Episode 71: Make Work Feel Like Play: Where Improv Meets Sales With Vivek Venugopal
Improv can be applied in business in surprising and effective ways. In fact, this episode’s guest believes that the skills you need to be good in improv are exactly the same skills you need to be a great salesperson. Join Sara Murray as she interviews Vivek Venugopal, VP of Sales at Freestyle+ (formerly Speechless), who is making work feel like play through improv. Discover his journey into using improv techniques in sales. Explore the fusion of entertainment and B2B sales training and learn how improv enhances professional skills like sales and leadership. Delve into the neuroscience behind play and trust-building, from improv’s origins to serious applications in mental fitness. Plus, uncover practical tips for building trust with clients and leveraging improv in presentations and team collaboration. Tune in for a captivating exploration of improv's transformative power in business and beyond.
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Make Work Feel Like Play: Where Improv Meets Sales With Vivek Venugopal
Vivek Venugopal is the VP of Sales at Freestyle+. He is a seasoned improviser, comedian, and host based in the Bay Area with a background in software development, nonprofit fundraising, tech sales, improv, and performance. It’s not in that order, but sort of in that order. He has hosted events and performance shows around the world with Speechless, American immigrants, and Freestyle+. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, two kids, and her dog where he improvises being a good parent and a good partner every day with varying degrees of success. We can all empathize with that. I met Vivek at an event and we clicked. I sat through his session and it was so much fun. I know this episode is going to be so cool.
Vivek, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. Way to set the bar relatively high. We have to make this a fun episode.
We will. It’s Friday afternoon. We have no other option. Kick us off to set the mood. I don’t always ask icebreaker questions of my guests, but I knew that as a comedian and an improver, you could handle it. You didn’t know what this question was, but I’m going to ask you. If you were going to host Saturday Night Live, who would you want for your co-host and who would you have as your musical guest?
Would I need a co-host while I’m hosting Saturday Night Live?
Yeah.
My musical guest would have to be Taylor Swift only so that my daughters could meet her. I’m contractually obligated to say Taylor Swift whenever anyone asks. For my co-host, it would have to be someone who does impressions really well because I’m bad at impressions. In fact, I’m terrible at accent work. Whenever I perform improv, my performing partner, Anthony, will purposely endow me with an accent that I have to then struggle through. I read somewhere someone describing their accent work as always ending up on Borat quickly. That’s me. Any accent I do, I end up sounding like Borat in the end. I would say someone like Bill Hader.
That’s a good one.
I would love Bill Hader as a co-host. That’s my co-host, and that’s my musical guest. The only impression I can make, and it doesn’t involve talking, is I can play Steve Harvey. I can shave my beard and have a mustache. I’ve got a bald head already, and I look good in a three-piece suit. There you go. I’ll do Family Feud.
Can you give us the Steve Harvey impression?
No, I can’t. I cannot make the impression. I can look like him, and that’s the point. I’m so bad at impressions.
Origin Of Freestyle+
That was a good answer. I appreciated that. Thank you. Let’s get into a little bit about your background and then Freestyle+, and how those two things came together.
I have a varied background. I was born in Zambia, Africa. I lived there until I was eleven. I moved to India and finished high school in India, and then I made the natural transition to Iowa for college. I’m not going to tell the whole story because it has been told in various forms thousands of times in movies and podcasts, but we’ve all heard the story about moving from India to Iowa.
I was a Computer Science major out of college. Right out of school, I had a software developer job. I worked in software development for the first five years of my career, and then I moved into nonprofit fundraising. I moved into nonprofit fundraising because I really wanted to work on something that had an impact, so I moved into that world.
What drew me to nonprofit fundraising was the idea that I was going to be working with people. I did not enjoy being a software developer because I was working with code and computers. At one point, I was talking to someone and said, “Do you enjoy being a programmer?” He said, “Yeah. I love that feeling you get when you solve a problem that you’ve been working for a week to solve.” I said, “You’re defining pleasure as the absence of pain.” If you bang your head against the wall for long enough, you will break through and you’ll see the view. You’ll say, “What a beautiful view. My head doesn’t hurt anymore.” I was like, “I don’t want to do that.”
I moved into the nonprofit fundraising world. For anyone who has done any nonprofit fundraising, you know that that is sales. Nonprofit fundraising is sales except you’re not usually selling a physical thing. You’re selling warm, fuzzy feelings. I really took to it. I loved the work I was doing. I worked for a hospital foundation in Chicago. That brought me to San Francisco where I work for an international nonprofit that works in both Zambia and India doing literacy and girls’ education work. That was a true calling for me. I worked there for a little while, and then I was in San Francisco. I was surrounded by tech and was like, “Let me see if I can translate my sales skills in fundraising to the tech world.”
Nonprofit fundraising is essentially sales, except you're not usually selling a physical thing, you're selling warm fuzzy feelings.
What I learned was if you can sell nothing, you can certainly sell something. I worked for a small startup. We got acquired by LinkedIn at one point. I spent a few years as an enterprise sales rep at LinkedIn. During that time, I met a couple of folks who were running a comedy show called Speechless Live. Speechless Live is a show where we get comedians and improvisers to get up on stage and give a fully improvised talk using slides they’ve never seen before. It’s most people’s living nightmare. It’s really funny to watch.
Who would be in the audience? Would it be like a comedy show?
Yeah, a comedy audience who would come to watch. The performer gets up on stage, spins a wheel, and the wheel lands on a specific style like Ted Talk, startup pitch, eulogy, sermon, or a whole wedding proposal. It has a number of options. The audience would give a suggestion for the topic of the talk. You might get to the eulogy and the host would say, “Who’s a fictional character that this person is eulogizing?” Someone will say, “The Little Mermaid.” You’re giving a eulogy for the Little Mermaid. You then have to start talking and click through the slides as if you prepared the slides and as if you know exactly what’s coming up next.
I did this show and loved it. I was pretty good at it. I started to do the show more often. What I realized as I was doing the show was that all those sales calls that I was doing as an enterprise sales rep were these mini improv shows. If you’ve ever been to an improv show, you know that the show itself has a structure, but it’s all informed by the gets from the audience. You would ask the audience, “Give us a location. Give us a fruit. Give us an animal,” or whatever. You’d use all those to create that story.
As a sales rep, what I found was that the most successful conversations I was having with people were ones where I spent the first ten minutes of the conversation not ever looking at my slides and not ever talking about the company, but asking them questions. Those questions could be personal questions. It could be questions about the work. It could be questions about their company. The most successful pitches were the ones where I was able to integrate the answers they had given me at that moment into the pitch that I was giving.
As I started to recognize that, I started to really immerse myself in improv a lot more. I started taking classes. The way that improv works is very much like Scientology. You buy into all the different classes until you get to a point where you have mastered something. I went through an improv school here in San Francisco and loved it. I then started to perform at this on the Speechless stage a lot.
The guys who had started Speechless were Anthony Veneziale and Sammy Wegent. They took me out to lunch one day and said, “We’ve got this B2B business that we’re trying to build out. You have all this experience in sales and you have this really cushy tech job where you don’t do a lot of work. If you would get paid a lot of money, how would you like to do the opposite?” I said, “Sign me up.” That’s how I came into Speechless, which now has become Freestyle+.
We can talk at length about this, but there is a very clear Venn diagram that shows how the skills that you need in order to be good at improv are exactly the same kind of skills that you need to be a great salesperson and to have those conversations and build authentic connections with people. That is why when I heard your talk at the Forbes Travel Guide Summit, I was so excited because I was like, “This is exactly what we are talking about.”
I feel like I have a lot of light bulbs firing on my side too. When you’re sharing at the beginning of a call or the beginning of a presentation, you’re getting the gets from your prospects versus the audience. I’ve never made that lineation before, but it makes so much sense. The audience of the show knows that we sell a business model. Instead of going in with your pitch, you have to engage and understand who the roles are, what project you are working on, and what the circumstances are in the problem you’re trying to solve. I’ve never thought about it in the improv sense. That might make it a lot lighter for people to go into it. I can’t wait to dive into this with you.
Improv And Sales
I’ve been in sales for a while. I remember the time when young SDRs were being trained and saying, “Everyone needs to ask discovery questions. Marketing will give you all the discovery questions. Here are the questions you need to ask in order to vet, and then you can score the lead and all of that fun stuff.” I’ve been in so many meetings where you would see the person asking the questions and they would say, “What are your greatest,” look down their notes, “Challenges? What are your greatest pain points?”
They would ask all these questions, and whatever answer was given, they would say, “That’s great. Here’s the presentation I put together yesterday.” It has nothing to do with anything you said. For me, when we run any kind of sales training or when I’m talking to salespeople, I say it’s as important to ask them personal questions as it is to ask them those discovery questions. That’s because then, you can start to build that connection early on and not do it in an authentic way.
Sometimes, I’ve seen people trying to create that “authentic connection.” They say, “What did you do this weekend?” The prospect goes, “I don’t know. I have a kid's birthday party.” They’re like, “Okay,” and then it never gets brought up. If they say a kid’s birthday party and halfway through your pitch, you say something about how everything is complete chaos, not unlike a four-year-old’s birthday party after the cake has been served, if you can do that, you can build that connection. You can go into a meeting with a mindset of not, “I’m going to try and create this relationship,” but you go in the mindset of, “I’m going to have a conversation with someone.”
Our natural conversation skills allow us to draw on things that we have heard, do callbacks, and all of those different things. You don’t have to go to school to study that. You can draw on your own conversational skills, but you need to be in that authentic mindset when you go in there. When you do that, that all happens much more seamlessly.
That’s awesome. How do people hire you? How do companies hire you, and then what happens next?
We're a super unique company in that there are a lot of companies that are called applied improv companies. These are companies that have created these trainings and these workshops using improv and bringing them into the workplace. What we did a couple of years ago was that Speechless as a company joined forces with an entity called Freestyle Love Supreme Academy, which was also created by some of the folks who created Speechless.
Freestyle Love Supreme is an improvised hip-hop Broadway show that was created by Anthony Veneziale, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Tommy Kail, and a whole bunch of folks who went on to create Hamilton and do all this fun stuff on Broadway. They created this group many years ago. There’s a great documentary on Hulu about it called We Are Freestyle Love Supreme.
About a few years ago, they resurrected the show. They had a couple of runs on Broadway pre and post-pandemic, and then they had a national tour. As part of that whole process, they created the academy where they were training people on things like beatboxing, freestyle rapping, and all of that fun stuff. We joined forces with them a couple of years ago and created Freestyle+ to bring in the B2B sales training and things we were doing from the Speechless side along with that entertainment and wow factor that comes in with the Freestyle Love Supreme folks.
Freestyle+ exists in this really interesting space where we are so many different things to different people. When event organizers reach out to us, it’s because they want that entertainment and that star power coming in and delivering entertainment that also educates. When L&D managers and HR directors reach out to us, it’s because they want us to bring in some of our training and our workshops.
We’ve created these really cool services that combine the two where you get entertained and you get educated. You saw a little glimpse of that with that session that we did at Forbes Travel Guide. Typically, we show up to our engagements. We’ve got these Tony Award-winning Broadway performers and me delivering our workshops, so it runs the gamut. We also make typically comedic videos. Everything that we do though comes from a place of improv thinking and mental fitness. We have, over the years, understood that, one, the word improv strikes fear into everyone’s hearts.
That’s one of the questions I have for you. Are people super anxious and nervous to participate?
Yes, very much so. In fact, a lot of times, when we send a blurb that they are going to send out to their team to say, “This is the session we’re going to do,” we don’t use the word improv. That’s because when people see the word improv, they suddenly have a really important client call that’s at exactly the same time. I’m very clear when we talk to our prospects and our clients. I say, “We don’t teach improv classes. What we do is we run sessions on improv thinking,” which is to say, “How can we help you become great at the work you are doing using the skills that performers, improvisers, and musicians use?”
We’ve taken those skills and those methods and adapted them to the professional environment. You’re not going to come out of a session that we run saying, “I’m ready to be on Whose Line Is It Anyway?” or audition for SNL. You might, but it’s not probably because of our session. What you are coming away with is, “Here are 2 or 3 things that I can use immediately to help me get into a mindset that allows me to be truly present and authentic, raises my confidence, allows me to build and collaborate more effectively, and listen effectively or deeply listen to people.” Those are all skills that are so important for salespeople. We do training for engineers, sales teams, leaders, and all sorts of different groups. We do DE&I workshops and all those kinds of things.
If you think about the skills that you need in order to be a truly great performer and you break them down into the core tenets of what it takes to truly be a good performer, you’ll see that all of them relate to all these different things. Depending on the group that we work with and the outcomes they’re looking for, we’ll create these curriculums and deliver sessions that last anywhere from an hour to a full day or multi-day sessions that we work with bigger teams on.
I did drama in high school. I always enjoyed it. A lot of it’s performing, memorizing lines, and being comfortable in your own skin as you’re in front of other people. When you think about presenting to prospects or in a sales presentation, you’re on and you’re presenting. Hopefully, you’re not reading your notes. I could see this apply to any type of role. You mentioned engineering. Engineers need to present to senior leadership as well as L&D leaders, project managers, and product managers. I could see how it applies to anyone at the company.
I attended your session and I was partnered with people doing the exercises. I have business coming out of those partnerships. I didn’t know who the other person was and they didn’t know who I was. It wasn’t uncomfortable. It was pretty fun. It was a unique way to start a relationship with someone. Afterward, it felt so much more close, fun, and compatible. It was interesting. I felt like I developed business out of it too, so I would add that to your list.
Completely. It’s all because we got to a state of play. Play is the big thing that we’re trying to get across. In our ideal world, everyone would have at least twenty minutes of play a day. That’s our goal. Every person in the world has twenty minutes of play a day. Anyone under the age of 18, or maybe even 25, finds ways to play every day. You have these things.
As we grow up, we have been taught to stop playing. We’ve said, “When you come into work, put on a serious face. You’re an adult now. Be an adult. Be a corporate person.” We’ve stopped playing. It has changed a little bit with things like Wordle, Connections, and things like that where people are finding ways to be like, “I need to do something that isn’t being on social media that allows me to take a break.”
There’s a lot of science and study that shows that play not only helps keep your mind agile. We can talk about the science. It allows you to create these new neural pathways that give you permission to take little risks here and there and do all those things. Also, it’s the fastest way to establish trust and build connections with people.
In fact, improv was created by a woman named Viola Spolin. She lived in Chicago. She worked at an organization called Hull House in Chicago that worked with immigrant families and immigrant children specifically. She developed improv, which is these games and exercises, as a way for immigrant children to start to build trust and connection with the community and the other kids around. She was like, “If everyone is equally bad at something, then it breaks down these perceived hierarchies that you have.”
To your point, when you start having conversations with someone, if you go in there as, “I’m Sara. I’m trying to sell something to you,” there’s already a power imbalance. If you go in there and say, “We’re going to create this story together. We’re going to pretend we went on a trip together. This is so weird,” both of you are “equally bad” at it and also equally good at it. You’re on an even playing field. It is because of what’s happening in your brain when you start to get into that flow state that you are being authentic. That authenticity builds that human connection so much faster than anything else could.
I hug my people at the end of our two-minute thing. You made a point that was really interesting about being present. My session was directly after yours. I had some nerves going, but as I was partnering and doing my exercise, I couldn’t even think about my session because I was so focused on what was happening. From a present standpoint and an active listening standpoint, it was nice to dump everything that was rolling around in my brain off and then be focused on being with my partner. I thought that was great.
We call it the flow state. Athletes call it getting in the zone. That allows you to fully immerse yourself in the activity you’re doing and lose track of time. You forget about all the things that are worrying you. I read, and this is a little bit of a tangent, that the phrase sleep on it is rooted in science. It’s not a way of kicking the can down the road of making a decision. When you’re asleep, your brain is making all these neural connections as you’re sleeping. In the morning, when you wake up and think about this thing that was stressing you out the night before or a problem you couldn’t solve, you’re more likely to be able to solve it or figure out the solution because you’ve allowed your brain to do its work.
When you get into the flow state, something similar happens. You are like, “I’m engaged with this part of my brain now. Things are happening in the background, but I don’t need to think about them. When I come back out of it, everything’s better.” When you’re stressed out about a talk or something like that and you’re able to play a game with someone, and then you come back either a little less stressed out or the thing that was stressing you out has solved itself in your head. There are so many different ways that can enhance whatever it is that you’re trying to do or trying to get to. There’s a lot of science here.
We’ve been working at Freestyle+ for the better part of a decade with a neuroscientist out of UCSF here in San Francisco. He runs a lab at UCSF. He has been studying the effects of flow state on your brain for a long time. He has a great TED Talk. The first part of his experiment was he put jazz musicians and freestyle rappers into fMRI machines, so functional magnetic resonance imaging machines.
His name is Dr. Charles Limb. He is a great jazz musician in his own right. He wanted to understand what’s happening in your brain when you’re improvising. Jazz music is all about improvising. You have a tune and then you’re going crazy, coming back to the main melody, and doing all that stuff. He had to create a keyboard that had no magnetic components in it as well as an earpiece and a microphone that had no magnetic components in it. There are these great images of people lying down with a keyboard on their lap. He studied their brains.
The second part of the experiment he did with a bunch of us at Freestyle+ where he studied our brains when we were doing improv exercises and improvising. He found that there are two parts of your brain that can get activated when you communicate. One is called the medial prefrontal cortex. The other is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
I’m not a neuroscientist, but the very basic breakdown of it is that your medial prefrontal cortex houses authenticity, creativity, memories, background, and all of that fun stuff, and your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex holds your judging voice, for lack of a better phrase. It is that voice that says, “Don’t ask that question. People will think you look dumb. Don’t wear that shirt. People will think you look stupid.” It’s a survival voice. It’s the voice that says, “Don’t walk in oncoming traffic because that’s a bad idea.” Oftentimes, it is the voice that holds us back from taking maybe a little bit of a creative risk or even asking that question in a meeting because you don’t want to look dumb because you feel that judgment.
Improv Exercise: Remember When
What Dr. Limb found is that when you get into your flow state or when you play Remember When with a partner and that’s all you’re thinking about, when you get there, two things happen simultaneously. One is that your medial prefrontal cortex gets amplified. More oxygenated hemoglobin flows to that part of your brain, so more blood comes to your medial prefrontal cortex.
At the same time, that judging voice gets muted. Both of those, the judging voice and your medial prefrontal cortex, can exist at the same vole. When one goes up, the other one goes down. What does that mean? It means when you get into that state, you are more likely to be less self-judgmental. You’re more likely to care a little bit less about how you might be perceived if you do this and get into that analytical thinking part of it. All of that gets muted and you get to be more yourself. You allow yourself to be authentic.
When you get into that state of play, you're more likely to be less self-judgmental. You're more likely to care a little bit less about how you might be perceived and you allow yourself to be authentic.
That’s what we are trying to get across. That’s what play can do. Twenty minutes of play a day can help you do that much more effectively. If you are able to do an exercise, like one of the exercises we did before you go into a difficult call with a manager or a client and you have no idea what to expect, I always tell people, “How many times have you joined a sales call and it has gone exactly as you thought it would?” It’s 0%. You’re like, “I’m going to say this and they’re going to say that. All my slides are in perfect order.” That never happens.
If you can get into that flow state mindset and then go into the call, you have this part of your brain that you have access to. When a client asks you a question, you go, “I don’t have that on my slide deck, but I do know I worked on that same problem with another client last year. This is how they were able to solve it.” If you memorize your talk and you go in and you’re like, “I know exactly what I’m going to talk about,” and then they say, “What are you going to have for dinner tonight?” You’re like, “I don’t have a slide for that.” You crash and burn. That’s the science behind the work.
Thank you for sharing that. I want to say that it is very cool to learn about the origin story of improv. I did not know that. That makes it less silly. I don’t want to say that, but it makes it a little more serious in a positive way.
We love the silliness. We want people to give themselves permission to be silly. You’re right. When people think of improv, they think of sketch comedy. Most people’s first experience with improv is not a positive one. Most people’s first experience with improv is either, “My friend made me pay $10 and go sit in a black box theater. It was terrible,” or, “I got called up on stage and I had to pretend to be a dog. I hated it.” They have these visceral reactions to it. What we are trying to get across is any conversation you have is improv. You are improvising every single moment of your life.
There are some very important and serious applications in what you can do with applied improv. In fact, it is one of the reasons why partnering very closely with AARP and the AgeTech Collaborative because improv has shown to be a great way for you to be able to keep your mind flexible, slow down the effects of aging on the brain, slow down the effects of early-onset Alzheimer’s, and those kinds of things. We have been working closely with them. In fact, we did a big activation with them at CES this 2024. It was really interesting to see how it fits into all the other tech that’s being developed around aging and what you can do. There are serious applications for a silly thing. That sometimes is thought of as a silly thing.
My grandma had dementia. They say with dementia patients and Alzheimer’s patients, you have to roll with whatever they say. That’s how we handled some of the things. You’re repeating yourself 5 times a day or 5 times an hour. It got easier to roll with it. She enjoyed that more too. I appreciate you sharing that. That’s super cool. I would love to dive into that more too. That might have to be a separate episode because as we’re talking, I’m like, “I have so many things I want to say.” I love the idea of going into a meeting without the buyer-seller vibe and more of, “We’re here to have a conversation. We have a common goal, hopefully. Let’s walk through this together more connected and more authentically,” versus, “My mission is to get you to buy from me today.”
I always talk about it as your goal at the end of your meeting with your client should be to be on the same side of the table as them. You’ll start on the other side of the table, but your goal is to become that trusted advisor. That might mean that it’s a longer sale. That’s okay because it’ll be a much more impactful and effective sale both for you and your client if you are able to be on the same side of the table and be that trusted advisor.
Your goal at the end of your client meetings should be to be on the same side of the table as them.
There is one story that I always think about. I mentioned I used to work at LinkedIn. I remember I was talking to a colleague of mine. I was at his desk and his phone rang. He was like, “Hold on. This is my client.” He answered the call and talked to the client. He was like, “I’ve heard great things about them. I think you should.” He hung up and I said, “What was that?” He said, “He’s thinking about purchasing this sales software. It is not a competitor of ours, but another piece of software in the MarTech ecosystem. He called me to ask me if I’d heard about it and what my thoughts were about that company.”
That is a trusted advisor. It is someone who your client is going to call you because they trust that you know the industry well enough that you’re going to give them good advice on it. That is what every salesperson should be striving for. You can only build that trust if you don’t go in with that buyer-seller mentality where you’re like, “I’m going to go and I’m going to destroy. I’m going to crush this.”
I’m a business owner. I’m on the receiving end of pitches more. It is like an episode content of what not to do. The people that do it right are the ones that get the business. It’s interesting to be on the other side of it because I feel like I have more perspectives to offer in general for my clients or the audience. It’s not been a bad thing. It’s been interesting.
Have you ever read the book, The Challenger Sale? There was a time at least in the Bay Area where that was like the sales bible.
Yes. Several years ago, that was required reading for the company I was at.
Everyone had to read The Challenger Sale, and then everyone had to present in that mode and everything. I found the effects of it to be very similar to what happened with Radical Candor. Radical Candor is a great and amazing book. It has an amazing concept of, “Let’s not beat around the bush. Let’s be truthful, honest, and all these things.” A lot of people in the business world took that to mean, “It’s okay for me to be a terrible person to the people I work with.”
I was like, “Where is it going with The Challenger sale?” It didn’t really resonate with my style.
That was Radical Candor. With The Challenger Sale, the same thing happened. The Challenger Sale, for folks who haven’t read it, a couple of researchers started to research different types of salespeople. They happened to start their research in 2007, and in 2008, the big recession hit. They were able to track how people did during a recession.
They broke it down into three main personas. You had the lone wolf who’s the salesperson who goes from company to company with their Rolodex and has their clients. They sell and move on. You had the relationship builder, which everyone knows what that is. You then had the challenger. The challenger was the person who was willing to challenge the client and ask them the hard questions.
During the recession, they thought, “The relationship builder’s going to do the best,” but what they found was that the challenger salespeople did better. That’s the best way to sell. A lot of people that I work with took that to mean, “It’s okay for me to tell the client that they are not smart.” I’m not going to use salty language here so that the show can stay in the top 2%.
We’re a clean show.
They were like, “It’s okay for me to not be a nice person to my clients.” It was brutal. I’m a relationship builder. I would rather have a great relationship with a client that potentially will bear fruit down the line than close a quick, cheap, and easy sale. That, for me, was a very eye-opening experience because people were like, “The right way to do it is to treat your clients like they’re kindergartners who don’t know what they’re doing.” I know best. In fact, what happens over 3 years, 4 years, or 5 years is if you don’t have that relationship built, you’re never going to get another sale. If you do have the relationship built, not only are you going to probably sell to that client, but they’re going to take you with them when they go. That is what we found.
I have one person I can think of. She moved companies a couple of times. Every time, it was like, “You’re the brand standard for XYZ national chain. You’re the brand standard for this.” It was the gift that kept giving, and it was because I spent the time in the beginning building the relationship. That’s what this show’s about too. It’s very relationship-heavy. I liked what you said about how before you go into a big presentation or before you go into a client meeting, get loose and get in a flow state. Can we share some examples? Can we get some examples of what that looks like if people want to practice?
Sure. We have a host of exercises. Something I tell people a lot is, “If you go backstage to a Broadway show about an hour before showtime, you’ll see 20 different actors doing 20 different warmup exercises.” The key is not everyone has to do this warmup exercise. The key is everyone has to figure out which ones resonate with them the most and which one helps them get into that flow state as fast as possible.
The second thing that we talk about is that it's not important to do a physical warmup exercise or a mental warmup exercise. You really want to do something that can connect your mind and your body and align them. I talk about it like people who are musicians. Yo-Yo Ma is the greatest cellist in the world. If Yo-Yo Ma goes out on stage and puts on a piece of music that was written many years ago, a perfect music that has already been written, and he has been playing the cello for 50 years, 60 years, or whatever it is, he’s completely adept at it. If 1 string of his 4 strings is out of tune, it’s going to sound a little bit off to the audience. He can do a lot of work. He’s Yo-Yo Ma. He can do the work to make it sound okay, but it means that he has to work extra hard.
If you go into a presentation or a client call and either your mind isn’t warmed up or your body isn’t warmed up and you’re not fully aligned, it’s going to sound a little bit off. It doesn’t matter how good your product is. It doesn’t matter how good of a salesperson you are. If you are not warmed up and in that right headspace, it’s going to sound a little off. You could probably power through it, but it takes a lot more work.
You’re tuning your instrument before you go into the room.
Improve Exercise: Warm Up
Exactly. We have a whole host of exercises to tune all the different parts of our instrument, but let’s do one that can be fun for you. Do you want to do one?
Yeah. Tell me the hard ones. I don’t care. We’ll do it.
Do you want to learn how to beatbox?
Sure.
I’ll then talk about why beatboxing, why beat specifically, and the hip-hop of it all with the work we do. We’re going to learn how to beatbox. The way we’re going to do it is there are two words that you need to know in order to beatbox. The first word is the word boots, like these boots are made for walking. Go ahead and say the word boots.
Boots.
Say it again. This time, I want you to make that B explosive. Go ahead and say, “Boots.” You want to make those lips tight and go, “Boots.” We’re going to do a quick version of this, but we’re going to take away the two Os. We’re going to take away the ooh sound. Try that. That’s one word. The next word is the word cuts. Go ahead and say that.
Cuts.
When you do it, I want you to emphasize that first C. I want you to think about your mouth like it’s a cave. The top of your mouth is the top of the cave, the stalactite. That’s what hangs from the top. The stalactite is right up there. You’re going to really hit that part. You’re going to feel like it’s a ricochet off the top of your palette and down. You’re then going to take off that middle syllable. You’re going to put it all together. You can start to add to it.
I feel like I should do the little one and then you rap.
You can start to take those four sounds and put them in a different order. You can start to do that, and then you can get even more. You can start to float tones. You get to do all that. I am by no means a beatboxer.
I was going to say I’m not going to do that.
I’m not an expert beatboxer. However, there are a few reasons we do this as an exercise. First of all, it’s a great vocal warm-up. You are doing things with your face where you’re like, “I didn’t think that I’d be able to do that.”
Thinking of my mouth as a cave was tricky. Maybe you’re going to get to this, but I wasn’t thinking about anything else. My brain was empty.
You were like, “How am I going to do this?” That’s what happens when you’re learning. When you get into that “growth mindset”, you’re like, “Now all I’m going to focus on is trying to figure out what’s happening here.” You are doing something that your brain is like, “Impossible. I can’t do that.” What happens then is because it’s fun to do, silly, something you’ve never done before, and something that probably, you’re going to start to do a lot more, anytime you hear a song, try and match the beat. You can start to do that.
You start to get into that little bit of a flow and a little bit of a rhythm because there’s a part of your brain that’s going to go, “The last time we tried to do something crazy, it was a little bit fun.” That little bit of fear that comes with trying something new is being replaced by joy. It's a tiny bit of it, but it is enough that maybe your brain becomes a little bit more plastic and a little bit more adaptogenic. It starts to go, “It’s okay for me to learn new things. It’s fun to learn new things.” Once you start to enjoy learning new things, you can start to practice it. Once you start to practice, you get better at it. There are all these great benefits or tangential benefits that come from a seemingly silly warmup exercise.
It's fun to learn new things. Once you start to enjoy learning new things, you can start to practice it. Once you start to practice, you get better at it.
I’m representing the White female beatboxers of Utah.
The beatboxer that we work with most frequently, her name is Kaila Mullady. Her stage name is Kaiser Rosé. She is a two-time World Beatbox Champion. She is a White lady, not unlike yourself, and is unbelievable at beatboxing. Please look her up. Watch her videos. She is named one of the greatest beatboxers in the world. Don’t let that hold you back.
That’s a limiting belief that you helped me overcome.
Exactly. There you go. Quickly, I want to talk about beats and the importance of beats in the work that we do. We bring hip-hop and elements of hip-hop into the workplace as well. That is also scary to people. They’re like, “That doesn’t feel like it makes sense for the work that I do. I work in manufacturing. Why should I learn how to beatbox and do hip-hop?” Beats are an important way of creating trust. It is really effective at creating trust quickly.
There are some great studies that show that a bunch of people listening to the same beat at the same time creates trust really quickly between adults and toddlers. You can hold the toddler’s hand and walk if you’ve been listening to the same beat for five minutes. There’s some great science behind it. It explains why drum circles are so effective at creating community and why marching bands exist for Armies and things like that. You’re like, “Now we’re all in sync. We’re on the same wavelength.” The synapses are firing at the same frequency. There are a lot of great benefits that come with that.
When we do a warmup like boots and cuts early on in a workshop that we’re running, people are like, “That’s silly. That’s crazy,” and, “This is so difficult,” and, “I cringe trying to do it.” What happens in that room is that everyone is starting to build trust. You’re creating a space of psychological safety. The exercises we do are putting people outside their comfort zone, and they’re not going to do that if they feel judged by the people around them.
Putting everyone on a level playing field and creating that psychological safety allows people to surprise themselves and try doing something that they have never thought they would be able to do, like beatboxing or giving a fully improvised talk using slides they’ve never seen before. By the end of our workshops, the people who are volunteering to do things are very different from the people who volunteered at the beginning. Those “extroverts” are being usurped by the people who are like, “I’ll try it.”
They’re on this wavelength. Everyone’s looking silly together. I like the even playing field. We all know how to beatbox. Thank you for that. As we were doing it, afterwards, I was like, “The show does take me to some interesting places. That is nice about that.”
That’s exactly it. Every time we do a debrief, people are like, “I didn’t think I’d be doing that today.”
How awesome. I loved it. Give us another one that we can practice with our managers before we go into a pitch.
Improv Exercise: Shake Out
Something that I do before I get up in front of any audience whatsoever is I do something called the shakeout. We did this as an energizer at the summit that we were at. If you watch the We Are Freestyle Love Supreme movie, you’ll see them do this. You’ll see a lot of actors do this backstage. A shakeout is simply shaking each limb of your body if you are able to.
If you’re seated, you want to sit with your feet flat on the ground. The shakeout is you’re going to start with your right hand and then you’re going to shake it for a count of eight. You’re then going to go with your left hand for a count of eight. It is then your right foot for a count of 8 and your left foot for a count of 8. You’re going to shake it up. You’ll do the same thing again for a count of 4, then for a count of 2, and for a count of 1. The momentum will slowly increase as we do it.
What you’re going to do is you’re going to count out loud as you do it. Let’s go ahead and try that, and then I’ll explain why we do all these things. Start with your right hand and count out loud. It’s so easy. It’s very straightforward.
I feel like my energy is pumped or elevated.
Your blood starts flowing. A lot of times people go, “Sakeout,” and they shake their whole body, which is great. What’s happening when you shake and count at the same time is that you’re starting to establish that mind-body connection.
That makes sense
Every warm-up exercise that you do, we want to make sure that it is specific and intentional. You’re not randomly doing it. You’re shaking out this right hand. Sometimes, I’ll tell people, “If you’re feeling nervous, think about it like you’re flicking off that nervous energy.”
I like that.
Shake it off. You do that and you’re starting to connect your mind and your body. Deep breathing is the fastest way to calm down what’s called the vagus nerve. That is scientifically shown to be the best and fastest way to get out of that mode of fight or flight in your brain. It is a couple of deep breaths. Sometimes, what we do is we’ll say, “Inhale through your nose for a count of 4 and exhale through your mouth for a count of 6.” You’re going to exhale longer than you inhale. Three deep breaths like that can be the fastest way for you to get into a flow state.
The mind-body piece is really clever. That makes a lot of sense when you lay it out that way. I don’t think I would’ve naturally gone there.
Next time, before you go into a call or meeting with your manager, look at each other and do a quick shakeout. You do that, and then you get in there. You’re both synced up. You’re on the same page. That rhythm of counting together gets you that trust as well. There are so many exercises that we do specifically with pairs of people who are presenting together and need to be able to bounce off of each other. How many meetings have you been in where there’s a salesperson and an account manager where the salesperson starts talking and goes, “Now, so-and-so is going to talk about this,” and then the account manager stands up and is fumbling? He is like, “I don’t know. I wasn’t even listening to what they were saying.”
Someone goes rogue. I’ve been in meetings where I have a path. I’m taking the climb down the path and my teammate grabs them and takes them down another lane. It’s like, “You messed up the path we were on.” If you don’t get in alignment ahead of time, that’s huge.
It’s usually the salesperson who messes it up because the account manager’s like, “I have all the charts. I have all the results of our campaign.”
Let’s do one more and then we can start to wrap it up.
Let’s do Remember When. I wasn’t planning on doing Remember When. I wasn’t planning on doing anything. I had no idea what we were going to talk about. This is great.
You are an improv guy, so I was like, “I can be a little more loosey-goosey with this one.”
With Remember When, Remember When is the classic improv yes-and exercise. Yes-and is this foundational phrase of improv performance where you accept the universe that is being offered to you by your scene partner and you build on that universe. We like to do this exercise called Remember When where two of us, you and I, will recount an amazing trip that we both took together. Let’s not make it Las Vegas because we were in Las Vegas.
We’re going to pick a random location and we’re going to talk about this trip. The way we’re going to do it is we’re going to go back and forth. You are going to kick us off. You’re going to say, “Remember when we went to,” and you’ll pick a random place, and then my job is to respond with, “Yes,” and build on your idea. It will come back to you and we’ll ping-pong back and forth. We’ll start every sentence with yes-and and be enthusiastic and excited about saying yes. We’ll then talk about the exercise itself. Go ahead.
I have so many real places that I’ve never been to before.
Let’s go to one of those places.
Remember when we went to Tokyo, Japan?
Yes, and I really wanted us to climb Mount Fuji.
Yes, and I told you that’s not how I wanted to spend my vacation, but I would compromise and we would do a nice trail through the cherry blossoms.
Yes, and when we were walking on that trail through the cherry blossoms, we saw that animal that we’d never seen before.
Yes, and what was that animal? It looked like a deer.
Yes, and we slowly approached it and it spoke to us in English.
Yes, and it welcomed us to Japan. It told us we had to try this restaurant.
Yes, and we went to the restaurant. The restaurant was called Deer Japan and they served veal.
Yes, and they served venison. It was so messed up. The poor deer was sending us to his own cannibal restaurant.
Yes, and we were so turned off by it, but the food was delicious.
Yes, and we swore we’d never tell anyone about eating venison as vegetarians, but we put it on the show.
Yes, and PETA is out for us. Let’s pause it there.
First, I want to apologize. I should have rolled with the Mount Fuji plan. I didn’t follow the rules of improv, I feel like.
That’s the beautiful thing about it. Also, I’m not 100% sure that Mount Fuji is in Tokyo. It might be in Osaka. I don’t know Japanese geography very well.
Still.
It’s in the country.
The deer could talk. I didn’t even think about talking animals. That’s cool.
I did that purposely because there was nothing in the rules that said it had to be real. We didn’t even have to go to a real place. What I love about this exercise is that it forces you to do a few things. One, it forces you to let go of control of the narrative, which is a really important skill if you are in sales.
It’s something we all struggle with. I will speak for myself. It’s hard to feel like you’re not in the driver’s seat.
It forces you to deeply listen to what the person is saying. You might have said in your head, “We’re going to the cherry blossom,” and while I was talking, you might’ve been like, “What else can we do in Japan?” I go, “Animal,” and you’re like, “There was an animal. Was it a deer?” You have to force yourself to truly listen to what your scene partner is saying in order to be able to build on it.
You have never been to Japan or you have never been to Tokyo. I’ve never been to Japan. We drew our memories of stories we had heard about Japan. We were drawing on our memories of what it might be like to walk through a forest or whatever. These images that were being conjured up in our head are all coming from our medial prefrontal cortex. We’re forcing ourselves to use that part of our brain.
During the workday, we rarely give ourselves permission to do that. We are in the analytical part of our brain most of the workday because we need to make sure of the numbers and the things and that we’re sending all the right emails and doing all the right things. When we allow ourselves to draw on our memories and experiences, that opens up that medial prefrontal cortex.
The listening part is something that far too few people learn how to do effectively. Our tagline at Speechless used to be, “Be yourself and be heard.” How can you most effectively bring your authentic self into the conversations you’re having and the talks you’re giving? We learned pretty early on that we could teach people until we were blue in the face how to speak up and how to be heard, but if we didn’t teach the people around them how to listen, it would fall on deaf ears.
We could teach people until we’re blue in the face how to speak up and how to be heard. But if we don’t teach the people around them how to listen, it is falling on deaf ears.
What happens is people go, “This person talks a lot and complains a lot. I can’t deal with it.” You become the squeaky wheel. If we teach people how to truly, deeply listen to what folks are saying, it can change the dynamics of not just a sales conversation, but also a conversation with your colleagues. It can change the dynamics of how decisions are made in a company because everyone’s voice feels heard. I’m not saying that everyone has to do what everyone says, but it is truly hearing what they’re saying, building on their ideas, or addressing those concerns in an effective way.
This game does so many things at the same time. If you are in a sales meeting and you go in there and ask those discovery questions but don’t care what the answer is, you are not truly yes-and-ing. If you hear the answers and you say, “What are some of the biggest challenges you face?” or, “What are your biggest pain points?” or a generic question, the client says something and you start building on that thing as opposed to going to the next question. It completely changes the dynamic of the conversation. The client feels heard.
Time and time again, the clients have said that the salespeople who become their trusted advisors are people who truly listen to them and hear them. You could go in there and say, “I know that you guys provide this, but my problem is this.” For a salesperson to say, “I’m not even going to go into my deck because I want to help you solve that problem,” that can build that connection in a much more effective way. That’s what an exercise like yes-and or Remember When allows you to do. Yes-and has been a phrase that has been thrown around so much that it’s used in a negative way. I’ve been in meetings where I’ve said, “What does yes-and mean to you?” and people say, “It’s a nice way to say no.” It’s like, “That’s a problem. I don’t want that to be the case.”
Innovative Headspace
I appreciate that you talk so much about the brain and the science behind it. To me, it’s very straightforward and very clear, but I’m a silly person. It’s maybe easier for me to accept some of those things. I appreciate that you spent time going through the brain. The two different parts of our brain and pulling the more creative side in, that’s where true innovation happens. This is really giving us a path to crack open those doors to innovation too.
There’s a great case study that Airbnb did called the 11-Star Experience, which I won’t get too much into. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to follow up on. They used the yes-and technique to figure out what their next product could be after room rentals or the classic Airbnb. The way they did it is they sat around the table and said, “What does a five-star experience look like for us? What is a six-star? What is a sevenstar?”
At some point, like in our story where we talked about a talking deer, it got absurd. Their 25-star experience was private jets will fly you to a starship that takes you to Mars. You spend a week on Mars and all that fun stuff. They went back and were like, “What was that eleven-star experience? The eleven-star experience was you get to the house, it’s clean, there’s coffee, and there’s a note from the host that says, “I saw in your profile you enjoy surfing. Here’s a map of all the local surf areas.” That’s how they started to develop the idea of Airbnb experiences.
This is something that we hear a lot from people. They’re like, “This is all well and good in the workshop, but you can’t say yes to everything in a workplace.” We understand that. I always say when you’re brainstorming, if you can time box 5 or 10 minutes where you’re going to yes-and each other and then say, “Now, let’s try to solve this problem,” you’re going to find that you’re going to get to a solution a lot faster because you are in that innovative headspace. It is also because someone might have said something in that yes-and time where you were like, “There’s a little bit of a nugget there. We can build on that.”
Bring Play Back To Work
That’s so cool. I appreciate you walking it through. You didn’t disappoint. It was a fun and cool episode. This show is on YouTube if you want to watch how to do the shakeout. I want to thank you so much. Truly, this was a really fun conversation. I had a lot of a-ha moments too about tying the performance piece to sales, active listening and why improv is relevant there, how it makes different pathways in our brains, and how it makes us more open, authentic, and present. I loved it. I want to thank you first and foremost. Before I ask you where people can find you, is there anything else you want to leave us with or share that we haven’t covered yet?
Same Side Of The Table
This idea of finding ways to get into a state of play and reiterating something I said earlier in the episode. For us, that’s our goal. How do we get people to not only appreciate the impact of play on our brains but also start to develop that habit of play? We’re asking people to play. You’d think that it would be a really easy ask, but most people are like, “That seems uncomfortable. I don’t want to do that. Can I do the spreadsheet instead?”
Play means different things to different people. For some people, it is playing video games. For others, it is playing those word games. We’re starting to develop a digital platform that allows you to continue to practice, play these games, and build a behavioral change that allows you to get into that state of play much faster. When you do that, you’ll find all of these other benefits that come with it.
My easiest way to get into play is I have little hand puppets.
Speaking of SNL, it’s like the Kristen Wiig skit.
I know. I have my little pen jar, and then I have a little tiny hand. When appropriate, I’ll give someone a high-five. It’s a nice little reminder for me to be playful too because we can get pretty heads-down on our work. I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing that message. Where do people find you and Freestyle+?
FreestylePlus.com. All the information about us is on there. We have links to all of our social media things and all of that fun stuff. If there’s any way that we can support you, please reach out to us. That can be anything from performances at sales kickoffs to running multi-week and multi-month training programs. Go to FreestylePlus.com.
I love it. I have a couple of leads I want to send you.
That’s perfect.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks.
