What Happens When You Trust Yourself to Speak

There’s a moment in speaking practice where everything shifts.

I’m coaching an Ultraspeaking fundamentals cohort. The focus for the first week is on what we call “staying in character,” which means not falling into the nervous excuses or apologies that surface when you’re uncertain about what you’re saying.

You see it happen in real time. Someone starts strong, then trails off at the end of their point. Or they add a quick “I don’t know if that makes sense” or an apology for what they’ve just said.

But then you watch someone else say the exact same type of thing, and they just land it. They stay present. They end strong.

The difference isn’t knowledge or preparation. It’s trust.

We have this game in Ultraspeaking called rapid-fire analogies. You’re given incomplete comparisons in quick succession, and you have to fill in the blank on the fly. “Innovation is like a river because...” and before you’ve finished that thought, the next one is already coming at you.

It’s a silly game. But it creates just enough pressure that you notice so much about how your brain works.

You can see the pause after the word “because” where your mind wants to think. You can see what happens when an analogy trips you up. Does it throw you off for the rest of the game? Do you apologize? Do you blank? Or do you let it go and keep moving?

And when the game ends, when you’re finishing the last one, does your voice trail off? Or do you end strong?

There’s so much you can see about your speaking in that game.

What I’ve come to learn is that there are two sides to how we speak. One side is analytical. It wants the best thing to come out of your mouth. It’s thinking, evaluating, trying to find the perfect words. And it’s useful, of course. You need to know your material.

But there’s this other side of your brain with billions upon billions of beautiful, miraculous connections. This is the side that speaks effortlessly. It pulls from everything you know without needing to consciously assemble it. It’s the part of you that already knows what to say.

The work of speaking, especially under pressure, is finding the balance between those two sides. Yes, you need to know your stuff. But then you also need to get your thinking mind out of the way so you can just speak.

I was working with some high school entrepreneurs who were preparing for a pitch competition. A couple of them were nervous. They said they were afraid of stumbling, of forgetting their lines, of saying the wrong thing.

We practiced their pitches. They got better. The words were there.

And then we played a few rounds of rapid-fire analogies.

You could see it click in their minds. They could feel where their thinking brain was taking over, second-guessing, analyzing. And they could feel what it was like to let go.

Afterwards, they gave their pitch again, and it went much more smoothly.

They realized they could trust themselves to say the right things, and having that trust was enough to calm the thinking mind down.

This matters for founders in ways that go beyond pitching.

When you’re explaining your mission-driven work to funders who don’t quite get it, the analytical mind wants to over-prepare, to anticipate every question, to polish every word. But what actually lands is presence. It’s the version of you that trusts what you know deeply enough to let it come through naturally.

When you’re navigating the tension between profit and impact, between what your board wants and what your community needs, the clearest answers don’t come from thinking harder. They come from trusting yourself to stay in the conversation without needing to have it all figured out before you speak.

Confidence isn’t about certainty. It’s about not letting your uncertainty affect how you speak.

You don’t have to eliminate the doubt. You just have to trust yourself enough to say what you came to say, and let it be enough.

The thinking mind will always want more time, more preparation, more polish. But at some point, you have to let the other side speak. The side that already knows. The side that’s been doing this work, absorbing all the information, living your mission.

That’s the side people hear. That’s the side that lands.