Tristan de Montebello: recommendation

Transcript context

…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." nd 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. Oh, I didn't know that.…

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