The lock in your throat isn't about English

From Sohawa to a cadet college bunk

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Noman Abid not as a motivational speaker — a label Noman immediately pushes back on — but as someone with a very specific niche. “I have a very particular niche, communication, on which I deliver trainings and one-on-one executive coachings,” Noman says. The distinction matters to him, and it sets the tone for everything that follows.

Noman was born and raised in Sohawa, a small town on the GT Road between Gujrat and Jhelum. His father’s plan for him was modest: finish matric, come back, run the family shop. His mother had other ideas. She had been married in ninth grade, could not read or write English at the time, and used to walk to a cousin’s house to learn — then come home and teach Noman what she had just picked up. “She is a very, very big inspiration and a huge fan of my work,” he says.

At the end of seventh grade, Noman was sent to Cadet College Kohat. He describes the early months as brutal — cold food, 5 a.m. PT, no comfort of home. But he would not undo it. When Muzamil asks whether he would send his own children to a cadet college, Noman pauses: probably not at that age, he says, but the friction itself was formative.

The army dream and the red stamp

Everything Noman built in those years pointed toward one destination: becoming an army officer. He had no family background in the military. He did not arrive at the ambition through logic. It was, he says, almost absorbed from the environment around him — people kept telling him he would make it, and he believed them so completely that he included it in his daily prayers. “I didn’t know that there is life outside being an army officer. Believe me.”

He cleared the ISSB. He was recommended for the 136 Long Course. Then came the final medical. An ENT specialist put something in his nose, wrote a note, and told him to come back on Friday. When Noman returned to the candidate office and asked for his report, the officer pulled out a small slip — not even a full file. In the middle of it was a large red stamp: Unfit. The reason, he found out later, was hypertension.

“I literally felt that — and they say, you know, the life draining from your legs. I grabbed the bench, I sat down, I took out my phone, I typed one message to my father on WhatsApp, sent it, and switched the phone off.” He rode bus number 22 out of the CMH, staring out the window, with no map for what came next.

The year off and the first book

For roughly four months after the rejection, Noman barely left the house. Then, slowly, he started watching videos online. People kept quoting one book. He bought it — Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill — and it was the first book he had ever read by choice.

The insight that stayed with him was not motivational in the conventional sense. It was structural. “Napoleon Hill spent sixty years of his life researching, meeting all these people, and he extracted a crux and handed it to me — which I could learn in one month.” The same logic applied to Shoe Dog, the memoir by Nike’s founder: a lifetime of building compressed into something readable in weeks. That realization unlocked something. He started reading constantly.

Muzamil reflects on his own year off and makes a broader point: the students who move straight from college into the next phase of life never get the chance to connect with themselves, with society, with the system. “The enlightenment I have seen in people who took a year off — you don’t find that in the ones who went straight through.”

Noman then enrolled at Quaid-i-Azam University, partly because of its reputation as a mini-Pakistan — students from every province, every background, maximum exposure. He arrived to find a cow walking past the admissions bank. He laughs telling it. “If you ask me, Noman, what is the best thing that has happened in your life? I will say: the unfit scene. That was the best thing that happened to me, because I was not meant for that.”

The language problem Pakistan refuses to name

A teacher at QAU saw something in Noman during a presentation and pushed him toward a public speaking competition. That moment opened a door he did not know existed. But before the conversation moves there, Muzamil and Noman spend considerable time on a question that sits underneath all of it: what does language actually do in Pakistan, and who does it exclude?

Noman’s English coming into university was not strong. The conversation about how he improved it is one of the most honest stretches of the episode. His answer: Friends. Not a classroom, not a course. The TV show, watched repeatedly, until the phrases, the timing, the humor, and the expressions became instinctive. “My actual English — all of it — developed through Friends. I tell everyone: watch Friends. Watch it again and again.”

Muzamil pushes further. Input is one thing, he says, but output is what actually builds fluency. Noman agrees. The real barrier, he argues, is not vocabulary. Most people who have passed matric already know enough words to communicate. The problem is a lock — a fear of being judged for a wrong word or a mispronounced phrase. “If you took any matric-level student and dropped them in Europe where they had to speak English, they would do very well. The barrier is in the mind.”

He is also clear-eyed about the structural injustice underneath this. English in Pakistan functions as a filter for perceived intellect, not actual intellect. The elite maintain control over both the English-speaking upper middle class and the Urdu-speaking masses by commanding both languages. Noman’s critique is direct: “CSS is in English. Do it in Urdu and see what talent emerges from this country. You have cut off an entire class by making it English.”

Toastmasters and the standing ovation that changed direction

The competition his teacher pushed him toward led Noman to Toastmasters International — a global non-profit with presence in over 160 countries and, at the time of recording, 45 clubs across Pakistan. He explains the format to Muzamil in detail: a two-hour weekly meeting split between table topics (impromptu speaking on a random subject) and prepared speeches evaluated through a structured feedback model. The philosophy is learning by doing. “You cannot learn to swim by reading a book. You have to jump in the water.”

But the moment that actually committed him to this path happened just after his first competition speech. A competitor in the audience stood up mid-applause and ran after him outside. He told Noman that something in the speech had answered a question that had been troubling him for a long time. “A person like me, who memorized a speech and walked onto a stage — that those words had the power to resolve something in someone’s life, through me.” Noman describes it as a kind of confirmation. “Probably the divine came down to earth and said: this is what I want you to do.”

He went on to become the youngest president of the Islamabad Toastmasters Club, leading a team of older professionals as a student, with no power to hire or fire anyone — only the ability to influence. During COVID, when every other club was shutting down, his club grew from 34 to 60 paid members. Toastmasters International called to ask what was happening.

Building a training business from zero, then Zameen

After graduating, Noman and a partner launched a training initiative called Kindle. Their commitment for the first year: charge nothing. A regional head from a school network saw them deliver a session and offered to bring them on across all campuses in the twin cities. He asked what they would charge. Noman said nothing. The regional head — named Salman — pushed back: “In Pakistan, free service is a free fall. If you don’t charge, people won’t take you seriously.” Noman held the line.

Later, he joined Possibilities as a trainer, then moved into a business development role where he learned how to sell training to CHROs and HR departments. That experience taught him the mechanics of the corporate training market from the inside. He and a co-founder then built Trainers Tribe — described as an Uber for the learning and development industry, a digital marketplace connecting HR departments with trainers. They were incubated at the National Incubation Center and raised seed funding. Then COVID arrived, and organizations shifted to survival mode. Training budgets disappeared overnight.

When Zameen.com — Pakistan’s first tech unicorn — approached him to join as an in-house trainer, Noman initially resisted. He had always worked externally. But the logic of being inside a company that had reached a billion-dollar valuation while expanding to 16 countries was too interesting to pass up. “I want to know what happens behind the table.”

Communication as infrastructure, not a soft skill

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises what he sees as a systemic gap: Pakistan is building toward a $50 billion IT industry, training millions of technical professionals, but almost entirely ignoring communication. Noman responds with numbers. Fortune 500 companies spend $1.6 billion annually on communication training. Poor communication costs those same organizations $3.1 billion a year in losses. “In Pakistan, probably it is the time that we need to understand that we need to teach people workplace communication — how to communicate what we already know.”

The argument extends to founders. Noman describes watching startups at NIC pitch investors with genuinely strong ideas but no ability to make the investor see what they see. “An investor — what does he invest in? The idea or the person? I think the person. Because the implementation of that idea has to be done by the founder himself. If you can make him see exactly what you see, that is when he will put money on you.”

The same logic applies internally. A company’s employees are its first salespeople. If the founder’s vision never reaches the person at the front desk — the actual point of contact with the outside world — the brand is whatever that person’s communication makes it. “I will judge the company on the basis of that point of contact. I will say: they are just like this.” And the modern employee, Noman adds, will not work hard for a salary alone. “If the employee knew the purpose and the value of his work, I guarantee you he will work twice as hard. It’s not about pay. It’s not about benefits.”

Pakistan in 2050

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Noman the question he puts to every guest: how do you see Pakistan in thirty years? Noman is careful to say he tries to be optimistic, not naive. He points to the growing awareness among young people that technical skills matter, the online revenue Pakistan’s freelancers are generating, and the startup funding that has begun flowing in. His measured hope is not that Pakistan becomes a global leader, but that it creates enough opportunity domestically to slow the brain drain. “Maybe by then we will have created enough paths online, through startups, through investment, that our people won’t have to go out.” He does not promise it. He says it is possible.

Muzamil closes by noting how refreshing it is to see someone young in the training space — a field that has historically required decades of grey hair before anyone took you seriously. Noman thanks him and returns the compliment directly: “In this niche — podcast, social media — the way you are working, it’s really inspiring.”