5 Powerful Habits To Build Unshakeable Confidence - Aliénor Hunter (Ultraspeaking)
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I have this pet theory that

that we are looking at speaking the wrong way around. Let's say you're at a drinks. In that moment, it's very easy to think, "Okay, I'm going to get better at speaking." And the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to be so charming and charismatic. I'm going to learn how to sit up. I'm going to change all of these outside tips and tricks. And then when I have that,

I'll be good at speaking. Social confidence and charisma is definitely something that can be learned. It's not necessarily something that you're born with. And today's guest on Deep Dive has a personal story that illustrates this really well. Her name is Eleanor Hunter, and she's a professional public speaking coach, which is interesting because just a few years ago, she had debilitating social anxiety to the point that she couldn't even go to the shops to speak to a cashier or speak to the hairdresser. That's the thing I hated when I was shy, is that like the

popular people are confident people and I'm not them. And I'm this strange person like sitting on an island looking at one else through a telescope wishing that I could be like them. And so in this episode, we talk about Alinor's journey towards overcoming social anxiety and shyness. We talk about the various strategies that she learned in therapy on how to question her beliefs and how she ultimately got over her social anxiety. And then in the second half of the podcast, we talk more about tips for public speaking. The problem is not the problem.

the problem is your solution to the problem. Do I identify as shy? Can I push back? Could I be something else? Is it hindering my life? I think one of the biggest mistakes that beginners make when they're new to speaking is that... So Alidora, welcome to the podcast. You've had a pretty interesting experience with social anxiety. I wonder if you can talk to us a little bit about that, please. Yes. So I used to be really, really shy as a kid.

And as a teenager, I was so shy that I couldn't really interact with anyone that wasn't a friend or my family because I was afraid of them. So something like going to the supermarket to buy a bar of chocolate was really difficult because I was afraid of the cashier. A, I couldn't find the chocolate. Then I'd have to ask them and say, where's the chocolate? Forget that. Let's say I find the chocolate and I walk up to the cashier and I give them the chocolate bar.

Back in the time, we didn't have the electric machines, right? And so they'd say something like, that's two pounds, please. And I would have to give them the two pounds. Maybe I didn't have the right, I don't know. It just felt very, very stressful. Then the machines came in and you'd have to call over the cashier. That's even worse. So going into something like Tesco would be terrifying. Something like calling up the dentist to book an appointment would be really scary because I'd be afraid that they'd say, no, you don't deserve an appointment. And ringing on the doorbell

I remember one time my mum dropped me off to the dentist and I was not young anymore. I was like 15. And she dropped me off and I walked out the door and I stood in front of the door and she was sitting there in the car. I was like, I can't press on the doorbell. Mum, you're going to have to come and press on the doorbell for me because I'm worried that when...

I don't really know what I was worried of. I think I was worried that when I pressed it, they would open it and I'd have to talk to them and they'd say, no wrong appointment, go away. Your teeth are too dirty for us. I don't know. I was just terrified of something. And so for most of my kind of childhood and teenage years, I was okay with friends, okay in school, like day-to-day tasks, anything that involves someone else was terrifying for me.

And so you use the word shy. Yeah. Like what's the difference between shy and social anxiety? Is it or is it like the same thing? For me, it's like it depends on how you want to define what you're going through. I use the word shy because it feels more all encompassing.

like more people I feel can identify with being shy than with being anxious feels like a scary word. Like you've been diagnosed with social anxiety and you should go, you know, get help. Whereas shy just feels for me, what, like what I was going through, but I think socially anxious was also what I ended up being called. Yeah. Yeah. Cause anxiety has the sort of,

Anxiety has that aspect of medicalization applied to it. It has inherently in it. It's a medical term, right? So it just feels, I don't know, scarier. Yeah. And I would know, like, I know a lot of people who would identify as shy, but who wouldn't identify as socially anxious. Like I would have said I was shy when I was younger, but I wouldn't have said socially, like, I didn't even know what the hell socially anxious meant. Yeah. But I guess shy is also on a spectrum, right? Because, you know, there are people who are more, I guess, shy confident. Is that the spectrum? There are people who have more confidence than others.

you know, if, you know, I'd be shy about striking up conversation with someone on the train next to me. Yeah. But that's like pretty normal in London to not do that. But I wouldn't be shy to talk to a cashier. So there's like some, is it fair to say there's some sort of spectrum here? A massively a spectrum. And I think where it becomes anxiety is where it becomes so debilitating that you can't live your ordinary life. But

shyness or perhaps some people say introversion is just like a lack of desire I suppose to want to just be to other people's not that you can't it's just that like I'm quite happy sitting here having my cup of tea and talking to myself you know it's a different way of looking at it I think hmm so do you think being shy is a bad thing absolutely not okay absolutely not I think if we're talking about shyness

as a choice kind of in terms of being someone who just likes to prefers to observe rather than be the one taking the attention I think it's amazing thing because so few people listen you know and I think being shy gives you kind of a superpower of like I remember when I was really shy I didn't really when I actually I mean I would say I was anxious I didn't really have

the ability to walk into a room, do what I just did here before the podcast and chat to everyone and ask them questions. Instead, I would just stand there and be like, everyone else is going to talk. But what that meant is that I could watch everyone and I could intuit kind of what they were feeling. And if someone was at dinner over like that corner at the table, I could see that they wanted the bread.

Because I can't talk to that. My attention is just completely on everyone else. I can see that they want the bread. At the time, I was too afraid to go and give them the bread. But now it's a superpower because I can say, oh, that person wants the bread. Let me go over and talk to them and give them some bread. Okay. So it sounds like you're saying that being shy initially starts off as like,

Maybe a sense of fear, but then there's actually benefits to being shy because it means that you're able to listen and kind of observe what's happening around you. Yeah, I think that's what I'm saying, which is that, first of all, I think it's normal to be shy. Might be controversial there. I think that I can understand why it might feel scary to talk to people. Because back in the day when we lived in tribes, if you didn't get on with your...

fellow tribe members, if they excommunicated you to the jungle or wherever you were, you can't eat, you can't hunt, you can't survive without them. You can't look after your children. So when people say public speaking is scarier than death and all of that stuff, I think that applies to all speaking. I can see how it can get so distorted in your head that if I speak to this person, they reject me. It's going to feel like death, you know? So I think, yeah, shyness is

kind of normal way more normal than we think it is or anxiety around speaking in some way i'm kind of using those terms interchangeably uh that's that's that's really normal and yeah it is also a superpower so when we were speaking before the podcast i asked you what would make this a win for you and you said something to the effect of if even one kind of person listening to this is shy and then realizes realizes that they don't have to be or they can become not shy then that would be a win

I guess what I'm getting at is, yes, there are all these sort of side benefits to being shy. But if someone can become not shy, then at least they have the option rather than being sort of forced into a state of being. And sometimes I worry that, and like, feel free to push back on this, but sometimes I worry that when people say, oh, I'm just shy, it's a statement that they believe with all their heart and it stops them from doing the things that they really want to do.

And it's like, oh, I'm five foot six. They view it as a statement of fact rather than as actually... It's not like being shy is not quite like I'm five foot six. It's not necessarily a thing that you literally can't do anything about. Is that fair to say? I think that's fair. I think that's very fair. I...

The only thing I might have issue with is like, if you do want to, if you do enjoy being shy, you have no, like if I look back to when I was 18, right? And my mom was ringing me up once a week and saying, Alionor, you need help. Like you're, the fact that you can't,

So there was this moment. This is like the changeover moment. I'll tell you about this. This was the moment at university where everything changed was when I put my duvet in storage. It was first term, put my duvet in storage over the Christmas holidays. And I came back in January. And this is like January in the UK. It's cold. It's like minus five. And my duvet is in storage. And I have to email the lady who's in charge of the storage room to have her find a time that I can come fetch it.

All my friends do this easily. I somehow miss out on the times that they're going. I could not email the lady. I wrote it a few times and every time I wrote the email, it sounded too demanding, too pushy, too like I was asking her to open. I just I couldn't write the email. And so for two weeks I slept without a duvet.

at university. Wow. And minus five degrees. Damn. And that is when my mother rang me and she was like, girl, like I've gone along with this thing for a while because I've known that you're not ready. And she helped me and she pressed the buttons at the dentist and she called up the hairdressers and she did a lot of the things that I should have been doing by myself. And it was that moment where she was like, you gave yourself the flu.

because you couldn't email someone about getting a duvet out of storage.

it's time for you to get help and i think it's kind of the answer to your question there which is like if you are if it's really inhibiting your life if you are having to manipulate yourself in a way to make sure that other people are doing things for you and your friends you always do things at the same time as your friends because they're the ones who can ask for help yeah and not you if you find yourself like i i still do have a lot of extroverted friends because they're the ones that

that can do all the talking and the phoning and you just have to follow along, then maybe it is worth checking in with yourself and saying, like, do I identify as shy? Can I push butt? Could I be something else? Is it hindering my life, basically? Do you think it... So that's quite an extreme point to get to before deciding I'm going to do something about this shyness situation. Do you think if someone identifies as shy, like, to me, it feels that just having more confidence is almost always just a good thing to aim towards because...

generally being if we think of the spectrum as being shy to confident obviously any virtue taken to excess becomes a vice and so we're not talking here about arrogance and overconfidence and stuff but generally more people could do with having a little bit more confidence in their lives and I suspect most people would probably say yeah if I could wave a magic wand and magically become 20% more confident I probably would but

Do you think that's fair to say? Because it sounds like you're also trying to say that being shy is actually a good thing. And it's only when it gets to the point that it's causing you to have the flu that it really becomes a problem. Well, I think what I'm doing here is I'm kind of avoiding your question because I'm afraid of saying it's bad to be shy. Because I don't want people who's listening. I don't want people who are listening to be like...

Oh, I only thinks that confidence is the only way to be. That's the thing I hated when I was shy is that like the popular people are confident people and I'm not them. And I'm this strange person like sitting on an island looking at everyone else through a telescope wishing that I could be like them. Like that's what I'm trying to avoid saying is that it's bad to be shy and that it's good to be confident because I don't think that's true. But I do believe that in...

uh like looking at your shyness no matter what spectrum you end on you it can help improve your confidence but it's the same for the other side of the spectrum if you're very outgoing and very extroverted i also think it's worth looking at your speaking because uh because i think that everything that you all your beliefs all the values all the ideas the insecurities that you have about yourself i think they come out in the way that you communicate oh yeah and i think they come out

in a in kind of ways that you wouldn't expect so a an insecurity like i'm not smart enough for one person can come out as shyness and i'm not going to say anything until i say the right thing and for another person it could come out as extroversion and i'm going to keep talking because i'm afraid of the moment where it goes silent yeah and so i don't think that it's like if you're shy you have to get help but if you're extroverted you don't i think it's on both sides of the spectrum

you're going to have to face some kind of insecurity or belief that you have about yourself.

Nice. Yeah. So there's a middle way as in all things. Nice. Okay. So you had this experience where, you know, you were freezing in the cold for two weeks because you couldn't send an email. And now you've become a public speaking coach. So what was the, how did that transformation begin? So it was very, it was quite slow at first. At first I just got help. I went to see someone for social anxiety. I think at the time she called it shyness to not scare me off. But yes, I went to see someone for social anxiety and we did a lot of work on,

questioning my beliefs that I had about the world. So I'd made up all of these rules that I had to follow in order to be polite. Things like when you go to someone's house, like today when you offered me tea,

the old me would have said, no, thank you. Because I didn't want to inconvenience you. And what ends up happening is that it ends up being ruder because you go to someone's house for a drink and they say, would you like a drink? And you say, no, thank you. Not even water. No, no, thank you. And so we tackled a lot of rules that I'd come up with to keep me safe. And that took a few years and I got

more extroverted or better, more comfortable with myself, the more we tackled those rules. Because it really was, it was the first time I thought, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe my way of seeing the world isn't the right way of seeing the world. So that softened that a little bit. And about, oh gosh, five years later, I was working in a normal job as a tech, in a tech startup as a data analyst.

and I had to start presenting my stuff to clients. And I remember my CEO, he was amazing, he said to me, when we go to client meetings, you have to ask questions, because otherwise, he didn't say this, but otherwise if you sit there like a lemon, people are going to think you're not interested, they're not really going to wonder why you're there. And I used to get that feedback at school as well. My teachers used to say, we don't know if she's doing well or not, because she never asks questions. And I always thought it was stupid feedback, but for it to come back when I was like,

26 years old I thought okay this is something I've got to conquer so I had this on my mind and it was locked down I think 2021 and you don't know this but I was I opened up my laptop and I was on YouTube and this little notification pops up and says Ali Abdaal is live on YouTube right and so I'm like great I love Ali Abdaal this will be good quality content I click and

I click and you are doing a live coaching session with Michael and Tristan, the co-founders of Altra Speaking and they're coaching you in public speaking. And you guys were playing a game called Triple Step, which is a game where you get a random title and you have these words coming up on the screen and you have to incorporate them in your speaking on the fly and you were smashing it. You were incredible. And I was looking at this and I was like, this is what I need.

This, this is this. It was like, it was fun. You guys were speaking and it was, it was like, it wasn't this stressful, overwhelming. You've got to talk to client and ask questions. It was finally like something that looked really happy and joyful. And so I bought that course.

You sold me. You sold me and you changed my life. I didn't think anyone watched the live stream back in 2021, but yeah, seems like one of them had an effect. Yeah. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Okay, so you start seeing someone like a therapist or something who specializes in social anxiety. Yeah. So what does this questioning of beliefs look like? What sort of process do they take you through? I'm trying to think back now because it was a little while ago.

I think I remember a lot of it was about questioning evidence that I had for certain thoughts and beliefs. So we would write down in the week all the thoughts that I'd had about myself.

Like I'm not good enough. I am bad at speaking. I'm shy. People don't like me. When I speak, I say silly things. I'm a disaster. I'm a failure. All of these thoughts that you have going through your head, I would write them down. And then there would be this column that would be evidence for, and this column that was evidence against. And I would have to go out into the world and write down in that week, what was the evidence for that thought?

Which I found quite easy. You know, someone looked away from me when I was speaking or someone got distracted or whatever it is. And then the evidence against that thought. Did anyone listen to me when I was speaking? Did anyone, did I have a fun time? Did I make a friend? And I found that column really, really hard to start with because I think, I think they call it confirmation bias or something. You're wired to

look for evidence for the things that you believe in. And so I didn't really, I couldn't look for evidence against, but the more I did that, the more I, I mean, you just see it on paper. You're like, I'm not really, my beliefs don't really stack up to the evidence that I see in my day-to-day life. It's an overwhelming amount of evidence against the fact that I'm a failure and people hate me and a very small amount of evidence for it. It doesn't make sense that I hold onto this belief so tightly. So that was one of the things we did.

And I think one of the other things I remember was something called distancing statements, which I found I still use sometimes. I find it really, really helpful. It's when you're having a thought like, I am not good enough, let's say. I am not good enough. And you're sitting there and you're like, I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. And I mean, that feels very direct, very real, very heavy. Yeah. But...

They asked me to add the phrase, I am thinking that I'm not good enough in front of it. I'm thinking that I'm not good enough. Then you say that five times. I'm thinking that I'm not good enough. It sort of feels a little bit lighter. And then you add another phrase. I'm noticing that I'm thinking that I'm not good enough. I'm noticing that I'm thinking that I'm not good enough. And what that does is that it adds just like a little bit of distance between the thought being right and wrong.

The thought just being a thought that you can choose to believe or a thought that you can let go. And I still use that sometimes when I get really caught up in imagining scenarios of me failing teaching a public speaking class or something. I'm like, I'm noticing that I'm thinking that I might do a bad job here. Let's put that aside, you know, and just noticing and thinking, adding those two phrases makes it so much lighter for me.

I did an interview yesterday with a psychologist called Julie Smith, who's written a book, a great book about- I have her book. I want to read it. I watch all her shorts. It's really good. I think she's amazing. We talked about this. So the way she describes this is, apparently there's this film, The Mask, with Julie Smith.

with Jim Carrey where he gets this like random piece of wood and it's like something like wooden mask or something and then when he puts it close to his face it suddenly like snaps on and then sort of controls all his behavior and stuff and then at some point he sort of takes the mask off and he holds it at arm's length and he's like oh it's just a piece of wood and so she was kind of describing that as being kind of how we identify with certain thoughts where if the thought is like up close and personal we you know thought that I'm not good enough it's not just a thought it's a belief it's true it's like of course it's true

But when you do things like I'm noticing that I'm thinking that I'm not good enough, you're able to hold it at arm's length. You're like, you see it for what it is. Oh, it's just a thought. Like, and I thought like, just because I'm thinking it doesn't actually mean it's true. And it sounds like the process that you went through with the therapist of like evidence for evidence against. I mean, some people say that writing things down is super helpful in this context because

The mind is so powerful that if you were to just try and do this in your head to be like, well, what's the evidence for me being a waste man versus evidence against? The mind is just too powerful. But putting it down on paper and seeing it written out where you can't argue with it, it's like, okay, this belief wouldn't stand up in a court of law. Yeah. And even writing down sometimes beliefs, you feel they're really easy to hold in your head. And when you write them down, you're like, gosh, do I really believe that? That's quite powerful. Am I walking around all day thinking I have no value?

It's heavy stuff. So how long did it take to sort of get over some of the social anxiety when you started working with the therapist? I don't know how to answer that because I think it was gradual. It was like every week we would do a challenge or something. And so every week I would...

get a little bit better. And I think that in my case, I've noticed that confidence is really, it's a devious little thing. You kind of get it in one area of your life and then your insecurities go and hide in another area, I found. So like I'd suddenly become really confident at going into shops and talking to cashiers and I'd have conversations with them. But then I'd realize there was all this insecurity when I was at a party in the evening with friends and it was

it was it kind of shapeshifts my insecurities they'd come out in different ways so i think it took a lot of time it's like uh it's like that game whack-a-mole you know when you're like put it down there and it comes back here you know that's what it felt like i think so how long were you how long did you see the therapist for in total i think it was two years in total so every week you're sort of making gradual progress towards like breaking down these limiting beliefs and

becoming more able to have conversations with people. Yes. And you've got to put the work in as well because sometimes you turn up and you've not really done anything that week. It takes a lot of effort, I think, because every week you have challenges and you have to actually go out and do them. And not every week you feel like going to go

give someone five pounds because it'll help you improve your speaking or go and make a friend or go give a word of kindness or call your mother. It's a lot of, yeah, there's a lot of faff is the English word I'll use for that. I can imagine. And then what sort of benefits did you find in your life as you started seeing the therapist and sort of slowly breaking down these barriers over time? The biggest benefit I saw actually was more empathy.

Because I think in the old rigid structure of my life, there were rights and wrongs. And there was, this is the right way to live your life. And these are the right things to say and facts are correct. And then as I broke down basically my entire world view and everything I believed about myself, I realized that life is a lot more fluid than that. There's no rights, there's no wrong, there's no right way to be. And so it gave me a lot more empathy for

or my friend and my family in the ways that they express themselves and the ways that they're struggling. And I think I was just less rigid, you know, and that probably made me a little bit more open to speak to people as well, a bit more curious.

So when you say rigid, so were you thinking that like people who speak to cashiers are like doing a bad thing or something to that effect? Like what was the rigid belief that you had previously? Yeah, that sounds a bit ridiculous when we say it like that. I think, no, I think you are your own harshest critic. So when most of the judgment was on myself, I wasn't judging other people. I was mainly jealous of other people. But I do think, someone said this to me the other day, when you're judging others for something,

it's generally because you're judging yourself for that thing. So if I was judging others for being too loud or too dramatic, it's generally because I was really afraid of being loud and dramatic. Those are my fears. And the more I looked for evidence to kind of

get rid of my beliefs that were really limiting, the more I, the less I judged myself when I was loud and dramatic and the less I judged others. Nice.

And so you said that one of the benefits was increased empathy. And then sort of at this point, were you at university? Where you started work? I was at university and starting work. Okay. And so sort of if you hadn't had seen therapist, how would you have been in the workplace compared to how you actually were in the workplace? So the thing with how I felt back then, it wasn't that I couldn't do anything. It was that I

It was like being on a knife's edge. It was like being between a rock and a hard place, right? Where the rock is the speaking that you have to do to the other person that's scary and the hard place is the consequence of not doing that thing. So in the workplace, for example, the rock would be speaking to a client about...

some project that we're on that's I don't want to do that I don't want to ask them questions but then the hard place is if I don't do that well they're not going to give me other clients and I'll probably get fired and so I was kind of I would have been I think if I hadn't had this therapy not it's not that I wouldn't have been living my life I would have been exhausted

I would have been permanently going to sleep feeling like I'd run a marathon because 10 times a day I had been dancing on this knife edge in between my greatest fear is about losing my job and losing everything that matters to me and my greatest fear is about talking to people the whole time. And so I think the main thing that I found in that therapy was just a bit more ease and calm and comfort and less exhaustion. Yeah, because it's quite stressful being in that sort of knife edge where sort of

the mind is in overdrive and the body is sort of trying to be like, oh shit, like there's all these bad things that are potentially happening and you're having to sort of straddle that line. Do you ever get nervous now before you speak? Yeah, if it's like a big podcast or if it's, yeah, if it's a talk, if it's a keynote that I'm giving to a conference of

Ah, to a conference of real adults. So whenever I'm speaking to people older than me, I feel like I have nothing of value to say to them. Yes. When I speak to people younger than me who are like students or something, I'm like, I'm chill. Like I've been through, I'm fairly confident with that situation. If I'm speaking to people who are like beginner YouTubers and I'm doing a session on how to do YouTube, I'm totally fine because I'm just like very comfortable in that domain.

but if I'm giving a keynote on productivity and there are, for example, parents in the audience, I'm just like, what the hell do I know about? Like, I'm just like a 29-year-old dude, like spouting productivity advice. And like, I don't have kids. It's like, I know that changes the situation drastically.

you know, had a, I think I was doing a keynote where there was sort of average age of the audience was like 45. They were all like kind of McKinsey partner type people and shit like that. I was just like, what could I possibly say that would add value to this crowd? So then I kind of somewhat overprepared for the presentation, which is kind of a good thing. But then,

You know, the presentation happens and people are like, oh, that was really good. And I'm always like, oh, no, but like it could be better. And there's a lot of that sort of stuff that goes into it. Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember like was there a peak moment before you went on stage or the night before? Do you remember a peak moment of anxiety or stress?

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And so I was giving the keynote on day two. And I saw the guy who gave the keynote on day one. And he was absolutely phenomenal. And he got a standing ovation. And I was just like, oh, my God, this is like the best public speaker I've ever seen in my life. And my talk did not measure up in the slightest. And while I was sitting there, I was enjoying his presentation. And I was also just like, oh, my God, it's literally impossible to follow this because this guy is literally such a pro.

And so I spent the rest of that day just like over-preparing the show to my presentation to be like, okay, right. I can't compete with him on this front, but like, I'm going to make sure I just add enormous value to the audience and added like a hundred more slides to my presentation and just make it as practical and actionable as possible. And so I guess the anxiety was there around like, oh, my thing isn't good enough. So I was like, right, let me blow it away with value. So that like, I,

something about this feels a bit better. Yeah. So that moment where you're in the audience and you're going, okay, I've got myself into some real trouble here. That I think is the closest feeling I would describe to what I had. But every day, all the time, with no power to go in, prepare something valuable because I've got to speak right now. It's like that

24 hours a day. That's pretty terrifying or rather exhausting. Yeah. Yeah. It's really, it's really tiring. It's really, really tiring. I would genuinely go to bed every day feeling like I had done, like I'd run a mountain man or something, you know? So to what extent is the shyness slash social anxiety gone for you now? Or is it that it's still there, but you've found strategies to deal with it? Like, how do you think about it?

Yeah. So in my old version of events, what I was looking for when I called up a therapist, I was looking to wake up one day. Have you seen the Barbie movie? No, not yet. I have to see the Barbie movie. Okay. I wanted to wake up in Barbie land. Okay. I wanted to wake up in this world where I was perfect. I never had insecure thoughts and I would wave everyone. Hi Barbie. Hi Barbie. And they'd wave back at me, you know, and I imagined this world of all my friends who I saw who were

are naturally extroverted. And I imagine that in their head, they never struggle, right? Or I see you on YouTube and I'm like, he never struggles giving big keynote presentations to people. He's super important and people love what he has to say. And so I had this misconception, I think, that it is possible to feel nothing when you speak. But confidence means feeling nothing when you speak. And in reality, I think the most liberating thing I've learned in this process is not that

It's not that confidence means nothing. It means feeling nothing. You still feel the same feelings. You still have excitement. You still have anxiousness to get excited to go on a podcast. But what I have now is that I know that I can do it.

I know that that feeling is a good feeling because I'm excited because I want to talk to you and because I want to share this message and because it matters to me and I'm a human and I care and I have feelings and if I felt nothing, I would be chat GPT. We don't want to be that. So I don't think, I've definitely lowered my, I definitely lowered my anxiety from the days where I was like running on a treadmill only thinking about speaking. I've definitely in a much more

chill place. I've got a lot more room to breathe. The rock and the hard place are like at the end of the garden now, you know, and I get to frolic in between. But I still feel a bit of nervousness. I feel a bit of pressure. I still feel a bit of anxiety before I speak in something important. And I think now I think that's a good thing. It means I care.

Solid. So then it's 2021. You see this video of me and Michael and Tristan doing some ultra-speaking games. What happens next? So they were advertising their fundamentals course and a new cohort had just opened, I think at the end. They did a very brief plug and you had like a little link, so I clicked on the link. And the standard tier was

was sold out but I just desperately I was I was hooked I was like I need this and so I paid for the course and I started I think I literally started two or three days later and it's a it's a five-week course three hours a week and I remember my first session and we did a game called rapid fire analogies where you have to complete the sentence and I remember I shut my laptop after that first session and I was like what have I just done like this is I knew then that this was

going to be something huge for me because it was fun and because someone had said that I was good at it in the lesson. That was the first time I think I'd ever heard someone say I was good at speaking and actually listened and believed it because in real life you don't really get opportunities to have people say

Like sit you down, listen to you speak and say, oh, Ali, you're amazing when you speak. Maybe you get that. My day-to-day job, I didn't get that much of that. People never would come back to me and say, you know, when you said this sentence, it sounded so confident or at least I wouldn't hear it, you know? And so it was throughout that five-week course,

I had people, coaches, but also just other people taking the course say things like, that came across really confident. I really like your energy. Wow, you have such a fun personality. And I was like, I have these things. I've had them all along. Why have I been hiding them? And so just in those five weeks already, by the end of it, I was a different person.

What other sort of exercises did they do in the five weeks? I guess for someone listening to this who maybe is in their car or something, is there anything that someone could take away from the course they can just sort of practice without having taken the course? Yeah. So the premise of the course is that you play a bunch of speaking games.

The idea being that it makes speaking fun, but also that the only way to get better at speaking is by speaking. And so you get to practice this in a fun environment where you get a lot of feedback and a lot of quick feedback.

feedback loops. So the main games that we played was this one called Rapid Fire Analogies, where you have to complete the sentence. And the idea behind that one is to get snappy, to get you out of the overthinking phase, which was my favorite place to live in. The phase where I would have a thought like,

wow, that book looks amazing. But instead of saying it to you, I would sit there and think, should I say it like that? Should I say maybe something like, how long did it take you to write the book? Did you enjoy the process? And I would sit and overthink and overthink so long that the conversation had moved on. And so that game is about just doing the opposite and training you to start trusting the first thing that comes out of your mouth. Because if you're anything like I was, you're way too hardwired.

the opposite end. And so if you're listening to this in your car and you don't have access to the games, complete some sentences. The moon is yellow because... Because it's made of cheese. Right? Amazing. You know? Tables are sharp because... They have legs. Toes are wrinkly because... They have skin. Right? And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But the premise is just start thinking. Stop thinking, you know? And start saying...

Stop thinking and start saying. Yeah. Speak before you think is what they say. What we say after speaking. Speak before you think. Huh. Yeah. Because I guess like one of the things that I really liked about the course and about like the whole philosophy is that I think it sort of taps into the intelligence that we have outside of our brain kind of thing, where sometimes I'll find that, you know, I'm doing a YouTube video or something.

And it's like I'm sort of stuck in my own mind and it's just like kind of all these loops of like, oh, this is shit. It's not valuable, et cetera, et cetera. But when I'm in a live Q&A where there's a couple hundred people on a Zoom call or in real life and I'm doing a Q&A and someone's asked me a question, I don't have the luxury of overthinking there. I just sort of say stuff. And afterwards I'm like, damn, that was pretty good. And I'm like, where's all this confidence and power when I'm trying to film a freaking video? Why does it take an hour to record something that's going to be 12 minutes long? But on a live stream, I can just

I can just say stuff and it works. And there's something around like the more like thinking doesn't actually help a lot of the time. It does in the sense of like sometimes useful to have structure if you're giving a talk and all that kind of stuff, obviously. But I find that even now, you know, I've been, I've made about 700 YouTube videos over the last six years. And even now when I hit record, I sort of start to feel like, like, okay, come on, we got this, we can do this. I'll get up, play the guitar a bit. Be like, all right.

Come on, we got this. And if it's a live stream, it's just like, you know, I'm doing a 90 minute Q&A about YouTube later today. I'm going to be super chill with that. Zero prep, rock up, have a chat, like be friendly because I'm not in my head. When I'm in my head, then it's just like, nightmare. Yeah. Like I have this, I have this pet theory that we are looking at speaking the wrong way around. And that if you are someone who is, let's take the example of someone shy.

And let's say you're at a drinks and you're sitting on the sofa and there's people around you and they're all chatting to each other and no one's chatting to you. And you start to have these thoughts that may be like, I'm not interesting. And someone tries to talk to you and the conversation doesn't really go anywhere for whatever reason. They get distracted or, you know, you feel like they're turning away.

In that moment, it's very easy to think, okay, I'm going to get better at speaking. And the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to be so charming and charismatic. I'm going to learn how to sit up straight. I'm going to learn how to use posture, use hands, tell stories, be exciting, get rid of my ums and ahs. I'm going to change all of these outside tips and tricks. And then when I have that, I'll be good at speaking. And then everyone...

and I'll be confident enough to speak up at my drinks. And it's kind of this outside in approach. Only when I have learned all these tips and tricks will I be good enough to talk to people. And right now, the reason I'm not good enough is because I don't know how to do these things. I don't have those skills. And I think that's the wrong way around. I think it's the opposite. I think that in reality, I heard this phrase and I quite like it.

The problem is not the problem. The problem is your solution to the problem. Nice. So the problem here is not your inability to speak or your speaking ability. The problem here is you thinking you are a bad speaker or you thinking that other people are judging you. And so therefore you protect yourself by not speaking, by staying quiet. And that is the problem. And so in reality, rather than fixing it from the outside in,

of like if I do all these tips and tricks then finally on the inside I'll be good enough. The reality is that on the inside you're good enough. When you speak to your close friends, your family, to your loved ones, in some situations you're totally free. I think everyone has those places where they're totally free and they can speak but then in this situation you're not. So instead of learning speaking from the outside in of like these are the skills I need to learn

And then I will be confident. We should learn it from the inside out. I am the way me, the way I am right now knows how to speak. And if I just unlearn all of those beliefs I have about myself, about being terrible and having no value, then I'll be able, then I'll be amazing. So back in the day when I was like sort of early teens, I would have identified as quite shy in that sense.

The context in which it came up was that I used to do this sort of maths tutoring thing at a place called Kumon, like a study center on the side. My brother did that. Oh, no, I never had to, apparently. I wasn't good enough at maths. So I was like one of the markers sitting behind the desk because I enjoyed maths. I was marking stuff and helping kids with their homework.

And I was like 14 and the sort of everyone else who was a helper was, it was sort of older than me. And a lot of them were girls. So like 16 year old girl, 17 year old girl, like,

I was like, oh, I need to be able to maintain conversation and stuff. And I was very shy in that, like, these were like these cool older girls and like, they're like, you know, good at maths as well. And like, I don't know. And I would really struggle to kind of hold conversation. And so I found a few strategies here and there. Like I was at the time started watching like Gossip Girl in 90210. I

That's great. Great shows. And that was a domain in which I was very comfortable speaking about those TV shows. Cause I was like, okay, cool. I know these guys. I'm pretty sure these guys watch them as well. Like everyone I knew at the time did. So I can connect on that specific plane. I've always really struggled to just be like, you know, how was your weekend or anything like that? Basic like that. I would be like, oh no, I could possibly ask that because that's like, blah, blah, blah.

And then when I was 16, we had our GCSE results day and I smashed it. It was great. You know, went with my mom to see the headmaster, thought it was going to be this big congratulations type situation. And then after a bit of a chat with the headmaster, he sort of, he was, he asked me what I wanted to do at university. And I said, I wanted to do medicine. And he was like, okay, I'm going to say something to you that no one is going to say to you, but I think you need to hear it. And he said that he didn't think I would get into medicine, not based on my grades, but based on the way that I was coming across. Because he said that

you know, I've been asking you about the subject that you seem to be passionate about. Not once have you smiled. It seems like, you know, I've been mostly talking to your mum rather than to you because you haven't really spoken very much. And so he was like, over the next two years, I have no doubt that you're going to get the grades, but you need to work on this sort of confidence thing and sort of show a bit more enthusiasm and passion for the subject. And that was a real like sort of turning point because I was like, oh shit, like I've been writing off the whole, like I get good grades by default situation for such a long time.

Now there's this thing I want to get into medicine at a decent university. I might actually be shafted by the fact that I'm not particularly confident. And so at that point, I made a rule for myself that every single class I would go to or lecture or anything, I had to ask a question. And so for the whole thing, I'd be thinking, okay, what's my question going to be? What's my question going to be? Put my hand up and ask a question. And that was helpful. I also started doing close-up magic and so learning card tricks and stuff. And that was a bit of a crutch to then show tricks to the cool kids. And then they would be like, oh my God, like all this kind of stuff.

And through that, I came across a lot of training for magicians around confidence. And I was like, oh, this is what I need. Because as a magician, you have to go up to, you know, if you're a walk around magician making money professionally at a wedding or something, you have to go to a group of people, break the ice, talk to them and ask them if you can show them a bloody magic trick. Like the thought of that was absolutely terrifying. Yeah.

And there was this, my first paid gig was at like a family friend's restaurant. And there was this like corporate event he was doing at the restaurant. And he was like, oh, you know, we could do with a magician going around doing some card tricks. Like, would you like to come over? And I was like, yeah, this is great. And the very first group I went up to was this group of like 45 year old geezers with their sort of three buttons off, like sort of hands in pockets, like beer in the hand, sort of just like very kind of,

group yeah i was like i'm gonna do this i'm gonna show them a magic trick and it totally failed like i got the thing wrong i got the maths in my head wrong it was completely died and they sort of just sort of laughed and went back to that conversation and that was just like a moment of pure like oh my god i'm terrible at this i just sort of sat in the corner for the rest of it i didn't even approach another group for the whole hour and you know my my uncle saw me and he was like he offered to pay me anyway and i was like no no i couldn't possibly take payment for this and i was like okay

this is a problem and i found all this stuff around like confidence and public speaking and things like that and started really trying to actively improve the skill but it was like this these various i guess the headmaster moment and then that restaurant moment that made me realize oh shit this is something that i actually need to improve i started reading books about how to be more confident and stuff and then and they're actually pretty helpful i started applying some of the insights and ended up becoming you know now people look at me and they're like oh you're good at public speaking and you speak on camera all the time and it really wasn't like that at all um yeah

So you learned a lot of, how did you learn confidence? A lot of it was around, part of it was mindset and another part of it was strategy. So the mindset part was, you know, to your point just now, there's this other magician I used to follow who would

It was really good, but he would specialize in going up to a random group and like doing magic with like just stuff that was around him. So sort of thinking on his feet and all this kind of stuff. And his whole philosophy was that confidence is not something that you acquire. And if you're thinking of confidence as, oh, I will become more confident over time by doing more of this thing, you've already lost. Because confidence is just something that you can just choose. Like in the moment, you can simply choose to be confident. And it's almost like, you know, the whole fake it till you make it thing, but like, you know,

in this moment, I'm going to act confident. And one thing that he would say is that there is no difference between real confidence and fake confidence. Like broadly, people cannot tell the difference. And so if you're faking confident, if you're acting as if you're confident in a social situation, generally people are thinking about you anyway. It's going to fly, like it's going to be all good. And you do that enough times and you realize, oh, I can actually just choose to be confident. I can flip the confidence switch in my mind.

So there were a few mindset things like that that I found really helpful. Yeah, and I think that's what we learned in the first week of Fundamentals. It was literally that. It was you're saying absolute nonsense, like the moon is yellow because it's made of cheese. And you're saying it, you're choosing to flip that confidence switch. And people weren't noticing that I felt like an idiot. And they were saying nice things instead. And I was like, hang on, I feel like an idiot on the inside. And people are saying I don't look like one.

there's a disconnect between how I'm feeling on the inside and how others are seeing me on the outside. And if that happens here, maybe that happens everywhere that I feel nervous and oh my gosh, this whole time I've been thinking people can see it and they just can't. And I think that's

Yeah, I think that helped me. But that moment you said, the headmaster's moment where he called you in and he was like, you might not get in, you're doing all the right things. That I feel like I relate to it so much. It's my entire first 18 years of my existence. It's like, yeah, you're good at the stuff that we ask you to do, but all of the stuff, all of the speaking around it is going to hold you back.

And I know that there are so many other people who get the same feedback. And I think it's unfair that there are so many people out there who think that they are broken in some way because they get this feedback, because they get told things.

like you and I were. You're great at the schoolwork, you're great at your job, but you're never going to go anywhere because you don't smile enough or you're not confident enough or you don't ask enough questions. And the implicit understatement in that is you, the way you are is not good enough and you need to learn some kind of skill. And it goes back to the thing I was just saying about you in that situation, I imagine that you had all the skills already. Yeah.

what you were learning was the mindset, the confidence, right? Like with your mom, you were probably quite outgoing and you did smile when you talked about medicine. And I just think so many people walking around thinking, I am, yeah, I'm broken. Like I'm an outcast. I cannot speak and everyone else can. Why not? And it's not true. I would say it's sort of,

Like for me, when I got that feedback, it wasn't like, oh crap, I'm broken. It was like, oh my God, thank you. Thank you for identifying this area of my life where I need to level up. Sick. Let's go for it. And I think similarly, if I think to like my team members and, you know, I've given feedback to a couple of them around confidence and sort of, I find myself thinking that like,

yeah, you're good at the job, but when you speak, it comes across as you're questioning yourself too much. And when you have the questioning tone in your voice, now I have zero confidence that you actually know what you're talking about because you've got a questioning tone in your voice. And now I have to start thinking about like, have you actually done the work? And then I look at the work and I'm like, oh, obviously you know what you're talking about. And I think there are little tweaks like that where it's just sort of, you know, even just like when you're finishing a sentence, finish it on like a down rather than finishing it on an up.

And it just makes everything you say sound a little bit more confident. Just like little things like that, because subconsciously, you know, a medical school interviewer or a boss or something is taking into account the subconscious cues of confidence. And even just faking a little bit more confidence makes you sound as if you know what you're talking about way more. I used to notice this in medical school quite a lot. Like there was a guy who...

He was a friend of mine, his name was Paul, and he was very good. But he would also say things with such conviction that I started saying things with conviction. I was like, this is good. I started saying things with conviction and

you know, actually fairly often I'd get the thing wrong, but like I'd say it with such conviction and people would be like, wow, like I actually just believed you by default. And then I thought about it and then I realized that no, that's just, that's actually just completely wrong. And I was like, there was so much of it. I think especially the girls that I was friends with, they were all really good, but they would say things with like less conviction and therefore they

you know, in that environment where lots of things are going on, they get the impression that the doctors would have is that they are less intelligent than the guy who said things with conviction. Yeah. It's like, there's just all these things that are happening in the workplace and in real life around the way you're saying something rather than the thing that you're saying. Conviction is such an underrated energy. Mm-hmm.

people do not use conviction enough. I feel like we're afraid of it because it's quite a scary energy to say, "I believe this," even if you're only 80% sure that you do believe it. It's almost a self-perpetuating cycle of once you do have more conviction,

then people will give you better feedback and therefore you will grow more confident in the things that you do and you get stronger. But at some point you do have to just throw yourself off the cliff and say something with more conviction than you thought you should and see if it works, you know.

Yeah, I find that Americans are very good at this. So I think sort of Brits and Canadians, I've noticed a bunch of Canadians do this as well. Sort of we tend to downplay things. Whereas when I spend time in the US, I'm always just like surprised by how much conviction people have for saying stuff.

even if I know they actually don't know what they're talking about in that specific context. Like if someone's, if I'm at like a conference or something and someone's out there talking to me about YouTube and I've seen their channel and I know they've got like 300 subscribers and they've been doing it for like a month. And the way they speak about like content creation and like growing on social media with such conviction, I'm like, wow.

I didn't want that confidence in my life. Most of us, 99% of us are way too far on the wrong scale in terms of conviction, like pretty much all of us. And then there's a select few who could do with dialing it down a little bit. But I think we're also afraid of being that select few that we dance around the very, very much not enough conviction area because we're so afraid of going a little bit too far. And I would love to see everyone just wake up, go to the office today and go too far just for one day, see what it does, you know?

Yeah, it's a good experiment almost. In my team as well, like occasionally I'll get a message from someone being like, oh, hey, you know, sorry about that thing that I said. I think I might've gone too far. I'm like, what? They didn't even vaguely register me because to them they're like, oh my God, I was too direct with that thing that I said. And I'm just thinking,

It was just totally normal. It was so normal to the point I didn't even notice the thing, but they're all in their heads thinking like, oh, I said it too directly. Yeah, because the line is here, right? And they're usually here and they went here. And then I'm like, gosh, that's way further than I usually go. But the line is here. You can always do what you just said. You send a message afterwards if you really think you've gone too far.

Sorry, I went too far. You'll be forgiven. I've rarely heard stories of someone... Because conviction is not an energy that is anger or aggression. It's not a negative energy. It might have negative connotations if you're afraid of it. But it's not something that you are aiming at someone else. You must believe me. It's just more belief in what you're saying. More energy.

and more certainty in your beliefs. Okay, so you did the ultra-speaking course on your life changes in the five-week course. What happens next in your life, I guess, as it relates to public speaking?

So then what happens is I started leading a live class, ultra speaking, which is classes that happen every day. And I did once a week, I led a live class as a graduate of fundamentals, which meant I had a bit more knowledge in the fundamentals. And so I'd have 10 people come in once a week and they would be these eyes looking at me saying, Alinor, tell us what public speaking exercise we're going to practice today.

I felt like a total fraud. And so I did that for a few months, I think. And I loved it. And it was the scariest thing in my life to have to say with conviction things that I wasn't sure I had conviction. I didn't feel like I knew enough about public speaking to understand.

to lead a class when in reality I did. I had done the exercises and I was just giving the exercises that I'd done before, you know, with conviction. So I did that for a few months and then I got an email in my inbox that said, would you like to apply for coach training? And I remember the application process. You had to send in a video of you coaching someone, which I found really

I never coached before. I wasn't a coach, right? And so I found a friend and I coached him and my most extroverted friend. I don't know why I chose that friend to coach. And you had to write a little blurb, about 100 or 200 words, maybe 500, I can't remember, on why you want to become a coach. And I wrote that a hundred times and I couldn't get it right. And eventually I think I spoke it and I just typed what I was speaking and I sent that in.

And magically they selected me, which felt like a complete magical moment at the time. I couldn't figure out why. I didn't quite have the confidence yet to believe it. And I trained with them to become an after-speaking coach. Michael and Tristan trained me for quite a few months. And I was coaching a lot to get those coaching hours. But I was doing this all alongside my job because this for me was still...

at the time, a way of improving my job, a way of improving my career and my ability to ask questions to clients. You were still a data scientist at the time? I was still, exactly. Data analyst, data scientist makes me sound too important. And then at one point when I'd qualified and I was coaching, I just kind of had an epiphany where I woke up one day, an epiphany makes it sound so important, but I just woke up one day and I was like,

What I'm learning from the coaching is life-changing for me. And to be able to see people change in front of my eyes in the space of an hour is way more meaningful than anything else I could do in my life. And so I quit the job and became a full-time coach. Nice. With UltraSpeaking? With UltraSpeaking. And I still work with UltraSpeaking. Oh, nice. How long has it been? So that was in August of 2021. Yeah. Wow.

Nice. So it's my two year anniversary. There we go. So it's like Zoom sessions or real life? Zoom sessions, real life if they're in London. I'm head of the London Europe branch, if anyone's around and wants speaking coaching. Yeah, a lot of it over Zoom as well. And running the fundamentals course now, the one that I took. Nice. That's pretty cool. It's super fun. Yeah. It

It's super fun. It's a full circle moment for me to come back here and talk to you. Oh, that's cool. Because I found them through you. So, yeah. I wonder if we can go over the various concepts that the ultra speaking people or that you guys at ultra speaking teach and if we can just riff on some of these. Let's go for it. So we've got musicality. What is musicality as it relates to public speaking? Well, it's...

It's similar to, I mean, the reason we use the word musicality, it's similar to in music. What makes it interesting is partly the interpretation of the piece, right? You play musical instruments, don't you? Yeah. The devil with piano and guitar. Yeah. And they have all of these instructions about how loud it should be and how quiet it should be and how it should sound. And it's the same thing in speaking. If you speak in one emotion, one energy level, one tone, you're

We call that monotone. It's supposed to be not a good thing. And it can be being constantly excited. And you have those people you meet who are always excitable or really, really quiet, really, really calm. What we're looking for with musicality is a bit of contrast.

a little bit of movement between the energies so that you can express yourself in a way that matches what you're saying. So that when you care about something, you can have a bit of conviction about it. So that when you want to think about something,

you can talk about it in a thoughtful and reflective way. So basically it's about matching what's coming out on the outside with how you actually feel about it on the inside so that people can understand that's how you feel about it. What is the one thing concept? This is an important concept. So the one thing concept is this idea, especially when you're preparing for a presentation, that your audience

After a week, let's say, when they go home to their partners and they say, oh, I went to this really interesting presentation that Ali gave. It was about, right? And they're going to give their partner a one sentence summary. And so when you're preparing your presentation, the first thing you want to think about is what do I want that one sentence summary to be? And it's the same when you're speaking off the cuff, if you can. What is the one message you want to get across?

That's good. Yeah. That's good. I should do that with my keynotes. I'm just thinking that, ah, that would be a good kind of unifying thing to hang everything else off of. And that just makes it more memorable.

Yeah, if there's one thing I want you to take away from this, it's this. And you can have all your stories and your anecdotes and your data and that can be supporting branches off your one thing. But I think I certainly used to have this tendency to want to fit everything in because there's so much important stuff and I want everyone to know everything. And in fact, all that does is it clouds everything.

your presentation. It confuses rather than adds. So choose one thing and then build it out from there rather than the other way around. Yeah, this very much applies to book writing as well, where you start with the hook. It's like, what is the one thing? What is this book about?

And like asking an author the question of what is your book about is like a very anxiety inducing question because a lot of people are like, Oh God, like it's, it's actually surprisingly hard to answer that question. Cause like, well, it's about this, it's about this. It's only like the, the real pros understand that like you need to know what your book is about. Like that one sentence hook before you start writing it. Otherwise you're going to go off in weird directions. Um,

And like, certainly with this one, you know, like the three year long process, link down below, the three year long process of writing this all the way through was this question of like, what is this actually about? What is the one message? And for future books, now that I've kind of gone through the process once, I'm like, all right, cool. I'm not even going to begin to write until I know what the one message is. I like, what is the hook? What is that? Preferably, what is the title as well? Because this title, Feel Good Productivity, only came like two years into the process.

And it kind of like the title informs the hook and the hook informs the way that you structure the content in a way to make everything support the hook. And you could be saying the same thing, but it would be sort of packaged up in a different order and in a different way if the title was different. And so there was a lot of like sort of radical surgery we had to do once we got the title to be like, okay, let's make sure that this title is, you know, the one thing that people take away from the book is that

To be productive, you try and feel good in your work or something to that effect. Or feeling good about your work makes you more productive. That's the broad summary. Yes, there's all sorts of nuance there. It's not quite the thing. I'm like with atomic habits. Small changes lead to big results. That's what the book is about.

And then it's a really good book beyond that. But the thing you remember is that small changes lead to big results. He's got a little graph of like exponential compounding. And it's the thing that people remember. No one remembers the four laws of behavior change, but what they remember is that. Habit stacking. I remember habit stacking. Habit stacking is another one. Small changes lead to big results. So I think there's a lot in a lot of different areas, this idea of like, what is the one thing you are actually trying to say? This is

really helpful but then do you think you knew it before you wrote the book the one thing or do you think you discovered it as you wrote the book yeah i did discover it as i wrote the book but that i also made the mistake of not like doing the research i i trying to do writing and then research then writing and research future books i would do research outline right which is just sounds so obvious and sensible when i say it now it's just like initially i was thinking oh i've made videos about this shit before like i can just bash a book out

I got 10,000 words and I was like, okay, I've run out of things to say. And now I need to go back to the research papers and stuff. And doing it in like that way around, I think was suboptimal. So yeah. With speaking, it's a lot easier because you can just speak, right? And speak, speak, speak. And then say, let's say you set a timer for five minutes. You've got to give like a 10 minute presentation, set a timer for five minutes, speak for five minutes. Okay. That's roughly what I want to say. Set a timer for two and a half minutes. Do it again. Set a timer for one minute. Set a timer for 30 seconds.

Oh, that's good. This is the accordion method and it's an amazing method for preparing your presentations. You basically step down the time. So you can start with 20 minutes, half the time, every time, step down the time constraint. And what that's doing is it's forcing you to get rid of the stuff that's not important and keep the one thing that's important. So by the time you get to 30 seconds, you've got a one sentence, one thing, and then you can step up the time constraints.

and add the stories back in and add the data back in and see what you feel is valuable to keep. But basically, it's about refining your message on the go to discover what it is, the one thing that you want to say. That is a really good idea. I love it. That's a good method. Nice. Okay. I have a keynote coming up. I'm speaking at Google in Ireland next week or the week after. So

Need to do a keynote about the book. Okay, well, I'll share it. There's a link for a course online on archerspeaking that just takes you through that method. Awesome. So I'll share the link with you. Nice.

This episode is sponsored by Kajabi, and they've actually got something really valuable for all of our deep dive listeners. Now, if you haven't heard of Kajabi, it's basically a platform that helps creators diversify their revenue with courses and membership sites and communities and podcasts and coaching tools. So it's one of the best places for creators and entrepreneurs to build a sustainable business. We started using Kajabi earlier this year, and as soon as we started using it, we were like, oh my God, why haven't we been using this product for the last three years? It's got everything you'd possibly need for running an online course or hosting an online community or building an online coaching business.

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which gives you access to me and my team. And Kajabi does not take any cut of what you earn. Creators keep and own everything. The way Kajabi makes money is through the monthly subscription fee. And even though we generate like literally millions of dollars every year from Kajabi, we're still only paying them a couple of hundred dollars a year. And actually in their lifetime, Kajabi have paid out over $6 billion to creators, that's billion with a B, and over a thousand creators have become millionaires through products on the platform.

Now, back in May 2023, I did a keynote at a Kajabi in real life, Kajabi Heroes event in Austin, Texas. And in that keynote, I talked about the exact steps that I use to grow my business from zero to over two and a half million dollars per year from course revenue alone. Now, people paid for the pretty expensive tickets to watch this keynote at the Kajabi Hero live event. But as an exclusive deal for deep dive listeners, Kajabi have very kindly offered to provide the recording of that keynote completely for free to anyone who listens to this podcast.

So if you're interested in getting completely free access to that keynote, just head over to Kajabi.com/Ali. That's Kajabi.com/Ali. And that'll be linked in the show notes and the video description as well. You just enter your email address and then you will get the recording of that keynote completely for free, whether or not you ever become a Kajabi customer. So thank you so much to Kajabi for sponsoring this episode. Recovery. What happens when you make a mistake when speaking? That is, I think, one of the biggest mistakes that beginners make.

when they're new to speaking is that if, is that when they make a mistake, they let it get to them and they let it affect the way that they speak. So for example, let's say you stumble over some words. If you're a beginner, you might notice that and start apologizing. Sorry, sorry, let me start again. Right. And what you're doing when you apologize for the way that you're speaking is you're drawing attention to the mistake that you're making.

And there's lots of different ways to do this. Some of it is literally saying, I'm so sorry. Can I start again? Some of it is nervous giggling. Some of it is, we call it breaking character, basically. Coming out of the confident conviction version of you and into the apologetic version of you. And what that does is it doesn't allow you to recover from the mistake.

It means that the mistake becomes evident, obvious, and then it takes a huge amount of momentum to get back into speaking once you've stopped. I know that for me, when I'm speaking, it's all going and the ball is rolling down the hill and everything's amazing. And then when you stop, it takes a bit of activation enthalpy or whatever it is to get over that hurdle again. And so I was watching Simon Sinek's Start With Why at TED Talk the other day.

And I just think he's a phenomenal speaker. He has a lot of conviction. And I saw about five minutes in, or three minutes in, I think it is, it's a very small stumble, but he stumbles over the word organization.

like, why does your organization exist or something? He says, why does your organization exist? And it's completely imperceptible because he doubles down on the word exist, exist. And then he carries on with his message and he gets even more excited and brings even more energy and even more conviction. But you could equally do the opposite, stumble over the word organization, get a bit in your head, stumble over the word exist and kind of crumble. And the distinction between

great speakers and starter or beginner speakers is not the amount of mistakes they make, although it does reduce. It's the fact that great speakers recover from their mistakes much, much faster than beginners do. So what are some strategies for recovering? There's a few different ones.

One of the ones to recover from a mistake, one of the ways to recover from a mistake is just to up your energy. So like Simon Sinek did in that presentation, you stumble over a word, just bounce into it a little bit more, up your conviction a little bit more and use that momentum to throw yourself into what you're saying, to double down on it, which might feel scary, doubling down on a mistake. That's one way to recover. Another way to recover is take a breath. If you're stumbling, if you're feeling a bit lost, just take a breath. Take two breaths.

and then start again from a different angle. Another way to recover, I love these summary prompts. A summary prompt is a sentence that you can use to prompt yourself as you're speaking. So a little bit like we were doing earlier prompting ourselves with a table is sharp because it has legs. Instead of a nonsensical sentence, it's a sentence that will trick your brain into completing it. So a sentence like, the important thing to remember about this is...

the one point I want to get across is, I guess what I'm trying to say is, in short, in summary, and if you ever feel like you are rambling or you're making some mistakes, or you're kind of struggling with the direction of your speaking, take a breath. And basically what's important to remember about this is...

You don't necessarily know what it is that you're going to say, but you've prompted your brain and your brain will complete the sentence as you go. And it just redirects you with a little bit more clarity. Nice. Silence. What's the role of silence when it comes to speaking? I think there's an obvious role for silence, which is that from the outside, it makes you look more confident. I think if you think about really important people, they are not...

I mean, they're on their own time and everyone else is waiting for them to speak, right? And so if you look at someone like Barack Obama, he uses a lot of silence and a lot of pausing. And I think executive presence is something that's very related to pausing and silence and being the one who has the guts to take a breath. Basically, the important thing about silence is that in that moment of pausing, you are unbothered.

You are confident that your message is worthy of listening to and that people should take the time to not interrupt you and let you finish your thought. That's the exterior part of silence. It gives you more confidence. But then I think this is even more fascinating, the impact on your thoughts. Silence and in particular breathing is the only time you really have in your speech to check in and re-navigate. So silence.

So silence allows you to take a pause and maybe change direction. Maybe discover something new about what you want to say. So let's say you are describing why it's important to be productive and you get halfway through and you're like, I'm missing something. I don't know what I'm missing, but I'm missing something. Take a breath, take a couple of breaths. Maybe a thought comes up to you and you're like, I don't like that one. Put it aside. It gives you a

and it gives you a little bit of time to go, actually, you know what I just said? That's not the most important thing about productivity. This is the most important thing about productivity. So I think silence is good for confidence externally, but it's also...

the most important thing you can do to actually navigate your speaking on the fly. And I guess we're often reluctant to take pauses because in us, to our mind, a pause feels way more long than it does for the audience. It always feels longer. It's exactly the same as before. Conviction feels louder. Confidence feels harder. Pauses feel like hours longer.

to you and nanoseconds to your audience. So if you want to practice your pausing, pause for way, way longer in your practice than you think you ought to. You can set a timer for like 20 seconds and watch it go down as you pause. You can hold your hands up and count your way through the pausing. It feels way longer to you than it does to your audience. But also it's

it feels really scary to say something and put it out there and just let that sit. Self-talk. What's the deal with self-talk? The deal with self-talk is kind of like what we just talked about with the example you were saying of sometimes I just tell people to be 20% more confident or add 50% more conviction and more energy and it changes the way they speak. Well, what that means is that

the skill set in those people is already there. So most people's skill set in speaking is already really good. There are very few people I meet where I'm like, you have a major skill set deficiency in your speaking. I rarely, rarely ever see that.

But for a lot of people, the mindset is the thing that's holding you back. And so a lot of the work that you're doing in your speaking is your skill set is up here and your mindset is way here. How can we catch that mindset up to your skill set? And that is where the self-talk comes in. If I can simply say to a client, like I said earlier,

That was awesome. People liked it. And then the people in the room say, wow, yeah, you came across so friendly. You came across so smart, so intelligent. And they speak again and they are coming across a hundred times better purely because they've heard the words. You're coming across so smart and so intelligent. Then so much of speaking is self-talk. I would go so far as to say 90% of speaking is in the way that you think about yourself rather than the skills you have. Yeah.

I guess what we're saying is that it's useful to think of yourself as more confident than you feel or like more authoritative than you feel. It is. I listened to, I don't know if you've heard this, this clip on YouTube of Michelle Obama talking about imposter syndrome. And she describes it so beautifully. She says, you know, it's that feeling that you have when you feel like you don't belong. And she was saying, I've been...

I've been pretty much everywhere. I've been in all the biggest rooms of the world. I've met with the most important people in the world. And I've been in all these incredible situations. And at the start, she said she used to walk in and feel like a bit intimidated, like she didn't belong. And then at some point, she looked around the room. She looked at all these men around her and she said, no, actually, it's you that doesn't belong. You know, you're the one. I belong here. You're spouting a bunch of nonsense, you know. And

Just, that's just a mindset shift, right? That's just her walking in the next day and realizing that actually all these thoughts she's been telling herself about not belonging, not necessarily true. And she has just as much value to be there as anyone else. And so part of it, I think, is just treating yourself as if you have more value.

right to be there than you think you do. I sometimes say to myself, what would Michelle Obama do? I like it. I think she's awesome. And I'm like, how would I act if I had all the experience and the gravitas and the love that Michelle Obama has, how would I walk into a room? And I find that helps me just in the moment to pack myself up a little bit more. But the other part of it is the more experience you have doing things that scare you,

So speaking under pressure and surviving it and not only surviving it, but thriving during it, the more you will know that you can do it. Nice. A few more questions from our Telegram community. So we've got a question from Mylan who says, how do you have any tips to getting out of your comfort zone more and pushing yourself?

They say, I'm fine when I chat to people, but I won't ever start a conversation because I'm comfortable just doing my own thing. Yeah, I'm fine when I chat to people, but I won't ever start a conversation. Okay. There's a bunch of different things you can do for that. I like your one of you made a rule that I'm always going to ask a question. You know, I say that sometimes. I say that whenever you go somewhere, just raise your hand. You don't even know what you're going to say yet. Just raise your hand and then you've got to say something, right? So make a...

commitment to yourself kind of a commitment to yourself to speak and it's better if you can do it by tricking yourself i.e. by raising the hand before you know what you're going to say because then you know you've got to say something but if I'm sitting there the whole time I go to I went to talk the other day and I was like I'm going to ask a question I'm going to ask a question I'm a public speaking coach I'm going to ask a question

And I sat there the whole time. My hands were down and other people were asking questions. And it was getting towards the end of question time. And I was thinking, oh God, I'm running out of time to ask a question. I'm running out of time. And there was a moment where I would have let it go. And I was like, no, I can't do that. Stick your hand up. Force, trick yourself into doing the thing you want to do. That's one thing. The other thing I would say is join groups.

join a club, like join a Toastmasters club, join ultra speaking, go to a place where you can practice speaking in a comfortable environment that is separate from your life, where people care about you and improving speaking and giving feedback and all of that stuff in a way that feels very low risk. Because if you're trying to improve your speaking in the real world with friends that you care about and work that you care about, it can feel like a lot of pressure.

It can feel really, really scary, but do it. But you do need those reps. You do need to speak in a different way and feel the difference and be rewarded for that and go through that feedback loop enough times to have the confidence to do it in the real world. So find a place where you can do that, whatever it is. Yeah, I find that...

You know, when I'm about to stick my head up to ask a question or to volunteer something, I'll always feel that moment of indecision to be like, oh, you know, is this even a good question? Is it worth, like, I don't know. And then I almost always think that, like, who is the sort of person I want to be? Someone who asks a question or someone who is afraid of asking a question? And the answer is usually clear. It's like, okay, I mean, even if they don't pick on me, even if they don't like, even if whatever, it's like, I have...

it's a win for me if I put my hand up to volunteer the thing. And again, at this conference I was at last week, you know, the person sitting next to me was like confused about something and she was like, oh, I'm not sure if I should ask. I was like, yeah, put your hand up and ask because like, you know, you're asking questions from people during the talk and she was like, no, it's, you know, it's probably a dumb question. I'm like, no, you know, this thing is a dumb question. Like,

And she didn't ask the question because there was all the, all of the fear and the indecision and the, oh, but like, oh, I'm sure it's a stupid question. I'm sure not. I'm sure I'm the only one thinking like, who doesn't understand the difference between operating cashflow and free cashflow or whatever the thing was. And I was like, no, it's genuinely confusing. Like I would offer you to ask that question. Yeah. No, but so this, I struggled with that a lot, especially in my journey to becoming a coach.

So I went through this phase of when I just when I was in the early phase of my training, I was confident in speaking. I'd done my ultra speaking. I could speak to the clients. But part of being...

a coach is also being able to figure out what's going on underneath. Right. And so I remember I ended this session and I was being observed by Michael and Tristan because I was still in coach training. I ended this session and it was a really underwhelming session. Like I hadn't got any real meaningful change in the client. They hadn't shifted in the way they were speaking. And I ended it. And I remember Michael said, he said, what were you, what are you looking for?

What were you looking for in this client? What was the one thing that you think was going to change their speaking? And I remember I was thinking, well, they were saying that it was about them not speaking up enough at work. They were saying that it was about them not speaking up enough at work. But whenever we did the reps they were supposed to do, they were doing it perfectly. And I couldn't understand that disconnect.

And in that session, instead of asking them a question or saying a bold thing, like saying, hey, I'm noticing that you're saying you can't speak up. But when I ask you to speak up, you speak up. What's going on there? I just fluffied around the thing and wasted 45 minutes of our time when that one question would have unlocked everything. Right. And I think it's the same thing in everyday situations, which is that

one question can completely change the course of a conversation. That instinct you have about like, I don't understand this, this doesn't make sense, there's something that's off here. Probably everyone else in the room is having that instinct. And if you don't ask it, you're now wasting the next 45 minutes out, like the rest of this conversation, because there's something missing for you.

We have a question here from Molly in our Telegram community as well, who says, how do you get over thinking that everyone is judging you or thinking that you're stupid in social situations? How do you be yourself regardless of the people that you're with? Get over thinking that people are judging you and thinking that you're stupid in social situations. It's funny, I want to say you don't. Like I want to say it's sometimes I do feel like I've said something stupid, you know, and that's okay. It's normal.

So part of it, I think, is getting over this expectation that one day you'll feel perfect. Right. But to answer that question properly, I think it's a combination of pretty much everything we've talked about. So it's going to be look for evidence of things that you're doing well. Most of the time, if you're feeling judged or whatever, you'll notice that you're only picking up on the things where they prove the fact that people are judging you. Look for evidence that people are enjoying time with you. Do they invite you back?

Did you get invited? How did you walk into that party in the first place? Like someone invited you, right? They wanted you there. And so look for evidence. And every time that you speak, make it a mental framework to pat yourself on the back. Oh, I did this thing well. And then you can judge all the bad things you did if you want to, but make it a priority to think about the good things that you're doing. That's one thing. The other thing is, uh,

actively ask people for good feedback on your speaking. Either by going to join a club where you're speaking in front of them or just in general, ask your close friends, what do you like about me? What are the good things in my personality? Because so often I will... I think 50% of my job is just reflecting back what I see to people. They just come in and they speak and I say, has anyone ever told you that you come across like this? Wow, I've never heard that. So...

Ask for it. Another question from Brian from our telegram community is, my lack of confidence seems to be holding me back from pursuing opportunities and connecting with others. Are there any specific techniques or exercises you recommend to gradually boost my self-esteem? And then to follow up, how can I work on challenging negative thoughts and beliefs that contribute to my feeling of inadequacy? Come to Altra Speaking. I'll help you. But if that's not an option, I think I would say...

So if you're struggling with confidence and self-esteem, the first thing you want to do is to build yourself up step by step. So I think the main mistake I made when I was first in my kind of socially anxious phase is that I was expecting myself to...

do everything that everyone else could with the same amount of ease. So for example, we would be sitting in a restaurant with my mother and I would get a dish that I hadn't ordered and she would say, I'll call the waiter over and send it back.

For someone who struggles with shyness, that is basically the end of the world. Like I would rather crawl into the ground or sprint out of there, run to Timbuktu. I don't know what it like, you know, I can't handle that situation. And I think...

A lot of the challenges you see online are around that kind of thing of like challenge yourself to do something scary, go into a coffee shop or ask someone for $100 or something like that. And if you're struggling with self-esteem, I'd say start small.

Start with one tiny little change that you can make in your day and nail it, you know, nail it. So maybe it is using one summary prompt at the end of your morning briefing with your boss and saying, so the one thing I did this week that's the most important is, and say that with confidence and turn up your conviction and nail it.

Right. And pat yourself on the back and look at the evidence for how well you did. And then do that again and add something else to it and then do that again and add something else to it. But just work up there slowly a little bit every day rather than trying to do something terrifying and it being a traumatic experience. Nice. I think another thing that I find helpful for self-esteem is to recognize that almost everyone thinks that they're not good enough.

Like literally almost everyone does. It's by no means an original thought. And at one point, my brother and I have this podcast that we do on and off. And at one point we interviewed, well, we had a guest on who's a friend of mine who was one of the quote, cool kids at university in that, you know, gym going, alcohol drinking, socially like extroverted kind of vibe. Yeah.

And this was a few years after we'd graduated. So we were asking this guy, be like, what's it like being one of the cool kids? Like, what does that look like? And, you know, he was on the sports team and was good at all of the things that you'd associate with like, you know, a sort of quote, cool kid.

And it was really interesting because he was like, yeah, you know, I'd go to these parties often and I'll feel like I don't belong because I'm not drinking as much as the next guy. And or I'd, you know, I'd go to this thing and think that, well, you know, I'm only like on the third team for, you know, tennis rather than the first team. So it's like, you know, obviously there's some sort of social me there.

And he also said that he kind of went into these events thinking, feeling left out. And then after speaking to people over time, he realized that everyone sort of felt like they didn't belong at these events. And they were all sort of putting on a little bit of a show. But when everyone in a group is putting on a little bit of a show, you get the impression that you're the only one who's like feeling as if you're putting on a little bit of a show. And yeah, increasingly as I've come across more and more people through the stuff that I do and just speaking to people, just the feeling of inadequacy and lack of self-esteem and stuff

Almost no one has it in spades. It's like everyone is struggling with it to some degree in some domain. And so, yeah, I think I'm just understanding that you're not alone. I always find it to be really helpful. It is like one of the most human things. I think it is what distinguishes us from other animals is that we have this ability to reflect upon ourselves and question ourselves and question the things that we do. And overcoming self-esteem issues is...

a lifelong battle I think for for all of us it's not something that you click your fingers and it happens overnight you know okay um I guess final thing to talk about is what like let's say someone's gotten to the end of this this podcast I think we've talked about it over two hours now so you know they're clearly vibing with stuff that we're talking about here and they're thinking cool yeah I I do feel a bit shy I would like to be more confident I would like to be better at speaking what are maybe kind of the top three things three actions that they can take from immediately after listening to this that they can start applying to their life

put down the podcast, listen to all the other episodes first, watch all of Ali Abdaal's stuff, then put it down, put down the book and find a situation in which you can speak. You will not improve your speaking without speaking. That's a fact and I'm sorry, but it's true. So find a situation in which you can speak preferably under pressure because there's no point practicing a situation that you feel comfortable in and preferably under

with feedback right so that's the first thing you can do and there's loads of clubs and stuff online available so I would say that's the that's basically the main tip I would give you the second tip that I would say is so I was chatting to my sister yesterday and she's asking me how's your week looking what are you up to and I was like I'm going on this podcast tomorrow I'm going to talk about social anxiety and tell all about my journey about being shy just like oh wow that's so inspiring what's the one thing you want them to take away

Classic sister. Okay. And I gave her this really inspiring spiel about shy people not being broken and it being really a great thing to be shy. And I want people to feel not alone and not struggling in that.

and you can overcome it just like me you can overcome it all of this stuff and she just looked at me blankly at the end and she's like well that sounds horrible that sounds like a really unpleasant two or five years that you had overcoming your fears it looks it sounds like a really miserable time and i would not i'm not inspired to do what you did because you're asking me to get up every day for the rest of my life and do something that scares me and i was like okay i'm

I think I've forgotten something really important, which is that it's fun. Speaking can be fun. But look for the ways that it can open up opportunities for you. In this journey, not only have I become a public speaking coach and changed my career, I've also changed my life. I have better friendships.

I went yesterday to a coffee shop to work. I was writing out some ideas for a new public speaking course that we're going to launch and I was really excited about it and I knocked my notebook and I sat and I had my tea and I looked in my bag and I didn't have a pen. So I'll drink my tea, do some emails and I decide I'm going to go to another coffee shop but on the way I'll stop off at a store and buy a pen, walk into Mooji and

dangerous place to go into because that is like productivity central you feel I just felt like if I buy 20 boxes and organizers suddenly my life will be better so I walk in there and I come out with 23 pounds worth of pens normal right all the different colors of the rainbow go to my coffee shop open up my notepad lay out my pens in front of me and start writing and it's one of those coffee shops that has communal tables and

And this lady about 10 minutes in comes up to me and she says, hi, excuse me, excuse me. I'm thinking she wants to sit over there. Cool, of course you can sit there. And she says, excuse me, do you mind if I sit here and I borrow one of your pens? Because I forgot my pens today. So I told her this story about getting conned by Muji and buying all the different pens and she found it hilarious. And she's writing a book and she was making all these edits in her book. And for me, it was just a really wonderful moment of connection with a random human.

who also forgot her pens, also gets sucked into thinking that if she just buys 20 pens, she'll be more productive. And it brightened my day. And that's, I think, what's important about improving your speaking. It's fun. You're going to get to meet really fun people and talk to them about pens. That's cool. Yeah.

Nice. Um, speaking of fun, I was thinking it would be nice if we can play some of the, some of the games. Um, I would love that. So these games are freely available on ultraspeaking.com. Um,

You don't need to sign up to the course to play them. You can just play them for free. And I think the games are really helpful. We do sometimes play them as part of our YouTuber Academy when we're doing sessions on confidence and things like that. I'll just bring up Triple Step or Ratfire or Autocomplete or something like that, and we'll make it happen. So if you're watching this on the YouTube video, you'll be able to see the screen recording of the iPad as I bring these up.

If you are listening to it on podcast players, then some of this will require using your imagination. But I wonder if we can start with Rapid Fire Autocomplete. Okay, cool. So we've got Triple Step Conductor, Rapid Fire Autocomplete, Rapid Fire Analogies, Autocomplete with Breath, the podcast game. Oh, I love the podcast game. Let's take that one. Yeah. We should have warmed up with that one. Yeah, this is a podcast game. Okay, cool. So what, like, timer one minute, difficulty. Let's make it random. We love that. Yeah. Number of players. There's two of us. Yeah.

The more the merrier with this game. And it's going to suggest the title, right? And it's going to suggest the title. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. So we've got two players. And so what's the premise behind the podcast game? So the premise behind the podcast game. So the idea is that there's a number of you and you are all talking on a podcast. Yep.

And the game is going to come up with your name and my name. And when your name's on the screen, you're talking. When my name's on the screen, I'm talking. The interesting thing about this game is that we're trying to talk as one unified voice. So when our names swap over, I'm not saying, oh, Ali, that was such a good point. You know, tell me more about that. Instead, I will just finish your sentence. I'm literally completing your sentence. And the idea behind that game is...

to get out of your head okay because most of the time when we are speaking in conversation i don't know why you would definitely mean back in the day all i was thinking was what's the clever thing i can say next and i would completely forget the person in front of me saying something clever right now so in this game it's all about focusing on the person in front of you staying in the moment and trusting that you can complete their sentence without preparing it in advance cool let's give it a go let's give it a go so all right if money didn't exist

If money didn't exist, I think that I would be doing exactly the same thing in life because... It's a good question to ask yourself. Like if money didn't exist, how would that change how you spend your time? Because a lot of us do spend a large amount of our time working on things, doing stuff purely for the sake of money. And we can end up in this zone where, you know, depending on what our job is,

eight to 12 hours of our day could be spent doing a thing that doesn't fulfill us. And if money didn't exist, we wouldn't be doing the thing. And so I find that to be a really interesting question, like a journaling prompt. Another way to think about it is if you work up tomorrow and you had nothing left, what is the one thing that you would go and buy? Would you buy your family? Would you buy your friend? Like what is the one thing if you had only money and nothing else in your life?

What is the one thing you would wish you could buy back? That is the thing you should be focusing on, not money. Nice. That's not bad. That's fun. Okay, so let's try another game. I like the podcast game because you get handovers like that where you're like, I really don't know what you're about to say. Okay, let's do Blindfolded Slideshow. Love this one. Difficulty fast. Okay, you can go first.

Oh, amazing. This is your blindfolded slideshow. So what's the premise behind the blindfolded slideshow? The blindfolded slideshow is you've turned up to work, your colleague is sick, and your boss has said, you have to take their presentation in front of clients. You don't know what the presentation is. You don't know what you're supposed to say, but you're going to have to give it as if it was your own. And so in this game, you're going to get random slides coming up on the screen and you're going to incorporate them in your speaking on the fly and make it sound intentional.

Nice. Cool. So we'll do difficulty fast. Timer 50 seconds. It's going to suggest you a title. That's gonna be nice and fast. Okay. A title is what's the most addictive to addicted to a game you've ever been? I've recently become really addicted to playing chess online. I feel like I'm climbing up these stairs to finally become good at chess and opening up my horizon to being a

The kind of person I wish I was when I was 11 and I competed at chess and my brain was burning and exploding and everyone was judging me because I was losing all the time. Now I feel like my brain has exploded. I'm old, you know, like I've run out of things to do, but at least I can sit at home, open the window and challenge myself, play chess. It feels kind of like putting jewelry on, you know, like I'm suddenly sparkly, like I've cleaned my brain when I'm playing chess.

because it's like being outdoors, reconnecting with nature. It is like putting the pieces of your life together and finding what challenges you. For me, challenge is the most important thing. And that is why I'm addicted to playing chess.

That's pretty good. Thank you very much. Would you have been able to do that when you were in Europe? Not in front of people, right? Would I have been able to do that? Skillset-wise, probably most, I think pretty much everyone can do that skillset-wise. I've never really had someone who struggles with it. Most of it is the pressure you put on yourself and the panic. And they're like, oh my gosh, that's another image coming up on the screen. Yeah.

Nice, that's cool. All right, let's do one more. We can do, well, let's do one of the rapid fire ones. Oh, yeah. So let's do rapid fire analogies. Actually, no, let's do triple step. Oh, no, let's do, okay, let's do rapid fire. Oh, Conductor? Oh, oh, oh. What would you recommend? Conductor is a different kind of game, so that's an exciting one to show. I do like triple step because it's just the most fun for me personally. Okay.

Yeah. Okay, let's do triple step. I'm wary of conductor because I currently have a sore throat, so I don't want to lose my voice. We protect your voice for the podcast. Protect the podcast. Okay, cool. So triple step. Oh, multiplayer. Very nice. What's survival mode? Oh my goodness. This is the best. Okay, if ever you have like a fun afternoon in the office and you want to like do something fun, triple step survival mode is basically where...

everyone, so your name comes up, you do one record triple step, someone else's name comes up, they do one, and you can have as many players as you want. But every time that someone does a rep, the time gets slightly shorter and they add on another word. And so at the end of every session it says, did they survive? Which means, did they fit in all the words? And did they say what they wanted to say? And then eventually you get to this stage where you're in 20 seconds trying to fit in like 25 words. It's chaos and I love it. For Christ's sake, let's play survival mode. Number of topics, let's go...

Let's start with four topics and... Oh, we can do more than that. We can do more than that? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Six topics and 30 seconds? Oh, gosh. Okay. Yeah. A minute? Okay. A minute will be long, though. A minute will be long. Six topics and 30 seconds. Six topics and 30 seconds. Two-player survival mode. Why not? Why not? Give it a go. Let's do it. Okay. Z, a paradigm shift.

The biggest paradigm shift that I'm going through right now is I'm trying to eat healthier because I want to stay around for a little bit longer. I want to eat watermelon not only for the pleasure of it, but to feel good about myself. I want to be better at chess. And sometimes I wake up in the morning and I feel like I've lost a tooth and I've been sitting up all night eating popsicles because I'm like so grungy from the lack of stuff that I'm doing. But really, I should just get a job, take a nap and become healthier.

Nice. Solid. You did survive. Okay. All right. My robot best friend. My robot best friend these days is ChatGPT. Absolutely incredible piece of software. It's like a treasure trove. It's like I've got this map where I can just navigate, you know, whether I need to learn about horse racing, whether I'm talking about how I'm losing a tooth. It's like...

It just gives me such an honest representation of what a robot would be thinking, which honestly adds a lot of diversity to my life. A lot of the people that I know, it sort of feels like, you know, we're on a bridge and maybe, you know, these are Lululemon wearing yoga pant like wearing type people. But Chad GPT adds so much diversity to my life. I love it. Okay. You're good at this game. You're good at this game. I've got competition now. I feel a little bit of pressure.

All right. Behind the scenes. Behind the scenes in my life this morning, you would have seen me trying to listen to a meditation video and failing because really I don't play Nintendo. I'm a little bit afraid of becoming addicted to that. When I have kids, I'm going to ban them from watching the TV, but I'm socially distanced from all of this listening to rap music and getting a massage. People say you should do really if I'm being vulnerable and breaking the eggs to make an omelet, I should do more meditation.

Damn, that was very good. It's getting scary fast, isn't it? It's getting very far. Most interesting person I've ever met. The most interesting person I've ever met is a lady called Alianor. It's like I was playing on my Nintendo this morning. I was eating like a bunch of popsicles and I just, you know, came across her and she was teaching me how to do public speaking. It really felt like

I was eating chocolate. That's how much kind of joy I got out of this thing. You know, initially, last night, I was having some expired pickles. I was like roaming around in my jacuzzi and was like, oh my God, I can't do it. It's gone. I've died.

We're getting into extreme mode now. I think we're getting to extreme mode. Oh my gosh. Okay. Taking care of plants is the worst thing. I'm really bad at taking care of plants. Worse than listening to politics. I feel like I have this engine inside of me and all my plants just flush down the loo. I wish I could time travel and sit on foam rollers and make my plants not stick to the carpet because I'm like a monkey when I play with them. They're fast and they don't have any water. When I invite dinner guests around, they're laughing at my plants because they're like a broken finger. They're wonky. I can't look after plants. Wow.

Okay. I think you're the clear winner over here. GG. That was really good. I love that game. Wow. I love that game. Man, I thought I was good at this, but like, I've just been absolutely trounced.

It was great. So these games are available for free on ultraspeaking.com. And if you're watching this on the YouTube video, you'll be able to kind of see what was happening on screen as we were playing those games. It is a better experience when you see what's happening on screen. So if you are listening to this on the podcast, then do have a look at the YouTube channel if you're interested in kind of seeing what these games look like. Any final words of wisdom, parting words for anyone who's gotten to the end of this podcast? Yeah, thank you for getting to the end of the podcast. My final words of wisdom would be...

everyone's different. Take the pressure off being a certain kind of person, being perfect. If you're listening and you're thinking, I struggled with that shyness too, I relate to that moment in Tesco or I relate to that moment where you were pressing the doorbell at the dentist, then I would say you have strengths.

And we've been talking about today about just about the weaknesses, because that's kind of the whole point of a podcast is they how to improve your speaking. And if you're bad at this, do this. And if you're bad at this, do this. But if you listen to the end of the podcast and you're that dedicated to improving your speaking, close the laptop right now and text three friends. Ask them, what is my strength? Open up a piece of paper, write them down, stick that post-it on your wall on your laptop and have a nice day.

Nice. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching.

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