了。事实上,整个世界都需要更多地关注太空探索的价值。我们可以发现那么多东西,有那么多东西可以帮助我们在地球上的生活。我们不能忘记在我们这个小小的地球之外存在着多少潜力。我们以为我们的全部存在以及曾经存在过的一切都在这一颗行星上,而实际上我们只是这个微小、苍白的蓝点。当人们不去思考这些,不认为这很重要,不认为他们应该花任何时间把我们送入太空、在太空上投资时,我真的感到震惊。退一步说,仅仅是听听那些去过太空的人的故事,听听那对他们来说有多么改变人生,就应该告诉我们,太空探索具有难以置信的力量和重要性。
Tristan de Montebello: 是的,太棒了。这太酷了。你的标题是太空探索,给出的词是“事实上”、“整个世界”,然后是“我们不能忘记”,接着是“当……时我感到震惊”,最后是“改变人生”。感觉怎么样?体验到……
Lenny Rachitsky: 嗯,有很多……这真的很有帮助,就像是,“这就是你要相信的东西”。我不知道我是不是运气好,但感觉就像是,好吧,我有……突然冒出一些东西,而我不会泄漏出来。但不管怎样,就像是,哦耶,很酷,发生了有趣的事情。
口语化表达与产生洞见
这算是另一个我真正的,稍微跑个题,从你们教的课程中获得的洞见:当你被迫说话时,新的洞见就会出现。你几乎是通过被迫走出自己的大脑,才弄清楚自己到底在想什么、知道什么,而这些练习正是在帮助你做到这一点。我觉得这非常有趣,就像是,这会帮助你发展想法、产生洞见,并把它们从脑子里拿出来。
Tristan de Montebello: 是的。希望我们能谈到手风琴法(Accordion Method),这是我拥有的最强大的方法之一,跟这个非常接近。
这通常是我告诉人们在说话时用的提示。我是这么说的,因为人们往往会进入一种公开演讲的声音状态。所以我们会在课堂上,他们正常聊天时,看起来超级正常。然后我们会说:“好的,现在开始计时。我只是要让你做个演讲。讲60秒,我们取个基准线。”我按下播放键,突然我就说:“这样做的重要部分在于……”然后他们就进入了自己的另一个版本,一个非常专业的版本,无论那意味着什么。用对话的方式说话,会让人感觉自由得多、有力量得多、连接感强得多,也有效得多。
因此我经常给人们的提示是:不要想我们,只是大声思考。这其实就是我们在做的。我们可以看到,大多数人的技能水平在这里,而心态水平在这里。所以如果你能改变心态去匹配技能水平,你已经迈出了一大步。你通过降低你心中的筹码,仅仅是去说话来做到这一点。当你这样做时,当你在大声思考时,你会有这些在脑海中连接事物的时刻,然后它自然地就蹦出来了。
如果你做得好……我很喜欢多年前 Joe Rogan 播客上 Naval Ravikant 的一个非常酷的采访,太精彩了。如果我没记错的话,在某个时刻他谈到了沟通。我觉得就是在那个播客里。但他大概说了这样的话:“一个人应该在和听众相同的时间发现自己正在说的话。”这就回到了大声思考上,就像如果我真在脑海中,我在建立连接,突然间话语就是它的结果。
所以使用提示,刺激你的大脑,给出这些线索,自然而然地创造了你否则无法预料到的东西。这就像给一个创意项目施加限制。
避免“胡说八道”的免疫反应
Lenny Rachitsky: 我喜欢这个。在我们转入几种方法之前,手风琴法(Accordion Method)就是一个例子,我想问一下,当人们听到这些时,他们可能会觉得你更多的是在帮人们胡编乱造,为什么,我们为什么会想要那样?谈谈这怎么不只是……你不一定真的会像这样去发表演讲。这是……我想我是在自己回答这个问题了,但我很好奇你是不是这样想的。这是在建立一种技能,这样当你真的想发表一个你已经准备好的真正演讲时,你能做得更好。但是,对那个潜在因素的看法。
Tristan de Montebello: 是的,我认为这是一个重要的问题,也是我经常听到的问题,因为我们都认识胡说八道的人,就是那种掌握了沟通技巧却拿不出任何实质成果的人。
接下来发生的事情是,我看到了胡说八道的人,然后我心里想,我真的、真的不想成为那个人。结果这变成了一种免疫反应,或者类似免疫反应,不想成为那个人的渴望,以及那个人在你周围给你的感觉如此强烈,以至于现在如果我朝着自由说话、大声分享我的想法、对我的话语带来更多信念或信心、不泄漏的哪怕最小的一步迈出,我的身体里就会有一种像免疫反应一样的即时反应,太强烈了,它在说:“哎呀,你正在变成那个胡说八道的人。警报。警报。回到你呆的那个安全的小角落去吧。”
但现实是,如果你这样想,那么你根本没有机会成为胡说八道的人。因为如果那个念头甚至能跳进你的脑海,那么你就是那种已经培养了非常敏锐的技能组合、能注意到人们何时在胡说八道的人。你对自己也有同样的技能组合。所以结果只会是,现在它变得太响亮了。
所以当我们进行这种练习时,我们想要匹配的是:“嘿,我想匹配那个胡说八道的人的沟通水平,但我要有想法来支撑它。我要真正在我的手艺上投入精力,而且我要能够以最好的方式展示它们。”我们想要能够做到的是注意到,好吧,如果胡说八道对你来说是个大问题,而且你注意到了强烈的反应,甚至只是在听我们说,甚至你自己还没玩这些游戏,那么你绝对可以从平息那个声音中受益。所以花时间学习这些技能组合,因为你很可能因为你一直远离它而萎缩了。在你的脑海深处,你会有一个非常强大的倾听者在提醒你,就像:“嘿,你现在到极限了。忠于你所知道的。”它将是你自己的一个非常好的指南针。它会在那里,你可以信任它,因为你培养了这个能力。
即学即用的技巧
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。这真的很有帮助。
好的。到目前为止,我们已经分享了一堆技巧,一些你今天就可以开始做的事情。我们做了所有这些你可以在网上玩的有趣游戏。即使不说别的,仅仅从这些游戏教你的技巧中学习,我认为也是非常有帮助的。你分享了一堆原则,就像是,这才是你真正提高公开演讲水平的方法,不是那样,而是这样。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我知道你还有几个人们可以直接使用的方法,能帮助他们构思演讲,我觉得非常有帮助。所以也许作为结尾,我们来谈谈这两个方法,手风琴法(Accordion Method),我想还有一个是弓箭法(Bow and Arrow Method)?
Tristan de Montebello: 嗯哼。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。我们来谈谈手风琴法。我们在课上简要做过这个练习,真的很有帮助,我也一直在向别人解释,这真的是一种让你的演讲变得更好的酷方式。所以请讲讲它是如何运作的,以及人们在构思演讲时该如何应用它。
手风琴法(Accordion Method)
Tristan de Montebello: 现在我说这话可能带有偏见,所以请姑妄听之,但我认为手风琴法,手风琴法可能是我这辈子最骄傲的事情之一,因为它几乎颠覆了我认为我们应该如何准备演讲的方式。
到目前为止,我们主要讨论的是即兴表达,这将占你演讲的绝大部分。大概80%的演讲是你无法提前准备的。但在某些情况下,你知道自己有截止期限,并且必须发言。你要么因为工作面试而发言,要么要和你的CEO谈话,或者你要向整个团队或一千名观众做演示。
用表达代替书写
我认为老方法很糟糕。它是行不通的,我没有发现有任何人在对此进行创新。这让Michael和我抓狂,这也正是手风琴法诞生的原因。什么是老方法?老方法就是我有一场即将到来的演讲,所以我要把所有的想法倾倒在一张或多张纸上。然后我试图重新排列这些想法。当我在重新排列这些想法并试图把它们变成一场演讲时,我有了更多灵感。我会想,哦,也许我可以这样说,但我不想丢掉我一开始说的那个东西,因为也许我会用到它。
于是你开始创建这一堆怪异的纸,上面写满了你关于演讲可能内容的所有想法,最后你剩下了10张、15张纸。现在随着截止期限临近,你必须做什么?你必须经历将10页纸变成讲稿的极度痛苦,这样你就不会忘记那些你花了几个小时编辑的精彩句子。而它们仍然停留在书写模式,并没有进入你的大脑。
既然我已经创建了这个花了很多时间编辑的讲稿,现在我必须背诵它。背诵这回事……我们并不擅长背诵。机器人擅长背诵,人类不擅长。背诵就像一条链子,你把所有这些环节非常线性地连在一起。每个人都经历过小时候背诵诗歌时的感觉,突然你漏掉了一节,你就迷失了,然后你就变得像车灯前的鹿一样不知所措。
所以我们在手风琴法中做的,不是通过写作来准备演讲,而是通过说话来准备演讲。我们将以一种非常特定的方式来做到这一点:我们拉下手风琴以创造极致的清晰度,并理解我们演讲的本质是什么,然后再推上手风琴,有意地只把恰到好处的部分带回来。
所以我一直在想一个类比,我非常喜欢的一个是,想象你正在重新装修你的客厅。老方法,也就是写10页纸并背诵它,就像是我看着我的客厅,我要重新布置东西,把可能以后需要的东西放在角落里。然后我会带进一些我觉得可能会很棒的新东西,我会努力让这些东西凑合在一起。
手风琴法说的是,假设移动家具很容易,我要把客厅里的所有东西都搬出去,只留下那些构成客厅的最必不可少的物件。所以我可能只剩下我真正喜欢的那张沙发、一个枕头、一盏我三年前买的漂亮灯具,还有一两件其他小东西。当我看着这些时,我对我想要的客厅愿景会有一种清晰的认识。然后非常缓慢地、非常有意地,我会去拿回原本就在那里的某些我想重新引入的元素,我也会带进现在看来很合理的新元素。因此,当你完成你美丽的客厅时,它将是一个具有非常清晰设计选择的美妙的极简主义房间,那里的每一个元素都在那里,是因为你选择了它。它在那里,是因为你非常有意地这么做了。
具体操作步骤
那么这如何应用在手风琴法上呢?我们要做的是你可以走过第一步。如果你愿意,你可以把所有这些想法写在纸上,只是为了把它们从脑子里清理出去。这完全没问题。但从这一刻起,就不再有讲稿了。我只是给出一个时间的例子,但你可以稍微改变这些时间限制。我们通过使用时间限制来拉下手风琴。例如,你会说,“我要讲三分钟。”所以你要设一个计时器,你有两条规则:我必须在整个过程中保持角色状态(staying in character),我必须强有力地结尾(end strong)。所以你必须坚持到三分钟结束,不管听起来有多糟,不管你犯了多少错。这里唯一的重点是我试图把我的想法转化为口头语言。所以我开始用所有东西填充我的大脑,并看看我实际处于什么位置。
然后在三分钟之后,你想一想,好吧,我喜欢什么,我不喜欢什么?然后你进入两分钟。你设一个计时器,再做两分钟。你对这两分钟要求非常严格,因为我们只是想每次都学到点东西。它不需要完美。所以在两分钟的时候,你做同样的事情,但现在你必须从那部分内容中整整削减掉一分钟。当你这样做时,这意味着摆脱噪音,摆脱任何感觉不对的东西。
然后你降到一分钟。你要一直降到30秒。所以你从三分钟的演讲开始,一路降到30秒。当你到达30秒时,你将只拥有那些必不可少的物件,就像客厅里的那张沙发和那盏灯。当你拥有了这些核心部分时,你会对你的演讲内容有一种清晰的认识,而且在你拉下手风琴的过程中,它可能已经发生了改变。从那个节点开始,我们要再做一次30秒,然后我们就要推回手风琴了。所以你再做一次30秒,然后做一分钟、两分钟,一路回到三分钟。在从30秒到一分钟的这个每一步中,起初一分钟感觉很困难。现在这可是你刚才时间的两倍。所以你可以带入一些与你想要分享的演讲相一致的内容,然后是两分钟,同样如此。然后当你到达三分钟时,我的一位客户曾说,他觉得脑子里就像有一个足球场那么大。有如此多的空间。而现在留在那里的无论是什么演讲,都将是一场非常清晰、充满意图的演讲。
**Tristan de Montebello:**不仅如此,这也是为什么这是一个如此不可思议的方法,你的演讲现在已经被内化了。所以你不再是处于用老方法痛苦地编辑了一份讲稿,然后现在还得去死记硬背,并且不得不把一份书面演讲假装成口语化去发表的阶段。在这种情况下,你已经达到了那个阶段,但它已经完全内化了,甚至不需要死记硬背。它就是内化了。你拥有这些支柱,你知道你要走向哪里,而当你完成了手风琴法(Accordion Method)时,你基本上已经准备好去舞台上发表了。但你现在可以用一分钟、两分钟、三分钟、五分钟来发表它。它非常有弹性。你将能够驾驭不同的时间框架。即使你犯了错也真的无关紧要,因为你会对你的演讲内容有一种深刻的感知。它不是被死记硬背的,它是被内化的。所以,你不仅获得了清晰度,并以一种非常有意图的方式构建了你的演讲,而且当你到达最后时,你实际上也真正掌握了它,并准备好去表演了。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**当你沿着手风琴法推回到三分钟时的那个例子,正是我做这个练习时的感觉,就像,“哇,现在有这么多时间”,因为你本质上,在我看来,就是把它浓缩到了最好、最重要的核心点上,然后你就有时间去在这些核心点上做延伸,并且你删掉了所有没人真正关心的东西,这通常是一段冗长的开场白,就像现在直接进入精彩的部分,然后你再扩展这些精彩的部分。这对我真的很有用,也是一次非常具有启发性的体验。对于想要真正使用这个方法的人来说,假设他们马上有一场演讲,假设他们一周后要做一个全员大会演讲。你会提前一周做这个吗?你会提前几天做吗?我想问的是,你把它安排在工作流的哪个位置,以便当时间到来时你实际上能记住你想说的话?
演讲前的工作流安排
**Tristan de Montebello:**我不能说一定要提前整整一周或两周,这真的取决于你对内容有多熟悉。如果你有一个全员大会,而且这是你在过去两个月里一直和你的高管团队在反复推敲的东西,你可能非常、非常了解它,并且你有很多清晰度,现在只是要把它们很好地组织起来。所以在那种情况下,也许你会想提前一周粗略地过一遍手风琴法,这样你就能清楚地知道,“我想让我的听众记住什么,以及有哪些我知道我喜欢触及并且感觉非常好的支柱?”所以你可以把这些看作是支持你所分享的那一件事情的基础支柱,或者是书签,也就是我知道我必须触及然后我想做的事情。所以这就是我会写下来的东西。我不会写讲稿。我会把这些写下来。然后在全员大会之前,也许是前一天,甚至可能是当天早上,取决于这有多重要或者你感觉有多舒服,然后你可能只需过一两遍,但现在你已经知道它了,所以它应该会在你的脑海中非常、非常快地浮现出来。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**听起来最后保留一些要点也是可以的。我很难想象在众目睽睽之下走上舞台,没有任何幻灯片、要点或演讲者备注。在手边放几个核心要点的要点列表会有什么问题吗?
核心要点与书签
**Tristan de Montebello:**在演讲之前,我可能会写下四件事。我的一件事,我们会在弓箭法(Bow and Arrow Method)中谈到这个,我的一件事,也就是我想让人们记住的那一件事,然后是我想触及的三个书签或支柱。这些是某种线索或提醒,会把我送入演讲的那个部分。例如,如果我在谈论手风琴法,就像我刚才说的,如果我回过头来思考这个方法的支柱。嗯,我的一件事将是手风琴法比死记硬背然后用老方法去做要强大得多。那么我的书签可能是第一,描述老方法或者就是老方法。第二,新方法或者就是手风琴法。然后第三可能是内化,不要死记硬背,那将是一种收获。如果我把这个记在心里,如果我有30秒,我可以说老方法很糟糕,因为你必须非常努力地工作并死记硬背所有的东西,而且你是在死记硬背书面材料,手风琴法要强大得多,因为你要压缩它并向下走,然后再把它打开,然后我会花点时间解释这个,然后我会说,所以你是被内化了而不是被死记硬背了。我现在意识到的是,其实挺有趣的,那些就是那里的书签,所以它们把我引向了那条路径。但实际上我会说,书签第二可能是客厅的比喻。所以它将是老方法很糟糕,客厅的比喻,然后描述手风琴法。
通过练习获得的洞察
**Lenny Rachitsky:**太酷了。这是一个绝佳的例子,展示了通过强迫自己做这个练习而出现的洞察。听起来也许这个方法最好的用途是,如果你突然在短期内有一场演讲,突然你不得不在某个地方发表演讲。这是一种非常强大的方法,可以在你意想不到的、也许就是明天的演讲中,想出一场精彩的演讲。
**Tristan de Montebello:**当我说我热爱这个方法时,我自己在使用它,我和我合作的每一位客户都在使用它,不管是五分钟的演讲,还是20分钟的主题演讲,我们都在使用手风琴法,而且你可以在宏观层面或微观层面使用它,所以你可以把它用于整场演讲,但你也可以说,“嘿,让我们专注于你正在挣扎的第一部分或第二部分,让我们用手风琴法在那里获得清晰度。”所以你可以把手风琴法几乎当作一种头脑风暴的方式。我只是想看看我最后会落在哪,过一遍完整的手风琴法可能需要15分钟左右。这取决于你给自己设定的时间限制。有时我只会做两分钟、一分钟30秒,那就更短了,但我会为了拼图的一块去走一遍,或者就像,“嘿,我们快到了。让我们真正内化它。让我们把它理清。让我们把它变得非常、非常紧凑。”然后我可能会说,“好的,现在让我们通过手风琴法把整个东西过一遍。所以你的20分钟演讲,我想在三分钟内听到它。”那真的变得非常、非常有趣。
手风琴法的学习资源
**Lenny Rachitsky:**太棒了。好的。在我们讨论最后一种技术并结束之前,关于手风琴法还有什么要补充的吗?
**Tristan de Montebello:**我们在 Ultraspeaking 上有一门关于手风琴法的完整自学课程。我想大概需要花30美元左右才能访问所有的游戏和所有平台。其中很多是免费的,但我认为这个在付费墙后面。但我们也整理了一份资源,在其中我们一路深入,在一门我们制作的免费邮件课程中描述了所有的手风琴法、弓箭法、保持角色状态(staying in character)和强有力地结尾(end strong)。网址是 ultraspeaking.com/Lenny。所以这是无耻的自我推销,但如果你想拿的话,可以去那里获取,然后弓箭法也会与手风琴法结合在一起。
弓箭法(Bow and Arrow Method)
**Lenny Rachitsky:**太棒了。很高兴你提到了这些,我们会在节目笔记中把大家指向那个网址。好的,最后一个话题是弓箭法(Bow and Arrow Method)。让我们来谈谈它是什么,以及人们如何用它来发表更好的演讲。
**Tristan de Montebello:**弓箭法始于一种思维转变,我们大多数人都在细节中纠结,因此对我们正在处理的所有内容非常敏感且熟悉。如果你在做数据,你就有所有的数据。如果你在分享想法,你依然有所有的想法。大多数人在准备演讲、演示、全员大会或任何会议时常犯的错误是,我们往往更关注自己想说什么,而不是希望观众记住什么。所以这里的思维转变是,不要那么关注你想说什么,而要更多地关注你希望观众记住什么。
我们发现,如果你回想上一次全员大会、上一次大型会议,或者你在 YouTube 上或现场看过的上一次演讲,你可能记不住多少东西。事实上,我敢打赌你可能只记得那次演讲中的一件事。而这正是这一切的基础。我们称之为弓箭法,因为我们认为一场演讲你只能记住一件事,而且在构建演讲时通过那个框架或那种思考方式去处理是非常强大的。而这一件事就是你的箭。所以当你拥有那件事时,对我来说,它实际上就是一个单句,是人们离开你的演讲时唯一会记住的一句话。你会对那句话感到满意吗?
要得出一个好的句子需要花些时间,但如果你有了一个好的句子,它就能解锁一切。就像你口袋里装着北极星或指南针。你随时可以把它拿出来。你总是知道你要去哪里。它给了你极大的清晰度。显然,这也给了你的观众极大的清晰度。
但你不能直接把一支箭扔到别人脸上。你需要把它搭在弓上并把弓拉满。因此,要把弓拉满,你需要给那句话增加重量。这通常表现为一个有趣的轶事,或一个支持它的数据点,或者一个能增加情感或阐释它的故事。所以你想找到方法来增加重量或拉满弓,以便你的箭能产生更大的影响力。因此,通常明确你的箭是什么的过程,是弓和箭之间来回拉扯的过程。所以如果你在按照手风琴法(Accordion Method)进行,在第一次之后或第一次之前,你可能会写下一个初步的箭,“这是我要说的一件事”,然后在下一次你说,“好的,实际上我要说的一件事可能是那个的改良版”。
然后你可能会稍微重写一下,接着你可能会初步填入你认为的弓是什么。“我喜欢这里用的轶事。我喜欢这个我认为很有力量的数据点,也许我可以以这个故事或这个行动号召作为结尾。”然后你会把它放进去,接着你再回去尝试一下,这就在你的脑海中开始变得简明了。随着你的推进,通常一个会启发另一个。例如,当完成手风琴法时,你应该有一支非常清晰的箭和那些清晰的节点,也就是弓。但真正关于弓箭法要记住的是,如果你只能记住一件事,那就是把你的思维从我想说什么转变为我想要人们记住什么,并尽可能限制你希望他们记住的内容,这将会给你带来极致的清晰度。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**这真的很有帮助。我正在为峰会准备演讲,所以我将会用到这两个练习,我从最后这部分得到的一点是,尽管你可能想说很多事情,但正如你所说,别人真正会记住的其实只有一件事(如果他们记住了什么的话),但希望他们能记住那一件事。所以本质上就是,你希望人们记住的那一件事是什么,然后有哪些支撑的论据能让他们相信那是正确的,并且是能留在他们记忆中的东西?
**Tristan de Montebello:**完全正确。而且同样地,与手风琴法类似,这适用于宏观和微观。所以如果你有一个使用幻灯片的演讲,把它用在整个演讲上。然后对于每一张幻灯片,问自己我的一件事是什么?你可能在那里也有一些支撑内容,但如果你对每张幻灯片都没有一个“一件事”,要么这张幻灯片不应该存在,要么它应该变成多张幻灯片。
没有“一件事”的症状通常是幻灯片上说了太多东西。我不知道想让你记住哪个数据点,所以我要把它们全都放在那张幻灯片上。我不确定哪条信息更重要。所以我要写下我所有的想法,我要把它们全过一遍,或者希望你能把它们全看一遍并提取出你觉得有趣的内容。但现实是,如果你这么做,人们只会走神。所以如果你一张张幻灯片这么去做,你将获得难以置信的清晰度,而且同样地,你需要更少的准备和更少的背诵。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**在此基础上补充一点,一个进阶技巧是把那张幻灯片的标题就设为你想让他们带走的那一件事。就把它放在那里,确切地告诉他们你想让他们学到什么。
**Tristan de Montebello:**是的。我很喜欢这个。
结语与闪电台
**Lenny Rachitsky:**太棒了。Tristan,我们经历了一段旅程。这是一期非常独特的实验性节目。我玩得很开心,尽管我做一些困难的事情,你让我做了一些对我有益的困难的事情。在我们进入非常激动人心的闪电台之前,你还有什么想分享的吗?你还有什么想留给听众的,或者想分享的一点金句吗?
**Tristan de Montebello:**我希望人们发现了其中的价值。我的意思是,我们确实发现了。这真的是一个团队合作的成果,我非常感谢你整理议程,真正引入了这些游戏,并努力使这变得尽可能实用。我想留给人们的唯一一点还是那个想法,即攻克演讲能带来多大的蜕变,而你在演讲上感到的约束越多,它对你的生活产生的蜕变就越大。所以我只想给出这种鼓励。它比你想象的要令人愉快得多,多得多。它实际上可以令人兴奋和充满活力,一旦你踏上这段旅程,你会觉得自己可以征服世界。这很美妙。所以我只是鼓励每个人,迈出第一步,开始练习你的演讲。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**太棒了。在做完那个工作坊后我绝对感受到了这一点,我只是觉得精力充沛,我想一直说话,但接着我就想,我需要更多努力。我需要更多练习。Tristan,话虽如此,我们已经到了非常激动人心的闪电台环节。你准备好了吗?
**Tristan de Montebello:**让我们开始闪电台吧。来吧。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**来吧。第一个问题,你最常向别人推荐的两三本书是什么?
**Tristan de Montebello:**七年前,我的第一位教练 Nathan Seward 送给我一本 Gay Hendricks 写的《The Big Leap》,这本书我已经推荐过无数次了。它基于这样一个理念:当我们经历过多的成功或幸福时,往往会自我破坏。我认为这与我们成长过程中经历的五件事有关,其中之一就是……叫什么来着,野罂粟综合征之类的。就像最高的罂粟总是最先被割掉一样,如果你在兄弟姐妹中表现得过于出众,每当你太耀眼时,周围人就会说:“嘿,嘿,嘿,你这样对别人可不好。”这种感觉会被内化并根植于你的身体里,因此成年后,一旦你开始表现得有点太出色,你就会对自己做出同样的事情。这本书的核心在于,将这个“超过某个点就无法再幸福”的界限,转变为他所说的“没有上限的向上螺旋”。这是一本非常激动人心且能赋予人力量的书。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**你最近有没有特别喜欢的电影或电视剧?
**Tristan de Montebello:**我最近没看什么新片,但我可以说我有史以来最喜欢的电视剧之一是 Cillian Murphy 主演的英剧《Peaky Blinders》。我完全沉迷于那部剧,觉得它是真正的杰作。另外我最近重温了一部片子,所以就算作近期的吧:Ryan Gosling 和 Russell Crowe 主演的《The Nice Guys》。我觉得那是一部极其出色的喜剧,精彩绝伦,我认为又是一部杰作。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**你有没有最近发现并且特别喜欢的实体产品?可以是 App,也可以是某种实体物品。
**Tristan de Montebello:**我面前正好就有一个实体产品,是我的商业伙伴、Ultraspeaking 联合创始人 Michael Gendler 送给我的。这叫作 Ember Mug,它能让你放在里面的任何饮品保持温热,非常神奇。无论你是喝咖啡还是喝茶,肯定都熟悉这种感觉:刚倒出来喝,到了第五口就凉了。而这个杯子能让饮品在你想要的任意温度下,保持你想要的任意时长。我简直太爱它了,基本上每天都在用。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我有一个那个杯子。我发现你其实可以通过 App 来控制它,能用 App 调节温度这点我很喜欢。虽然我最近没怎么用,但我很喜欢这个理念,我知道很多朋友也很喜欢它。还有最后两个问题。你有没有一句最喜欢的人生座右铭,是你经常回味的,或者会分享给亲友,觉得在工作或生活中很有用的?
**Tristan de Montebello:**我认为作为一个物种或社会,我们过于关注未来了,结果就是总是在追寻下一个目标。因此,我最常跟朋友、商业伙伴和家人分享的一句座右铭就是:此时此刻就是往昔的美好时光。我也时常提醒自己,我现在就要告诉你以及所有正在听的人:想想你的播客吧,它再也不会像现在这么“年轻”,再也不会带给你此时此刻的感觉了。你总觉得这些事物是永恒的,但总有一天你会回首往事并感叹:“天哪,那真的是一段美好的旧时光啊。”所以我现在就要说,尽情享受吧,因为此时此刻就是往昔的美好时光。
**Lenny Rachitsky:**我太喜欢这句话了。这跟带小孩的情况特别贴切,你总会觉得“哦,他们还小”。太棒了。最后一个问题。你是史上最快闯入世界演讲锦标赛决赛的人,我想象那是一段相当不可思议的旅程。我很好奇,在那段经历中有没有哪个故事跃入你的脑海,比如旅途中疯狂的部分,或是可能会让人感到惊讶的部分?
世界演讲锦标赛之旅
**Tristan de Montebello:**那段旅程持续了将近七个月,是我一生中最疯狂的旅程。我是在毫无演讲经验的情况下参与其中的,所以真的只是个纯粹的业余爱好者,我完全靠着比任何人都更努力才一步步爬上来。我脑海中立刻浮现的故事发生在半决赛前六天。当时距离半决赛还有六天,而我在两个半月前就已经拿到了半决赛的入场券。我本来是个无名小卒,现在却要站上世界演讲锦标赛的半决赛舞台了,我的大脑真的很难消化这件事。那时我终于构思出了一篇我认为有资格在决赛舞台上发表的演讲。你必须带着一篇演讲去参加半决赛,然后如果获胜,第二天就要进军决赛,你必须再拿出一篇全新的、完全不同的演讲在那个舞台上发表。
所以你需要准备两篇随时可以拿出来的演讲,而且理论上这两篇都必须达到世界级水平。当时离比赛只剩六天,我卡壳了,真的非常艰难地想把那篇新演讲拼凑出来。我终于拼凑出了一版,而 Michael 帮我争取到了一个机会。我大概两天后就要飞往温哥华参加半决赛了,Michael 设法帮我解锁了一个在 50 人面前试讲的机会。我赶了过去,发表了演讲,像往常一样,我们录了像。在七个月的时间里我做了超过一百场演讲,每一场我都录了下来。回到家后,我们会向所有人征求反馈。当我到家时,我心里觉得:“天哪,有点不对劲。哪里不对劲。”我当时极其兴奋,我流泪了。在写那篇演讲时我是真情流露地哭了,因为它太感人了。那全都是关于我真实生活的内容,是我极具共鸣的东西。我不知道,可能也有压力带来的情绪在里面,但那就是我有多么相信那篇演讲。
回到家后,我们把演讲视频传到电脑上,当播到演讲最重要的部分时,我看到了两幕场景。那本来是我期待观众掏出纸巾擦眼泪的时刻,结果有一个人拿出了当天活动的议程,开始看了起来;另一个人掏出了手机;还有一个人开始在包里翻找东西。我看着这一幕,突然意识到:“哦,这篇演讲,根本没人在乎。这不是一篇好演讲,简直糟透了。”随后我翻看了所有的反馈。
我收到了 50 条反馈,但全都是“祝半决赛好运,一定会顺利的,我觉得挺好的”之类的话,而我心里想的是:“我要当众出丑了。这太糟糕了。”一阵阵焦虑袭来。我抛弃了那篇演讲,在五天时间里从零开始,重新构建了一篇完全不同的演讲。那基本上提炼了我在之前三个月里探索和试验过的所有内容中最精华的部分,以及效果最好的段子,就像脱口秀演员打磨自己的专场一样。我构建了我的专属表演,并着重打磨了各个不同的环节,比如所有的过渡部分。
就在半决赛前,我把这篇演讲讲给一个人听。我当时在温哥华,正试图将演讲内化并背下来。我在一个广场上用边界划出了舞台的大小,一个人大声地演讲着,以此来克服紧张情绪。我想为这种压力做好准备,看看自己的大脑是否能记住所有内容等等。
不管怎样,我的听众是我们 Toastmasters 的区总监,但这是一篇面向 500 到 1000 人的演讲,而不是给一个人听的。所以我原本很怕它会冷场。但在演讲进行到一半时——这可是一篇完全重写的演讲——我看到一滴眼泪顺着她的脸颊滑落。随后她一把抱住我说:“你找对感觉了。你做到了。你做到了。”后来我走上了那个舞台,我成功了,我正是凭借那篇演讲赢下了半决赛。
Tristan de Montebello: 我想对我来说,那真的证明了,它向我展示了我所做的一切都是有价值的,它确实奏效了。如果我能仅用五天时间构建出一篇演讲,就能让我在世界锦标赛半决赛中获胜。那简直就是一种极致的“哇,我赢了”的感觉。所以当我走进决赛时,我觉得自己已经赢了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇,真是一个故事。多棒的转折。太精彩了。我很高兴你问了那个问题。现在我只是想看那篇演讲,我想更多地了解整个公共演讲锦标赛,我对它毫无了解。那都可以单独做一期播客访谈了。
结语与致谢
Lenny Rachitsky: 但是 Tristan,非常感谢你来到这里。这太不可思议了。这是我做过的最有趣的几期节目之一。最后两个问题。大家可以在哪里了解更多关于 Ultraspeaking 的信息?我知道你建了一个页面,大家可以在那里体验一些这些东西,所以请分享一下。然后,听众怎样才能帮到你?
Tristan de Montebello: 如果你访问 ultraspeaking.com/Lenny,也就是 ultra 拼作 U-L-T-R-A,ultraspeaking.com/Lenny,我们整理了五封邮件,深入探讨了我们在这里谈论的许多内容。你也可以直接访问 Ultraspeaking.com,在那里你可以免费使用许多游戏,还可以查看我们做的所有其他事情。如果你想关注我、联系我或询问关于这期播客的问题,你可以在 Twitter 上找 @Montebello,M-O-N-T-E-B-E-L-L-O。至于听众怎样才能帮到我?首先,如果你听到了这里,我真的很感激你。谢谢。谢谢你和我们一起在这里,而我非常希望你能做的是去应用这些。我们在一开始就说过,不说话就无法提高说话能力,而这个谜题的另一部分是,你想做你正试图提高的事情。所以如果你在人们面前说话感到紧张,你想把在人们面前说话作为你练习的一部分。所以你能帮到我的方式,就是把这些游戏介绍给其他人。你自己尝试一下,和其他人一起练习。和一个朋友一起过一遍手风琴法(Accordion Method)。试试 Conductor,然后当你成功了,当你有了一次很棒的体验时,你就可以告诉全世界是 Ultraspeaking 帮你做到了,那将意义重大。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。Tristan,非常感谢你的到来。
Tristan de Montebello: 谢谢你,Lenny。这是我的荣幸。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这是我的荣幸,Tristan。大家再见。
非常感谢大家的收听。如果你觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或你最喜欢的播客应用上订阅本节目。另外,请考虑给我们打分或留下评论,因为这真的能帮助其他听众找到这档播客。你可以在 LennysPodcast.com 找到往期所有节目或了解更多关于本节目的信息。下期再见。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| Accordion Method | 手风琴法(Accordion Method) |
| Bow and Arrow Method | 弓箭法(Bow and Arrow Method) |
| Cillian Murphy | Cillian Murphy |
| Conductor | Conductor |
| conviction prompts | 信念提示(conviction prompts) |
| Creator Cohort | Creator Cohort |
| end strong | 强有力地结尾(end strong) |
| executive presence | 高管风范(executive presence) |
| fMRI | 功能性磁共振成像(fMRI) |
| freestyle rappers | 即兴说唱歌手(freestyle rappers) |
| Gay Hendricks | Gay Hendricks |
| Kevin Kelly | 凯文·凯利 |
| Lenny Rachitsky | Lenny Rachitsky |
| meta skill | 元技能(meta skill) |
| Michael Gendler | Michael Gendler |
| Nathan Seward | Nathan Seward |
| peak end rule | 峰终定律(peak end rule) |
| Russell Crowe | Russell Crowe |
| Ryan Gosling | Ryan Gosling |
| Speak Before You Think | Speak Before You Think |
| staying in character | 保持角色状态(staying in character) |
| summary prompts | 总结提示(summary prompts) |
| Triple Step | Triple Step |
| Tristan de Montebello | Tristan de Montebello |
| Ultraspeaking | Ultraspeaking |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)