Ultraspeaking

Training in spontaneous action

What it is

Ultraspeaking is a program that trains you to speak well, and to enjoy doing it. The aim is speaking spontaneously, conversationally, and confidently, with little or no preparation, and to love it. That is valuable in difficult, maybe high-stakes speaking situations: work meetings, job interviews, public talks, podcast recordings, dates.

I think Ultraspeaking is really cool. I did an introductory version of the training recently. I’ll explain why I did, and what happened when I did. And then I’ll describe other ways I think it can be important—which are not necessarily obvious.

Ultraspeaking is quite different from most advice and training for speaking. Usually, the approach is to add techniques and extra things to do.

The thesis of Ultraspeaking is that those mostly get in the way of speaking naturally and fluidly. And you already know how to do that; you have no difficulty speaking with close friends. But what happens in high stakes situations? You worry about flubbing it, your inner critic starts noticing all the things it thinks you are doing wrong, and you go blank, or stumble around, or start speaking in some off-putting, artificial way.

So the Ultraspeaking approach is the opposite. It’s about getting comfortable and confident in speaking under pressure, without relying on preparation or tricks, through practice in a supportive environment.

It’s about getting into flow, so your mouth does the work instead of your mind. It’s about trusting that you can, and will, speak well without planning. It’s about trusting that even if something goes wrong in the middle of your presentation, you will recover, and your audience may never even notice.

That trust has to be based on experience.

Eleanor (and Charlie)

Two years ago, my spouse—who is “Eleanor” (she/her) in the Ultraspeaking world and “Charlie” (they/them) in other professional roles—signed up for Ultraspeaking training. 

Several of our friends had done it, and raved about it. It did sound intriguing, and I was tempted to take the course at the same time Eleanor did, but I didn’t have the time for it.

What happened was completely extraordinary. I can describe it from my perspective, and then a bit about hers.

What I saw was that suddenly, like over about two weeks, her whole demeanor and way of being changed for the better. I saw a dramatic increase in her sense of basic confidence, in both social and professional life. And along with that, a sense of pervasive relaxation, like she was no longer having to struggle at all.

She had always been competent and capable and basically OK with life, but this was a whole new level of that.

Charlie’s work is teaching and leading groups in meditation and transformational practices. They’re on zoom doing that many hours every day. So speaking, sometimes in emotionally difficult situations, is much of their job. I see almost none of their work, so I actually didn’t see the outward transformation in their professional speaking. (Not at the time, although it’s clear when you see videos of their teaching before and after.)

They said that, for their work, what changed was a shift away from needing to present themself as an expert giving informational lectures, with confidence based in having answers to technical questions. Instead, they shifted to confidence in their own decades of experience with the practices they teach, and background understanding of their history and theory. So, they could relax into a spontaneous conversational mode, instead of lecturing, responding to the vibe of the room. And they could shift back and forth between the modes, based on a sense of the circumstances and what is useful.

We’d actually never discussed this before today. They were tearful remembering it. “It was a really big deal,” they said.

So they took all the Ultraspeaking courses available, and then did the Ultraspeaking coach training, and enjoyed and learned from that a lot. They worked part-time as an Ultraspeaking coach for a year, until their own coaching and teaching roles went to more than full time.

Why and how I did Ultraspeaking

I’ve been a reclusive autistic hermit for twenty-something years, and never talked to anyone if I could help it. That’s been by choice.

However, a few years ago, I realized it was time for me to transition into a more public role, both online and in person. That means I have to talk to people, which I’d forgotten how to do. The prospect of interaction was intimidating. That, along with having little free time, has left me repeatedly postponing what may be most important for me to do.

I had a continuing vague sense that I ought to do Ultraspeaking, but didn’t follow through. Partly that was for lack of time and money; partly, to be honest, it was anxiety.

I’m sometimes, not always, socially awkward. I can’t think of anything to say, or don’t know what would be appropriate to say. In many situations, this is not helpful. It was particularly a problem for me when dating. It could be acutely uncomfortable—for me, and probably for whoever I was with.

I think a lot. I usually think before talking. I don’t “think well on my feet,” meaning giving a fast facile answer to challenges, in work situations, for example. Some people think a quick, clever response is a sign of high intelligence. I’d rather be right than look smart; I value precision and correctness. That was sometimes detrimental in my career.

A month ago, on three days notice, I was offered a free place on a six-hour introductory course in Ultraspeaking. I dithered and gulped, because it seemed scary, and clicked the “yes” button.

Some course places are offered free to people with good-sized audiences, on the condition that you’ll talk about it on your social media—if, and only if, it is better than you expected. It was! A lot. So in a sense, this is an advertisement—but an entirely sincere one.

(Oh, yes, while I’m advertising things:

What I discovered from how I felt about it before doing it

In the run up to the first session of the course, I was feeling anxiety to the level of dread. Somehow the stakes seemed extremely high. 

I took the three days off before the course to prepare myself. I felt I had to figure out this pervasive sense of vulnerability. It is not typical for me at all. I too am a highly competent, confident person, most of the time.

I had no idea what I was preparing for. What was I thinking??

I spent the time in formal meditation, and informally reflecting on “what on earth am I so afraid of?”

What I found was anxiety about anxiety, and shame about shame. Also, anxiety about shame, and shame about anxiety. After contemplating this for a couple days, I decided that it was not altogether necessary, or possibly even quite dumb, and dropped it.

A weird thing was, I had painful memories in which I had messed up in some speaking situation, which were highly emotionally salient. But I also knew that I had given talks in front of a live audience of a couple thousand people, which went well. I sold more than a million dollars worth of enterprise software one year, by going into companies where I knew no one and being friendly and socially competent, speaking to groups and one-on-one. Often they were initially skeptical, or outright hostile; and by being forthright and open and humorous I changed their minds. 

So I’m not actually completely hopeless. Or, I didn’t use to be. That was before I spent twenty years talking to no one except Charlie.

What I didn’t know then was why I’d do well or badly when I did; what made the difference, and how could I be consistently competent?

Do I want transformation? No! What I want is to be left alone with enough time to do my work. I can do my work just fine without transformation, so long as time-wasting people aren’t wasting all my time (which usually they do). Or, so it seemed.

At the same time, I know my life has to change now, and that teaching and mentoring and working with people will be increasingly important. And that I have to change too.

What the experience was actually like

I went into the first day of the course still feeling somewhat anxious, but that dissipated almost immediately.

The course is mainly group practice, plus coaching. I generally find the word “coaching” unclear and mysterious, but in Ultraspeaking it’s individual feedback on what you are doing well, and where you can improve and how.

The coaches and the groups are friendly and supportive, which let me relax. This seems really important, and part of why the training works. You do get the challenge and the adrenaline rush of speaking exercises that seem impossible initially, but you learn immediately that failure is OK here. The way you learn to do anything well is through practice, practice, practice, at your edge, where you can barely do it, and it has to be OK to make mistakes repeatedly.

What I really wasn’t expecting was that it’s fun. It’s a lot of fun! The exercises are inherently fun, but also when you find you can sometimes do them well, there’s an exhilarating feeling of “I can actually do this!”

There’s a major psychological component in the training, and there’s a bit of theory about what that is and why it works. But nearly all the course, as I did it, wasn’t theory. It was purely practical. It immediately demonstrated, through exercises, that you can do what you thought was impossible.

What you practice are a collection of “games.” They are speaking tasks given to you at random by the computer, on a timer. You have anything from two seconds to a minute, depending on the game, to complete the task.

The different games train different abilities, but overall their value is extreme time pressure; you have to speak before thinking. That’s enough to get your heart racing, even if you don’t have an audience.

So in the Ultraspeaking courses, you do have an audience. Even though they are friendly and supportive, it’s different from practicing on your own. Time pressure is not quite the same as the pressure from an audience you can’t help wanting to impress and look good in front of. Or, I couldn’t, anyway!

I didn’t have an experience of transformation, which, frankly, was a relief. Maybe if I did more of it, I would! Maybe that would be good!

What I did get was a lot more confidence in my speaking ability, based on evidence: evidence that I could give a competent-sounding talk, or tell an funny and engaging personal story, on the spot, with zero preparation, on a random topic I was just given the instant before I had to start speaking.

Ultraspeaking is more than it says on the box

It seems to me that Ultraspeaking works on three levels. Following a Buddhist schema, I’ll call those the outer, inner, and secret levels. (This is my interpretation, based on just six hours of exposure; it’s not quite how its leaders present it, so it may be inaccurate.)

The outer level is getting better at speaking in a way that’s visible to whoever you’re speaking to. I’d guess that’s the reason most people sign up for the training. Like, you might get sent to do it by your boss if you are on a management track but can’t seem to give a coherent talk. Or, you might do it for yourself if you keep bungling job interviews. I’m confident it works for that, based partly on seeing how much better Charlie got in giving presentations and leading group discussions. I want that for myself, too, but I think it’s not—for me at least—the most important aspect of the course.

The inner level is the transformation of personality. Getting confident and comfortable with speaking in difficult situations seems to extend to the rest of life—or, at least, it can for some people. More profoundly: discovering the cool stuff that comes out of your mouth when you don’t have time to think is also a way of exploring aspects of yourself that you may have suppressed or neglected. This seems like it could be more important than the outer level, for some people, at least.

The secret level is the experience of spontaneous action. What does come out of your mouth is, in some sense, not coming from you, not from “deep within”—but from nothing; from pure inchoate possibility.

When you tell a story, it may be utterly personal and simultaneously perfectly impersonal. Your story is the story of everyone and everything everywhere. That can make it moving, intensely engaging, for your hearers.

This three-level analysis seems to suggest significant connections between Ultraspeaking and Vajrayana Buddhism. I suspect these connections can have practical implications. There’s a danger of sounding mystical in explaining that, so I will postpone discussion to another time, maybe when I have more experience of it.

What I can say is that it feels right, and it’s joyful. There’s a brightness to it. Outwardly, that probably appears as charisma, but the experience is more one of being in the flow, playing in the groove.

Ending strong: go play the games

If Ultraspeaking sounds intriguing, I’d suggest you try it, right now. If you go to the Ultraspeaking web site, it has lots of free resources. To access some of them, you need to create an account on the site, but that doesn’t cost anything.

There’s short videos with demonstrations and explanations and a free e-book explaining the principles. There are also free live zoom group classes, which could be a good place to start.

But I’d suggest skipping all that for now, and going straight to the games. Some are available free on the site.

In learning speaking, the important thing is to actually do it. Reading about it and watching videos may give you some level of comfort, and maybe some inspiration, but the important thing is to actually do it. If you start reading, you may bog down. It may be intellectually “interesting,” rather than practically compelling.

If you go play the games right now, you’ll already be started at improving, and that gives you momentum. Playing by yourself isn’t the same as doing it in a group, you don’t get the same adrenaline rush of “what if I’m judged, what if I screw up, maybe I’ll look bad,” but still you’ll probably learn something about yourself.

It takes one minute to play a round of most of the games. Repeated practice helps, it’s critical in fact, but you may be surprised by what you can do even on the first attempt! And if you totally blank or get stuck, you can slow them down and try again. 

It’s fun! Give it a go!