Tristan de Montebello on Ultraspeaking, Speaking as Flow State, and the Accordion Method
Tristan de Montebello is the co-creator of Ultraspeaking and became the fastest competitor to reach the finals of the World Championship of Public Speaking in 2017 — starting from zero experience. This episode is a live demonstration of the Ultraspeaking methodology: games-based, flow-oriented practice rather than tactics and scripts. Tristan and Lenny play three games on air, making the episode simultaneously a lesson and an example.
Key ideas
- Speaking is a flow-oriented subconscious process, not a conscious one. When you speak best, you are not thinking about speaking at all — you are fully present with what you want to convey. Every technique that adds conscious overhead (counting filler words, memorising scripts) moves you further from flow. The goal of practice is to reduce the bugs and gunk that interrupt flow, not to layer on more tactics.
- Symptoms versus root causes. Filler words, monotony, and racing are symptoms. The root cause of filler words is discomfort with pausing. The root cause of monotony is not trusting that intensity or emotion will work for you under pressure. Solving root causes eliminates multiple symptoms simultaneously; treating symptoms one at a time does not.
- Games as deliberate practice. Ultraspeaking’s three published games — Conductor (matching a randomly sequenced energy level while speaking), Triple Step (integrating random words mid-speech without breaking direction), and Conviction Prompts (completing conviction-building sentence openers on a random topic) — each create specific turbulence that surfaces a specific root-cause weakness. Short reps with immediate feedback are the mechanism; the game structure makes practice intrinsically rewarding rather than an act of will.
- Stay in character and end strong. Two of the three tactical principles: never leak your insecurities mid-speech (the audience cannot see what you feel unless you show them), and do not let go of the gas pedal in the final seconds (the brain naturally disengages as it approaches the finish line, producing weak landings). Together these form a self-reinforcing loop: confident behaviour generates confident reactions, which build genuine confidence.
- The Accordion Method for prepared talks. The old way — dump ideas, edit into a script, memorise — forces you to deliver a written document in a spoken context. The Accordion Method prepares talks by speaking them, not writing them: give a three-minute version, then two, then one, down to 30 seconds. At 30 seconds you have the essential core (the “one thing” and its load-bearing pillars). Expand back up to three minutes, bringing back only deliberate elements. The result is internalised, not memorised — flexible, not brittle.
- The Bow and Arrow. Every talk should have one arrow: a single sentence the audience would remember if they left immediately. Everything else is the bow — anecdote, data, story — that gives the arrow impact. Most speakers focus on what they want to say; the bow and arrow shifts attention to what the audience will retain.