“At the heart of it is finding and speaking with your own voice…”
Nausheen shares her journey from corporate to public speaking coach, and highlights the interplay between confidence and fear, advocating for positive self-talk and learning from failure, illustrated by her personal story and experiences. Finding and speaking with your own true voice is very unusual – particularly in women – and many people are self-silencing or silenced by others. Helping them involves addressing mindset, message, and delivery (in that order).
We delve into the importance of effective communication tools and different approaches, and the importance of finding one’s voice, establishing a personal brand, active listening, overcoming self-doubt, and intentional message sharing to attract audiences and achieve success. It is never too early to start telling your story – being more public and vocal is a good way to build a business, build your confidence and attract people. Breaking away from the conventional path can be a transformative experience – not always easy, but it grants a great sense of autonomy by creating a new identity, building creative resilience and showing ourselves and others that reinvention is possible.
Nausheen generously shares her stories, experience and insights from working with senior leaders across the globe.
The main insights you’ll get from this episode are :
– A varied career path and eclectic entrepreneurial adventure led to the realisation that anyone should be able to give their best performance in front of a camera; coaching executives is very fulfilling and aligns with her own passions.
– Finding and speaking with your own true voice is very unusual – particularly in women – and many people are self-silencing or silenced by others. Helping them involves addressing mindset, message, and delivery (in that order).
– It is possible to fake confidence but not advisable, as the performative aspect allows the projection of confidence without feeling it; in the absence of confidence, we must create a virtuous cycle by proving to ourselves we can do it.
– This requires the right tools and debriefing after speaking commitments to learn lessons for the future and filter knowledge of the subject into understandable messages that will be remembered, not minimising good content with poor delivery.
– The approach depends on the individual: introverts who are shy, hate the spotlight, and perform sub optimally require lots of mindset work; confident, ambitious people who develop very specific patterns of speaking and presenting and perform sub optimally require lots of work on message and delivery.
– Fear and confidence can coexist, but fear must not get in the way of performance – we take action to overcome the fear: people feel scared, do the scary thing and this action creates the virtuous cycle to feed the next scary thing.
– Confident people talk to themselves and impact their future action positively by taking accountability for doing well (sense of control); insecure people blame themselves and do not let wins positively affect their confidence (removes agency).
– Scary things are the worthwhile things; we must reframe what fear brings in a creative way and do away with negative self-talk, recognising that failure is part of progress.
– Building a practice to reframe failure means learning from experience and taking action to prevent failure, e.g. recognising red flags in behaviour and being a better listener to receive information with judgement.
– It is never too early to start telling your story – being more public and vocal is a good way to build a business and attract people.
– Breaking away from the conventional path is a transformative experience – very difficult, but it grants a great sense of autonomy by creating a new identity, proving resilience and showing that reinvention is possible.
– Know what you stand for and intentionally look for opportunities to broadcast your message: do new things to find your voice and spread a worthwhile message impactfully – a conviction of success will see doors opening through which you can then walk.
Find out more about Nausheen and her work here :
