SPI 794: How to Become a Confident Speaker with Nausheen I. Chen—SPI Pro Expert in Residence

SPI 794: How to Become a Confident Speaker with Nausheen I. Chen—SPI Pro Expert in Residence

Nausheen I. Chen: The audience wants you to win. If someone’s investing their time and sitting there, they want to make a good investment. They want to make a good return on their investment, which means they are rooting for you. They want you to do well. So reframing nerves, reminding yourself that the audience is on your side, and taking attention away from you and diverting it to the audience. If I can help people with the things I know, it becomes a lot less scary because then I’m not putting on an act. I’m simply there to help.

Pat Flynn: It’s becoming more and more important to create a personal brand, and not just create it, but to really own it, to have people understand who you are and what you’re about. But one of the best ways to show up is to show up in person, on a stage, or maybe it’s a digital stage, like a podcast or a YouTube video.

And being the best version of yourself to best support the personal brand and the missions and the values that you have, and of course, lead to leads and sales, like I said, is just so important. And we’re feeling this right with everything becoming. Less human it feels like the more that you can show up the more that your personality can shine the better.

So today we are inviting a guest on the show who I’m so excited to introduce to you. Her name is Nausheen Chen. She helps you speak in public better. And this translates not just to stages, but to podcasts, YouTube, your content. She’s a professional speaking coach, and she is also our latest addition to our roster of incredible experts, who we are calling our experts in residence inside of SPI Pro. Coaches and experts who are there to serve those who are in that community.

And I wanted to bring machine on today to talk about not just who she is as a person, but really dive into what can we do today to better share who we are and what we’re about. And of course, grow our business. So, you can find her at Speaking.coach, which is a great domain name, but more than that, sit back, relax, enjoy this half hour with Nausheen Chen.

Here she is.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he traded in his Tesla for an off road truck so he could find better fishing spots, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Nausheen, welcome officially to SPI. Thank you for being here today.

Nausheen I. Chen: Thank you so much, Pat. It’s been an honor, a pleasure, and I’m super excited to have this conversation.

Pat Flynn: I’m most excited about giving our community access to you and all the extensive knowledge you have about speaking and getting yourself on, whether it’s a physical stage or a digital stage.

I mean, it’s so important these days. to sort of get out from behind the keyboard and start, you know, getting in person or at least talking to person face to face and knowing how to show up in your best self is so important. So that is your superpower. And I’m so excited to dive into that. But I also want to ask you, why do people struggle so much with that?

What is holding them back? What are the stories that everybody listening to this probably is already telling themselves about speaking?

Nausheen I. Chen: People have this massive fear of the audience judging them, of being vulnerable on stage or on camera of forgetting what they had to say and of looking like a fool, looking stupid.

Those are all things that my clients have said to me. And a lot of it has to do with the pressure, the enormous pressure that we put on ourselves when we’re in the spotlight. When all eyes are on us, real or imagined, a lot of people also struggle with creating videos the same way. When all eyes are on you you feel this immense pressure to perform, to be perfect, and it’s ironically that pressure that makes you either robotic or stiff, a pale version of yourself, or just give in to speaking patterns that don’t do justice to your expertise.

Pat Flynn: I mean, there’s this sort of inherent psychology that comes along with that, this humanness to why it’s hard.

I mean, we as humans want to belong to a group, not be left out of it. We don’t want to, you know, that’s, that’s like a survival thing. So it’s like, why would we even do this? So if you were to speak to those people who have those fears before we get into the unlock, why is it important to pursue? Can we not just succeed by typing something out or maybe at a maximum doing an audio only show and not really like putting ourselves out there?

Why go through that struggle and pain and suffering? What is it all for?

Nausheen I. Chen: You can’t be a personal brand and be one dimensional anymore. If you’re building a business, yeah, from someone who’s extremely multidimensional, if you’re building a business based off of your personal brand, then you have to show people who you really are and the best, perhaps the only way to show them what it’s like to be you to talk to you, to have you in the same room is to either be on camera, create a video, do a live webinar, do a podcast, or then actually be there in person on stage. You can’t hide if you’re building something that is based off of your personal brand, your personal brand would be incomplete.

Pat Flynn: A hundred percent. I mean, we have to weigh the pros versus cons, the rewards far outweigh the risks here, and it’s easy to forget that. For you, what was the moment in time when you unlocked this ability to kind of get on stage? Were you always somebody who this came naturally to, and if not, can you lead me to that moment where things started to really jive for you and what you do?

Nausheen I. Chen: You know that annoying kid who always gets up in front of their family and recites the most boring poem ever? I used to be that annoying kid. I have always loved being in the spotlight, being the youngest in a family where everyone was much older, not just older, much older, put me in a position where I realized very quickly that unless I was on a stage, no one was listening to me.

No one wanted to know what I had to say. So that was the only way for me to get attention, to speak my mind, to be able to tell someone something that they’re going to listen to. So I always relished being on stage and being in the spotlight, but I challenged that word being natural or unnatural because there are a lot of people like me who were extroverted, who maybe have been speaking on stages or on camera, but they’re not effective.

They still use filler words. They don’t make an effort to engage with the audience. There’s this false confidence that comes with being quote unquote a natural, which I realized very, very early on in one of my first presentations in the corporate world, when I was at Procter and Gamble, my first boss asked me to present and I had no hangups.

I had no fear about it. I wanted to go and present, but was it good? So after I did the presentation, I’m feeling really proud of myself because I felt like I gave it my all and I was able to present. I was able to show my ideas to the audience. And after that, my boss came up to me and said, Hmm, not bad.

What the heck was going on with your hands, though? And I realized I had all these blind spots like using my hands uncontrollably fast all the time or going too fast, using a lot of ums and uhs that I had just developed over time. There were blind spots. I wasn’t really doing anything to improve myself as a speaker.

So that’s my journey as a speaker. And when it comes to coaching, I really took the long way around figuring out that helping people speak better it was the one thing that I wanted to do in life went through the corporate route, was a filmmaker at one point. And then as a third career. I’m now doing public speaking coaching.

Pat Flynn: I love it. And I cannot express how valuable a coach like yourself is. When I started speaking, which I was not an extrovert, I was an introvert and I actually almost felt kind of forced to speak because a friend was putting on a conference and I just wanted to help him. But I mean, it was the hardest thing to do, but I fell in love with it after that first one, even though I was terrible or at least I think I was, I hired a coach who really guided me because there are some things that are speaking and getting confident or at least seeming confident on a stage is a coachable, learnable skill. And that’s the beauty here. You’re not just like out of luck. If you don’t know how to do this, you can learn how to do this. When you work with a client, where do you even begin? How do you help a person begin to discover how they can best show up on stage?

How do you, like, do you have a framework or a process that you take people to? I’m curious to know how that works from your coaching perspective.

Nausheen I. Chen: Yeah. So this is a great question because that’s the question I asked myself a year and a half ago when I went full time into coaching because a lot of people do, but when you actually have to go and teach the thing that you’re good at, you don’t have frameworks, you’ve never learned it.

I, I’m such a nerd that I learn everything at school and university, but I never learned public speaking. All I did was I looked at the past 17 years of speaking on every single stage I could find from neighborhood coffee shops to the TEDx stage, being on radio, on TV. And I looked at what are the things that an impactful speaker does?

What are the, Key things that they’re playing with that make them impactful as a speaker? A lot of people use words like charisma or influence or personality, but what does that actually mean? So I drilled it down to what I call the magic trifecta, your voice, your energy, your body language. And if you analyze your favorite TED talk, you’ll notice that the speaker is playing with the way they’re using their voice.

They’re bringing in variations. They’re adding pauses. They’re playing with the pitch, the volume. They’re using the right level of energy. They’re not showing up super high energy that alienates the audience. Neither are they so chill that the entire audience just sinks to that level of being super relaxed. And they play with their body language.

And that’s the, at the heart of the system that I coach. And of course it’s extremely personalized for each person. This forms what I call the speaker’s toolkit, but just having the right mannerisms. or figuring out where to pause and how to stand isn’t enough because we don’t want people to be putting on a show.

We want them to be able to tap into and amplify their own personality when they’re on stage or when they’re on camera. So that’s really the core of the work that I do. I help people understand how to be the best versions of themselves, how to show up with more impact, more energy, more passion, more authenticity when they’re speaking in these scenarios where it’s really important to make an impact.

Pat Flynn: I love that. And this is why, again, a coach is important because they, or you can see that we can’t see it as a student often. We don’t know what stands out until we start doing it. And unlike a lot of other courses or other things that are like, okay, here is the framework and you just need to do these things.

It doesn’t quite work like that. Cause like you said, you don’t get the best version of yourself out there. What are some ways that our listeners who are exploring, you know, wide content creation or even public speaking on a stage, what are some of the things that a person on a stage could do to express their best self?

Is it tell a story or what are kind of more tact, tactful, tactful? What are the strategies a person can do to do that? Obviously, Not miss stumble a word like I just did, but.

Nausheen I. Chen: And you recover so beautifully. So absolutely no harm, no foul.

Pat Flynn: We’ll talk about recoveries in a sec. I’m sure.

Nausheen I. Chen: I’m sure you have a lot of stories.

I’d love to hear yours.

Pat Flynn: Oh, I’ve needed to recover a lot, Nausheen, trust me. Maybe we can pass some stories back and forth in a minute here, but, but tell me a little bit more about, okay, a person’s on stage, what is it that they’re doing that gets an audience to connect with them?

Nausheen I. Chen: I would actually rewind. I would say, what can a person do before they end up on that stage to be able to be impactful?

Because all the work really happens a few weeks to a few months before you end up on that stage. When you’re on stage, when you’re in the spotlight, when you have all eyes on you, the goal is to be there with a hundred percent presence to be as relaxed as you possibly can to be at ease and to know how to channel your expertise, your emotions, your passion into the way that you’re delivering your message.

So rewind a few weeks or a few months. The first thing people think of is what am I going to present? What’s the message? What’s going to go on the slides? And all of that is great. What people don’t think of is, if my delivery If the way that I’m delivering the message and the slides fails, then all that hard work that went into the beautiful slides and the message and crafting the stories will go to waste.

People will tune out. So, by the time you get to that stage, understanding how to be at ease, how to have warmed up beforehand so that you’re not hitting the stage very freaked out and nervous and letting the nerves take over. Understanding how you’re going to engage with the audience so that it’s not a one way lecture that people are going to tune out of and understanding how you’re going to make sure that you’re flexible and adaptive enough. That’s something that a lot of people don’t do. They have a very set talk or a very set presentation that they go through, regardless of whether people are lost, confused, need to ask questions, tuning out, the best thing that you can do is start work early and not even when you have a talk, but figure out how can you become a better speaker?

Regardless of where you’re speaking.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. And I think one thing that has helped me as well as thinking about, okay, who’s going to be there, like who’s watching. And it’s just so much easier to nail a message when you kind of understand a bit about who your audience is. I mean, if you have a brand and you’re creating YouTube videos or podcasts, then you should hopefully know a little bit about what they might need help with.

But very rarely do I hear people talk about how important it is to think about. Well, who’s going to be sitting in that chair when I’m up on the stage? What are the words that they would resonate with or the lyrics I like to call it? What stories do I have in my story bank that would best make sense for this particular audience?

So I love that. I think it was Seneca who said, luck is when preparation meets opportunity or something like that. I don’t know. I completely butchered that. But it’s true. I mean, the prep work is very important and it’s something that we shouldn’t take lightly this responsibility that we have when we have.

And we know we’re going to have a person’s attention for, you know, X number of minutes.

You mentioned a few times being at ease. How do we do that when there’s so much the opposite of that happening in our mind? Do you have any exercises or, or ways that we can combat that nervousness and that anxiety that is likely to show up when we’re supposed to be a little bit more at ease and relaxed and show up as our best self?

Nausheen I. Chen: There’s work that you can do on the inside, the inner work, and then there’s work that you can do, quote unquote, on the outside, things like exercises that you mentioned. The inner work is, of course, longer term, but has much deeper impact, and that inner work would be figuring out what’s putting you ill at ease.

What is it that is making you feel so nervous or anxious? Is it the fear of judgment? Is it the imposter syndrome? Is it that feeling that the audience is judging you or criticizing you? And that you’ll come up as less than. There are strategies to deal with all of them. So I’ll tell you about one of the times that I was presenting to this group.

I had Twitch contact me and they wanted me to do a workshop for their engineers. And I was freaking out. I of course said yes immediately. And I wanted that opportunity to tell them and to share as an expert. But of course, the one thing that was in my mind was, Oh my God, they’ve made the wrong decision.

They have the wrong person. I don’t know what they were thinking. They’re going to be massively disappointed. And I had that feeling, to an extent, where I would tell my husband in the days leading up to the workshop, Cecil, I think that I made a mistake. I should just back out. Or you think there’s like a last minute family emergency I could tell them about?

They’re going to be fine, right? And he looks at me. My husband, and he says, what’s wrong with you? Not only do you enjoy doing this, but you’re really good at it. Why are you psyching yourself out? And I realized I wasn’t doing the one thing that I teach and coach people on, which is don’t let the nerves and the fear take over.

The body produces the same physiological reaction to excitement and nervousness. Your heart starts beating faster. You get butterflies in your tummy. Some people get sweaty palms. You start obsessing over the thing that you’re excited or nervous about, which means that it’s up to your brain to label that emotion.

Was I really, really nervous and anxious, or was I that excited at the prospect of meeting these great engineers at this amazing company? And I realized I was really excited. It was the excitement that was this overwhelming feeling that was bubbling up. That, coupled with reminding myself that the audience wants you to win really helped.

And I say that not because I believe in humanity, which I do not because I think people are great, which I think they are, I hope, but because if someone’s investing their time and sitting there In the audience, they want to listen to you, they want to make a good investment. They want to make a good return on their investment, which means they are rooting for you.

They want you to do well. They’re not sitting there with their notepads, judging you and putting points on exactly how you’ve done unless you’re at American Idol. I can’t promise that they won’t judge you there, but anything other than that, your audience actually wants you to win. So reframing nerves, reminding yourself that the audience is on your side and taking attention away from you and diverting it to the audience.

Instead of thinking about how I need to be perfect, I need to have the right words to say at the right time. I need to show up as this confident person on stage. Instead of that, think about how I need to make sure that people understand my message. I would love it if one person walks out of this room being a little bit more knowledge rich because of something I shared.

If I can help people with the things I know, it becomes a lot less scary because then I’m not putting on an act. I’m not pressurizing myself into some strange image of perfection. I’m simply there to help.

Pat Flynn: That’s a huge unlock, Nausheen. Thank you for that. The reframe is so important. I’ve had to learn. my way through that as well.

I still get nervous. I still want to throw up, but I change what that means to myself right before I go on stage. Typically before I go on stage, I’m pacing, I’m going over the intro and I’m just trying to kind of get into a flow state. Do you have a ritual? I do breathing exercises as well, sort of right beforehand.

Do you have like a pregame ritual for your talks? I’m curious to know if you do anything interesting.

Nausheen I. Chen: Absolutely. That’s the part too, what I was referring to earlier, those are the, the tactical things that you can do on the outside that would help you feel a bit less nervous, a little more comfortable.

So I do, and I teach three types of warmups, physical warmups. The kind that you mentioned, a lot of people think of Tony Robbins jumping on a trampoline. On this, my clients constantly bring that up. So physical warmups absolutely help. What I suggest doing there is doing a two parter physical warmup where for the first half you are working at bringing the nerves down and under control.

So stretches, exercises that aren’t high on cardio. warmups that you might do before going to the gym, before really going all out, do that first, especially if you’re feeling extra nervous, because if you go straight into jumping on a trampoline or dancing, as some people do, you may not be fully in control of your nerves.

That’s part two. Once you’ve calmed yourself down, then intentionally raise your heartbeat. So that’s the physical part of the warmups. The second thing I teach is vocal warmups. This is something that singers do, but we often forget. And what happens is at the beginning, when you first start your talk, your voice might croak.

You might want to clear your throat, which It’s really bad for the vocal cords. So warming up your voice also helps you get in the zone because we’re doing these little exercises as the pregame ritual, but what we’re also doing is taking time for ourselves. So it’s working on two levels. And then the third part of the warmups that I recommend are something called expression warmups, which is, which I’m really proud of because it’s not something everyone does where the idea is to give your brain a signal to be extra expressive in the near future.

And the idea is to take a line, any line and say it in different moods and styles. Be silly with it. Get yourself to, to go into an angry mode or be really excited or be really scared. And just channel different emotions and expressions for 15 seconds, 20 seconds. That will get you into a mood where you’re feeling good, you’re feeling expressive, you’re feeling animated, and your facial muscles have warmed up, and your brain is now thinking, Alright, okay, I know what it’s like to express anger.

Now I know what it’s like to express sadness and to express excitement. So that’s the pregame ritual.

Pat Flynn: Dang, I like that last one. I mean I do those other two, but I have never heard of anybody doing that, and you know, I think of actors before they go on stage, they do these weird, silly things with their voices, like bumblebee, bumblebee, bumblebee, like whatever like exercises they have.

And I mean, I don’t know the science behind it, but I imagine that just connects, like you said, some part of the brain to being that way. When then you’re in front of people, you sort of wake that part of the brain up. And I have been very clear with the audience lately that when you can bring emotion into the work that you’re doing, whether it’s on stage or online, that’s when real connection happens.

When you can connect emotionally because everything is so heartless these days and soulless it feels. Everything is just information and regurgitation. And this is why I’m so keen on having you come in as an EIR inside of SPI Pro because this is where uniqueness is going into these realms of business, not information anymore.

It’s the emotion, it’s the human, it’s the connection, it’s the storytelling. These are the things that AI is going to take a long time to catch up to. And it’s the sort of thing that if we’re not thinking about it, we’re going to be left behind. We’re just going to be a search result. And that’s it. We could definitely go deeper, and I want to go deeper, but we’ll save that for another time or inside of a workshop inside of Pro.

And then we have a webinar coming up two weeks from today, which if me might already be out by the time this goes out, I’m not exactly sure, but we’ll have the replay available and link to it in the show notes if we need to. But tell me a little bit about your life outside of speaking. I’m curious to get to know you a little bit more.

What are you doing when you’re not on stage or coaching other people? What do you do for fun?

Nausheen I. Chen: My business is about a year ish old year and a half old. So. I don’t have fun right now. That’s not entirely true. My business is fun, but to tell you a little more about me as a person, I have always been the kind of person who’s jumped first and thought later.

That’s how I ended up being a second time entrepreneur. And it was only very recently, only the last two years, where I’ve been a lot more intentional, always just had that bias for action. But I realized that that’s not always the best way to go in terms of building something. I was constantly experimenting, constantly figuring out what would work.

What doesn’t work? What else can I do? How can I do things differently or better? So the last two years have been really significant for me in terms of changing my life around the second time round. I had a huge change. When I was in my late 20s, I had what I refer to as my lovely late quarter life crisis, where I broke away from my first job, my country, my first marriage, everything happened over the space of a few months.

Pat Flynn: Oh, wow.

Nausheen I. Chen: It was very drastic and dramatic. That’s what my first TEDx talk is about. But then I realized that I needed to do reinvent myself again for a second time in my late thirties, something about turning 40 was this big alarm bell, which rang in my head. So in 2022, when I was 38 or so, I realized that it’s been 15 to 16 years of my working life where I’ve just done things that seemed exciting. I’ve gone down all these rabbit holes. What do I actually want to do for a living? And that’s when I started going into building my personal brand on LinkedIn and going into public speaking at the same time. They happened very simultaneously. And I was building in public before I knew what building in public was.

Pat Flynn: Very cool.

Nausheen I. Chen: That’s what got me. To hear to not having fun in the traditional sense of the word, but having so much fun doing this, building a business and helping people do the one thing that I love doing, and I’ve loved doing for so long.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that’s amazing. I mean, the reinvention story, we can link to the TEDx talk and those other things.

I mean, you have been on so many great stages, there’s just almost too much to share, but, you know, our lives are seasons, right? There’s different seasons. We have our elementary school, high school season, then we have college season, then we have our kind of first dipping our toe into a career and family season.

And then, and then that evolves over time. And it seems like you’ve just reentered this incredible season that is bringing you so much joy and even though it’s work and you know, you’re, you’re grinding for sure, you’re helping a lot of people and having fun doing it. And I think that’s incredible. And again, I want to thank you for allowing us to be a part of that story now here at SPI and for you, you know, tapping your value into, into our community, it just means so much.

And I know that a lot of people are going to get a lot of value. Speaking of value to finish up here, I’m curious, most successful entrepreneurs that I talked to have some sort of value system that they have beliefs about certain things they have, or they almost use that as a filter for what to say yes to, or what to say no to and what they stand for.

What is your value system? What are the things even not just like about public speaking, but just in general that you believe in that, you know, our audience, should they believe the same thing can get behind and truly begin to start, you know, teaming up with you in some way, shape or form,

Nausheen I. Chen: I believe in being able to create your own identity, and that’s something that took me a very long time to learn coming from a very conservative patriarchal country where that was not the norm.

You didn’t just figure out who you were and what you wanted to believe in. You had things handed down to you. And that’s at the core of my belief system. That you should be able to choose who you are at any stage in life. You’re not merit to a particular identity, to a role, to a career. That’s what gives you true power and freedom?

A lot of us love saying we love freedom, but we don’t give ourselves the freedom to be truly who we want to be and to change things as well. I’ve gone through so many changes in life. And each time it’s been really hard, especially when I’ve changed something that’s linked so intrinsically to my personality, to my identity.

I was saying, I’m a filmmaker. Hi, I’m Nausheen. I’m a filmmaker for seven years. That’s a really long time. And I had to just completely get rid of that, change that up. I found out I was adopted. And I had to have a whole different worldview in terms of what does family mean? What does being related to someone mean?

What does having the same DNA as someone mean? Does that link you emotionally in any way? What is real? What is real family versus biological family? So I’ve been thrown into this, these situations where I’ve had to constantly change and adapt my identity in very core fundamental ways. And I believe that I am truly stronger and more resilient for it.

And that creates this belief in yourself. If you can allow yourself to carve and craft and develop and change your identity the way you want, you are adding so much self belief in yourself. I don’t need to be this one thing that the world has told me I should be, or that I told myself I should be five years ago.

Because I will always be who I am.

Pat Flynn: That’s so beautiful, Nishin. Thank you for sharing that. And I’m sure the audience is excited to get to know you more, especially those who will get access to you in SPI Pro. So thank you. I look forward to more deeper conversations with you about this. And we’ll link to all the incredible stories that you’ve told on stage that we could find and put on the show notes page for everybody.

But if anybody here is already listening and perhaps wants to work with you, see what you have going on and reach out, Nausheen where should they go?

Nausheen I. Chen: Speaking.coach. That’s the website. You’ll find everything that I do there. You’ll find lots of free resources, videos, blogs, guides. So Speaking.coach is where you want to go.

And that’s where you can also find out how to work with me.

Pat Flynn: That’s a great domain name, by the way. Thank you. When did you get that?

Nausheen I. Chen: About a year ago.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, it was available. That’s great. So much fire and machine. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. And Speaking.coach is where you’ll want to go. And obviously SPI pro where you can connect more directly.

Thank you so much. And she’d appreciate you.

Nausheen I. Chen: Awesome. Thank you so much, Pat.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with our brand new EIR, Expert in Residence, Nishin Chen. You can find her again at Speaking.coach. And it is so great to just have resources like her in our community. So that as you build your platform, as you get up there and learn to better position yourself in the market to better showcase your superpowers.

Having access to people like Nausheen is gonna be incredibly valuable. So if you’d like to check out SPI Pro, go to SPIPro.com. But more than that, definitely check out Nausheen and she’s amazing Speaking.coach. Thank you so much for listening through. I appreciate you. We just continue to add to this amazing roster of experts inside of pro for our members and our entrepreneurial community, and would love to see you in there too.

Head on over to SPIPro.Com. You can apply there and get access to Nausheen and all the amazing experts, myself included, and keep on keeping on. All right. Cheers everybody. Take care.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!