Nick Lambe’s surprising way to become a public speaking pro… without the stress!

Today we're talking about unlocking your potential. Mastering Public speaking with Nick Lamb. What you will get to learn about him in this episode is how he helps people to enhance their speaking presence, their skills, their confidence, and in turn help them find the opportunities that they're looking for within the fitness space and within speaking. So this is going to be an awesome episode and it's kind of a teaser for a future episode coming up where we will once again have Nick on the show again. But without further ado, let's start that episode.

What's up, Nick? Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. How are you?

I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me.

I am so excited. Right before we hit record, we were talking about how this is such a long time in the making. I'm so glad that we could finally get this podcast and, and to the world. I'm really excited.

Likewise. Likewise. Yeah, we finally made it happen. This was, I think this has probably been close to a year in the making in total, maybe even in a different capacity going back further than, than that, so.

Sure, sure, sure. So for those of you who are new to your work or just joining the podcast for the first time, can you please share with us a little bit about who you are, who you serve and how you got there?

Absolutely. So I have been, I've been in the industry, the health and fitness industry for coming up on 15. Coming up on 15 years, I have worked in a lot of different settings, but over the last, I'd say seven, eight years, I've taken a pretty non traditional path and worked in some different settings and been in some different situations, primarily based around education for the industry. And that is where I have found the most amount of passion and fire has been to educate these amazing coaches that we have in our industry. And a large part of that was focused around sleep. So practical related sleep content for many years, how you can implement practical sleep coaching tools with your clients and your community. Over the last few years, my focus has shifted more to public speaking skills. I have, I've been very fortunate in large part to an emphasis on sleep. I've been very fortunate to speak at this point over a hundred industry events, both inside and outside the health and fitness industry and public speaking has completely changed my life. It's changed the trajectory of my career, not just in the opportunities provided, but in all the carryover of these skills, both professionally and personally. And so my emphasis now is on primarily helping health and fitness coaches to improve their public speaking skills and that can. That can be seeking out and getting on industry stages and speaking. That can be speaking in your community. But at the heart, really, it's just making the things that you say, the things that you're teaching, the things that you share, more engaging, more dynamic, more impactful in the way in which you actually deliver it. I. One of the things I always emphasize, especially in the health and fitness industry and space, there's enough information, there's enough information relayers, there's enough people who just take and regurgitate information back. Where there's a gap is in what I call message shares. You can have all the information, you can learn all the things, but do you have a message to share, A powerful message to share? Can you share? Can you take the things that people likely have already heard and already know and already should be doing? And can you. Can you package them and deliver them in a way that actually moves them and gets them to take real action so, so powerful.

The word impactful was the one that was really coming up to me. Like, there's, you know, do coaches ever stop and wonder, you know, if information is so abundant, then why is it that the majority of people continue to struggle? It's because there's this gap. This, missed, this, this, this call, this implementation component that sometimes be missing.

I always say. I always say there's three. There's three layers to the things that you know and the things that you teach and share. There's. There's what you know. And of course, having and acquiring more knowledge is. Is incredibly important. There's what you know, then there's the next layer is what you can actually communicate. What can you explain simply? What can you make more digestible? What can you create an analogy or metaphor around? And as we know, a lot of times people don't get to that layer, even they don't get to that second layer. But then what I would say, where there's really the biggest gap, is that there's a third layer, which is what actually lands with other people, what actually sticks with them, and what actually gets them to go and do something different, to take real, real action. And if we don't reach that layer, all the knowledge and information in the world doesn't really matter a whole lot because it's not gonna change people's lives in the way that we intend.

Mm. So true. So true. Okay, so you kind of talked about it, but just for clarity sake, when you say public speaking, how do you define public speaking?

I love this. So public speaking typically gets classified as being On a stage, in front of a large group and a large audience. And this is where a lot of the, the anxiety and limiting beliefs and things kind of manifest is this way of envisioning public speaking. And that, that is a component of public speaking, for sure. But if you really just take it, at the core public speaking is if you are speaking to someone else, if you are trying, trying to connect with someone, if you were trying to influence them to do something, if you were trying to lead a conversation in a given way, you are speaking in order to do that. And the person or people listening are the public. Whether that's one on one, that's a group of 10, or it's a group of a thousand. It's all public speaking in a sense. And so at the core, to me, public speaking is how you express yourself. It's how you communicate ideas, it's how you find ways to connect with other people. And that's, to me, I think that's one of the important shifts, because if you envision public speaking that way, you make it more accessible to improve the skills that can, that can help you show up in your personal and professional life. Whereas if you're just positioning it as this maybe far into the future opportunity of speaking on a massive stage in front of thousands of people, and that gives you anxiety and that scares the hell out of you, you're not going to lean into some of these, these skills that can be so valuable for you.

I'd love for you to dive deeper a little bit more into what are some of the essential skills, skills that a health professional needs to have in order to cultivate an impactful presentation or an impactful talk that's going to get people to, you know, excited about booking them for a public speaking gig or presenting them, so on and so forth. What are the.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. There's a few components that we, we can break down here. The, the first is one that I will say is one of the most underappreciated communication tools, one of the most underappreciated assets that you have as a coach, as a speaker, and that is your voice, your physical voice. Sometimes when I say your voice, it gets perceived as, try and find your, your voice and find your authentic voice and your own, your mess, your own way of communicating information. And that, that can absolutely be a, a valuable part of finding your voice. But I'm talking about your physical voice, the way in which you actually sound. And I think we lose sight of how much that actually matters. Your physical voice plays directly into how engaging you are, how engaged people are with the things that you're saying, how much they remember of what you're saying, how connected they might feel to you, how impactful the things that you're saying actually are. One of the ways to think about this is you have a visual image and a vocal image. If. If you and I were to. To walk up to one another at an event and you had never met me before, as you're walking towards me, you are taking in my visual image. If I am completely disheveled and don't look like I practice good hygiene, you are starting to form some initial perceptions or assumptions about me, who I am, what I can potentially offer to you, all of these. These things that happen in real time. But as I start to speak, you are taking in my vocal image, and this is where those assumptions really turn into beliefs. Because if I'm very dynamic in the way that I use my voice and I have a presence with my voice where I have volume and I have melody, that makes you feel more connected to me. It's forming a positive vocal image. And when we think about this in terms of speaking and communication, we're really good at understanding that you can change and style your. Your visual image. You can change the clothes that you wear, you can take care of your hygiene, you can get haircut. You can do all these things to change your visual image. You can change your vocal image as well and understand how that actually plays into how people perceive you. One of the biggest misconceptions with your physical voice is the thinking that your voice is set in stone. The natural. The idea of a natural voice. Well, this is just my natural voice. This is the way I always have spoke, the way I've always communicated. And really, it's important to understand that your natural voice is not really your natural voice. It's your habitual voice. It's a set of behaviors and habits just like anything else, based on upbringing, based on culture, based on people that you've been around. You use your voice in a certain way. You communicate in a certain way. The. The best analogy I've heard for this is to think about a piano. And on a piano, you have 88 keys. All of these keys have different notes. They make different sounds. They can elicit different feelings and emotions. They're all the tools that you have to use your voice and to communicate. The vast majority of people use a very set number of keys, a very limited number of keys. They might only use 20, 25 of those keys. They're the ones that they're conditioned to use, familiar with, using. And a big part of leaning into public speaking and communication as a whole is learning to explore some of those other keys so that you can be more dynamic. One of the other things I talk a lot about with voice is these different forms within your voice, depending on what you're trying to do and who you're talking to. Are you trying to educate? Are you trying to motivate and inspire? Are you trying to connect? And based on what your goal is in any given situation, you should be using your voice and your body language and your presentation differently. If I'm trying to educate someone on something and it's, it's nuance, there's a lot of details and things to explain. But I'm speaking as the motivational speaker with strong body language and volume and speaking quicker, you're not likely going to be able to digest the things that I'm saying. Conversely, if I am trying to get you excited about something, I'm trying to fire you up and inspire you, and I'm speaking to you like a, like a lecturer, like I would if I were trying to educate you on something. And I don't have a lot of dynamics in my voice. It's not very likely I'm going to motivate or inspire you. And so one of the really underappreciated foundations to public speaking and to being more effective in that space is the use of your. Your physical voice.

It's definitely underrated. I think so many people are fo. Most people are focused on what they're saying as opposed to the impact of how they're actually saying it and how sometimes we think that will be impactful. When we're really loud and we speak really fast and we use our hand and we forget that when that there's so many other variables like pace, like loudness and pauses and how those, you know, sometimes it's not even. Sometimes it's not even about what you're doing to fill in what you're saying, to fill in gaps. It's the. What you're not saying to let people just sit with what you said 100%.

I mean, one of the most powerful tools that you can implement is pausing more frequently, right? And when you pause more frequently, especially when you do it strategically, you give people more context as to what's important. If I am speaking and I all of a sudden have an extended pause, it draws you in and almost tells you that what I'm saying is likely a little bit more important. When you pause. It also tends to reduce the presence of a lot of these filler words and non words, and we can certainly talk about those and unpack those.