Richard Newman | Lift Your Impact: Transform Your Mindset, Influence, and Future to Elevate Your Work, Team, and Life

Srini Rao: Richard, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Richard Newman: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to this. Yeah, it is

Srini Rao: my pleasure to have you here. So I found out about your book by way of your publicist. You have a new book out called Lift Your Impact, which I think is very relevant to everybody who's listening to this, regardless of what they're doing.

But before we get into the content of the book, I wanted to start by asking you where in the world were you born and raised and what impact did that end up having on what you've ended up doing your

Richard Newman: life and career? Yeah, interesting. So I was born in Bromley, Kent which is in. The south of England I'm trying to think how far about an hour south of London, something like that.

And I lived there for the first four and a half years of my life. And I don't remember much about it other than I used to be really happy going to school. I had a little group of friends and just skipping school, having a very fun life. And then I think the impactful part that happened for me is that we moved house.

Just before my fifth birthday, where I then moved to Buckinghamshire, which is Northwest of London. And I then started going to a new school. Everything was fresh. I I didn't know anybody in the area and I. That was the significant part of for me, for growing up. I was in an area then that really prized education.

In Buckinghamshire, it's one of the parts of England where they have very good schools, you have to sit exams to get into specific schools. And that was part of the reason that my parents had moved us there. And so there was a big focus on doing well in education. And so I think that then took me down quite an academic route if you like so that was probably where it impacted me the most.

Yeah.

Srini Rao: So for your parents and in general in England, what is the. Default narrative

Richard Newman: about education. That's a good question. I think there's a lot of different opinions on this. So some opinions on education are that everyone should go to the same school. So there shouldn't be, so there are what we call comprehensive schools, which is.

Where most people go, they go from junior school up to high school. And it's called a comprehensive. It means everybody can go. And then in certain parts of the country, you have what's called a grammar school usually or a high school if it's the female equivalent, all girls or all boys, and there's.

Some people say that's a good thing because you should take students who are more academically minded and put them all together and take other people who are less academic and have them together so that you've got people focusing on whatever is their passion. So I don't know what the right answer is on that, but that's probably where the debate goes.

On education, I do not certainly know that if you go back a few years we had Tony Blair as our prime minister and his most famous speech probably is where he said that his policy with leading the country was to focus on three things, which was education. Education and education, because he felt that was the way forward for having a great future for our country.

So I think that it is, it's something that we care about, that we really want for our children is a good education. But I think what we also want here is to bring well rounded beings into the world. And I'm certainly seeing that with my two children at the moment, that at their schools. It is talked about saying you're going to be bright and well educated by coming through a decent school anyway, let's make you a good, rounded person.

Srini Rao: So even for you, that was really an inflection point. And if I remember correctly, you're dyslexic, right? No,

Richard Newman: I'm autistic. Okay. So

Srini Rao: explain to me one how that came about, like how that was discovered and the role of education and all of that. Sure. So I didn't know that until I was 44.

Richard Newman: So this was just over a year ago I got the diagnosis. But it was something that I was aware of from an early stage. So going back to what I was saying with my education, I moved house just before my fifth birthday. That was the first moment where I suddenly had an inkling that there was something about me that was different to the other kids, which I hadn't really picked up when I'd grown up with everybody.

And they known me from the day I was born. I hadn't really noticed it, but suddenly when I went to a new area, I realized on that first day at school that I was trying to connect with other kids and. Something was off. I wasn't able to connect with them. They were happy with each other and laughing, smiling, having conversations.

And I wasn't able to connect. And I started to think is there something wrong with me? Is there something different about me that means that this doesn't work? This sort of conversation in in my very early. Years of wandering. And then as I went through my education, I started to realize, okay, there, I am having a challenge here.

Other people seem to be able to make friendly bands with each other and build friendships and relationships. And I'm not doing as well at that. I don't know why. And then I got a book when I was 16 years old, it was a friend of mine gave me a book on body language. And I started to read that and think, wow, this is incredible.

This is the missing part of communication for me that I just hadn't really understood in any way. I hadn't understood how I was coming across at all. And I hadn't understood what other people meant in terms of their body language and I then was essentially fascinated with communication and teaching it, but also aware that I was approaching it from a different perspective to other people, because a lot of people who run training companies on communication, they tend to come at it, a lot of people I've seen anyway, they come at it from a perspective of they've always been good at communicating.

So they're going to try and help people be better at communicating. I come at it from the perspective of I was really struggling. So I was shy as a child. I'm highly introverted. And I'm autistic. And so for me to try and communicate I had to build this from the ground up to really understand what works and what doesn't.

And because I've done that, I can then share those principles with people. But it's much more of a built communication. Style, which I'm really glad to say when I go on stage, I had a very nice compliment at one point where someone said, Oh, you're just a natural at this Richard, you should have seen me, you should have seen me a few years ago.

I've worked on it enough that it makes it look like it's natural. And then the great thing is I can then teach other people what the skills are, what they're missing, what areas they might want to work on in order to have a great impact and in order to appear natural at doing it too. Yeah.

Srini Rao: It's ironic. I actually had one other guest here who had been diagnosed with autism and who was a communications coach. Which I thought was really interesting, but I think that the thing that strikes me most about this is this effectively was at some point your Achilles heel and you've made a career out of it.

And I think Danny Shapiro in her book still writing said the blessing and the wound are always next together or something like that. I'm paraphrasing. But Thank you. One thing I wonder is some people would allow something like that to basically hold them back. And somehow for you, it was a catalyst for massive transformation.

It seems yeah. What is it that distinguishes those two types of people and how did the former become the latter?

Richard Newman: Do you know, I think that from my perspective. I'm grateful that I didn't know what it was because I don't think that autism was understood that well back in the 1980s, as well as it is today, from what I've understood from people around the topic.

And there's a very different there's a much wider scope of what the autism spectrum is all about these days. So I was grateful that I didn't know what it was. I just knew that I wanted to get better at something. And so I pursued it. And I think that there's actually something great about that of just thinking don't label yourself or box yourself in with something and just think, what do I care about?

What am I passionate about? What I'd like, what would I like to improve on and just go for it? Which, which has really helped me in life in so many different ways. So as an example on this, when I was 18. Everybody that I knew without fail was going to university. I went to the kind of school where university was the path.

As I mentioned being academic was very priced by my community certainly. And I decided not to, and I decided that I would turn down all the offers that I had to go to university, all the different places I've been off to go and live. In India, in a Tibetan monastery in the foothills of the Himalayas.

And people thought I was crazy. And even my friends had laid bets on how soon I was coming back. And the longest bet anyone had, the longest bet that anyone had made on me was 10 days. That was it. Now my trip was supposed to be six months. They'd bet 10 days. And so I knew I have to make this at least 11 days, no matter how hard this feels in order to make sure that I proved them wrong.

And I went off to India completely naive. I had no idea I was 18. I'd never been overseas without my parents before. And I had no idea what was going to happen where I landed in Delhi. I then had to figure out how to get a train ticket, a train that would take me two days to get across. The other side of the country, and then a jeep that would take four hours to go up through the mountains with monkeys on the side of the road to eventually then get to take a rickshaw that would take me to a monastery.

And I had no idea what I was doing. I was quite lucky, actually, in a way that I survived the trip and managed to get there. But it was the naivety in me of just thinking, I want to do this. I am really passionate about helping people. I'm passionate about communication. This is what I'm going to do. And I'm going to figure it out as I go.

And I did, and I came back, I actually took eight months in the end because I traveled around Southeast Asia after my experience of teaching English in this monastery. Yeah. And I came back thinking I'd really grown up from the experience because I would wake up in the morning thinking, I feel like going to Malaysia today.

And I just get up and go and book a flight and go and do it. And it was extraordinary to have that freedom and that independence at that age. So later in life, I would then think, yeah, if I want to do something, I'm just going to do it. And the same thing happened with my business is that I just, I didn't know how to do it.

And therefore I didn't know how not to do it. And so I just started this little hobby of mine of running a business of helping people that sort of grew and it got a bit bigger and I needed some people. And now I've got 20 people and it's a multi million pound company and we get booked for about 2000 events per year.

And I just went for it with not knowing. And so I think sometimes not knowing can be an advantage if you just think, I don't know what I'm capable of doing. So let me follow my passions and find out. And that's it's been a theme that's run through my life, which I encourage others to pursue too.

This ACAS podcast is sponsored by NetSuite, 36, 000. The number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system, NetSuite by Oracle. 25. NetSuite just turned 25. That's 25 years of helping businesses streamline their finances and reduce costs. One. Because your unique business deserves a customized solution.

And that's NetSuite. Learn more when you download NetSuite's popular Key Performance Indicators Checklist. Absolutely free. At netsuite. com slash optimize. That's netsuite. com slash optimize. Yeah.

Srini Rao: Yeah, so one thing about being diagnosed later in life with any sort of neurotypical label like autism or even like for me, it was ADHD.

ADHD, I was not surprised when I got the diagnosis and I don't think it has nearly the sort of stigma that autism comes with because I've had a couple of other guests who were diagnosed much later in life. And even from talking to them, I remember my friend Tara McMullen, I was like, I've met you in person half a dozen times, Tara, I was like, I would never in a million years have guessed that you would be on the spectrum at all.

And even from my conversation with you in this moment, I would never guess that because I had one guest and this was really, it was interesting and it was simultaneously disappointing. He was absolutely brilliant computer scientist. And he had so much invaluable advice for parents, and we aired the episode and he was so upset with how it turned out that he immediately threatened legal action.

So we had to pull it down. And I just I couldn't believe that. But my question about this is. What does that do for your identity when you get that label at such a later stage in life? And how do you not over identify with it? Because I feel like for so many people that sort of label what ends up starting as a diagnosis becomes an identity.

I feel like for

Richard Newman: so many. Yes. Yeah. That's, a really important question. Because. When I first was given the diagnosis there was a part of me that thought, Oh what is what is this going to mean? What is this change exactly? And that there was suddenly, if I'm honest there was a moment of me thinking, Oh no, I've just been told there's something wrong with me.

And then I thought for a second, wait no this doesn't change anything. I'm still the same person I was yesterday. And I like me and my family likes me and I'm proud of what I've done in my life so far. This doesn't actually change anything about me and it doesn't need to define me. So I always say to people it's really important that you don't define yourself overly specifically about being one identity.

It's important to think about all the facets of who you are, because otherwise you can get boxed in them and burned out by staying in one particular facet of who you are or one particular skillset and so on. So it's important to think about all the facets of who you

,

are. So I'm a brother, I am a son, I am a father, I'm a business leader.

I am an occasional basketball player. There's all sorts of things that I could say about myself rather than just thinking, okay, there's this one thing. And so I think the way that I have that I've been dealing with it is simply not to have any fear about it, not to aim to hide it and not aim to talk about it all the time, unless it feels like it's relevant.

It has been my sort of my path through. Getting used to it. And I think that initially when I mentioned it here and there, it was also a bit of a surprise for family and for friends and for colleagues and so on. Some of whom said, no, you're not, you can't possibly be because I've heard such and such about autism.

So there was like a little bit of a conversation that needed to happen to begin with. But then I think that occasionally it feels useful. To let people know where I could say, ah I'm seeing this perspective on things. I'm seeing things differently and that will be because I'm autistic and therefore I'm seeing the world differently to you in this situation where we're aiming to resolve something.

So occasionally that's valuable for somebody. I would say to anybody who gets. Who is neurodivergent in some way or in any other sort of term, rather than feel that label defines everything about you, you can say that's an aspect of me. And I'll talk about it where it's relevant.

Srini Rao: You saying that made me think of something I often funny enough, despite hosting a podcast and where I ask questions and like people are like, wow, you're a great listener. And people have listened to the show, set me up on dates with friends of theirs. And like my friend said, you are a terrible listener.

I was like, yeah, that's because I'm playing a character on the show. That's not me in every moment but the thing I realized was like in this context, I'm exceptional at it and in every other context, I'm terrible at it. But one thing I realized at a certain point was I would actually tell a girl before the date started.

I was like, just as an FYI, I have ADHD. So if you think I'm not listening, you're wrong. I actually hear every single thing and I'll be able to basically give you every detail of our conversation and explicit detail, but just know that and it was amazing because it was like a good way to disarm that it's to let that person know up front that, Hey, it's

Richard Newman: not that I'm not listening.

Yeah, that's a really good idea that yeah, if there's a situation where. That it's going to come up as an element of that interaction, that's definitely worthwhile from my perspective. I get a sensory overwhelm in, in certain situations. And if I think that's going to be relevant for the people around me, I might mention that how that impacts me.

For example, if I'm in a space that has lots of hard surfaces and several people speak to me at once, it feels like my brain is about to explode. And so I just have to, I have to leave the situation or in advance, I need to let people know that I just need one person at a time to be giving their thoughts.

How in the world

Srini Rao: do you deal with being on a stage as a keynote speaker then?

Richard Newman: Oh, it's bliss. Honestly, it is bliss, which surprises people. To me when I'm teaching, when I'm speaking on stage even if I'm in front of a thousand people and there's lights and lasers and smoke machines and everything it's fantastic for me because.

It's purely meditative because it's essentially, I feel like I am a surfer on the ocean. I am in complete control of the situation because essentially I guide people to do exactly what I would like them to do for sometimes I'll do a big talk for people for up to 90 minutes or bigger, longer keynotes I do for four hours in front of a large audience.

But all times I know. Roughly speaking what they are going to be doing. I'm in control of that environment. I've spoken to the tech team saying, this is where I'd like things to go. This is when I want it to be loud. This is when I want it to be quiet. This is when I need big lights or the lights come down.

And so it's a wonderful experience for me because it's also great because I, with many of the talks I've given them so many times. I'm in total flow. . And my mind feels quiet. I can observe the people around me. I know how to then interact with them. It's a very safe space.

It's a little bit like where I loved acting when I was a child. So I I loved learning a script and I loved being directed because I thought I know exactly what to say and I know where to stand on the stage and how to move because we've been through it. We've done it loads of times. So when the audience shows up and I do it, I I know what's supposed to happen here.

And the only different factor in there is that every audience I speak to is different. So now the the fun of it for me is I talk about it like surfing the ocean. Like I've built up lots of good surfing skills and then I go out onto the ocean and I ride the waves that are there and it feels meditative in that way.

And that's how I feel as a speaker. I go on stage and I ride the energy that is coming back from the audience.

Srini Rao: Yeah. I remember Stephen Collier telling me something similar about flow he's a expert on flow. And we've met him here as a guest many times. And I remember he told me, he said half the time when he's in the middle of a keynote talk, he said I get done with the talk and I don't even know what I said for an hour.

Richard Newman: Yeah. Do you know what I mean? I'm actually the opposite on that where I know exactly what I said and I know exactly what reaction I got from each person. Afterwards, and I rerun it in my mind afterwards, I come off the stage. First, I rerun every moment that I feel went well, so I can congratulate myself and just consolidate that memory.

Then I run every part of the aspect that didn't go as well as I wanted. And I think, what was the inflection I gave on that sentence? What if I gave a different inflection next time? Would that have a different reaction? And so I I much like yourself, you were saying that you remember so much of a a conversation.

Because I've I've done these talks so often, I can just go back in my mind and go through each piece and think, Oh yeah the first row of the audience on the left hand side, didn't seem that engaged when I was going through this section, how could I improve that piece next time? So yeah, I like to recall it and then make it better for the, in the next event.

Yeah I usually have one person as my focal point. Like I will find the person that I can see as having a positive response to my talk and I will just talk straight at them.

It's funny. I think that's a really useful tool, actually, particularly if people want to build their confidence around speaking, because with any audience, if it's big enough the these are rough statistics, but you can translate them to lots of situations.

There is 2% of any audience that will love what you do, no matter what you do. And there's 2% of any audience to hate what you do, no matter what you do. And it's really the rest of the room that's up for grabs. And so you're always going to see that happy nodder who's like smiling at you, giving you loads of energy.

And I remember when I, early in my career, I would be fixating on the one person sat at the back who looked miserable, who was like folding their arms, sitting back and not doing the activities. And I can remember specifically an event I did in Manchester. There's 500 people in the room and this one guy in the back row, the session I was running was voluntary as well.

They didn't have to show up for it. He chose to sit there and furious through the whole thing. And what I had to learn later in life through my career is. That his reaction to me has nothing to do with me. Or maybe at least 99% of how he's reacting is based on something that's happened to him in his life, all the way leading up to the moment at which he came through the door.

And I have no idea what that was. So yeah, I always encourage people look for the happy nodders in the room and then see if you can get the rest of the room that's up for grabs, but never expect to get everybody. So by all accounts, you would be considered an expert in communication. So I have to ask you a question out of morbid curiosity.

Srini Rao: Do your kids drive you crazy like every other parent? Are you able to use your professional skills on dealing

Richard Newman: with your kids? So I I'd certainly say like any other parent where I've got two boys, they're currently aged 11 and eight. There's certainly moments where I feel stressed out or worn out by by a day with them.

But I do, I also feel really grateful for having studied communication for having understood, I've really invested in personal development as well. I like to go on a lot of workshops, seminars, read books and so on that really helped me understand me to have more self awareness, but also helped me understand people.

So when there are challenges that are coming up. It's helped me see through what the surface level of what seems to be happening in the argument or the stress that they're feeling to get to a place where I can help soothe them. And I'm not able to do this every time, but many times able to soothe them based on a technique or a strategy that I've seen someone use in the past, or I've used in different situations that then allows them.

To be calm and also other situations where I'm able to help problem solve with them, help them communicate with each other. So I certainly feel that's been valuable but it's it's not bulletproof situation where they've had too much sugar that day and they're exhausted and they're throwing things at each other.

You just have to do the best you can.

Srini Rao: Yeah, it's funny because every time I have podcasts guests who have been raised by therapists, I always ask them, are you immune to all the bullshit that all the rest of us go to therapy to fix? And they're like, no, in fact, it's worse because I have parents who are therapists.

Richard Newman: Okay. I can imagine that. Let's get into the book. And you open the book by saying, lifting your impact on people around the world. It begins with a lifted mindset that's firmly grounded in your core values. Your values are your inner guiding compass that shows you the way to your true north.

Srini Rao: And you say, if you ignore them, you could end up working for years towards goals that feel meaningless on completion, wondering what came of your life and the person that you used to be. And you tie this into the idea of external validation. And I come from a culture where every single person I think on some level is got this perpetual sense that it's not, they're never enough.

Yeah. The Indian culture is much like the school district you went to. It's just that perpetuates for our entire lives. It's Hey so and so son got a PhD great, thank you for letting me know. So talk to me about it because I think that so many of us like have to have some sort of wake up call to even consider values.

If you would ask me about values when I was 20, I would have written it off as this just sounds like a bunch of nonsense. What are you talking about? Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Newman: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned Indian culture there. So I'll give you the example of my wife is a doctor and in, in the UK, there are a lot of people in the, we have a lot of Indian people in the UK Indian heritage who trained to be doctors.

And she's been surrounded by people from that background. And what we've noticed though, is that several of her friends. They reached a stage where they they qualified and then they made their way up the career ladder a little bit to the job at which they thought their family would be proud and that the place where they thought I'm going to I'll be in a place of success and fulfillment here, and then they've pulled their head up and thought, I actually don't, I don't know why I'm here, like why I feel like I put my ladder against the wrong wall and I've climbed up that ladder and now that I'm at the top of the ladder, I think why did I climb this?

This side, I should have put the ladder up against a different wall. I don't know why I went this way. And so I think that's really important for anybody to think, to really stop and think, why do you have the goals that you have? Because I think with social media these days, we are shown people who are.

Airbrushed and driving fancy cars and often beautiful locations and seemingly never doing a job and always being calm with their children and so on, and managed to get in perfect family photos. And so sometimes we think, Oh, that maybe that's what happiness is. Maybe that's what I need to do.

And then we end up doing it and thinking, I still don't feel like I've done it. And so this is why I care so much about values. And I have to say, it was a huge gift that. I happened to get about going to live in this monastery when I was a kid, because I started thinking about values really early on.

And what happened is that when I was at school there was a guy who'd been at our school a couple of years before, and he came back and he gave us a talk and he said I know you're all thinking about going to university, but I just want to encourage you to see if any of you might want to take a year off to go and do something good in the world.

And he'd explained how he'd been to. Catmandu to go and work in an orphanage. And he explained the experience. I thought, that sounds amazing. That's so much better than just going to university. And I ended up going to then apply to see if there was a place that I could get somewhere interesting.

Ended up at this monastery and what was fantastic about it, it was up in the foothills, it was near Darjeeling, which is quite high up, and they had a flat roof at the top of the monastery and on evenings when I couldn't. Sleep, I'd go up to the roof of the monastery, take the rug from my room and lay it down this concrete

,

roof and lay there and just stare at the stars.

And you could see stars like you've never seen before because there's no pollution around a beautiful sky. And there's also many power cuts in the town. So it's almost like a blackout all around you just staring at these stars. And I would think about where I wanted my life to go and what kind of person I wanted to be.

And I'd write loads of things out in my journal to really think about that in a place where I had no friends from home. I had no family, nobody pressuring me with any ideas. This was before the internet, before social media. So I could really clear my mind and think, who do I want to become? And so I came back feeling.

Pretty clear about the kind of person that I wanted to be, which is, which has helped guide me since then. And I've been feeling saddened by some people who I've seen who they that they find that they're just exhausted because they're not really sure who they want to be.

And they're bouncing between trying to please various people around them. It could be in their personal relationships, could be their friendship groups, could be the people they work with. And then they have this moment of crisis of thinking what am I doing this for? Can I escape what I'm doing?

And in some cases I've heard some people say, I want to change career, but I can't right now because if I did what I really want to do, then we couldn't pay the mortgage and I couldn't feed my kids. So I'm just going to keep on doing it for now and keep on going. So this is why I'm always so keen that people figure out.

What those values are. And they're also, they've also been important to me. Like it's not something I figured out when I was 19 and never had to look at it again. This was really important to me over the last five years in particular, which is why I put a big focus on this in the book is that I went through a lot of stress, a lot of challenges challenges in my family life, challenges in my business.

We went through the pandemic that shut down everything that we did. And I had people on the payroll concerned about whether or not they were going to be able to to keep having a job. And so I really had to make careful decisions as a business leader there. And I would meditate every day and really focus in on what other values that I'm going to make decisions by such that I will always be proud of what I did in this situation.

And when a lot of people are feeling stressed. Going out of their mind with a worry about various situations. I came back to those values daily and found that valuable. And I also found that clients were coming to us saying, look, we know you normally teach us about communication, but we're stressed and we don't know where we're heading and we need some help.

And so I spend a lot more time working on mindset and values with with different organizations too. So that's why I find it's so important. Yeah. I think that the one thing that I have found is even through the past 10 years, like my values have changed throughout my life as well. Yeah.

Srini Rao: Like I realized values are not static.

Richard Newman: Yes. Yes. So true. And I'll say to people that you probably have, it's somewhere, I think in a region of 30 to 40 values that might be guiding your life at any given time, depending on who you speak to, who you ask. But there, that can be overwhelming. If you woke up every morning and thought I'm going to live by these 40 values today, it's really difficult.

So instead I encourage people to think about their top three and that top three, as you just mentioned there that top three will change. From time to time, and you might need to reprioritize which values are important to you. To give an example from my life one of my top values had always been about centered around giving, and it was specifically giving to charities, giving of myself, generosity, and all these things.

And we came to the point of the the pandemic. We also had a situation with a major legal case that came up because there were some people who left our company and were then aiming to steal our clients and do everything they could to try and tear our company down. And I thought I need to really think carefully about what values are guiding me every day so that I do the right thing by my company now and help us thrive, not just survive, but really help us thrive and protect the people in my company.

I thought I need a value that's going to be all about protection. What is that value going to be? And the word that I came up with for that was silverback. Where I thought I need to be the silverback for my team, where I am focused every day on protecting my team and providing for my team. And I will do everything I can to make sure that they are safe, that they have.

They have work in their diaries, they've got money in their pocket at the end of each month. And that needs to be my primary focus. So it doesn't mean that I stopped being giving or generous or working with charities and so on. It just had to go down to number four on the priority list.

And Silverback went to second place and first place has always been to be a good father to to my kids, which has many different ramifications about why that's important. So realigning which values need to guide you right now is critical. And then you can, if you've only got three, you can then be focusing on them as soon as you wake up or before an important meeting before a really challenging, stressful situation.

Just think I'm going in knowing this is who I am. And this will guide my behavior so that I'm proud of myself. Even if we don't achieve the goal you can have that to to guide you. This ACAS podcast is sponsored by NetSuite. 36, 000, the number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system.

NetSuite by Oracle. 25. NetSuite just turned 25. That's 25 years of helping businesses streamline their finances and reduce costs. One. Because your unique business deserves a customized solution. And that's NetSuite. Learn more when you download NetSuite's popular Key Performance Indicators Checklist.

Absolutely free. At netsuite. com slash optimize. That's netsuite. com slash optimize.

Srini Rao: You hear that sound? It's the sound of a sale you're missing out on because you're not selling on Shopify. And what does it sound like with Shopify? This is the commerce platform that's revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. When I was in college, I had so many ideas, but executing them was a different story, because the resources were limited and the path to bringing those ideas to life was anything but clear.

If only a platform like Shopify had been around then, I could have transformed those ideas into reality with a lot less struggle. It's really remarkable to see how far we've come and how platforms like Shopify are empowering entrepreneurs to turn their visions into tangible businesses. So whether you're hustling from your garage or gearing up for an IPO, Shopify is the only tool you need to start, run, and grow your business without the struggle.

Shopify puts you in control of every sales channel. So whether you're selling satin sheets on Shopify's in person POS system or offering organic olive oil on Shopify's all in one e commerce platform, You're covered. And once you've reached your audience, Shopify has the internet's best converting checkout to help you turn them from browsers to buyers.

Now let's talk about growth. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. It's not just about having an online store. It's about having a powerful platform that can scale with your ambitions. And Shopify powers 10% of all e commerce in the U.

S. and as a global force, powering big names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklyn, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across over 170 countries. Plus Shopify's award winning help is there to support your success every step of the way. This is Possibility powered by Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial at shopify.com/unmistakable.

All lowercase. Go to shopify.com/unmistakable to take your business to the next level. That's shopify.com/unmistakable. Let's talk about translating values into vision in which you call a vision story. Because you say, when you lift your vision, you can create a future goal that will motivate you and others giving your daily life greater meaning as you venture towards your goal.

You may have set goals in the past and perhaps have felt disappointed when they were not achieved. And you say, by understanding how to create your vision story through vision, the vision creation process, you can use it to subconsciously drive yourself toward goals. And I think that with all the various books that have been written about this idea of vision like Simon Sinek's Star Wars, why?

It all is really vague at moments or it feels nebulous. And I realize that's because it's not one of those things that you just wake up and you're like, okay, this is my purpose. This is my why. Like I realized it took me five years. I was really fortunate that Simon Sinek pointed it out to me when he interviewed me, he's your why is that you're obsessed with people who are good at unusual things.

And I thought to myself, I'm like, that's great, Simon, what the hell am I supposed to do with that? And that was 13 years ago. And then when I look back at all the people I've interviewed, I thought, holy shit. He was absolutely right. Wow, that's fantastic. But talk to me about connecting vision to values, because I feel like vision Yeah.

Really often becomes just an exercise in mental masturbation for so many people where they create vision boards and stare at them and at the end of the year they create another vision board and everything is still the same. It just becomes this sort of Yeah, exactly. New age bullshit exercise.

Richard Newman: Yeah. Yeah. I certainly say that a lot of people who, first of all, who set goals, they never achieved them. Like people make a new year's resolution this year. I'm going to run the marathon or something. And then they look at it next, next year comes next January 1st. They go, Oh yeah. What happened about that?

So they set a goal and it had no connection to anything. It was just something that they would write down. Or dream up on a drunken New Year's Eve, but also that when other people think about what is my vision to talk about what we were just mentioning, if you haven't focused on your values first and really, truly got connected with what you deeply care about, who, what kind of person you want to be.

If you haven't done that first, you write down your goals. Inevitably, those are going to be goals that are influenced by what other people think you should be doing, what you've heard about in the media how your mind has been primed to believe that you should have certain goals on there, like a certain level of health and a certain level of wealth and whatever else you think should be on that.

And you create a vision board of all these pictures of that's one of the dream life is I've seen Disney movies and people are really happy at the end of the movie. If they had the house and it's got the white picket fence and there's lots of people nicely dressed and there's a wedding, there's definitely always a wedding.

So that's going on my vision board and that's where I have to be. And then people go through that and then suddenly think, why am I not happy? I've done those things. It was in the Disney movie. Why is it not there? So this is how I start that vision process. Differently. And it's something that I've done for more than two decades myself.

I've gradually refined it over that time and done it with clients as well. You have to start with your values because your values is like your true North compass, and it says, this is the kind of person I want to be. And therefore it points to your true North. Now, all you have to do then when you start to create your vision story is you think inevitably, if I, if this is pointing me to my true north, if I keep heading in that direction for the next five years, where does that take me?

What kind of person am I going to be? What sort of journey am I going to go on and what would that lead me to? What sort of legacy would I love to leave behind me if I truly am the embodiment of these values and live a life that I'm proud of? Being guided by them. And so that can then give you a very different approach to to, to goal setting, and it comes from within rather than from getting to cognitive about it and so on.

It's truly coming from what you care about. And so the other parts of the vision story process is that sometimes people will approach goal setting, they're told just dream big. And they they come up with a dream. And sometimes they're even told to come up with an action plan, but they think that sounds nice.

I'll do it one day. And then the next day they get up and they think, Oh, just not today. I'll just have a lie in today and eat two pizzas and then play some video games and go to bed. Because they're not actually connected to it. They don't see that it's a journey. So the different elements that I've put in there that have worked over the years is that you start off with, where are you right now?

You focused on your values. You then think, where am I today genuinely? And how is that in alignment with my values? And you start to realize, actually, there's parts of my life that are not aligning here and the more that you focus on them, you can see what is the challenge about that? Why am I concerned about it?

And if it doesn't seem like a big deal right now. If nothing changes about my life, where would I end up in five years time and 10 years time? And how would that impact me? And how would that feel if these are my values and I head in this direction that's out of alignment with my values, how far would I have to go down that road for it to become a crisis?

And this is done in classic storytelling to get people engaged in a movie or in a good book. They do this at the beginning of every story. They say, here's this person who cares about these things right now. They have this challenge and Oh, by the way, if they keep going in this direction, they're going to be kicked out of where they live and they'll never see their children again.

That's a basic setup for a story we think, Oh no, what are they going to do about it? So if you do that for your own life, you can suddenly get really focused on why you care. About changing things to stay in alignment with your values.

,

And then you can dream up that bigger future, which people are maybe more familiar with of where would I love to be, but put it in alignment with your values.

And then the next part is to build the journey and the journey. People have heard this so many times, but I always say to people, the journey is the point that it whether or not you end up with a certain amount of money or a house, that's a certain amount of square foot. That's not really the point.

The point is. Where are you now? What are your values? Where would you love to be in alignment with your values? And then you start going on that journey and you become a person that you are really proud of, and no one can ever take that away from you. A pandemic can't take that from you who gets voted president of the next election that can't be taken from you because you've been on this.

Aligned value journey that you've gone on and that you can take steps on every single day. I've really been aiming to take the premise of the best pieces that I've seen that work elsewhere, but also fill in the pieces that I'd never seen somewhere else to put something into practice that I knew would work.

And the way that I do this, I actually do it all the time. So I have I have these yellow notepads that I love using, it's like a legal notepad. I've used them for years. And whenever I open up a new notepad, I write that story. I put down my values. What are my current challenges? If I keep going in this direction, what does that inevitably lead me to?

Where would I love to be? What does that journey look like? Let me break down that journey into steps that I can start moving forwards on. And who will I become on this journey? And so I just do that and you can get it done in the space of 10 minutes. It doesn't have to take a long time. And then suddenly you're set up with a meaningful, purposeful day and you feel better about yourself as you make progress through your days and your weeks.

Srini Rao: So in the interest of time there's so much here in this book. So what I would like to do is go through these six archetypes for growth that you talk about and then relate them to how they. Relate to the idea of lifting your storytelling, lifting your stakeholders, lifting your message, lifting your presence and lifting your performance.

Richard Newman: Yeah. Yeah, great. So I developed something that I'm super proud of in the book which is all about these archetypes. So there are storytelling archetypes. And I believe Carl Jung was the first person to really popularize the phrase archetypes. It's been around for a long time.

And so he said that there are limitless archetypes and an archetype is essentially a set of behaviors. That's that people may have that you can see reflected by other people throughout time. You can see them in from cave drawings to ancient Greek mythology and various other stories and actions that have happened throughout history in between.

And so I wanted to pin down a series of archetypes. And the reason for this is that I see a lot of people feeling boxed in. We've talked about labels already on this conversation, but I see a lot of people getting boxed in. And feeling burned out because sometimes they go through a personality profiling system that says you're a red or you're a triangle.

And that means that you'll always be this way and you'll never be that way. And that's never really worked for me. I like self awareness of thinking, okay, that's how I am right now, but I've never thought that's who I am forever because it doesn't match as human beings, and so I developed this archetype system to say to people, look.

Where are you right now in your behaviors and what part of yourself are you forgetting that you could draw upon that you could lean into that might actually help you move forward in your life? And so I created these six archetypes that everyone can embody and you don't get stuck with one.

There might be one that you prefer right now, but there's six you can embody. And if you're having a real challenge in your life right now, it's probably because you are using the wrong archetype of behaviors. It's just not matching your, it's not serving you. There's no sort of good one or bad one.

It's just not serving you right now. And so these six different archetypes to go through these each in turn. If we start off with the servant, so the servant archetype. Is the one that wants, the person who wants to be the wind beneath somebody else's wings. So it that may resonate with people if they feel very much heart led wanting to do the right thing by others, helping to support people, lift them up, do things that will make them feel better or elevate their success and so on.

Now it's a really powerful archetype to have, but if you get stuck there and I've seen this sometimes, we talked about parenting earlier, I've seen this multiple times with parents. Who they get to the point where they feel put upon and they don't feel able to escape the servant role because everyone around them expects them to do so much for them that they get to the point of feeling like a martyr.

I'm feeling like I'm always having to do this. I'm always having to be in this servant mode of do things for others, do things for others. What about me? And so they get worn out from that piece. So it's important to be able to shift and change and find another archetype you can lean into. There's then the sage archetype, and I should say also these archetypes, they're built on Eastern wisdom as well as Western wisdom, and I've mixed those two together.

So the sage archetype, which is often associated with the element of earth as well. The sage is more the calm and wise, methodical person who approaches. The people around them aiming to be a mentor towards them helping to give them calm and solid advice, often reflects on what's happened in the past and will give their perspective from there.

And the challenge of being the sage too much is that you could be too stuck in the past that you're not able to be creative in the moment and think about new ideas. Then the next piece is the sovereigns, the sovereign archetype often in different archetype systems, this sometimes shows up as the king or the queen, but I wanted something that was gender neutral for everyone to relate to.

So I've called it the sovereign and this connects with the element of metal. As well for some people who are interested in the elements and the archetype systems around those. Now, the sovereign is great at decision making, planning process, which is really important for running a business or for having strategies in different aspects of your life.

But again, if you get stuck there, if you're spending too much time there, then you're going to end up being too black and white. And people will say, you're so stuck. You're so rigid. You need to loosen up a little bit. Or you could find that you find just, you're being put upon whenever a decision needs to be made around you, people come to you.

And you get decision fatigue and you get fed up with that situation. So it's useful, but also it can feel that you can get worn down in that situation. The next three you've got the shield and the shield is the person who is there to protect and provide. This taps into what I was speaking about earlier of using my value of silverback.

But the shield again, aimed to be a gender neutral piece. This is where this is connecting with the element of wood. And it's that sense of strength, like a big, strong tree that has stood the test of time and that provides for others, provides shelter, provides food for others. And if you spend too much time there, sometimes people resist being the shield because the shield, if it gets stressed and worn out, can become aggressive towards others.

So you've got to make sure that you're not pushing too far in that direction. The last two, you've got show time which is when people are in the spotlight, being creative, being expressive. In what they're doing. And again, there are some people who shy away from that. They said no, I could never do that.

And that I used to do that. I used to be, I remember when I was a kid, I was much more sort of servant mode and so on. And then I realized that there was this aspect of me that when I got on stage, I became more vibrant and more alive. And I quite liked that. And I thought, Oh, that's intriguing. That's part of me.

So I encourage people to, to venture forward into that the negative side of the showtime is the person who always wants to be the center of attention. So you've got to watch that piece. And lastly, you have the sprite and the sprites piece is there. It's connected with the element of water and it's there as the playful part of ourselves that sometimes when we get past, you know, childhood, we suddenly think I'd rather grow up now.

I can't be playful anymore. But to be childlike, to be playful is super important part of ourselves. And if we feel worn down and burnout, then certainly the Sprite aspect of us could be missing and it could help you sometimes actually make better decisions and be more productive. So it's key for people to think.

If they're listening to this now, think which one of those am I being most of the time? And which one of those am I being least of the time? And often when you look at really compelling stories fiction stories or real life stories, you see someone goes on a journey from one archetype towards the other.

Like I said earlier, you set a vision where you want to be in your life. Often the journey is the point. The journey could be that right now you're very sprightly and you need to be more sovereign in your life. And that is the journey. For you to be heading on in order to have the full realization of your values.

So I hope that's been clear for people to to understand those archetypes. Yeah. So let's tie that together and I distilled this into now thinking about as the four pillars of impact, which are storytelling, stakeholders, message, presence and performance. So how do we tie those archetypes into each one

of these?

Yes. So for example, sometimes when I'm teaching things like body language, people might say to me what's good body language and bad body language. And I always say, look it's a language like any other language, like French, for example, there's no bad words and good words. It just depends on the impact that you want people to have.

So let's say that you are the impact you want to have is more like a sage. There's different body language that the sage would embody versus the sovereign. So how you show up, you've got to decide what are my values? What's my vision? What sort of archetype is going to help me? And then you think, okay, what body language is going to be useful in this next situation that allows me to connect with people in a way that will be a positive influence because today I've decided to be more showtime or more servant and so on.

Storytelling as well is something that ties into, we talked about the vision statement and seeing ourselves in those stories. You've also got to think if I'm telling a story, if I'm telling a story to my team, to pitch to clients. How do I show up as the storyteller? Do I want to show up as a shield sort of storyteller?

Because let's say your company's going through all sorts of challenges, if you show up as a sprite storyteller, that's probably not where they want to be because they might be thinking you're not taking this seriously enough, so they might need you to show up as the shield when you tell those stories and you also want to think about this when you're connecting with your stakeholders, whoever they may be.

That could be your family. That could be your friends depending on what you're talking about in your life, things that you want to achieve. Those stakeholders are people who are going to influence or potentially support your ideas and where you're heading with things. So you might want to think about when you're showing up for key conversations, which part of you needs to be there in order to build those relationships?

Would they like a little bit more showtime from you or would they actually like a little bit more sage? Is it helpful in those relationships if you show up a bit more sovereign like saying Decisions need to be made here. Or do you need to be something else? So you can connect yourself with all those other elements of the book by first all decided this is the archetype I'm going to be.

And then you head into how you influence people through all those different aspects, storytelling your body language, your voice. questioning skills and so on. So being the version of you that needs to show up and put those techniques into action.

Srini Rao: I think there's one other thing that really struck me throughout the book was this idea of how much we seek external validation. And that's such a slippery slope, I feel and yet I think every one of us understands that and I wonder how we'd stop doing that because I think there's no point like I realized at a certain point that like every one of us always wants our parents to be proud of what we've done.

We don't want them to be disappointed. I remember talking to Danielle LaPorte about this. She's that's not something you ever really outgrow. And she's and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that when it basically becomes the driving force, that's when it becomes

Richard Newman: problematic. Yes.

Yeah, I completely agree. And it's, there's nothing wrong with other people being proud of what you're doing, but if you're doing it to make them proud. Then ultimately you're going to feel hollow. And it could be that you do the thing that you think will make them proud. And then they're not, and then you've lost everything.

You think I put years into this. I thought that's what you wanted me to do. And now you're saying you didn't. And I didn't like going through the process. It's certainly okay to make people proud. And sometimes our parents being very well intentioned, there may be certain values they meant to instill in us.

And we thought that meant, Oh, you're saying that I have to be a doctor, but actually what they meant is hard work and providing for your family. Like maybe that's the value they were hoping you would pick up from it along the way, or maybe they actually did say you should go and be a doctor, but what they mean underneath that, even if you don't do the thing that you thought they wanted you to do, you can sometimes think.

Is there a value underneath that, that they really care about? That if I'm living out that value and not doing the thing that's that they thought was specifically was the end goal, where they would still be able to feel proud. And you can approach it

,

from those pieces too but always going from that place of internal validation we love it when we see someone who seems really authentic, they feel really aligned.

Do you think, wow, you're just you're living life the way you believe it should be lived. That's something that we can really aspire to be in ourselves. So I'd encourage people towards that. There are two tactical pieces of this that I wanted to finish up with. You talk about something called the pro system, which really struck me.

Srini Rao: I love it when people are able to organize complex ideas and acronyms and frameworks because it makes it so much easier to understand. But you say the pro system allows you to take any idea and speak to any group of people influencing their actions and lifting them to new levels of success, motivation, and inspiration.

So can you walk us through the elements of the pro system? Give us the brief overview.

Richard Newman: Sure. So the pro system was, like you say, my way of organizing a lot of complex ideas into something simple that everyone can use. And if you think about going back to the 1950s, when Joseph Campbell was around and he was a researcher, a mythologist, and he put together the hero's journey that a lot of people have probably heard about.

The hero's journey, the challenge with it, not only is The Hero with a Thousand Faces his book, quite a complex book to read, it's quite challenging but it's also, it ends up with this hero's journey that is 17 stages. And I realized with working with people day to day, that it's not realistic to put that into practice, to take complex information and put it into this 17 stages in order to write an effective email or to put together a good document or so on.

So I thought I need a simpler system. So I came up with this pro system that allows people to put together the essential elements the hero's journey would cover, but in a way that you can use it, you can actually use it. It's a similar journey to creating your vision story, but you can use this to create a a three paragraph email.

You can use it to create a 20 minute conversation. You can use it to create a three hour meeting or a two day training session. In fact, just by following these five pros. And to go through them simply, you start off with the problem, which is the challenge, which I talked about earlier with the vision story, it's that piece of where am I right now and what's concerning about it and think about it from whoever you're speaking to, what concerns do they have what challenge they have right now and now in their life.

And if you spoke about it in a meeting, their eyes would light up and say, yes, let's talk about this. So you start off with the problem. As you would in any good story, there's there's some sort of a beast that comes to attack the village somewhere at the beginning of the movie. And you go, Oh, the story started.

Here we go. The next piece is the promise. And this is where you start to think where would I like to get to? So if you're speaking to someone that you could say something along the lines of what if we could have a quick conversation now that would help us. move forward on this project where we could save money, we could save time and do it in a way that improves your team's reputation.

How would that be? So that's setting up the promise from a sort of a meeting perspective. but it's something that also happens in all great stories. Let's say that you're watching a movie and a dragon comes in and eats everyone in the village. And they're all dead and the dragon walks away.

You're not going to watch the rest of that movie. Instead, what you watch is you see the two or three people who escape the dragon's attack. And they go up on the hill and they realize there's another village on the other side of a far mountain. And that village is a place that is safe from dragon attack.

And you realize that's what the movie is going to be about. It's getting them from where they are to where they want to be. And so you can do that in just everyday conversations. 32nd adverts, commercials, they do this as well. Where they say, do you have this challenge? Would you love to be free of that challenge and have this in the future?

So they do that in the space of about five or 10 seconds. And so that's the second piece of the promise. Then the next two pieces are more about logic, which is process and proof. So you can talk in a conversation or an email or a document or a story about how do we get from the problem to the promise?

What is the process of getting from A to B going to look like? And what proof, what evidence do I have that's going to work? And that's where you spend most of the time in a conversation or in a meeting or a discussion, that sort of thing. And then the last step around this is the prompt.

And this is the piece that most people forget and most people get wrong, which is where at the end of meetings, people often talk about something where they say, Hey, everybody based on what I've said, could we just agree to invest 17 million into this project for the next six years, which will involve 25 people.

Can you just agree to that? And people say, no, I can't agree to that. That's too big. Let's take this offline and they never talk about it again. So the idea of the prompt is at the end of an email or a meeting or a conversation, is that you give someone one simple action or you agree one action together based on our conversations, we do this one thing right now.

And that one thing is the key to an effective. Discussion or interaction with someone because you actually take the step forwards rather than thinking that was good. Everything's resolved. And then next week you have the same problems coming up. You actually take an action immediately together that moves you forwards towards where you want to be with that that promise.

Somewhere in the future. So that in essence is those five pieces that I put together for people and I've coached people to do everything from write more effective emails. There was one team that said that this had reduced the time that it takes them on emails day to day by about 30% because I trained 50 people on their team to do this for each other.

Every email was using this pro system. I've used it all the way up to help people win. Deals worth hundreds of millions where they are putting this pro structure into practice in how they pitch to elevate what they're saying over and above what other people are doing. Literally my first thought was, wow, I should restructure my podcast ad reads based on what you just said.

Okay so let's finish

Srini Rao: with this one last piece. And this really struck me. I'd never thought about this before. Where you're talking about how our gestures create a perception of time and you say the most effective movement you can do on the stage is to move from the past, you're right and the audience is left to the future, you're left and the audience is right and by using the stage this way, you walk your audience from their past to the present, finally to their future, you've connected more deeply with their minds through embracing the way that they see time expand on that for me because as somebody who has done my fair share of keynotes that just made me think, wow, that really could have a potent impact on the audience.

Richard Newman: Yeah, it's so powerful when you do it. And it's very rare that that you find a speaker who knows about it. And when they do it, it's just so brilliant. It takes people to the next level of storytelling. I remember years ago when I first found out about this technique, I saw a speaker on stage. And I was just mesmerized by how fluidly he managed to move to the audiences left when he talked about the past, he moved to the audiences right as he talked about the future and he was so engaging as a result because everything he was doing physically was congruent with how our brain sees.

time taking place. To give people an idea around this, if they're listening to the podcast, if you imagine a graph on a screen in front of you, and you imagine zero being on one side of the screen and a hundred being on the other side of the screen, which side is the zero on? Or for example, if you have January on one side and December on one side, which side is January on?

We know that when you have a graph that you see time where you see on the left, you see the past and on the right, you see the future. And in different parts of the world, people read from right to left or down a page and so on, but graphs are done the same way. We see time as human beings going from the past on our left to the future on our right.

So when we're watching a stage or looking at a screen if you sit still and you visualize, you might see the past behind you in the future in front of you there's lots of variations around that and people don't need to change that. But you as a speaker, if you're trying to take people from the past to the future and give them a story, that's how you can do it.

So just imagine this. If you're not aware of doing of this, then most likely what you're doing, you're already doing it, but you're just doing it the wrong way around. So you're most likely, if you're a speaker and you're thinking about what you're saying to an audience, you might be gesturing to your left or walking to your left.

The audience is right. When you're talking about the past, cause I'll just feel instinctive because that's how you as a speaker see time. And then when you think about the future, you might instinctively without even knowing it, move to your right and the audience's left, as you talk about the future, the challenges for them, it gets confusing because they think hang on a second, that's.

They won't think it consciously, but subconsciously they'll think that's going against how I see time. And this is now confusing me, particularly if you have graphs up on the the screen behind you that are going in the other direction to where you're indicating or gesturing. To bring this down to a simple level, you don't have to be on a big stage to use this.

When you're speaking to someone and let's imagine you're trying to resolve an issue with them and imagine that you're facing them. Then ideally, what you should do is use your right hand To indicate anything that is a challenge and anything that happened in the past. And then you use your left hand to indicate anything that is in the future and anything that you're aiming to achieve out of this meeting.

And the joy of that is that they will feel on a subconscious level, very grateful for the fact that you are congruently indicating in which direction the meeting is moving. And so off to your rights with your right hand, you can say, look, I know that we've had some challenges in the past. And I'd really like to put those challenges behind us and move away from those.

Let's just talk about what those challenges have been up until today, and you're indicating them and visually in their past so they can mentally take a break from them. And then you visually indicate with your left hand, I'd love to create a better future in the way that we work together. And let's talk about what that might be.

What does that look like for you? And you just gesture off to your left, so you're indicating to their future. And they subconsciously are moving with you towards imagination, dreaming up where things can go and so on. So I really love coaching people through this. When I have a group running a workshop face to face, sales teams love this obviously, but leaders and managers really love this as well because they suddenly see how they can elevate their game and be much more engaging in front of a large group or even just in front of one person by gesturing the way that people see time.

Srini Rao: Beautiful. This has been really incredible. You've just packed it with so many practical and thought provoking insights. So I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unmistakable. What do you think it is to make somebody or something

Richard Newman: unmistakable?

To make somebody really unmistakable I think that building on the conversation that we've had around. Value values that's, there's only really one way to live an engaging life, which is to truly be you, not the version of you that other people expect you to be, or that you think that you're supposed to be, but to be truly unmistakable then you've got to live totally in accordance with your values, knowing that your values are different to everybody's and that's okay.

And so when you live in alignment with those, then the way that you create things is going to be completely different. And be really exciting and engaging for other people. That's what I would always encourage people to do is just think very deeply and carefully about the kind of person that you want to become and live in alignment with that.

And then you'll be unmistakably you. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your wisdom and your insights and stories with our listeners, where can people find out more about you, your work and everything

that you're up to. Great. So there's a couple of places. If people are interested in getting some workshops for their team then they can go to ukbodytalk.

com and find out more about the workshops that we provide and we travel worldwide and do virtual events from there. If people want to know more about the book Lift Your Impact is available on Amazon, Barnes Noble any way you want to get it, just look for Lift Your Impact, Richard Newman. But I can also give people the first 25 pages of the book for free.

So if you go to Lift Your Impact. com forward slash the book. And you scroll down that page, right at the bottom, there's a form you can fill out contact form. They tick the box to get a free 25 pages and we'll send that across to you. And that goes really deeply into the values piece we've talked about on this session.

And lastly, people can find me on Instagram at Richard Newman speaks.

Srini Rao: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

Richard Newman: This ACAST podcast is sponsored by NetSuite, 36, 000. The number of businesses which have upgraded to the number one cloud financial system, NetSuite. By Oracle. 25.

NetSuite just turned 25. That's 25 years of helping businesses streamline their finances and reduce costs. One. Because your unique business deserves a customized solution. And that's NetSuite. Learn more when you download NetSuite's popular Key Performance Indicators Checklist. Absolutely free. At netsuite.

com slash optimize. That's netsuite. com slash optimize.