How to Bring Your Real Voice to Work

5 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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1:19

In this video, Dr. Ed Tori explains a workshop he runs that uses the party game Snake Oil as an icebreaker and team‑building exercise. Participants draw cards that assign them a whimsical character—such as a ninja, princess, kindergartner, or dragon—and must invent and pitch a product to that character. The game provokes playful, imaginative dialogue that reveals participants' authentic speech patterns. Tori observes that people excel at these imaginative sales pitches, displaying genuine, spontaneous communication, but when they return to their formal workplace roles, their language becomes stiff and constrained by hierarchical titles. The workshop therefore highlights how a simple, humorous game can surface a more real voice, foster laughter, and improve team bonding by breaking down role‑based communication barriers.

Chapters

I sometimes conduct a workshop around a game that I used to play with my kids, and the game is called Snake Oil. You can order it on Amazon. But in the game, you have to sell something to a character, and the character might be a ninja, a samurai, a kindergartner, a pregnant woman, a princess, something like that. And you have to create something and sell it to them using cards. And what I find really interesting is sometimes I'll do that workshop as a It's a great workshop for— what do you call it— more like icebreaker in a way, but also for team building because it's absolutely hilarious. Like, whenever I conduct this workshop, you can't be eating because something will come out of your nose kind of thing, or someone will choke, right? We can't have that in a work situation. So anyway, when I do this workshop, what's really incredibly fascinating to me is that people are really good at selling to a princess or a kindergartner or a ninja or a dragon, right? But for some reason, they go to have a similar conversation using similar speech patterns, and when they enter their workplace, all of a sudden it all falls apart because there's some stiff kind of role. I'm this, I'm the vice president of that, and therefore I have to speak this way. But really, you're totally real when you're in a game. You're having these conversations. It's just so much more authentic.