Digital Social Hour - Richard Newman on Autism Diagnosis, Training with Monks in India & Battling Mental Health | DSH #155

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

On today's episode of Digital Social Hour, we sit down with Richard Newman to talk about stress reduction, the power of storytelling and how the autism diagnosis has changed his life. BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail] APPLY TO BE ON THE POD: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH HelloFresh: https://www.hellofresh.com/50dsh Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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autistic employees are 40% more productive doing the same role as neurotypical people. Whoa. Were you meditating with the monks like every day? But I lived in a room just above the monastery, just above the temple, and 5 a.m. every morning for six months. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they're hitting instruments. I found out after about four or five months, they'd never had one lesson

for how to play their instruments. They just thought they had the instruments were in the temple, they thought they were supposed to use them. I love that, because normal people scare me personally. Yeah. Like if you're not a little weird, love that because normal people scare me personally like if you're not a little weird yeah if you're too normal for me welcome to the digital Social Hour, guys. I'm your host, Sean Kelly.

You're my co-host, Wayne Lewis. What up, what up? And our guest today, Richard Newman. Hey, good to be with you. Out here from the UK, man. That's right. Yeah, just flown in. Man.

Just flown in. Haven't slept at all. I got some sleep, but you can't sleep much in Vegas. Nah, you can't. You got to gamble instantly. You got to start losing money as soon as you got to sleep. Vegas yeah is this your first time here third time in Vegas yeah yeah yeah came here a few years ago before the pandemic what's it like in the UK what are you doing over there so it's yes pretty good it's

pretty busy at the moment it's we're having a good hot summer at the moment and business is really picking up so yeah it's good what type of business so so my business is uh communication training and i've been doing this now for 23 years and it's been a big shift over the last few years we went from doing everything in person to suddenly everything was virtual and now we're back about 50 50 but we travel all the way around the world doing what we're doing and we get about uh about 2000 events booked for our team per year. 2000 per year. Yeah. So what's the math on that? Six a day, five, six a day.

So that's a question, though. We've got 20 people on our team. Okay, okay, okay. Yes, we travel all over the world to do these events. And sometimes if we're doing it virtually, we can be doing events sort of say three or four events per person per day. Yeah. Taking in different time zones. Right. But then if I'm flying out like I've got a job in LA tomorrow then I have to fly out do the job fly back Wow yeah and what type of

events are these and what services are you providing for them so it's it's all about communication training so we're doing things around presentation skills storytelling confidence and mindset for people conflict resolution has been a big one recently as well so anything around helping business communicate so one of the areas we work on is say helping a business win sales pitches so for example there was a client we worked with a couple of years back they came to us because they're a big construction company and they're winning about one in four of their sales pitches and they came to us and they said it'd be a really big deal for them if they could

start to win about one in three that'd be a good industry average so we worked with them over the course of a year and we were giving them two or three days of workshops before each major pitch and we're working on storytelling and team dynamics the whole piece and we got them by the end of that year they'd won every single pitch so 100% win rates and got them about $1.5 billion of new business. So what were they lacking as far as communication goes? What were they lacking? So when they go up for these big pitches, essentially they get measured on,

which is what every business gets measured on, which is what's your price, can you do the job, and then a behavioral assessment. So do we want to work with you on this major project over the next couple of years and so they were finding that that was really the only place where they could stand out because everybody's cutting down their price to try and get it everybody can do the job but can you stand out with your behavioral assessment and so we're working on them to make sure they were a really solid team they understood how to really pitch their message, strong storytelling behind the message,

because a lot of people get stuck in details. They go too much into sort of cognitive overload with details and graphs and bullet points. So we got them a really solid story, good objection handling skills, questioning and listening skills to build rapport, build a relationship with people, good body language in the room,

so that they would come together as a really cohesive team to make sure that people think they stand out they've got the best behavior therefore they're going to get the job that's awesome because most pitches suck like honestly it's just suck but most people don't work on their pitches either they kind of just stick to kind of one template or what style and that's it so how did you actually get into that yeah so well long story for me so this goes all the way back to when i was four years old. I was going to school at kindergarten level and enjoying school. And then before my fifth birthday, we moved house and I went to this new school. And suddenly my earliest memories there are of really struggling to connect with other kids. And I felt like I was living in this sort of glass bubble and unable to connect with anybody. And that went through my childhood, up through my teenage years, and it got to the point where I was around 16 years old, where I thought I really need to get a handle on this.

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you, not the insurance companies. They don't have an incentive to recommend one insurer over another so you can trust their guidance. Policy Genius is for parents, caregivers, and anyone else who has people who depend on them. They simplify the process of getting life insurance so you can protect the people you love. They got thousands of five-star reviews on Google and Trustpilot. Your loved ones deserve a financial safety net. You deserve a smarter way to find and buy it. Head to policygenius.com slash DSH or click the link in the description to get a free life insurance quote and see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com dsh i don't know why but i'm struggling and i didn't realize at the time but i was highly shy as a child uh i'm very much introverted

and i'm autistic and i didn't get diagnosed wait wait wait you're autistic yeah i got a diagnosed last year wow what what what style i mean what kind so um yeah it's a good question because yeah like there's a lot of different variables. I'm learning so much about them. Yeah. It's because we kind of view autism in like one kind of concept in a sense of, you know, what they show us. But there's a lot of different styles of autism. There really is.

So the spectrum of what it means to be autistic has really expanded over the years. So back in the 80s and 90s, if you diagnosed autistic it was very specific but now they've expanded what that range covers. Why do you think that is? Why is it autism? I think it's just being there's a greater understanding of what that means at this point but more things are being encompassed but it can be a little bit confusing because it's a bit like saying that you're European so you know people who live in southern Italy are very different than people who live in the north of Norway so it's a bit like saying that you're European. So, you know, people who live in southern Italy are very different than people who live in the north of Norway.

So it's different. So for me, being autistic simply means that I, I see communication through a different lens. So neurotypical people, they can communicate, they can pick up on signals easily. It's a bit like a fish being in water. They know how to breathe underwater. They know how to exist underwater.

And I'm on the outside thinking, how does that happen? That doesn't look like my sort of frame of reference. So that's been really valuable for me because I've always been able to approach communication through this different lens of looking at it, thinking what is it that a neurotypical person is doing that helps them to succeed, and what is it they do when they don't succeed,

and how can I break that down, rebuild it, make make it work for myself and then teach that to my clients so then a neurotypical client can come to me and say I want to have more gravitas and I'll say to them okay here's the building blocks of gravitas this is what somebody does when they have it and somebody does when they don't have it let me give you those building blocks or I get them to show me a presentation and I'll say okay these three parts of your style are missing we need to work on those pieces and that's something I've been able to observe by having that outside lens so to come back to your question about autism it's something that's always been a benefit for me

almost like a sort of a superpower of being able to see things through that different lens so I can analyze communication from a different perspective Wow so you've been able to use it to your advantage because I feel like some people get diagnosed and it they see it as like a hindrance almost. Yeah, they should call that a super. I think it's not autism. I think they should kind of have a space where you have a superpower. Yeah. I mean, there's certainly, you know, some people really thriving. It does depend on who you are and where you are on the spectrum. But I think it was Chase Bank that found that their autistic employees are 40% more productive doing the same role as neurotypical people.

And they said that the autistic population in their company could learn how to do something new in the space of a few weeks. It would take other people months to do. Wow. So I have to understand the concept of autism because that sounds like an efficient person to me. But they just lack certain personality traits,

so they automatically identify them as autistic because they're not normal. Yeah, so to get, if you want to get- Because it has a negative stigma around it, I believe, or like, not like a negative stigma, but like a disability. That's how we view it in a sense, versus like a disability. It is something that i had to really start to understand when i started to get this sense that maybe i was autistic i just got some

ideas about it over the course of a few years things that i was hearing i thought i'd go for a diagnosis and it is something where you need to get it really done properly so the person who did it for me was the head of diagnosis for children and adults in Scotland for 35 years. And she went through like a big form, 10 page form, looking through your childhood and then a four hour consultation to really understand. And so for me, though, explaining to people what it means to be autistic, in my case, the best example I can give is that banter is something that still slightly baffles me. So banter to me looks like two people insulting each other and then laughing in their faces.

And so if I try that, it doesn't go very well. But the key concept that I found behind it to figure out, well, how does that work for neurotypical people, what am I missing? And the key part of it that I talked about in my recent book is lift. So the concept behind banter is that whatever you're saying to the other person behind banter is that whatever you're

saying to the other person your intention is that by the end of that interaction they'll feel lifted by you they go from a negative or a neutral state to a lifted or a more positive state and so if you if you speak with that intention in mind then suddenly you can lift that person no matter what you're doing in the interaction so if that's your intention then you can also apply that to doing a business pitch you can apply that to an interview speaking to your team if you have the intention of lift then you can be a much more effective communicator whatever other principles you're using

yeah and you're a great communicator you said you used to be an introvert right well still very much I'm highly introverted which means to me that I can't tell so I enjoy going on a podcast i enjoy speaking on stage and teaching but uh the definition that i go by for introvert or extrovert is that if you're introvert when you are recharging you like to spend time by yourself and if you're extrovert you like to spend time with other people and so my wife is highly extrovert i'm highly introvert so i go traveling for work i come home on the weekend her ideal weekend is go and have seven social events with different people and my ideal weekend is put my hoodie on and stay in my room not too much other

kind of shine a little bit on this kind of shine is the intro he talks to everybody but right he could be to herself so there's a switch I think I could turn it on when I need to talk yeah but I prefer to be alone most of the time yeah yeah so that would be true for an introvert. Yeah, so it's not, introverts aren't people that sort of dislike others or dislike communication, but there's just like, where does your energy come from? Yeah.

So tell us about your book. Yeah, so. Lift Your Impact. So I wrote Lift Your Impact based on the last few years because I've been running this training company for 23 years. And up until just before the pandemic pandemic people would ask us about public speaking presentation skills storytelling keynote speaking that sort of thing and then

something really fundamentally shifted these last few years where the three biggest challenges we found people have is they talk about being stressed much more stressed there's more demands they're getting thousands of emails and you know 20 different teams calls in a day, or you guys are recording nine podcasts in a day. There's so much that's being put on people at the moment. And then people homeschooling their children and trying to share wifi with everybody at home

as they're working at home. So stress has been huge the last few years. Also loneliness, people are spending less time together and have less depth in their relationships. There's more transactional relationships, much more conflict happening in the workplace. And the third piece is that some people are still showing up at the same steel and glass buildings, but they have a lack of purpose, a lack of meaning behind it. And so I wrote this book to address those three areas.

So that firstly, people can have a really powerful mindset so they can thrive and really be a rock in the storm no matter what's happening for them. And then secondly, once you've got yourself really secure, then you need to interact with other human beings, which is the challenging part. So then you need to lift your influence through storytelling, body language, questioning and listening skills. And then when you've enhanced that level of your influence, you then need to think further about your legacy to give yourself a sense of meaning and purpose about what you're doing where is this heading and what's gonna be left after all the work that you're doing so if you go through mindset then influence with others and then focus on your future then you can lift the impact you're having daily and have a more fulfilling

life I was watching something yesterday and they talked about how the really we live in a lonely world right now. Most men and women are lonely. What's the difference between being alone and lonely? And why do you think that is? Well, they actually blamed it on video games. Social media. Yeah, so it's funny.

A question has been asked of me for many years saying, do I think that communication training will be less interesting in future because you know more people are just gonna be on their phones or separate and I've said no communication training is gonna be much more important in the future because people are having less face-to-face time so not FaceTime on a screen but actual face-to-face time with each other and so the skill set that we used to have where if you think about kids you know going back 20 30 years ago they'd have a sleepover and they just be talking and giggling all night. Whereas these days, what do they do? They get together and they're all on their phones. Or they're on their headphones and that's a sleepover. They're

up on a game all night. That's it. Yeah. And so then they're actually not used to the day-to-day reading of the other person. So it's a little bit like if you imagine a surfer, if you just practice surfing by having a surfboard on the beach all the time, that's a bit like what people are doing with communication where they're on a headset or a screen they're not actually on the ocean so if you're on the ocean face to face like reading people reading those subtle cues knowing what works and what doesn't in communication just like actually getting out there on the ocean and riding the waves and so people are getting less skilled with that and therefore there's that sense of loneliness people are

going into the workplace and feeling that they don't connect with other people that they're not being understood they're not cared for they're not respected or appreciated and there's much more conflict happening and so people need to understand then well how do you build a deeper state of a relationship when you're not seeing each other at the coffee break every day how do you get to that place of having a meaningful relationship that therefore builds a more effective business and a more When you're not seeing each other at the coffee break every day, how do you get to that place of having a meaningful relationship that therefore builds a more effective business and a more fulfilling life?

And also mental health issues are at an all-time high right now as well. Do you think that's attributed to social media and lack of connecting with others as well? I think that's definitely part of it, that we need to be together. And I think that multiple studies have shown that the fundamental aspect that allows us to thrive is connection with other people so if we don't feel that as a baby then we get what's called failure to thrive that sense of failure to feel connected with another human being

and so you know later in life if you don't feel uh cared for needed appreciated respected by your tribe important to your tribe, then you have that sense of, you know, what is the point to my life? And then you can get people feeling depressed or suicidal or just that sense of loneliness, of not feeling needed by their tribe. So we do need to have that sense of community. So I think that that's definitely attributed to by the pandemic, the lockdowns where we weren't allowed to be together and people being more on a screen and less with someone face to face. Did you struggle with these issues growing up? You mentioned you felt isolated as a kid. Yeah. So, I mean, I found, you know, in my era, I grew up in

the era before the Internet, before email and all this sort of stuff. And so I did still struggle with that sense of how do I build a connection with another human being? And so that's what made me so fascinated about it. So I was mentioning earlier age of 16 I thought I have to do something about this because I want to feel connected to people I love people and so I then read around 200 books on communication Wow sort of between the age of 16 and about 22 Wow And I was reading everything, like body language, tone of voice, storytelling, stage presence, anything that would be useful. And I then, at the age of 18, when my friends were going off to university,

I thought I wanted to do something a little bit different, do something good for the world. And I went off to live in the foothills of the Himalayas, where I was living in this little tiny Tibetan monastery, which is kind of near Darjeeling, where the tea comes from, but like a four-hour taxi drive from there and I was teaching English to these Tibetan monks now I lived with him for six months and the big challenge being that when I got there they didn't speak any English Wow at all so they spoke Tibetan Nepali and Hindi and I spoke a bit of French and a bit of German but we

didn't actually have any language to connect with so we had to just connect non-verbally. And that was something I found really powerful. Because when I first got there, they sat me down in their kitchen and they gave me a cup of Tibetan tea, which is pretty horrible stuff. If you've never tried it,

it's tea with butter and salt in it. Really? Yes, really not that nice. Sounds gross. Yeah, so I was sipping this thinking, this is gonna be a long six months. We can't speak to each other and I'm drinking this. And then over the course of about an hour of sitting with them, I thought, wait a second, we actually understand each other.

The words don't make sense, but non-verbally we are really connected. You had to read them. Yeah, we had to read each other and therefore we had to connect with each other beyond words. And we got to the point of understanding enough about each other. And by the end of the six months, they could all then have a good conversation with me in English I managed to teach them through body language but it really gave me that respect for understanding and connecting with someone beyond the use of words to the point where recently I went to a retreat in Italy it was amazing experience and on one of the days they said we're gonna have a silent lunch

you're not allowed to say a single word to anybody. Wow. And for me as an introvert, I loved it. We sat there and we were actually with each other rather than this surface level chit chat of, how are you and how's it going all day? Like all that stuff. Suddenly we were really with each other. And I felt like I suddenly understood people in a way that I hadn't understood them with that chit chat. And that's what I'm always aiming to do when I teach people about communication is to say the words need to be good. But underneath

that, you need to think, how am I connecting with this person? How am I communicating, expressing myself beyond words? Because that is so pivotal to how we all connect as human beings. Absolutely. Were you meditating with the monks like every day? No. It's funny because it took me a long while to figure out their language and understand how they did things. But I lived in a room just above the monastery, just above the temple. And 5 a.m. every morning for six months, I was woken up with this sound of, and then they're hitting instruments.

And I found out after about four or five months, they'd never had one lesson for how to play their instruments. They just thought the instruments were in the temple. They thought they were supposed to use them. They knew they had to do it at 5 a.m. But what I did gain from the monks is they had this incredible way of being. Each day. So when I first got to the monastery, they had never had hot running water.

There was no internet back then. They occasionally had electricity, but we had a power cut most days. We had a phone in the monastery that worked for maybe five minutes per week. So completely cut off. And yet they had these incredible smiling faces every day. Beautiful smiles. Every lesson that I was having with them at breakfast, where they sort of barely slept on a really hard bed and suddenly

that they're up and they're beaming and it gave me this appreciation which of it's come all the way through my life of you know really understanding how lucky we are with all the privileges we have a comfort that we have in the West and sometimes we get all these comforts and if you think about the in the comfort zone of most people is very small where they think I only want to do things in my comfort zone you bounce outside that comfort zone suddenly think oh that feels like pain whereas with them they they were able to be happy having no creature comforts at all and so i always come back to that in times of stress thinking they were able to have this beautiful mindset with nothing around them just through

that sense of peace and connection with each other and connection with something higher than themselves so you can always come back that if you're you're dealing with a day-to-day stress of like how many people did uh liked my post on instagram you're right right these sort of things you can just come back to what is it that really matters so did you have a hard time um talking to women at one point oh yeah absolutely yeah yeah so so certainly yeah work on that uh so i think that that for me was was practice and actually i'll give people a tip on this one so i was speaking to somebody when i was in my early 20s saying look i'm really struggling with this i see my friends going off and having girlfriends and this was there now we moved from 16 to your early 20s you're still struggling with it oh yeah yeah so

so when i was uh yeah so when i was 18 i went off to the monastery i then studied acting for a few years at a london acting school and i learned how to do things like have more stage presence and storytelling and so on and i was you know i was having dates and so on but i just thought i really want to find the right person and so i i met someone who gave me this huge piece of advice so I encourage everyone to do she said what I want you to do is to write down a list of a hundred things that would describe your perfect woman your perfect partner a hundred things and don't stop at 99 make it a hundred as you got to get really specific when you do that and so to give you an idea one of the things I wrote

down was someone who likes to stand on the front row at concerts. Because I had friends back then who'd like to sit at the back. I'm like, why are we here? We could watch this on the TV. You're the front row guy. Yeah, I'm the front row kind of guy. So I thought, OK, I want someone who wants to do that with me. Otherwise, this relationship is not going to be as fun.

And so I wrote this hundred things. Then you have to write down from that, OK, what are the top things they absolutely have to have? The top things they absolutely cannot have. Otherwise otherwise you won't be in a relationship. And then you write down, well, 10 things that I'm going to do to find this person. So what am I going to do to work on myself? And one of the things I wrote down is I will go to every social event I'm invited to anywhere in the world, no matter how hard it is for me to get there, I'm just going to say yes. And so I committed to doing all these things. And I also decided that I would only go on a second date with someone if they met the list if they didn't meet the list there's no second

all hundred things yeah yeah no these things otherwise there's no second day and so I then I and I would read it every day and I read it every day for the course of eight months and then and then I met the person I met my wife and she's all 100 things she had everything apart from one thing which was and I hadn't specified I've written down on the list lives nearby but I didn't specify that so lives nearby in the States is like relative in four hours or something so for me she was a few hours away but everything else she was and I literally she walked towards me my brain was saying this is it this is the one this is the person

you're gonna spend the rest of your life with because I knew because I was laser focused on that's what I'm looking for in a partner and so therefore it made the rest of the conversation that much easier before you even talk to her yeah yeah yeah so how did that list how does that checklist go over a hundred things so are you just talking to her like okay one two how does that work like yeah what is it like does she know about the list yeah so the funny thing was short door I it was a may have like look so on it was on our sixth date I think it was where I was paying for lunch and I just got my wallet out and the

list was in there and i said to her oh you should uh you should just take a look at this list and i went to pay the bill uh pay the check and i came back and she was like oh that's nice you wrote a list about me and i said no i wrote this list eight months before i met you and she's like what so suddenly she knew that you know i'd obviously been looking for her i was serious that this was a big commitment on my side so yeah i was manifesting at his finest that's crazy and i say to people i've never heard enough ford riley did that too with her boyfriend yeah really list of 100 things yeah you got to try that wayne that's too many things i can only think of like five like off the top like you got to be this is that in the third but i guess that's more in-depth, I guess, right?

Because it kind of gives you the full package. If you think about it, if you describe someone... It kind of creates your person, in a way, in the mind. Yeah, if you describe a person physically, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, then you've just got 25 of each of those things. You just sort of go through the list, and you think about, well, what kind of person do I like? I like a little bit of this person, a little bit of that person,

and these are things I definitely wouldn't want to have and suddenly 100 is quite an easy to get a little bit from every person that you've dealt with and add that person whatever you liked about that person to the list yeah that's a lot easier yeah now does she you got diagnosed with autism last year right yeah how did she take that news she she was the one who encouraged me to get the diagnosis so she's she's from a medical background and so she's more familiar with this and i was talking to her about some struggles i was having with communication she said i think you should maybe go and get diagnosed and i said really because i just didn't understand what autism was back

then like you said it's kind of confusing it's really expanded what it is and what it isn't and so uh and the little breakthrough that I had also was a couple of years back on my podcast, I interviewed this lady who's a specialist in early childhood communication. And she was saying that essentially 90% of people in their childhood, they will communicate perfectly well. Then you get around two and a half percent who have a permanent challenge, like permanent hearing loss. And then it's the other 7.5% that she would deal with that they would have some sort of challenge

that they could work on where they might be able to sort of improve their skills with it. And as she was talking on the podcast, she was describing who fell in that 7.5%. I thought, that sounds like me. And I was driving her to the train station after the podcast and I said, I think I'm in that group. And she said, a bit like you said earlier, earlier she said I can't believe that there's no way

you know you like communicating you're a good podcast host and I said no I really think I am and so I shared those suspicions with a couple of people around me my wife said you should go get diagnosed and I'd really encourage people if they think that they might be autistic go and get yourself diagnosed because it could be that you are or it might be that there's something else. And getting the diagnosis for me was a huge revelation where it was almost like, you know, a moment where suddenly like a big surprise happens in a movie

and suddenly it makes sense of everything that you've seen in the prior sort of two hours where you're sort of rolling through your mind of, oh, this is why everything happened. It was the same thing for me with this diagnosis of thinking, oh, this is why I react like this in this situation. That's where I was struggling here.

This is why I like these kind of things. And it was making sense of sort of the prior 44 years of my life. That's crazy, because I say Elon and Mark Zuckerberg is- They both have it? Autistic, yeah. Yeah. A lot of entrepreneurs, I feel like,

have a little bit of it. Yeah, well, I think that it makes sense for people to be entrepreneurial who are somewhere on the autistic spectrum because you just you permanently live outside the box. I think I saw somebody recently online talking about this saying being autistic means that living out of the box is a way of life. There's no part of being in the box. I know they put so much of a negative stigma on it, even in school.

Like the kids who have autism are in this special class and they go to lunch at a certain time. Like it's kind of like a taboo thing. They treat them like as if they're like mutants in a way. They made fun of it for sure. I remember kids bully them in my school. It wasn't good. That's why it's kind of, I feel like it has a negative stigma and then we lack the understanding of it just because yeah kind of place oh he has autism that's exactly what he is that's exactly what it what it is and

it's like no so well i think i think knowledge of that is now thankfully expanding to the point where people realize actually this is you know there's so much neuro neurodiversity out there and it's actually a benefit for a company, not just to have diversity in different forms, but neurodiversity is key, because you get loads of people thinking differently, seeing the world differently, and suddenly they can make something that is much greater.

And I've always encouraged my kids to think outside the box as well, because if you think about the majority of people, I often say to them, the majority of people I often say to them the majority of people are unhappy poor they are unhealthy and lonely that's the majority of people who are there so why would you not think outside the box thinking outside the box means that you're more likely to be in a place where you are healthy wealthy in good relationships doing something that matters to you because you've decided not to go the main central path and

having some part of neurodiversity helps you do that because you don't see things the same you don't approach things in the same way yeah no i love that because normal people scare me personally like if you're not a little weird yeah if you're too normal for me i don't like that they're holding back their true selves yeah fit into the exactly that's the fact that's the fact it kind of appear too perfect yeah yeah and fitting in is one of the things that we do where it's it's really about tribe survival where we think you know I need other people around me to survive if I do what they do then I'm gonna fit in with them and

therefore maybe I'll be safe but it's actually giving you this undercurrent of anxiety of thinking but if I am my true self if I express who I really am then maybe I won't be liked anymore and you know I don't have value in this group and there's huge fear behind it whereas if you start from that place of Who am I really what do I want to be and I always talk to people about thinking about what are your key values in life what are the principles you want to live your life by because when you know them you get internal validation and you don't need the external validation from other people and people can do this exercise really quickly where

they work out what are my top three principles in life is it that you care about putting your family first is it integrity in everything that you do what what is it for you and one of those things for me is an example is to be a good parent it's always been there and oddly it's been there as a principle for me since I was about 10 years old I thought one day I want to be a good parent. It's always been there. And oddly, it's been there as a principal for me since I was about 10 years old. I thought one day I want to be a parent and I want to be a great parent. I want to be the kind of parent that is there on sports day and is there for when they're doing a show at school

and there to connect with them and make sure that they are well looked after and have a great life. And so that's guided me in my decisions about who I would spend time with, what I would choose to do in my career and So on so if people figure out what their values are they can suddenly make career decisions Relationship decisions and feel good about themselves

Even if they don't get the job when they go to an interview because they can think okay that that may not be in alignment With my core values. I don't need to impress them because I'm heading in this direction. This is my true North Compass This is who I want to be I'm gonna head in direction. This is my true North compass. This is who I want to be. I'm going to head in that direction based on my values. Love that. Yeah, everyone should have clear values written down. Yeah, and then pick the right tribe to be a part of so you're not blending with the wrong tribe that doesn't fit you.

So that way you're always comfortable in your true self. Yeah, well, people say your vibe attracts your tribe. And it really will only if you think, what are my values? And you live in accordance with that. And then suddenly when you're showing up as that person the right tribe is going to come to you rather than trying to yeah rather than trying to fit in with whoever happens to be around you decide what your vibe is

gonna be and then those people will be drawn to you Richard it's been a pleasure man where people find out more about you and what you're working on so people can find me on instagram at Richard Newman speaks they can also goyourimpact.com forward slash the book and they can find out more about the book and also my company if people are interested is ukbodytalk.com okay that's for the consulting stuff that's for the consulting yeah six events a day bro all right guys thanks for watching see you guys next time peace