Communication and the Relationship to Taking Ideas to Scale | Richard Newman

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Communication and the Relationship to Taking Ideas to Scale

An interview with Richard Newman about non-verbal communication and the role discomfort can play in personal growth.

Imagine being 18, and standing on the doorstep of a monastery in the Himalayas, believing you are there to help the monks speak better English — to find out they do not speak any English at all. Could you teach the language, using only body language and tone of voice?

This is the actual story of our guest Richard Newman, and the beginning of his fascinating journey into the lessons of non-verbal communication. Richard is the CEO and Founder of UK Body Talk, the global leader in evidence-based training on the psychology of communication, and the author of You Were Born to Speak, which is Richard’s personal journey of discovering the secrets of communication and is filled with practical strategies that you can immediately apply to transform your success.

Richard shares the story of his journey to a Tibetan monastery to spend six months teaching the monks English. During this time, he learned much about non-verbal communication, and how comfort and discomfort can impact our shared dialogue. During our conversation, Richard shares the insights that help people move out of their comfort zones, so that they can become aware of and change habits that stand in our way. He teaches ways to unlock communication, how to mentor others, and ways to inspire those around you through earnest communication.

Moving people to change habits, or encouraging a business to make large changes, isn’t as simple as providing evidence that the change is for the best. Richard explains how storytelling can be a great tool to connect with the emotional mind stagnant. Then, we can connect with the logical brain and share information that will support and maintain change.

The insights Richard shares into communication are powerful, and can help move employees, companies, and executives forward!

Three Key Takeaways:

• Moving people through change means taking them into an uncomfortable place. In order to be successful, your thought leadership will have to offer a safe space to listen and accept new ideas.
• Storytelling is a powerful tool that, if done correctly, can change people’s beliefs and actions.
• In order to get people to accept your thought leadership insights, you have to help them feel a sense of ownership in that idea.

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And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage or reach out to Bill Sherman on Linkedin!

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Transcript

Bill Sherman Why do so many people who practice thought leadership struggle with getting their ideas out there? Some might say it’s communication skills, confidence or even imposter syndrome. It’s only natural to feel nervous, but it’s important to overcome these hesitations and get comfortable with discomfort. So today I’m speaking with Richard Newman, the founder of Body Talk. As a child, he was diagnosed with high functioning autism. And at 18, he traveled to the foothills of the Himalayas to live with Tibetan monks who spoke no English. By learning to communicate non-verbally, it helped him develop techniques of communication that vastly increased confidence and produce impact. So today we speak with Richard Newman about thought, leadership and communication skills. I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Richard.

Richard Newman Thanks so much for having me here, Bill.

Bill Sherman So today we’re going to be talking about communication and its relationship to taking ideas to scale and how that piece of storytelling matters. And I want to begin with the story that you shared with me, which I think is incredibly powerful. Tell the listeners your experience of getting in that uncomfortable situation where you were standing in front of a monastery door.

Richard Newman Great. Yes. So if you can imagine this. Think about spending six months of your life where you can’t communicate using words. So this is where I found myself when I was 18 years old. I’d never been overseas without my parents at this point. So it’s fairly fresh. And I, I decided that I wanted to go and teach English overseas. And I came across this opportunity to go and work at a monastery in the foothills of the Himalayas where they wanted to improve their English. And so I ventured across India. Sort of took me a couple of days to travel up there. I eventually found this little monastery knocks on the front door, and out came this monk to greet me. And he greeted me in Tibetan. And I remember thinking, Oh, hang on a second. I thought I was here to improve your English. Do you not know how to say hello in English? And it turned out that he couldn’t speak any English at all. And they in the monastery they could speak Tibetan, Nepali and Hindi pretty well. And I spoke a bit of French and a bit of German, and after about 5 minutes we realized that none of our languages were going to connect with each other. The only way that we would be able to communicate was through body language and tone of voice. And so they sat me down in their kitchen. They gave me a mug of Tibetan tea, which is rather strange in taste. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a third tea, a third butter and a third salt. And there I was, drinking this very strange drink, thinking, Wow, this is going to be my life for the next six months. I’m going to be here drinking something strange, not able to connect with people. But over the course of about half an hour, maybe an hour had passed, we realized that through body language and tone of voice, we could really connect with each other. We could start to understand each other. And then over the course of six months of living with them, I was doing lessons with them each evening, usually during a blackout, usually using candlelight, just sitting in their kitchen. And I would start to share words and phrases with them through body language and tone of voice. And the only way that I was able to pull this off was by having 100% congruency in my communication. So to give you an example, if I was trying to teach them the word excited, if I didn’t sound excited and I didn’t look excited, then I could have been saying pineapple. They had no idea. And so I had to be totally congruent. And so I came back home after that experience, totally fascinated by the possibilities of nonverbal communication and determined to study more of it, get more competent at it, and eventually went on to start teaching people these findings, which led eventually, many years later, to publishing research about what nonverbal communication can really achieve for us.

Bill Sherman So one of the things that I think we often overlook in the process of thought leadership, both as individuals as well as then organizations, trekking ideas to scale is that we necessarily have to be comfortable with discomfort because the things which are simple and obvious to us hello, are not to our audience. And like you used, how do you match the word excitement with the emotion of excitement? Right. And so I want to dove a little bit deeper. Let’s talk about discomfort and comfort in communications and how they impact.

Richard Newman Yeah. So often we’ll get this where I’ve been training clients now for more than two decades and we very often get people who will arrive at the beginning of a workshop. And essentially will say, look, this is how I am. I’m not capable of being anything else. So I can’t gesture. I can’t speak up. I’m not capable of projecting my voice. I can’t put emotion into what I’m saying. And what we then do over the course of a couple of days, often with them, is to allow them to get into the area outside of their comfort zone to explore more of who they are. Because what I’ll often say to them is, Look, your current habits are not who you are. They are just your comfort zone. You’ve been doing them for so long that you wake up in the morning and you believe that that is who you are. But it isn’t you. It is just one tiny fragment of all the potential that you have. And so to go through a couple of these. If someone says to me, Oh, I can’t project my voice, this is as loud as I can ever get and I can’t get my voice any louder than this. I’ll say to them, Okay, do you have any children? And they’ll say, Okay, yeah, I’ve got a child. I say, okay, well, your child is just run out into the road and there’s a large truck coming towards it. Are you honestly going to stand by the side of the road and say, Oh, please come out of the way because the truck’s going to kill you? Or are you going to find that voice within you that you’ve had since you were born and use different musculature that may feel outside of your comfort zone. But it’s it’s there and it is freely available for you. Same. So people understand. Okay, actually, I’ve got it now. I just haven’t used it that much. It feels outside of my comfort zone. But it is me. It is part of me. The same goes with gestures. Often people have been told, Oh, you mustn’t gesture because it’s distracting and people won’t take you seriously. But actually, as we found by published research that we created, that if you don’t gesture, you are perceived to be less confident, less convincing, you are less likely to be seen as a good leader, and you’re less likely to win votes if you’re running for election. Because people know that human beings gesture. If you’re not gesturing, you are holding back your ability to connect with another human being. So what we’re all always talking to people about is how to get back to the way you were born. To communicate and the way you’re born to communicate is that you have this free access to this huge voice, gestures, intonation. And it’s what people tend to do is to get themselves into this little comfort zone over a period of time where they build up habits or armor, as I like to refer to it, where they maybe have been hurt or rejected or passed over for promotion. They may have had challenges in their personal, professional life that have led them to limit the way they communicate so that they feel less of that pain. And they find a place where they think, If I stay like this, I’ll experience less pain. But you’ll also experience less joy, less success, less fulfillment. So we have to take back some of that armor and get people back to that space of discomfort so that they grow into more of who they really are.

Bill Sherman I think that’s a fantastic example on the individual level of limiting beliefs in many ways. We’ve constructed an identity of who we are and what’s possible. And I think also then in thought leadership, your audience has constructed either an identity or a sense of how the world works, of what’s possible, what’s not possible. And if you’re coming with a story of how the world could be different, whether it’s a better way to do something, a new way of thinking of the world or a new approach, you have to challenge those limiting beliefs. And I like your example of the well, let’s put you in a situation hypothetically where there’s urgency. Right. Which is similar to the child running into the street, because it is much easier to prepare and to have those resources to take those steps early rather than wait till that moment of crisis where you have to make transformation. Yes.

Richard Newman Yeah. So if you think about if you’ve got a broad number of people where you need to move them from a space of comfort to a space of discomfort, there needs to be a change, a new initiative, a pivoting of a business which a lot of people have had to do the last couple of years. We’ve had to rethink how organizations work, what it means to be part of a team. Is it okay to be working virtually, or are we coming back into the office? So many things have had to change for people to thrive or even survive during this time. And so you may need to get people to shift and people don’t like to do that. And here’s the reason. Part of that happens is that people know everything they have done in their life up until this moment has kept them alive. And if they do something different, they could die. That’s how the survival mind works. And so if you get people to shift that, be thinking, well, am I going to be safe? Is this going to still allow me to comfortably bring home rations that I need for me and my family to survive? So you need to get to that place. The other thing that we need to understand is that as business leaders, you may have found out, you may have rationally, logically come to an answer where you know definitively this is where a business should go, or even speaking to a client, you may think, I know that logically speaking, this is the best product. It is at the best price point for them. It will give them the biggest return on investment. I know that because I can give you proof and you’re wondering potentially why? Why is this client not listening to the proof? Why is my team not listening to the proof? And the reason being you’re trying to connect with the logical mind and the logical mind is not in charge. Before you get to the logical mind, you need to involve the survival mind and the emotional mind. It is the survival mind. An emotional mind will give you lots of reasons not to believe someone’s evidence. And so if people are behaving in a certain way currently, first of all, to go back to our earlier example, you can give them a sense of talking about, you know, have they ever believed something for a period of time? And then suddenly they realized that what they thought was real was not. And you may have an example for them, or you can get them to think of their own examples. They’re open to the idea of, Oh, change sometimes happens and sometimes that can be good. But this is where storytelling is so important for changing people’s beliefs, changing their actions, and the cascading messages of change in organizations. Because storytelling, if it’s done well, it connects with the survival mind, the emotional mind first and only then starts to deliver something to the logical mind. So the key areas of the mind that are really in charge of our decisions have said, Yes, I accept this information, I’m engaged, I understand why it’s important for me. I understand what I can gain from this. Tell me how now you can give me your proof. And so that’s the space that people really need to lean into if they want people to move forward in a new direction.

Bill Sherman And that is, I think, one of the fundamental gaps that I see again and again is the idea on its own is not a guarantee of success. And so I see people wrestle with the question of why are average or mediocre ideas outperforming what we know are good ideas? And that ability for storytelling or if I were to wrap it in a different frame, you have to sell and market the idea. Money may not be changing hands, but you’re asking for people’s time, attention, belief, effort, and you have to engage them so that they have ownership in the idea. If you cannot emotionally activate them, or if their survival senses danger, they’re going to run the other way from the idea to something that feels safe.

Richard Newman Yeah. Yeah. I love the phrase that you used in there to the sense of giving people ownership of the idea. And this is one of the biggest challenges that I see people having where they head in the wrong direction if they’re using business storytelling, because so many organizations, they sometimes think of their company as the hero of the story. Our company is going to achieve all these things, or the leader thinks of themselves as a hero. I’ve come up with this great idea, this great project, this great initiative. And when you do that, the simple question around this is if you are the hero of the story, what is the audience? So if you think about it, if you’re the hero, the audience is either going to be the victim or the villain in some way. And neither of those is good. Nobody wants to be sitting there listening to a story, feeling like if it’s a hero victim situation, they don’t want to feel like they need you to come into their lives to fix them because they’re not capable of fixing or looking after themselves. We don’t like that sense of disempowerment. We also don’t like this. And I’ve seen this in businesses where a company is pitching to a client who they feel should be choosing them and hasn’t gone ahead yet, where they start to talk to them as if they are the company is the hero and the potential client is then the villain in the situation. We’ve had to talk them round from that and say that’s not how to go, so how should you do this instead? Very simply, you want to position yourself when you’re sharing a story, you are the mentor and whoever you’re speaking to is the hero. Every single human being is the hero at the center of their own life experience, meaning that every person has challenges and every person has goals. And we all, we all want to move away from the challenges and towards the goals. That’s our hero’s journey. And what we love to have around us are people who are mentors. Mentors are people who care about our challenges, they care about our goals, and they care about the journey that will get us there. So imagine that. Imagine if you go into a meeting as a hero and you say, Look, there’s this new thing that we must do. I’ve come up with it and you’re coming with me and you wonder why nobody starts following you out the door as you go off to it. Well, they don’t feel involved. They don’t feel ownership of it. But instead, if you come in and you say to them, I really want you to know that I understand the challenges you’re going through right now, having spoken to you, I see you and I hear these challenges. And I think the biggest one that we’ve talked about is this one. Ultimately, we know that if we keep going as we are, the challenges you spoken to me about are going to get bigger. And so suddenly people are with you. They see that you are on board with what their heroes challenge is. And then you can start to describe the future through storytelling and say, You know what? If it was possible for you to end up over here and what if we could get there? That would give you more of this thing you want and more of this thing that you want. How would that be? Is that something you’re interested in? Is that something you’d like to hear more about? And again, it’s them. They’re in their mind seeing themselves on their journey. They have ownership of it, at which point you can logically describe the journey because they now know why they care and they now believe that they can see themselves on that story journey.

Bill Sherman And I think we describe this similarly in some ways, the way that I describe it is when you’re practicing leadership, your role is to shine the spotlight on others and on ideas. Right. And it’s I think it’s natural in human behavior to seek the spotlight for ourselves. Right. And you have to restrain that impulse and say, no, no, no, no. They’re the hero. They’re the one in the spotlight. The idea. And they are the ones that deserve the attention. And there’s an important role. Someone’s got to be the spotlight operator. Right. And it’s okay to be a little bit in the dark and behind the scenes because people don’t care that it’s you. They’re looking for the solution. Right. And you don’t have to be the hero.

Richard Newman Yeah. Yeah, yes. So good. And we often talk about this where we say that, you know, great leaders lift. And what I mean by that is that they achieve their goals by lifting others, by making sure that other people feel seen. They are they feel supported. They feel a sense of responsibility and empowerment. And by empowerment, it’s not just delegation. You know, you’re empowering them. And there’s accountability along the way because you stay is the mental there with them on that journey. And the more people that you can lift, the more likely it is that the goals you have are going to happen. So we all want to have that leader or that parent or grandparent who sees greatness in us and helps us become more of that greatness. So the more that people can do that, the better. And, you know, very powerful ways to do that is through storytelling. But it’s come back to what I was earlier. You can’t just have a great story. You have to make sure you commit to being a great storyteller. And that comes through the body language and the tone of voice and with cascading messages these days, you’ve got to be comfortable with doing that on camera as well. I think too many people have turned their cameras off in the last couple of years because they don’t like it. They put up a big slide with some bullet points and some graphs and then they’re only aiming to engage the logical mind. And we get this helps people talk about with screen fatigue where people say, oh, I’ve got too much screen time, screen fatigue I’m suffering with from work. And they finish work and then they go and watch Netflix for 3 hours. That’s not so it’s not really screen fatigue. They’re just not feeling engaged emotionally with what’s happening, whereas they do feel engaged emotionally with the stories they might watch in the evening.

Bill Sherman Well, and I think about screen fatigue a little bit differently. My training in university and graduate school is on theater. It is incredibly draining to be on stage three, 4 hours at a time. As a performer, you need to be focused, you need to be present. All of those senses need to be aware and activated. And sometimes when I hear zoom fatigue, I hear people sort of reflecting that theatrical perspective. I know people’s attention is on me. Right? And unless you’ve developed those muscles and it’s something that you’re comfortable with, not everybody wants to be visibly on stage. There’s plenty of people who are happy to be backstage or off stage or want to be in the audience. But you pointed out something that I think on storytelling and being a good storyteller that I want to explore, that you have to be willing to tell the same story again and again in good ways, because although it may be the hundredth time that you’ve told the story similar to if you’re producing on Broadway or, you know, The East End, that show you’ve been through rehearsal after rehearsal, even on opening night, you’ve done it dozens of times, right? But your audience is seeing or hearing it for the first time. Yeah. And if you can’t be present and engaged with them and be respectful that they’re encountering your idea maybe for the first time or hearing the story for the first time, just. I want to go back to your moment in the story in Tibet, where if you don’t talk about excitement with excitement and you’re checked out, your audience is never going to be more enthusiastic than you are. Period. Full stop.

Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast, please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.

Richard Newman Absolutely. Yeah. The audience will never be more passionate than you sound or appear, and there are so many things to talk about with that, where I’ve worked at countless conferences over the years and generally what happens at a conference is the first speaker who gets up is the CEO, and then maybe the second speaker is the CFO. And then they have a couple of updates from managers and then maybe they come around to the keynote speaker and generally one of those senior people will come up on stage not feeling very comfortable with being there. It would be either the CEO or the CFO and they might stand up and say, Hi everyone, I’m very excited to be here and got some good news to share with you today. And they just don’t look excited. They don’t sound like it’s going to be that.

Bill Sherman Good news makes people worry, are we shutting plants? Are we laying people off because the tone doesn’t match it?

Richard Newman Yeah, it’s it. And so, you know, if you are speaking to, you know, maybe it’s speaking to one person in a meeting and you’re feeling stressed that day. You’re feeling, you know, rushed and busy that day. But this piece of information you’re sharing is important if you don’t give it the space, if you don’t give it the gravitas and the commitment, the certainty that it requires, they’ll be left thinking, Oh, this person feels quite stressed about this idea. Like it’s not that important. They kind of rushed through it. So maybe I shouldn’t give it much of my attention. So, so like you said, if you’re telling a story once or if you’re telling it a thousand times. And on that show, to give you an example, I worked with a Formula One racing team over the space of four years early in my career, where I delivered the same message a thousand times. So 200 times a year, delivering it to people from all over the world. It was a thousand different audiences. And sometimes I had multiple interpreters at once, but I delivered that same message a thousand times and we just updated the statistics after each of the races, but otherwise it was the same message. And what I was able to glean from that is that if I was mailing it in, if I was phoning it in, then I was getting much less engagement. I could test the exact same message back and forth, sometimes multiple times per day. But if I put energy into it, if I placed pauses after key moments, if I put extra expression into certain sentences, I was visibly seeing in real time greater reactions, better responses at the end. And so I encourage everybody to think about this. When you go to deliver a message, have in mind, how do I need everybody to feel by the time they finish listening to this message? And that will allow you to have a target for your body language and your tone of voice. So you’re going to say the words you’ve decided, perhaps what the words are. You might add in a few more expressive or passionate words in there, but just giving them the information isn’t good enough. So so think about it this way. If you want to share information with business people in business these days, you don’t ever need to meet human beings again to do that. You can email it to them, you can send them a fax, you can post them a document if you want to. You never need to be there to give them information. The real reason that you’re there for the real reason that you turn on the webcam to speak to people is to change the way they feel about the information. Now, there might be some interaction back and forth about it, but again, your target needs to be what is the feeling? So let’s say the feeling is I want them to feel reassured. Well, then the way that you say that information, the pace at which you say it, the way you move, needs to be dictated by that sense of I am aiming to reassure somebody, if you’re aiming to excite people, whether you need to have excitement in the tone of voice and excitement in your energy back and forth. So it totally changes the style. So for people to to feel at home with that idea, it’s not about thinking, okay, I gesture on this word, I pause on this word. If you just navigate based on this is how they need to feel at the end, much like, you know, a plane taking off in London and landing in New York. It’s going back and forth along the way, but it knows what the end target is going to be. And so that’s how you can move with your storytelling. That’s how you can move through your meetings.

Bill Sherman So with your point on. How do you want people to feel? I want to sit on this for a moment and expand that idea. So you talked Formula One. You could take a Formula One race announcer and a BBC news reader. Give them the same message in the same words. But you think about the tone of the intonation of the newsreader for BBC versus the race announcer. They’re going to evoke different emotions regardless of the content.

Richard Newman Yeah, absolutely. And we often say to people like, if you want to get good at understanding how to change the emotion of what’s happening in a meeting, watch someone deliver the news over the course of 30 minutes because it’s not all going to be bad news. There’ll be positive stories. That’ll be intriguing stories. And so you’ll hear people delivering the news saying and that is the latest update we have on Syria. But now we’re going over to London Zoo where we’ve got news on a new baby panda and suddenly the tone of voice changes. Now, imagine that they did the tone of voice the other way around. Exactly. So the latest news that we’ve had on Syria know suddenly they get fired for having the wrong tone of voice.

Bill Sherman And the news about the baby panda, if it’s, you know, more somber, is like, oh, no, what happened to the baby panda? Right. So we send signals by intonation, by energy that prepare an audience. And if there’s a dissonance between either the non-verbal signals or the intonation signals, we convey an entirely different context, a message.

Richard Newman Yeah. And this is so critical in important meetings, people will come into that meeting, they’ll be observing the leader or the speakers of the meeting before they even start to speak. So your job starts the moment that you see the other person, not the moment that you put up your first slide or get your time speaking around the boardroom table. It starts from the moment that you arrive, the feeling that you generate a sense of confidence or a sense of anxiety. And so, for example, my wife is a doctor. And so we have lots of friends who are doctors. And they talk about when test results have come back and they need to talk to a patient. The moment the patient comes in the room, they need to be aware of the feeling of the conversation. So if for a doctor, a patient comes in and they say, Oh, hi, nice to see you again, Mr. Smith, come and take a seat. Right. I’ve got your test results here. It turns out you do have cancer and there’s four weeks to go. Then it’s got to start right from the moment that you lock eyes with the person all the way through to that moment to navigate it. We coached leaders on this where there is a huge change for one of our clients, where they’re going to be making several hundred people redundant or seven, several hundred rolls rather redundant. They were really worried about this and we talked about the fact that from the moment that they go into the room, they need to be a rock in the storm because everybody else, when they get the news, are going to start to feel stressed, anxious. What does this mean for me? And if you, as the leader, you might be feeling upset. It might be involving people you’ve had relationships with for years who are affected by this decision. But if you look anxious and stressed, it’s going to amplify the anxiety and stress for everybody else in the room. So, again, you need to think, how do I want them to feel by the end? And therefore, who do I need to be based on where I am leading them towards?

Bill Sherman So as we begin to wrap up, I want to come full circle. I want to return to the moment of you standing at the monastery door ready to knock. Not quite sure what you’re getting into. Right. I think that is comparable to a lot of people who have an idea, but they don’t know how to take it to the world. What advice would you give your younger self based on what you’ve learned over the past decades?

Richard Newman Well, I think actually what I would say to to my younger self and to anybody doubting we had a conversation before about imposter syndrome, is that generally speaking, what we have, we tend to not believe that we are as competent as other people perceive us to be. And this is imposter syndrome comes up. And so there was part of me that thought, I don’t I don’t want to get on this plane to go to India because I’ve never done this before. There was also part of me before I started my company where I feel like I can’t do this. What do you mean? This is there’s no way that I could do this. And in fact, it wasn’t even my idea to start my company. I was sitting in a hair salon and my hairdresser said to me, you know, what are you doing? What are you interested in? I talk to him about the books I was interested in. I talk to him about my trip to India and he said, Wow, you could come and teach communication to my hairdressers. They need to improve the way they speak and interact with people, come back and do it next week. And I thought, I can’t do that. There’s no way I can do that. I’m terrified by the very idea. But what stayed with me is that he saw something in me that I didn’t know I was yet capable of. And so what I would say to my younger self is understand that other people view you without all of the limitations that you have in your own mind. They don’t know the stories you have in your mind that limit who you think you are and what you think you can do. They just see you and they see all the potential that lies before you. And so if there is that sense of excitement that may come with a sense of nervousness as well, it’s worthwhile stepping forwards into it to grow who you are. And so I you know, I feel delighted by the fact that I took that courageous step to knock on that monastery door and enter into an adventure which I couldn’t possibly have imagined before I got there. And, you know, part of that actually to go out the other side was fueled by the fact that my friends at the time had a bet that I was going to be back within two weeks. The longest any wanted bet was two weeks. I think the shortest that someone bet was two days. And so I thought I.

Bill Sherman That’s hardly enough time to do it. The round trip.

Richard Newman That’s exactly right. Yes. So you’re on the plane there and then took a plane back. That’s pretty much how much they’d bet on me. So I thought, I’m going to bet on myself. I’m going to believe that actually I can do this even though I don’t know how, because I know that I want to. And by doing it, it’s going to grow who I am as a person. And I think that becomes harder as you get older. Your comfort zone sort of settles into gear and we get a bit more so stuck in our ways, cantankerous about, you know, what’s right and what’s wrong. And so I think it’s always important to think about if you’ve got a go, just know who are you going to grow into by stepping forward. You may not achieve the goal. You may not actually hit, you know, 20 million in sales this year. But what would that mean if you aimed towards it? How would you grow as a person? Because whether you get there or not, you’re going to be building up this life, CV, if you like, of who you became by stepping into those moments. So that’s certainly advice that I like to pass on to my children now as they go about the world and something that I’m so pleased that I was able to do at that young age.

Bill Sherman I think that’s a fantastic lesson to carry forward in terms of have the courage to knock on the door and step through. And with that, I want to thank you, Richard, for joining us today. If any of our listeners want to get in touch with you, how would they do so? Where do they find you now?

Richard Newman The best place to find me and my team is at UKBodyTalk.com. There’s loads of resources and videos there, so UKBodyTalk.com or you can find me on LinkedIn, that’s where I’m most active. So Richard Newman from Body Talk at LinkedIn and if you’re on Instagram, you can find me at Richard Newman Speaks.

Bill Sherman Thank you.

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