Isolate One Thing

Recently I was on a coaching call with a fellow Ultraspeaking coach and filmmaker. I wanted to get my ideas together more efficiently for my one-minute reels, and stick the landing.

He said something I didn’t expect: “Let’s just practice the ending.”

So we did. Fifteen-second reps. Just the call to action. Nothing else.

After a few rounds, something clicked. Not a gradual improvement, but a shift. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could isolate one part of my speaking like that. I’d always practiced the whole thing, start to finish, hoping repetition would smooth out the rough edges. But when I focused on just the ending, I saw a quick transformation.

This is the Ultraspeaking way.

For those unfamiliar, Ultraspeaking is a method built around rapid, focused speaking exercises under the guise of fun games. It’s designed to help people become more confident, clear, and present when they speak, whether on camera, on stage, or in a room full of investors. The approach isn’t about scripting or memorizing. It’s about building fluency under pressure through deliberate practice and immediate feedback.

What makes it different is the emphasis on isolation. You don’t try to fix everything at once. You take one element, your pausing, your musicality, your storytelling, your presence under pressure, and you do reps on that one thing until it becomes natural. Then you move to the next.

For entrepreneurs, this matters more than it might seem. So much of building a business requires communication. Pitching. Selling. Leading. Explaining your vision in a way that makes others want to be part of it. And most founders I know, myself included, have felt the gap between what we’re trying to say and how it actually lands.

Ultraspeaking closes that gap, not by teaching you what to say, but by helping you show up more fully when you say it.

But here’s what struck me after that coaching call: the principle applies far beyond speaking.

Whether you’re building a business, learning a new skill, or trying to show up differently in your relationships, the instinct is always to improve the whole picture. We want to barrel through. We want to tell the entire story from start to finish and then repeat it, hoping it gets better each time.

But doing that, we just gloss over the messy parts. We never slow down long enough to see what’s actually tripping us up.

I think about this often when I’m working with founders. There’s a temptation to keep iterating on the entire product, the entire pitch, the entire strategy, when the real leverage might be in one conversation you’re avoiding. One assumption you haven’t tested. One moment in the customer journey where people quietly drop off.

Isolation feels counterintuitive. It feels like you’re ignoring everything else. But the truth is, when you focus on one thing and refine it, the rest starts to shift too. Confidence in one area has a way of bleeding into others.

I’ve seen this in my own work. When I got clearer on how I end my videos, the whole video started to feel different. The opening had more direction because I knew where I was headed. The middle had more purpose because it was building toward something specific.

The same thing happens in business. When you get one part of your offer dialed in, the rest starts to organize around it. When you understand one customer deeply, you start to see patterns everywhere.

It’s a reminder that progress doesn’t always come from doing more. Sometimes it comes from doing less, but with more intention.

There’s a patience required for this kind of work. It asks you to resist the urge to fix everything at once. To trust that small, focused effort compounds over time. To believe that the messy parts deserve attention, not avoidance.

So I’ll leave you with the question I’ve been sitting with lately.

What’s the one thing you could isolate and focus on? Not the whole picture. Not the ten improvements you’ve been meaning to make. Just one thing.

Start there. Do the reps. See what shifts.