The ability to communicate persuasively has never been more critical. Gone are the days when mere words alone could sway minds and shape decisions, and nowadays buyers are more savvy.
Understanding how to use of nonverbal communication in a positive way will enhance your influence and impact by building rapport and deeper connection.
In this episode of Influence by Design, I speak with communication and mindset coach, keynote speaker, and best-selling author, Richard Newman. He’s an expert in helping global business leaders improve their communication and impact.
At an early age, Richard realised that communication was going to be his lifelong passion. In his quest of learning more about communication, he discovered the importance of congruence, meaning that language should transcend all areas including, physical, vocal, and actions.
Richard advocates the power of body language in amplifying influence and storytelling. Doing so helps establish a dynamic presence and connection in the most powerful and engaging way.
The art of nonverbal communication will not only enhance your influence as a thought leader but will also unlock a deeper understanding of your prospects. This episode is filled with Richard’s valuable insights on why you should embrace body language, storytelling, and impactful communication.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- The importance of congruency in communication (02:18)
- Discovering his passion for helping people find their voice (06:50)
- How to increase influence through storytelling (11:25)
- The impact of looking at opportunities through the mentor-hero dynamic (15:37)
- How to position your prospect as the hero (18:40)
- Understanding physical impact and its power to bring people on board (27:29)
- The components of successful communication (37:19)
QUOTES:
- “You’ve got to make sure that you are connecting with people on the emotional level because that’s the level at which decisions are made about working with you, or decisions they want to make in their own lives.” -Richard Newman
- “The body language work that we do is about giving you back to yourself to unleash your true full potential so that you can show up as the best version of you every day.” -Richard Newman
- As business owners and entrepreneurs, we are influencing others on a daily basis. We’re influencing them to change their thoughts, their behaviours or decisions.” -Samantha Riley
- “In this day and age where things go so fast, people feel the need to connect to be heard and seen more than ever. To have people know that we care is easily going to put us at the top of any list.” -Samantha Riley
RESOURCES
Lift Your Impact: Transform Your Mindset, Influence, and Future to Elevate Your Work, Team, and Life
The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
WHERE TO FIND RICHARD NEWMAN
- Website: https://ukbodytalk.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardnewmanspeaks/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/richardnewmanspeaks/
- Body Talk Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ukbodytalk/
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ABOUT RICHARD NEWMAN
Richard is the Founder of Body Talk. Over the past 23 years his team have trained over 120,000 business leaders around the world, to improve their communication and impact, including one client who gained over $1 Billion in new business in just one year, using the strategies that Richard teaches.
TRANSCRIPTION (AI Generated)
Richard Newman Snippet (00:00):
We make a decision emotionally. And then we try and back it up with logical reasons for why we made that decision. But the emotional part of the brain is, is acting much, much faster than the logical part of the brain.
So you’ve got to make sure that you are connecting with people on that emotional level, because that’s the level at which decisions are made about you about working with you or about any decisions they want to make in their own life.
Samantha Riley Intro (00:19):
Welcome to the Influence By Design Podcast. I’m Samantha Riley, authority positioning strategist for coaches and experts. If you’re ready to build a business that gives you more than just a caffeine addiction, and you dream of making more money, having more time, and having the freedom to be living your best life, then you’re in the right place, it’s time to level up.
Welcome to today’s episode of Influence by Design, I’m your host for today, Samantha Riley.
And today we’re going to be talking about all things communication and influence. And I’ve invited Richard Newman onto the show who’s the founder and CEO of BodyTalk.
So over the past 23 years, himself and his team has trained over 120,000 business leaders around the world to improve their communication and their impact. And they’ve even had one client who gained over $1 billion in new business just in one year using the strategy that Richard teaches. So strap yourself in. This is what we’re going to be covering today on the show. So welcome to influence by design. Richard, it’s great to have you here.
Richard Newman (01:28):
Thanks, Samantha. And I appreciate you having me on your show.
Samantha Riley (01:32):
Now you’ve got a beautiful accent. I love that accent. Whereabouts in the world are you to that.
Richard Newman (01:37):
So I’m based just outside of London, just on sort of the west side, I’m in a little area where it’s called Burnham beaches. So to give people the picture of it, burn and beaches is where quite a few movies are filmed including some parts of Harry Potter when he’s like hiding in the forest. It’s the forest. It’s just behind my house.
Samantha Riley (01:55):
Well, that’s pretty cool. I hope Hagrid doesn’t come and make a make a little entrance as we’re chatting today. No, that’s very, very cool. So you are the founder of Body Talk.
Nonverbal communication is something that I read that you’re very interested in. And you spent six months with Tibetan monks. To further this, I guess interest, I’d love you to share a little bit about this story and how that eventuate it?
Richard Newman (02:21):
Sure. So, you know, I realized from a very young age, that communication is going to be a big passion of mine. And the reason being starting back from when I was just four years old, I my parents moved house, we went to this new school new area, getting to know new people.
And I really struggled to connect with the other children and I and I really didn’t understand why at the time. But I started to ask myself this question of is there something wrong with me? Is there something different about me? Am I missing something about like how to connect with other kids?
And that question continued really through my young years up into my teenage years. What I didn’t realize now I can reflect on is that I was very shy as a child. I’m highly introvert. But what I didn’t know until very recently is I’m also autistic, and I just got diagnosed autistic last year. And so what this means is that simply I see the world differently, my instincts around communication are different to neurotypical people.
And so there’s sometimes a disconnect in communication. And I certainly was in my early years. And so about the age of 16, I started reading books on communication to overcome these challenges.
And in the space of about 10 years, maybe less than 10 years, I read around 200 books in the field of communication on body language, tone of voice, storytelling, stage presence, all these different areas.
And I was so fascinated with it. And then when my all my friends were going off to university aged 18, I decided I didn’t want to do that I wanted to do something different and something involving communication.
And so I went to this gap year activity projects organization, I said, you know, where can you send me somebody that really needs some help, I want to go and help people. And they said, Well, we’ve got this monastery that we’ve spoken to once and they think they need a teacher. So things aren’t really well set up there.
But you can go and do it if you want. I said that’s the one for me sign me up. So I found myself traveling then across India, I’ve never been away from home without my parents at this point.
And I was traveling across India to me two days to get from Delhi across to the east side of India, the Northeast, and eventually found myself up in the foothills of the Himalayas, in an area that’s near Darjeeling, where the tea comes from.
And I found this Tibetan monastery where I knocked on the front door and the monks came up to greet me and greeted me in Tibetan. And it was at this point where I realized Oh, hang on a second. They don’t speak any English.
I thought I was there to improve their English but they didn’t speak English. And so they they brought me inside they sat me down in their their kitchen. They gave me some Tibetan tea, which if people haven’t had it before, it’s pretty terrible. It’s It’s It’s tea with butter and salt. So rather than milk and sugar is butter and salt.
Yeah, it’s quite something. So I was sitting there, you know, across the table from them thinking this is going to be a long, six months, we can’t communicate with each other, and I’m drinking this stuff that’s really bitter. And anyway, during the course of about half an hour to an hour of sitting with them in their kitchen, I started to realize, hang on a second, we can understand each other.
There’s something happening here with each with us non verbally, where beyond the use of words, we can connect and understand each other a little bit. And so I built on that over the course of six months to just communicate with them non verbally so that they would learn my language.
And I learned Nepali, which was the main language of the area that I was in. And the key fundamental that I built from that experience was all around really congruency. And congruency meant that if I wanted to teach them the word excited, if I didn’t look excited, or I didn’t sound excited, then I could have been saying pineapple, they wouldn’t know the difference.
So I had to make sure that everything I was doing physically and vocally and with my words, were all heading in one direction, so they could completely understand me. And that’s something that I brought into coaching clients ever since. Because, you know, good to the other extreme of that.
I’ll go and work at conferences sometimes where, let’s say the CFO walks onstage and says something like, hi, everybody. glad that you’re here today. I’m really excited about the conference. And you know, the numbers for last quarter were amazing. And the numbers for next quarter look fantastic.
And I’m just sitting there thinking tell your face. If this is genuinely good information, people are looking at you. And they’re looking at you. And they’re thinking, he looks anxious, he looks nervous, he looks like he doesn’t want to be here, we’re going we’re going out of business, we’re going to be bankrupt this year. And so you’ve got to make sure in day to day work that you have that congruency that I was learning and experiencing with the monks.
Samantha Riley (06:46):
Oh, my goodness, how amazing. How has that six month experience and really understanding what happened there? I guess flowed over into the work you’re doing now, you know, you did meet you did sort of touch on it a little bit about you know, the way that our the way that we show up nonverbal communication.
But on a on a bigger scale. What are the outcomes that you’ve seen from the work that you’ve done?
Richard Newman (07:17):
Yeah, so I mean, for me, first of all, at that pivotal age of 18, going to live with those monks, it was just extraordinary, because it made me it gave me a sense of independence of understanding that I could go out into the world and do things for myself.
But also the feeling of euphoria that I gained from working with these monks in this kitchen, when I saw the aha moment that happened for them, where they were, they were learning these elements of my language, and they were loving it as well. I thought I love teaching, they love learning from me, this is something that I want to do.
The other piece that I did learn to is I also worked at a local Tibetan school with nine to 12 year old children. And I loved working with them. But it was very challenging with them because they were kids, and they were sent to school because they were told you have to go to school, they didn’t really appreciate that they were learning something in the same way that the adult monks did.
So I thought I want to coach people who are adults, and I want to help them with communication. And what it really spilled over for me into was the idea of I love helping people find their voice.
So if I can take someone where, you know, I’ve been working with people, like you mentioned, 23 years, there’s over 100,000 people we worked with, and what keeps me passionate about it is that there’s so many times I find someone who’s brilliant, they’re really intelligent, they are very experienced, and they’ve been passed over for promotion, or they have the best product and service and people are buying from their competitors.
And they’re losing out. And it’s not because what they’re doing isn’t good or doesn’t have value. It’s just because they haven’t learned how to find their voice and connect with other people in the most powerful and engaging way. And I care about it so much partly because I had to find my voice.
But also because I know that you know, helping people do that can have a massive knock on effect. So I always think back to an example of there’s a lady at a financial company who I worked with, we were training all the partners there. And we went to a booster event, sort of six months after the initial workshops we’d done.
And people said to me, as I walked in the room, they said, do you know about Sarah, have you heard what’s happened to Sarah? I said, What do you mean? And he’s they said to me, you know, it’s this this course that you’ve given them has changed her marriage. It’s changed her relationship with her children.
Her clients are delighted. She walks into the office smiling every day. And I was thinking back to the original workshop thinking, I’m pretty sure we just taught them presentation skills, like isn’t that what we did?
But by doing this, it’s it creates such a shift. It can give people such a level of confidence in themselves. With the body language work that we do. It’s always for me, it’s never about sort of manipulation tactics, which some salespeople used to teach years back.
It’s always about giving you back to yourself unleashing your true full potential, so that you can show up as the best version of you every day and that for her have repercussions in so many areas of her life. So. So that’s what that journey has been like for me and I still feel passionate about it every day I show up thinking today I can help somebody find their voice and get the results they really deserve.
Samantha Riley (10:13):
Oh, my goodness, I love this so much. I love this so much, because we’ve got to remember that business isn’t or our career isn’t just one backer of our life, that we are a holistic beings and that every part of our life does affect other parts of our life.
What I also love is that as business owners and entrepreneurs, we are influencing others on a daily basis, we’re influencing them to change their thoughts, their behaviors, to change their decisions. And if we can master this, and like you said, and I love that you mentioned, it’s not in a manipulative way, it’s not manipulative at all.
But for us to have a great impact, we do need to influence other people’s thoughts and decisions and behaviors. One of the ways that we can do that is through storytelling. And I know that you talk about increasing influence through storytelling in a way that we get people to listen and care.
And I know that this is something that I personally have struggled with and still do. Sometimes, it’s something that a lot of people tell me that they struggle with. So I guess I’m gonna throw the mic to you. Where do you want to take us from there? Because I think that storytelling is so important.
Richard Newman (11:31):
Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I’ve loved working on storytelling with clients for so many years, you know, originally, I was working with them just on, you know, body language and voice and that sort of thing. And clients kept on saying, We love this.
But we also need to figure out what to say, and what we say seems to be letting us down, even if we’ve now got you know, more presence, or gravitas, and so on. So for about the last 15 years, I’ve been working on that storytelling piece with people.
And the biggest piece that I could share with anyone around how to increase your influence there that that is a big aha moment. And particularly for coaches and consultants who might, you know, listen to your podcast, the biggest piece that I often share to people is simply to stop being the hero in your stories.
And this can transform your your impact, particularly in sort of sales pitches, the way that you interact with your team, how engaged people are when when they listen to you. And so I’ll talk you through a big example of this, then we can go down to a small one.
So the biggest contract we’ve ever helped a company when was worth $800 million in one contract. Wow. Yeah. And so it was, it was a huge deal to work on this. And this company, this big construction company, they were aiming to build a brand new building on the bank of the River Thames in London.
And they’d been working towards it for somewhere between a year to 218 months huge project. And it got down to the last couple of weeks. And they’d heard that they were in the final three, but they were in third place. And so it got into his final couple of weeks, my team and I, we were in there coaching them.
And on the final day, the night before the big pitch was going to happen, their CEO flew in by private jet from America, he came in to do this rehearsal, and he was gonna be the first speaker in the pitch. And we hadn’t met him until sort of 5pm the night before that the pitch happened. So he stood up to do his part of the pitch.
And he got about three minutes into it. And I thought, oh, like, I’m, like, I’m putting myself on the line saying this, but I have to say it because there’s, there’s there’s moments until they do this pitch. And I said, I have to stop you. Uh, can you tell me honestly, do you believe you’re gonna win the pitch tomorrow? And he said, No, we’re not going to win the pitch.
And the whole room stopped breathing. There’s like, you know, around 20 People in this in this sort of mahogany conference room area. And they sort of they stopped breathing, thinking, Oh, God, we’re gonna lose? And also, why are you saying this to our CEO, you’re gonna get your head chopped off.
And so they looked at him, they looked, they looked at me. And I said to him, can you explain to me why you don’t think you’re going to win? Because that’s what I’m feeling is if I imagine that I’m the audience, the panel on the decision making panel, that I feel like you don’t believe it. Tell me why.
And so he said, Well, the reason being, there’s a lady on the decision making panel who doesn’t like Jim and Jim and have had this challenge, and therefore they are, they are counting us down on points where they should be giving us extra marks on we should be in first place.
So I’ve now had to come in here to try and rescue this situation and look after my team. And so I said to him, okay, let’s just pause there. Let me talk about storytelling. I said to him, you know, every pitch that someone does is a story. And then there are characters in that story.
And I said to him, would it be fair to say that you would see your position here as the hero of that story where you’re coming in to rescue or save or protect your team in some way? And he said, Yeah, okay, that sounds about right.
And I said, would you then say that your your team, your company is almost like a victim of this story of where you’ve got to in the pitch and he said, Yeah, they are. Absolutely. And I said so. What does that make the decision making panel?
You know, where what how are you seeing them? What character do they play in this story? Would it be fair to say that you’re seeing them as the villain? And he said, Yes, probably he’s right. And suddenly there was a moment in his mind was like, Oh, God, this is that you’re so right. And we have to change this. And so I see
Samantha Riley (15:18):
that on your face, then it was that light bulb moment of like, ah,
Richard Newman (15:23):
yeah, yeah. That’s how he felt, then there were people in the room thinking, how do we fix this now, and I said to him, like, you’ve got to, you’ve got to shift it. Because if you want someone to sign off and agree $100 million for you, and you see them as a villain, it’s just not going to happen. So we have to shift this around.
So I talked to him about the mentor and hero dynamic. And this is something that is so important for all sorts of people that we work with, because too often people go into a meeting thinking of themselves as the hero without even realizing it.
So they go into a meeting, maybe with their team, and they say, Hey, team, look, I’ve got concerns that I want to talk about. And I’ve got goals that I want to talk about. And straightaway, you’re positioning yourself as the hero, Every hero has challenges.
And they’ve got goals that they want to achieve, they want to move away from their challenges towards their goals. And the problem with doing that in any situation is the person who’s speaking to also has challenges. And they also have goals, all of us are the hero at the center of our own life experience, we have challenges, we want to move away from goals we want to achieve.
So when you speak to people like that, then they stop listening. Whereas if you go into a meeting, thinking, okay, whoever I’m speaking to, is the hero. So in that 800 million version, I said to him, they are the hero, they have a challenge, which is a hole in the ground next to the River Thames, and a goal they want to achieve, which is a beautiful, breathtaking building that will change the landscape of London.
And so they are the hero, you’re coming in as the mentor. You don’t want to be in anything else, you want to be the mentor, which is to understand what is their challenge? What is their goal? And how do you guide them towards it. And so you can do that in a sales pitch, you can do that with your clients, you can do this with your team, you can even do it with your CEO, if you’re going to speak to your CEO or someone more senior to your line manager.
If you go in from the premise of thinking, I wonder what their challenges and what is their goal, and how do I help guide them towards it, then suddenly, you’re in a much better position.
And so coming back to that initial question around influence, that is the key pivotal shift that I get people to make to understand, unless you’re willing to shift that way, you cannot influence that person. Because everyone is going to see themselves at the center of their own life experience, and whether or not you’re going to help them move from their challenges to their goals. And when you do that, you then are in that key position of influence to then tell them an effective story.
Samantha Riley (17:35):
Oh, my goodness, mind blown. I absolutely love what you shared there. Because I feel like this is the piece that I guess so many of us are missing is that we’re hearing these stories of I you know, I was sleeping in someone’s you know, basement, and then I bought a sports car.
And like, we’re just so sick of those stories, right? I don’t think I’m the only one that’s got that feeling. It’s like, Give us something more meaty give us something that we can lean into, that we just we are waiting to hear, you know this story unfold.
And, and even as you were telling that story, I found myself leaning and going, Wow, this is amazing. I’m just getting so many, so many learnings or so many perspective changes. And that is what storytelling is all about, is getting other people to, you know, to be able to influence. If we’re in the position, you know, I love I love that you share that the the, you know, this company was had to be the hero.
How did that happen? And I’m asking this question, to understand the context of how we can make our prospect the hero?
Richard Newman (18:47):
Yeah, so so the best way to make a prospect or anyone you’re speaking to the hero, you’ve got to get to a deep level of understanding of, of where are they really So diving in without any sense of assumptions around things.
And so it could be that you’re meeting someone you’ve never met with before. Or it could be the meeting with someone who you know pretty well. But either way, great questioning and listening skills are fundamental.
So if I look at, you know, in my own business that I’ve been running 23 years, we’ve I’m very proud of the fact that we’ve grown every single year, we grew through the 2008 financial crisis, we grew through the pandemic, that shut down everything that we do.
And to put that into context before the pandemic 70% of our work involves getting on an aeroplane and going to fly and work with people internationally. All of it was done face to face, and all of it was canceled.
Going to the beginning of March 2020. Everything that we had booked in was canceled. And yet we still had our best financial year that year because we shifted around in our thinking and our approach towards our clients. And so the way that we’ve always pitched the way that I pitched that year, the way we’ve always pitched it comes down to understanding the hero which is whoever I’m speaking into.
And so if you’re going in and you don’t know that person that well, or if there’s been any challenges or conflict that’s maybe come up at along the journey to that point, then there’s three levels of questions that are critical to have and great listening skills that go with it. Now, just to touch briefly on the great listening skills, I always say to people listen to three major pieces, listen to the words, listen to the tone, and listen to the body language.
People may be used to, you know, looking at body language, but I will say listen to the body language, because those are the three parts of the answer that you really need to take a look at, when it comes into the questions that you’re asking someone, if you think as a mentor, you realize you’re speaking to a hero who has challenges who has goals they want to achieve, then the three levels that you can go down to understand their challenges and goals are looking at three key areas of the mind that we’re aiming to engage somebody in.
So you’ve got the logical part of the mind, the emotional and the survival part just to look at this really simply. So if you’re starting to get to know somebody, maybe it’s the first time you’ve met a client, or maybe it’s somebody who you’ve had a tense relationship with. Starting off with the, the logical level is the best place to be because there’s no risk at that point. So if you say to them, something along the lines, say it’s a conflict resolving you might say, so, uh, can you tell me what happened last Tuesday?
And you know, what time did that happen? And what did that lead to? What were the events, the person could just sort of talk you through a series of events? Or if he’s talking to a client, you could say to them, for example, you know, do you mind sharing, you know, where are you at in terms of the size of your team?
And what’s happened? What are the goals that you’ve set for this year? And so on? It’s simple things for them to answer, which is on a logical level, it’s a great way to start to build a little bit of rapport where the person thinks, Okay, you asked me some questions I’ve answered, and I feel safe.
Now, if you ask too many of those questions, if you go beyond 10, say, for example, the person starts to feel interrogated, because that’s what happens in interrogation. It’s all about the ask you 50 Questions about the facts, and you get really frustrated.
So once you’ve asked a few to build up the context, you can then dive down into the emotional level of the question, which is along the lines of how do they feel? What are their thoughts? What are their opinions around those facts? And this is something that we go to straight away. When, you know, when a loved one comes home from work?
We don’t you know, we don’t start off with the logical questions, because we know them very well. We don’t start off with what time did you arrive at work today? What time did you leave work today? If you do, then the person thinks sound the second, what do you see? That’s the
Samantha Riley (22:27):
interrogation? Yeah.
Richard Newman (22:29):
So instead, they walk through the front door we go i How are you? How are you feeling at the moment? What was what was life like for you today at school at work? And so we go straight there with people we know really? Well. If you don’t know them? Well, you might need to do the context logic questions go into the emotion.
Now, once you’ve looked at the emotional questions, you know, when you’re ready to go to the next phase, when they’re giving you emotional answers. So some people you say, how do you feel about the 17% that we achieved last quarter? Now, they might give you a fact based answer, if they don’t feel safe?
They might say, Well, I think if you compare it to 12 months prior, it was, you know, a 12% increase on where we were, and therefore it’s statistically appropriate. Like they’re giving you a logical answer. They’re not willing to open up about emotions. Once they open up about emotions, they say, you know, I’m really feeling I’m feeling disappointed in myself, but I’m feeling excited about the future.
And I just think if we kind of head in this direction, things might get better. They give me that answer, then you’re in a place where you can dive down into the survival part of the mind, because the mind is feeling super relaxed, open, receptive to you.
And that’s where you can dive down into what is the core driving part of your decision making that will make you move in one direction? Or another? What is what is driving how you feel about this? What is the greatest driving concern that you have in this area? If you can get down to that place with a client? It’s amazing, it’s gold dust, because you then know why exactly? Are they looking for this service? Or this product? Or this idea right now? What’s the core component of the decision making process? And you can do that with their goal as well? Not just you know, what numbers do they want to achieve?
Or, you know, what weight are they aiming to achieve? Or financials are they aiming to get to? But what is driving it really what would make them feel absolutely extraordinary on a survival level?
So once you can get those two pieces in place, you know exactly who they are as a hero. And that’s what we see, when we watch a great movie, or we read a great book, we know those things. Sometimes we’re reading it where we get the internal narrative of they have a conversation, but what they’re really thinking what’s really driving their behavior is down here.
So we get to really associate well with those connect well, those characters, and so you can do that in day to day life by being the mentor and truly listening to that person with their responses, not just think I’m gonna ask these questions and I’ll move on with my pitch. You got to truly hear what is happening there.
And so by doing by doing that, I found that this is really effective in the pitches that we’ve done as a business where I never show up with a slide deck and a brochure. And repeatedly this has happened where I’ve shown up and N clients potential clients have said to me, did you not want to use the screen and present something because all the other company He’s done that.
And I’ll say, no, no, I just thought we’d sit down and have a conversation and ask them things I get by the end, I know them really well. And I know that they’re feeling. He’s the only person who’s actually listened to us. He really knows this, he gets us he gets us in a way that nobody else gets us.
And, you know, we feel like we want him to come back here because you position yourself as the mentor and them as the hero. So that’s the key way in which to establish that relationship.
Samantha Riley (25:26):
Yeah, wow, that’s amazing. And in this day, and age where things go so fast, they’re, you know, on people used to scrolling on screens, I think people feel the need to connect and be heard, they want to be heard and seen more than ever before.
And to come in and give people that feeling of we care, we we see you we hear you is easily going to put you at the top of of any list because then it’s not just a thought process of do we want to hire this person? It’s a feeling of I want to be around this person. And that’s completely different. Amazing.
Richard Newman (26:06):
Yeah. And the key part that you’ve touched on there, that sense of feeling, I always say to people, when they say, you know, how should I approach this meeting, and so on? The fundamental question is, how do you want people to feel when you leave the room? Because that’s really your legacy? That’s your personal brand?
How do they feel when you leave the room? So you should drive everything towards that. And I was just listening to a great podcast. Earlier today, actually, on this is the diary of a CEO. Have you come across this podcast? Yeah, he was interviewing Dr. Steve Peters, who I love his work. I’ve read his book, The Chimp Paradox. I’ve looked at a lot of his speeches, he does his great speeches, he’s from the north of England, he’s got this great dry sense of humor.
And he was talking there, you know, simply how we make decisions on an emotional level, you’ve got the emotional part of the brain, the chimp part of the brain, you’ve got the logical human part of the brain. And you know, when we’re interacting in different situations, we make a decision emotionally, and then we try and back it up with logical reasons for why we made that decision.
But the emotional part of the brain is acting much, much faster than the logical part of the brain. Daniel Kahneman talks about this in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, as well. So you’ve got to make sure that you are connecting with people on that emotional level, because that’s the level at which decisions are made about you about working with you, or about any decisions they want to make in their own life.
Samantha Riley (27:25):
Hmm, I love that so much. So putting together what we spoke about earlier, and body language, and putting that together, or piecing that together with storytelling, what is it that we need to? I was gonna say, think about, but um, I don’t know, I guess you’ll let me know if it’s something we have to think about.
But what do we need to? I guess, think, Yeah, think about in our personal presence, so that we can bring people on board to our stories?
Richard Newman (27:56):
Yeah. So in terms of someone’s personal presence, that the place that I always like to go to, with body language is people thinking about, you know, what is your physical impact when you go into a room, because, you know, you can be in a place where you have the best products and services where you’ve got really nice slides, you know, what you want to say, and you still get into a place of getting a poor reaction from people, because there’s something around the way that you’re delivering that message that just isn’t working.
And this is something that I, you know, I learned early on to so in between working with the monks and starting my own company, I was working as an actor. So I studied as studied at the London acting school and spent three years there.
And you spent three years where you know what you have to say, because it’s in the script, and everything they are doing is working on how you’re going to deliver that message in a way that is going to impact your audience and impact the other people on stage with you.
What can you do in the way that you sit, stand, move, walk, breathe, what can you do in your voice that will change the meaning of that delivery and get a much greater response from your audience where you get them to gospel, you get them to laugh, because of how you’ve changed the delivery around that.
So I was always fascinated with it. And so as I then went into working with clients, that was the first area I was working on, I put things together, and gradually I got to the place where I thought there’s you know, there’s a lot of books around on body language, but a lot of it is is based on outdated information. It was studies done back in the sort of 60s 70s and 80s. And I wanted to bring things up to date.
And so in 2016, we created our own research project, which was then published in the journal psychology, its peer reviewed journal, we worked with this guy who’s Professor Adrian Furnham, who’s the head of Psychology at UCL in London.
And he helped us design this study. And what we did is one of the largest studies ever done of its kind, looking at people universally and essentially the question I asked is, is there something every person can do that will improve the impact that they get every single time no matter who they out.
So we looked at, you know, whether you are a man or a woman light skinned, darker skin, you’re older or younger? And if you’re speaking to people in Asia, in Europe, people across in the US anywhere around the world, could you get a better reaction just based on changing a couple of things that anyone can use?
And what we found that the answer was yes. Which actually surprised us, because we thought surely, you know, your gender, your skin color is going to have some sort of bias. Yeah, we thought that if you go to like if we, if we did this test in, say, in Delhi, that we’d get different reactions from doing it as a test in Los Angeles.
And what we found in finding it was, it didn’t matter where we did the test, that didn’t change the results. It didn’t matter if the person in the video in the study, it didn’t matter what their gender was, it didn’t matter what their skin color was, it didn’t matter what age they were, all of which completely blew up our hypothesis, we thought this is obviously going to play a part. But it didn’t, there was no significant change in those pieces.
And just to give people the clarity on this study, we got people on these videos to wear the same codes and say the same words. And then we slightly changed their body language in each video to see if that made a different impact on what was happening, each person involved in in the study, they would watch one video and they would rate this person, how confident do you think they are? How convincing are they would you vote for them in an election? Do you think they’re a good leader, all these different elements.
And so we would see if the different behavior from one video to the next would change that person’s ratings universally. And simply what we found is that you can say the same words, wear the same clothes, you slightly change your body language, and you can increase the number of people who think you’re a good leader, by 44%, you said the same words, you wore the same clothes, you are the same person, you just make a couple of small changes, you can also increase the number of people convinced by what you said, by 42%.
And you’ve said exactly the same words, you are the same person, you’ve worn the same clothes. And so it was there was a whole range of other statistics we could go into which we are so pleased with, we were genuinely hoping for 5%, when we started off with this experiment, if you can make a 5% change, that’d be great 5% increase in sales, wouldn’t that be good. So it was huge, though the results.
So to give people clarity on this, what essentially we found made, the difference is bringing people back as I was saying earlier in the conversation, bringing people back to the way that they were born to stand the way they’re born to breathe, move and gesture and so on. If you come back to that, and you get rid of habits that are holding you back, then suddenly you get a much better reaction from people.
So as an example of this, we looked at posture was one of the areas we studied. And what we find is that day to day, there’s so many people if they’re standing or if they’re sitting, they will be leaning off to one side. Particularly they’re standing there sort of leaning off to one hip. And then we can’t bear our weight there for very long, so we get uncomfortable, so we then lean off to the other side.
And so when we go back and forth, and when you’re in that position where you’re leaning to one side, gravity is pulling you off balance. And if you give that person a quick push, they fall over. So they are literally the physical embodiment of being a pushover in that position.
And so if you move from that position of gravity working against you, if you sit or stand in a position, where gravity is going straight down on your torso, and your feet are evenly placed your weights even in place between your left foot, right foot, toes and heels, you get grounded and centered, much like you would if you’re playing a sports, and I used to play basketball.
So if I’m taking a free throw, I’d only leaning off on one hip, and so sort of do it, it’s not gonna work, you’re gonna get yourself grounded. Or if you’re playing tennis or golf, you get into this ready position.
If you do that, when you’re speaking to people, whether it’s one to one or speaking to an audience, or sitting or standing, then gravity’s now working with you. And what we found is that then there is a perception that you have gravitas, your words seem to be more important. And part of the reason for this is if you think about, you know, tribes back in the day, if someone stands to speak or starts to speak, the tribal thing, do we believe this person can now lead this tribe Do we believe that their voice is valuable.
And so part of that is going to come about physically, and if they sense the gravitas that you have physically, they’ll give that gravitas to your words. And so just by making that small shift was huge.
We also looked at things such as gestures. And this is a great one, because so many people I’ve coached have said that they’ve been told to stop gesturing too much, because they are displaying in their hands around and it’s distracting, and so on. And there can be some truth in that if you’re just doing the same gesture over and over, it becomes very visually distracting. So you don’t want to do that you need variety.
But we found that if you do no gestures at all, then your ratings go down, you’re less confident you’re less convincing. You’re less likely to be seen as a good leader, you’re less likely to get votes in an election all these things go down. If you do limp gestures, as I call it, if you’re gesturing below the waist or if you’re sitting down and sort of gesturing below the table people are sort of looking at you like what are you doing gesture? gesture to bow then You get very low ratings as well.
But if you gesture using palms up for open messages, open statements such as questions, or thank you for coming here today, if you just your palms down for strong statements or close statements such as we have to finish this by two o’clock on Friday, or we are definitively the best organization to work with palms down close statements, if you do that congruently.
To come back to that word I learned from the monks, palms up for open, palms down to closed. If you do that, as you’re going through your message, suddenly you get the highest ratings that you can get for using gestures.
And that’s just by thinking about those two, of course, you can use loads of other gestures, descriptive gestures, depending on you know, the stories that you’re telling. But those are two that are really good to get back in the swing of things because people get very self conscious in meetings, pitches, interviews, and so on.
And when they’re self conscious, they stop gesturing, and they’re like, oh, bunny in the headlights, I can’t move. So if you start gesturing again, if you just think, okay, palms up for open messages, palms down for closed, and it gets your body back in the groove. And what this has also been seen to prove it, there’s great study in Chicago, by Susan Golden Meadow works, the University of Chicago, she showed very simply, in her study that the more you gesture, the more you stimulate your mind.
And you’ll give more intelligent answers under pressure, because there’s so many nerve endings going from your hands into your brain. So it speeds up cognitive processing. And there was also another really good study done on TED Talks that proved simply, there’s so many TED Talks out there, and many TED talks on the same subject, but some have loads of views. And some of them don’t have very many views.
And they found in one of these studies, that the ones the the TED talkers, who do the most gestures, are highly correlated with having the most views. In fact, they were doing somewhere around twice as many gestures as people who are speaking on the same subject and getting much lower views. So gestures can really be your friend, as long as you know how to use them in action.
Samantha Riley (36:54):
Yeah, and I think confidently, too, and I think that’s what you’re talking about there, because we’re automatically drawn to people with confidence. And I’m sure you hear it all the time. But, you know, speakers saying, I don’t know what to do with my hands.
It’s because they’re, they’re nervous. And as soon as you’re able to confidently gesture, then that goes out the door. So yeah, I absolutely love that. That’s so good. I want to talk about leaders lift, because you talk about this one secret that transforms influence in every situation. And I think just like with everything that you’ve shared, so far, it’s been absolute pure gold, to add a little icing onto this cake right now. It’d be fabulous.
Richard Newman (37:41):
Yeah. So lift is something that I was thinking about a lot over the last few years where people have, you know, people have really struggled, we’ve been through these, these lockdowns, people working from home not seeing each other as much.
And I was thinking, you know, what is it a great communicator really does? How do I boil that down? It’s something that we’ve taught across so many different concepts and strategies that we teach people, how do I put that into a simple phrase for people and I realized, it’s comes down to the word lift.
And so what this means is that if you approach every interaction, thinking about your aim is that by the end of that interaction, that person feels lifted, that’s what successful communication looks like. So they go from a negative, or a neutral state to a positive or a more positive state.
If that’s what you achieve by the end of the interaction, then that was a really effective communication, that person will go away thinking about what you’ve said, acting on what you’ve said, feeling differently because of that.
And it doesn’t necessarily mean that they go away feeling elated or go away smiling. It could be that before that they were feeling, you know, maybe stuck in a rut, maybe doing their work half heartedly, and after their interaction with you, they suddenly feel a bit concerned or disappointed in themselves that they have been working harder, and suddenly they go, I think I’m going to be motivated, I’m going to get on with this piece now.
Because I feel that sense of lift of energy or urgency around my role because of this interaction. So lift doesn’t necessarily mean that people are sort of smiling and kicking the leaves, and it’s all a Disney movie at the end. It just doesn’t have lifting people from from a state that they’re in, which is not serving them to a state that will be serving them.
And so that’s what lift can can achieve. And that’s what I’ve seen great leaders able to do when they step on a stage at a conference. You know, I get to go to many conferences every year. When I see somebody who’s working well as a leader.
That’s what you can palpably feel from the audience when that person steps off stage is that the state has changed in the audience, where they are in a place that is more productive than they were in before. So that’s what I coach people towards doing, whether they are a coach, whether they are leading a team, whether they’re going into a pitch, you want to leave people feeling lifted in some way to a more productive state.
Samantha Riley (39:52):
I love this so much, Richard, I am just eating every word that you’re talking about today. You are absolutely just Lighting me up thinking about how we can really lean into influencing in a more positive way.
Because I think that, you know, as you say, there’s a lot of, you know, unrest, people are still tired from the last few years, the economy’s not where it was a few years ago. And to be able to influence people in this positive way.
And to create change is such a gift that we have as humans, for people that are getting the same feelings as me, and they want to learn more about what you do, where can they go to, to learn more about your teachings.
Richard Newman (40:36):
So I’ve tried to capture as much as I possibly can, for people in my in my book, which is, which is lift your impact, which has just come out about a month or so ago, it’s available worldwide, Amazon, Barnes and Noble wherever people want to go.
And what I did with that is, I know that it can be, it’s a big investment if people want to work with me or want to work with my team, and I wanted to capture everything. So for the cost of, you know, 20, or 30 bucks, or whatever it is in different countries, that they can get as much in there as possible.
And it’s also designed as a workbook, so that there’s lots of note pages in there. So you, you work through it, and you’re transforming yourself, if if people want to find out more information about it, if they go to lift your impact.com forward slash the book, there’s loads of information about the book on there. But at the bottom of that page, there’s a form that people can tick a box and get the first 25 pages of lift your impact for free.
So if they want to get started on it, they can do it there. I’m also on social media, the two main places people find me is Instagram, where I aim to share some inspiring or educational videos about three days a week.
So it’s at Richard Newman speaks and same again on LinkedIn, I put videos up on their LinkedIn and Richard Newman from Body Talk. And lastly, my main company site if people want to work with us, we’ve done done great events in Australia and everywhere in between. We love traveling to work with people, or do it virtually. The company is UK body talk.com I
Samantha Riley (41:58):
love it so much. Now, if you’re listening on the go, you’re cooking dinner, you’re on the treadmill, you’re in the gym, you can just head over as always to influence by design podcast.com And the links for everything that Richard talked about, will be there so that you can go and get more resources and more information. Richard, it’s been such a pleasure chatting with you today.
Thank you so much for coming onto the show and sharing all of your value bombs. It’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you.
Richard Newman (42:25):
You’re really welcome. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Samantha Riley (42:27):
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If you want more head over to influencebydesignpodcast.com for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other experts who are growing and scaling their business to join us in the coaches, thought leaders, and changemakers community on Facebook, the links are waiting for you over at influencebydesignpodcast.com
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