How to Speak with Confidence and Impact in Any Setting, with Nausheen Chen

Welcome to Building your Leader Brand. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Nosheen Chen. All of us have a bazillion things going through our heads all the time. We're stressed. We're brought down by life. So figuring out a way to tap into your energy will bring out the passion that you have for your subject. And it's really not about emulating someone like Tony Robbins, for We don't want you to go over the top. We don't want you to be fake. But what I want you to do is understand how do you amplify yourself. Maybe show up as a 1. 3 or 1. 4 version of yourself. Hi there, and welcome back to Building your Leader Brand. My name is Bob Gentle, and every week I speak to incredible people who share their secrets to building, marketing, and monetizing your expertise and the mindset you need for your business to grow and thrive. If you're new to the show, then while you still have whatever device that is in your hand or on your lap, take a second to subscribe. That way you won't miss a single thing. If you are particularly enthusiastic, you can also download the Personal Brand Business Roadmap. It's everything you need to start, scale, or fix your expert business. Click the link in the show notes or visit amplifyme. Agency/roadmap. This week, we are getting into a topic where, honestly, it's another self-indulgence. If you listen to this podcast regularly, you can probably work out. Guests usually reflect what I'm particularly interested in the moment. Right now, that's speaking and being seen in person. To help me this week, I'm joined by Naushin Chen. Naushin, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Bob. This is very exciting. Like I was saying a moment ago, speaking comes in all shapes and sizes. I've been dabbling with lots of these different sizes, but as the stakes get higher, I start looking at getting it right a little bit more carefully and a little bit more diligently. For the listener at home, that's what you do. For the listener who's meeting you for the first time, can you maybe just tell us a little bit about who you are, where you are, and what it is you actually do? Sure. You know when you have a big presentation coming up or a podcast that you need to speak on, like this one, and you get nervous beforehand, or you walk out of that room or out of that podcast I'm just thinking, I could have done that better. That's where I come in. I'm a public speaking coach for both stage and Camera, and I help people become and speak as their most impactful selves, regardless of which room they're in, which Zoom they're in, which podcast they're on. What's interesting listening to you there, this is episode 302 of this show, and I'm still very nervous before before every single interview. Not terribly nervous, less nervous than I used to be. But what that's telling me is stage fright and nerves never go away. This is why planning for it is probably a really powerful thing. I guess rather than me ploughing into all my questions, what would be interesting for me is to understand what is an ideal client or an average? There's no average client. They're all outstanding. What do the people you work with actually look like? Why do they come to you? And what's the normal experience they're having that's the main pain point for them? I work with both business folks, people that are in regular corporate our jobs as well as founders and entrepreneurs. Everyone who comes to me who wants to work with me falls into one of two groups. They're either folks that get very, very nervous, that get extreme stage fright, that don't have the right words to say at the right time that just don't like that feeling that they get before a big meeting, a big presentation, a big podcast. Or I work with folks who don't feel the nerves, who have experience in speaking, but They want to be better. They feel like they're at a five or a six, and they want to be at a nine. They want to be at an eleven. I've had clients come to me and say, I want to speak like a president. I want to speak like this big influence or household name that I admire. I want to make sure that the influence that they have when they walk into a room or when they share a video, I want that. I want that impact. So broadly speaking, it's those two groups that I work with. And how often do you look at them and you think that's unrealistic? I don't believe anything is unrealistic because great speaking skills are absolutely something that you can learn. No one is born with it, regardless of what people think about, for example, extroverts versus introverts, where people think, Oh, I'm not an extrovert, so I can't go out there and express myself. That's crap. You can absolutely learn to be an impactful communicator, regardless of your personality type, experience, age. All you need to do is have deep expertise in what you're talking about, be passionate about it, and then understand what are the tools, what's the delivery mechanism that the best speakers in the world use. I never really think it's unrealistic unless you want to improve overnight. I normally don't get clients who say, I have a huge talk tomorrow. I need to ace it. I haven't rehearsed at all. Let's go. One of the things that's been on the back of my mind for a long time, when I say a long time, I'm probably talking about seven or eight years is writing a book. I've done it now. It's just about finished. But the first few times I approached it, I came up with the unified theory of everything, according to Bob. I think I think a lot of speakers approach speaking the same way. I need to explain everything. That's impossible. It's generally a very bad idea to approach that, I would imagine. How do you help people a Because the speaking is one part of it, but what are you actually speaking about? What's the essence? What's important? How do you help people whittle down what they should be speaking about? Yes. We're looking at content and delivery separately, which is exactly how I approach my coaching. If you're looking at the content piece of it, the actual content of what you're saying, you can structure it in many different ways. The first thing that I do is I help people understand that actually sharing less is more powerful than sharing more because you're not convinced of it, because you think that, I want to help people. And this is coming from a great place. You want to be generous with the knowledge that you've learned, that you've gained. But very often, we have the curse of knowledge. We know a a lot more than the audience that we're speaking to. And very often, we also overestimate where they're at. People think that, Oh, they understand this. I assume they know this. Don't assume. Check with the audience. Create a flowing interactive conversation. Just because you're on that stage doesn't mean it's a one-way speech. If it's a one-way speech, people are going to tune you out. If people feel that you are there to share something with them, to engage them, to actually have a conversation with them, even if you're on a stage and they're in the audience, that's when they'll pay attention. So first being selective about what you're sharing, then checking in with the audience very frequently in terms of, are they with you? Are they lost? Do they need an explanation? Do they not need an explanation? Can you glaze over something? Do you need to spend more time on something? So being flexible in the moment. If you're speaking in a completely improvised way, which a lot of my clients do, so they're not delivering a presentation, maybe they are doing a podcast, maybe they're speaking up in a meeting, they need to structure their thoughts. There are these things that I teach called thought structures. I didn't invent this. I just did a lot of research and I understood that world of improvisation. I also got trained as an improv coach. So understanding what are these mental structures that you can have in place that all you need to do is fill in with your thoughts as you go along, that makes your improvised response sound a lot more structured and refined. That's something I'd never really considered before. I always think about speaking in public as the big flagship event. I am the speaker, and then there's an audience. But there are moments of impact, I think would be the phrase I would put it, where we have an opportunity to communicate and we leave this always to chance. I'd never considered that we could take process into this and practise for those moments of impact. And thinking about this, everything from a coaching call to a job interview to a sales pitch, these are all moments of impact. If we get it right, we move a step forward. If we fail, We get pushed off the board. So having processes and frameworks around that is something I'd never considered. Now, being nosy, Bob, I've had a rumage around your website, and you have the best collection of lead magnets I've ever seen. Do you have one for this? No, I don't have one specifically for this, but I do have a free course that anyone can take that lays out the foundations of impactful speaking. I've had a lot of people take this course over the last year and a half. I believe it's almost a thousand people, if not more. They always say that, Wow, I am now actually being intentional about the way I'm showing up. I am now paying attention to how I communicate. I am now getting other people saying that, Wow, something's changed in the way that you're showing up, and all in just five days. I would love everyone to actually just go there and get this course. It's completely free. It's called Speak Fearlessly Course, and you can just get it at speaking. Coach. I think I subscribed to that earlier today. Awesome. I've been a bit promiscuous on your website. I do apologise. Another aspect of this, I guess, we're talking about stages. There There are stages that happen one-on-one, like the coaching calls. I would almost say a podcast interview is a one-on-one thing, really. Yes, people get to listen to it, but I don't get to watch them do it, and I have no impact on that once it's in their ears. But if we're looking at scale, then we have stages, everything from a TikTok video or a LinkedIn video. Video, really, I guess, is what I'm saying here, where we're recording. I notice some people have real presence in those and other people don't. Some people seem to have the ability to just turn it on, and others don't. I think you're a really good example of this. Your videos are very engaging, very smooth, and they make a very simple point elegantly. If you were coaching anybody in terms of their more visibility at scale, what simple frameworks do you recommend demand people have in mind or school me. A lot of my clients actually don't even think of it that way. The way that you're describing it, turning yourself on, that's exactly the principle that I first introduced to my clients, because a lot of people think that the way that they speak in regular life should be the way that they speak on stage or on camera. But if you do that, you're not in control, you're not intentional, and you're not leaning into the message or the way that you're delivering it. You're not being mindful and intentional. That's the first principle here. Then I coach folks on what I call the speaker's toolkit. If you think When you think about a speaker that you really enjoy listening to or watching, you'll notice that if you really break down what it is that you like about them, they're working with and playing with their voice. They are showing up with the right energy, and they're using their body language. That's at the core of the speaker's toolkit, your voice, your energy, your body language. You have to understand, how do you not speak in a monotone? How do you emphasise certain words? How do you add pauses strategically so that people lean in a little bit more so that people remember that great point that you just made? How do you vary the pitch of your voice so that you're not always speaking at the same level? What happens there is that our brains get lazy as the audience, and then they tune you out if you're not varying things up, if you're not changing things and keeping them fresh. So that's working with your voice, your energy, Really matters. All of us have a bazillion things going through our heads all the time. We're stressed, we're brought down by life. So figuring out a way to tap into your energy will bring out the passion that you have for your subject. It's really not about emulating someone like Tony Robbins, for example. We don't want you to go over the top. We don't want you to be fake. But what I want you to do is understand how do you amplify yourself. Maybe show up as a 1. 3 or 1. 4 version of yourself. Then there's, of course, your body language. What should you do with your hands? How should you emote things with your face? That's really at the heart of the system, your voice, your energy, your body language. I went to a big conference. The main theme of this conference was personal branding. It was like 500 people in a room. I think there were five speakers through the day. And one speaker essentially just presented. So all the speakers had amazing high impact messaging. One speaker come all the way from Australia to give this presentation presentation where he presented, Here are my five favourite apps. I thought, Really? But I knew the organiser of the event, and he said this was the highest rated talk of the whole day. It made me reflect on what was that, and it was exactly what you said. It wasn't what he delivered, which was essentially a listicle, but he delivered it with passion and enthusiasm. He had great body language, charisma on stage. He made people feel, which was really interesting. People were taking away from how that talk made them feel. They were enthusiastic, they felt empowered afterwards. They could go and take some easy action. They were going to know something they didn't know before. I think what you described there, I saw that in real stark contrast to people who were bringing amazing insight, genuine personal transformations. It was not logical, but it was there nevertheless. I love that. Yeah. A lot of times people ask me, what's more important, the message that you're delivering or the way that you're delivering it? And of course, both are equally important. But what you just said, it demonstrates that you can have an amazing message. And a lot of people that I work with do. You have something to share that has the potential to change lives. But if you deliver it in a way where people are tuned out, then you've lost them. You're not going to make an impact if people haven't even heard heard what you've said, if people haven't understood what you've said. Even if they listen in the moment, if they forget you an hour later, again, you've lost them. You've lost that opportunity. There's a reason why aeroplane safety videos and demonstrations have gotten more creative over the years. They're sharing a message that can actually potentially save your life, but you're going to pop in those headphones unless something really gets you out of it, and that's their way of delivering the message. We've spoken It's a lot about getting over the hub of making a start, really. But there are a lot of people who do speaking. I mean, this is a show predominantly focused on people who are building marketing and monetizing their personal brand or people who are in leadership roles and want to show up a little bit bigger. So a lot of them are doing some speaking. And one of the things I hear quite often is I'd like to go from maybe running a workshop from time to time to actually getting paid for this work that I'm doing an awful lot of the time for free. And again, being nosy, Bob, I've had a rumage around your website, and this is an area that you'd play in as well, is helping people move from essentially being good free speakers to making this actually part of your business. How do you approach that work with people? What advice would you have for anybody that's listening thinking, I want to play bigger. I want to actually get paid as a speaker? It's interesting that we're talking about playing bigger and getting paid in the same sentence because it's great to take a step back and understand what are your motivations. For example, potentially you could just want more visibility. Potentially, you could just want more credibility as a speaker. Sometimes those opportunities are not paid. Tedx, for example, doesn't pay its speakers. A lot of the top-tier conferences, WebSummit, South by Southwest, They don't pay speakers. But what you get there is a lot more visibility, a lot more credibility. You can really show that off everywhere on your LinkedIn profile and your content. I'm going to be speaking at Web Summit. I'm going to be speaking at South by Southwest. I have TEDx all over my profile because I've been on the TEDx stage multiple times. That opens doors. That is a very legit reason to want to go bigger, potentially not necessarily to tap into a direct revenue stream, but to raise your profile. Then, of course, another legitimate idea is to create another revenue stream and get paid as a speaker. Then you have to understand what events do you want to speak at and what's available. Very often, signing up with the speaker bureau could be a way of doing it, where you list yourself as a potential speaker. If you've already been speaking for free, that's great. That means you have enough material to create what's called a speaker reel. Before you dive into this world of professional speaking, it's great to have a speaker reel landing page which shows off both your past speaking opportunities as well as the topics, themes that you speak on. With those two things, armed with those two things, you can not only enlist in speaker bureaus, but then you can actually pitch to specific folks in HR, in the event world. That takes time. It is painful, and you may have to start low. You may have to start, for example, getting paid $500 or $1,500 or $2,000 first as a first-time paid speaker. But the great news there is that if you do it regularly, you can actually start charging more for every single event that you do. There are folks, of course, that get paid tens of thousands of dollars. Of course, the celebrity-level folks get paid a lot more than that. But there are a lot of regular folks that don't need to have celebrity-level status that get paid in the tens of thousands for every single speaking opportunity. Like you said, I think being paid to actually speak is one route to monetizing your visibility on stages, but there are many others. What I see a lot of the time is people have a speaking opportunity. They show up on the day, they give their talk, and then they go back in the green room and they go home again, and they wonder why nothing happened for them. I'd be interested in your perspective of how do you... Outside of your actual talk, how do you prepare for an event in order that when you get there, you're ready to exploit the opportunity? And then I'm guessing the magic is all in the follow-up. What do you do after the event? How do you approach those two things? There are two ways of maximising the impact of every speaking opportunity. One is to leverage it across your platforms, across your content, and then the other is to actually network with the folks that present there in person. Every single speaking opportunity is an opportunity to network, especially if it's in person. So make sure that you hang around after the event. I typically encourage clients not to get bogged down with this before their talk because I don't want them to get distracted, and I definitely don't want them to be networking right up till their talk. But right after is a great opportunity because A, people have heard you speak. You automatically have authority, at least for the moment. And B, you can now relax. You can now really focus on the people that are there and figure out what it is that they do. Why were they there? What interest level did they have in your talk? What do they feel now? I just had a client speak at an event two days ago. We worked together on not just her presentation, but also her elevator pitch. So what is she actually going to say to people who then come up to her after the presentation and want to talk to her? And We worked on her getting the courage to just go up to strangers and introduce herself. I was just talking to her on WhatsApp earlier today, and she said, Yeah, I did that for the first time. I just went up to people and introduced myself. I used the elevator pitch, and I had some really great conversations, and now I'm actually in the middle of sending them follow-up emails. That's where your follow-up idea comes in as well, where you make specific contacts and then aim to build relationships. It's not that people who are listening to you in the audience are going to become clients overnight. It might happen, but that's not what your own vision for that event should be. It should be to build relationships with anyone who's seen you speak because now they're going to remember you. You've been on a stage. Even if they don't work with you, they might refer other people to you. They might get you to speak at their company, at whatever they are a part of, whatever environment they're a part of. If nothing else, they might be great for you to get feedback from. How was the presentation? What parts did you like? What parts did you not like? Something I'd be interested to hear from you is what your journey as a speaker has looked like, because you weren't parachuted into the world as a speaker. This was something that you had to create over time. What did that journey actually look like for you? Because I think a lot of the time understanding somebody else's journey and the context that the speaking has within your broader business, I think that would be quite helpful for people to hear. Speaking has been a part of my life for so long. That annoying kid who always gets up in front of the whole family and recites the most boring poem ever. I always used to be that annoying kid. Just a natural show off. Right? It was encouraged. I was an only child, I was the youngest by far in the family. The only way that I could get people to actually listen to me, to pay attention, and not write me off as an annoying brat was to perform. And once I got their attention, that's when I realised this is precious. Having people's attention is precious. Now, what should I do with it? So since then, I've sought out every single stage I could. My first job was on the radio. I've I've been director and producer for a crappy little late night comedy TV show, done improv and theatre on stage, and then been a filmmaker for seven years, where I was behind the camera, but my job was to coach both professional and nonprofessional talent, which is a nice way of saying CEOs or CTOs who were speaking on camera for the first time and showing up as robots, really devoid of all personality and emotion. My job was to coax emotion and impact out of them so that people want to listen, they want to tune in. I've had a very close relationship with both the stage and the camera for most of my life. It was only about four years ago where I was still a filmmaker at the time, and I was just not feeling it because I had actually gotten into filmmaking in a way by fluke. It was my ex who was into filmmaking, and I just, I tagged along and then just got into directing and producing, but I never felt like a filmmaker. I was complaining to my husband for the bajillionth time, saying that, What am I doing with my life? Everyone thinks it's so great being a filmmaker, but this is not me. I'm not this visionary director. I just hate doing all of this. He said, You know the one thing that you've been doing is speaking on stage. Ever since I've known you, you make time for this. You go out of your way to host these events, to speak on different stages, to deliver these workshops. I was like, Yeah, all right, sure. That's something I do. That's my passion. He said, You can make a living off of that. I literally hadn't thought of that before. I always thought, Well, I'm no Tony Robbins. Who's going to want to pay me to hear me speak? All I've done is, Well, I have a lot of experience in speaking on stage and camera, but so what? Turns out that is something that a lot of people really struggle with, both folks that are in the corporate world and folks that are entrepreneurs who are now speaking on camera and representing their brand who are now going to these events. So something that I had completely taken for granted was something that was in very high demand. And that's when I started posting on LinkedIn and being very intentional about building my brand, getting my name out there, getting visibility. And since then, I haven't looked back. So full-time public-speaking coach and trainer. What's really interesting watching you is I've met lots of people who do what you do, but they're very easy to ignore. You are quite literally a very colourful person Awesome. You have purple hair. I think that's purple. Yeah. Today, it's purple anyway. You are very visible. I think a lot of people in your space, they tend to be backroom barny. They're not very visible. Their job is to facilitate visibility for others. But when you meet somebody who does what you do, who's also walking the walk, it puts a very different colour on, a very different perspective. For me, that's always a strong signal that you should pay attention. It's very easy to do the work that we do and not do the work, if you see what I mean. But people can spot that a mile off. I really admire that you are doing the work as well as teaching the work. That's quite an unusual thing. Thank you. Yeah, you're so right. It's in a way leading by example. It's showing people that, Yeah, okay, I know this, but not because I studied it from a book. I've never had a technical qualification in public speaking. It's literally just built on decades of experience. I have to continue to do that as well because people want to see that you're in touch with what's happening. Even though speaking on a stage will always be speaking on a stage. The Romans did it at some point. We do it. It's very similar, but also different. I think even since ancient times, people have had stage fright. That hasn't gone away. We haven't mutated out of it. People will still value a companion to help them through difficult things that they value. People will hire the companion. They know can trust. If we can show them that this is somewhere I'm going anyway, they just get to come with you rather than, I'll go on this journey, but only if you pay me. It's a very different proposition, which I really like, and I take that seriously as well. So let's get into part two. So part two, I am going to invite you to share three things that people can go and, loosely speaking, do. So a mental model that you regularly fall back on or a book everyone should read, or a podcast you like, or an app you like. But three things people can go and take action on today. Do you have anything for me? Sure. I would actually give you a three-step process and turn that into something you can do sequentially, because a lot of people don't do this. So the very first step is actually record yourself speaking and watch it back. It sounds so simple, and all of us have amazing cameras that we're carrying around in our pockets. So just take your phone, record yourself speaking for about a minute on a question that you get asked all the time, something that you can talk about in your sleep, and then watch it back. Really aim to separate yourself from the person you see on the screen. I often call this the writer-actor-director model, again, from my days of filmmaking. When you have the actor, the performer, you're actually, well, you as a person, you are playing all three roles at different points in time. You're the writer coming up with what to say. You're the performer, whether it's on stage or on camera or in a one-to-one conversation. Then you're the director, you're the critic, you're the one who's judging your own performance, either in the moment or later. When you are watching yourself back, if you can separate yourself and say that that was the me that was performing, and this is the me who is helping this person, who's the, I'm the director, I'm the critic, that will help you, A, desensitise yourself to cringy process of watching yourself back. You know what I'm talking about? Oh, yes. B, it will help you improve in a way that is going to help future you. So that's step one. Step two is using an AI platform. There are actually a lot of public speaking AI platforms that help you in different ways. Utly is one that I use very often. I use it with my clients, where you can upload this video that you've just created, and the AI will give you some great data and analytics. It will tell you how fast you were speaking, how many filler words like you were using. It will tell you whether you were looking straight at the camera, whether you weren't making eye contact. That data is great because then you can do it again. And that's step three, to do it again, to take that same idea, the same topic, and now give yourself one goal. So after you've watched it, after you've looked at the AI analytics, Find one thing that you want to improve, and that's your step three. Once you can do this exercise and you actually look at the results and see, Wow, that took 15 minutes and I improved this one thing, you will gain this immense sense of control over the way that you're speaking, the way that you're showing up. That's amazing progress. What I love about that is it's something you can do in private to a large extent. Because a lot of the time we depend on very long timelines for feedback in any presentation, because we go from the idea through to the preparation, the planning, the execution, and the feedback. That could be months. If you're waiting all of that time to get the feedback for the improvement, A, the stakes are much higher. You're going to take that criticism probably much more harshly. It's not gamified in the same way. Being able to iteratively improve like that, it's a lot more like... I don't know. I could think of a good analogy, but I really like that. What was that app called? Yoodli. That's Y-O-O-D-L-I. I'm going to have a look at that. I have a lot more questions I could ask you, but I think we've probably covered enough for today. I'm going to have to have you back sometime. The first interview, when I'm particularly into what somebody's talking about, sometimes the first interview can be a little bit all over the place. Hopefully, my listener will not think that. They'll think, Bob, that was a really good interview. But I have many other rabbit holes I'd like to go down, so maybe we can do that another time. Sure. I love going down rabbit holes. If people are thinking, You know what? I need a little bit more Naushin in my life, how can they make that happen? Going to my website. That's the best way, speaking. Coach. Like I said, we have the free course If you just go to free course, it's right there on the main page. That's going to first get you the foundations. Then, of course, once you're in the newsletter, you're going to be hearing from me every week. Any time, if you respond to it, I do read all the responses myself. I may not get a chance to respond to everyone individually, but I'm very happy to get your questions, and I'm happy to integrate them into future content and respond that way. Everyone should go and do that. You have the most generous website I've come across. There's so much good stuff on there for free. I'm looking forward to see what the consequences of getting on your email list are. Thank you very much for your time. This has been a lot of fun. For you at home, thank you for your time. It does bring us to the end of another episode. If you have enjoyed the show, which I hope if you've got this far, you have, then I would invite you to leave a five-star review. That's five like the fingers on your hand wherever you listen to podcasts. Again, if you did enjoy this, you will love the Personal Brand Business Roadmap. It's everything you need to start, scale, or fix your expert business. Thanks at home for listening. Now, Sheen Chen, thank you so much for your time. You've been awesome. Thank you so much for having me, Bob. This was great. Thank you.