Powerful Storytelling Skills for Leaders and Managers with Richard Newman (Ep. #56)

Wendy Hanson  0:24  

Welcome, everyone. I'm so happy you joined us today. Every time we get to have a guest on that is going to really help us up our game. I think it really makes a difference. And we're going to talk today about communication. You know, research suggests that the average adult spends about three quarters of their waking hours communicating in some form 70% of small to medium sized businesses say ineffective communication is their primary problem. Can you imagine at a large global company if small businesses are having a problem and 70% of the time? Yet, on the other hand, teams who communicate effectively may increase their productivity by as much as 25%. So it's a really important topic that we we need to figure out how are we going to do this better. So today, my guest Richard Newman is going to help us with our communication. By giving us some tips and strategies to become better communicators. We will discuss nonverbal communication, using storytelling to help people remember what you said, and how to articulate things better when you're under pressure. So let me tell you a little bit about Richard. Business leaders all over the world rely on Richard Newman to transform their communication. One client one over 1 billion in new business in one year using Richard's techniques to win 100% of their new business pitches. His team has trained 120,000 clients worldwide, but Richard has had to learn it from scratch. Richard is highly introverted, which I have a lot of introverted people on our teams that will be very interested in what we're going to talk about today. He has high functioning autism, he was painfully shy as a child. At age 18, Richard started his mission to discover the core communication principles. He went to live in the foothills of the Himalayas with Tibetan monks who spoke no English, they had to communicate non verbally to understand each other. Then he worked as a professional actor, studying how to walk, move and speak to increase his impact to an audience. He became a keynote speaker, coach, author and speech writer, winning the coveted Cicero grand prize for best speech writer of the year, Richard's research on nonverbal communication was published in the Journal of Psychology. His study proved that you can increase your leadership ratings by 44% and win 59% more votes in an election by changing a few sample behaviors. Well, welcome Richard, I am so excited to have you on this show today.

Richard Newman  3:18  

Thank you, Wendy. And thank you to everyone listening for having me.

Wendy Hanson  3:21  

Oh, I think we're gonna hear some great stories today. So we're gonna start at the very beginning, you started your career living with monks. What did you learn there about communication?

Richard Newman  3:35  

Yeah, this was really an amazing opportunity. This is when I was just finishing high school. So I was 18 years old, lots of my friends were going off to university or starting careers, and so on. And, and I knew I wanted to do something different. I really wanted to explore the world and do something good for people less fortunate than me. But I was also already passionate about the subject of communication, I know that I wanted to improve my ability to communicate, I liked the idea of teaching. And so I got this opportunity, where I was introduced to this monastery in the foothills of the Himalayas up in northeast India up near Darjeeling, where the tea comes from. And I heard that he wanted a teacher so I thought, Great, I'm gonna go and help them improve their English. And so I flew out there, I'd never had a holiday overseas without my parents before. So this is quite a big experience for me. I got I finally got to this monastery, it took me a long time to find it. And I was greeted by the monks there and quickly realized they didn't speak English. I thought it was there to improve their English but they didn't speak any English. And so I had to use body language and tone of voice just to find a way to connect with them. And pretty quickly, I mean, I the way I discovered this was that they sat me down in their kitchen over a cup of Tibetan tea and Tibetan tea if people have never tried this, this is a third tea, a third butter and the third Salt. So it's fairly disgusting. I was being like polite thinking, Okay, I have to drink this, I'm going to be drinking this for six months, but it's not in smile and just try and make, like build a relationship here. And I realized that over about an hour of trying to drink this and, and getting to know them that actually through my body language and tone of voice, I could communicate a reasonable amount, I started to get to the point of thinking, Okay, I figured out where I was sleeping, where I'd be doing my lessons, and a few other pieces, and realize that okay, non verbally, we're actually connecting. And then through trial and error over the coming months, I then was able to take them from no English to having a good conversation with me. And the way that I did this was simply by figuring out the simple principle of congruency, which I didn't know what that word was, at the time, I didn't know what this would mean. But what I found out is that if my body language, my tone of voice and my words, when in exactly the same direction they understood, and if there was any lack of alignment in my communication style, they didn't get it. So if I was trying to teach them the word excited, if I didn't look excited, or if my tone of voice wasn't excited, they had no idea I could be talking about a table or like they wouldn't know what the word was. And that to sort of roll forward a few years. The reason this has been so useful is that so many times we're working with companies, whether it's, you know, small company, we work with MBA students, we work with CEOs, you see this time, and again, people go into a meeting, and they just don't have congruency where you'll see typically, it might be the CEO or CFO steps up at the start of a big company meeting and says, Hi, everybody, I'm really excited to be here today, we've got good news to share with you there's and you think just tell your face, give me some indication that you actually feel good, otherwise, I'm going to be worried I'm going to lose my job or something. So so that's what really put me in good stead. But it also gave me that opportunity. Every single day I was being tested by I worked at a local school as well, nine to 12 year old children there. And they were much more challenging because they you know, they want these to date monks, they were bouncing off the walls, and they didn't speak my language. So I was trying to figure out how to engage them. And then I was working out how to engage the monks and it was quite different skill. And so I brought that back, and then put that forward to, you know, the way that I teach my clients of how do you engage people beyond the use of words, you might be able to very carefully pick out a sentence where you go, Okay, that sounds reasonable. But if you can't deliver it, if you can't connect virtually, with people or in person with people, or figure out another way to do it apart from that sentence, then you're going to be missing out a huge amount. So that's really a core piece that I took away.

Wendy Hanson  7:46  

I love the idea of congruency because I think we see that all the time. And, you know, in coaching we always talk about reading the room. And and it's hard to read the room. If somebody's you know, facial expressions are not matching what's going on, you have to really look carefully and kind of feel it. You know, what, what's happening. Yeah. And that's, and I see that a lot. I see that happening. And I love your example of a CEO making an announcement and, and everybody your first you're looking at their face, you know, his or her face to see. Is this a good announcement or a not so good announcement. And then finally we hear the words and then you have to see the tone and everything. So great thing for people to be aware of? Yeah,

Richard Newman  8:33  

yeah, just on the subject of reading the room as well. I didn't realize until recently, this was something that I was something that I was studying without knowing I was studying it. Because it wasn't until it was just a couple of months ago, I got diagnosed high functioning autistic. And this is quite late in the in the day for me to be diagnosed. But I realized as a child, that there was something happening and communication between the people around me at school, where they were sort of they were able to figure out what was going on a lot quicker than I was. So I was taking things very literally which be quite common for someone in my situation. And so I wouldn't realize I wouldn't be able to detect things like sarcasm or just like colloquial phrases I take everybody literally at their word banter meant nothing to me. I just I didn't understand it. banter to me is two people insulting each other and then laughing in each other's faces. And I thought, well, how does that build a friendship? I'll try that. And then people didn't want to spend time with me. So I had to figure out from a young age, okay, there's something I'm missing in reading people. And so I'd really be studying it and thinking what is that person doing? That is making their communication successful? Why is it that he goes up to him and the conversation works and then I go up to him and it's not let me figure that piece out or, or he's going up to that girl and she seems to like him, but he's what is he doing this different to that person? And so I'd be I then started studying books on this and ended up reading about 200 books on communication just to Try and figure it out, which has been, which has been useful since then. Because since then I've been able to talk to clients who are saying, you know, a client will come to me and say, Richard, I just don't feel like I'm getting a good reaction from the room. And what I really want is gravitas. And I'll say, Okay, imagine you're talking to the room, show me what you're doing. And I'll say, Okay, here's the piece from gravitates, that you're missing, it's that one, because I've had to sort of figure out what are the ingredients along the way, in sort of a different way, a different perspective than many people need to approach it from?

Wendy Hanson  10:30  

Wow, you had to work really hard back then to be able to figure things out, and I love your commitment to it and reading 200 books to try to figure it out, and then to be recently diagnosed. Wow, what what a big learning that must have been, and there are so many people out there, you know, that we know are on the spectrum, and then are unbelievably talented in what they do. But they're not reading the social cues. And so it makes it more difficult for them at work. Good for you to be able to help this the communication of everybody you know, and it's such a great to have a role model. That's, that's like, wow, this is how we can do it. We know how and you, you've been able to pull apart the pieces, which not everybody can do. Here's here's how we examine this so that we can make it work. So do you think everybody could be a good communicator in your experience?

Richard Newman  11:24  

I certainly do. I mean, there was a lady that I spoke to a few years ago who's a specialist in early stage communication. So she'll work with children, who around sort of five or six years old, and heads up this organization that helps children all over the country. And she was saying that, if you look at look at the sort of broad spectrum of things, there's 100, if you look at 100% of people, 90% of them are neurotypical, which means that they just get on with communication. They're like a fish in water, they don't have to figure out how to swim, they just do it. And then there's two and a half percent of people who have some kind of permanent challenge, like permanent hearing loss, which means there's going to be a challenge for them to overcome. And she said, It's the other seven and a half percent, which is where her and her team will do some work because there's something there, that's a block or, or something that's holding them back, but you can overcome it. And you can sort of gradually get past that, and gradually, you know, build up your skills. And it was then actually that my awareness of the idea started because I talked to her in the car, of driving back to the railway station afterwards, I said, I think I'm in that group. And we talked back and forth. And she said, Yeah, I think you are in that group. But then how did you get to where you are because you didn't have support from us. And now you're teaching communication, that doesn't, that doesn't usually happen. And so yeah, from my experience, I've found that actually, if you approach it, the way I tend to approach it is that I don't feel like I've got a limitation, I don't feel like I've got you know, a it's called Autistic Spectrum Disorder, I don't feel like it's a disorder. I'm not keen on that term. But autistic spectrum I think is very, very useful. I just think I have a different perspective on communication. And what's also fascinating here is that they've seen in a study that autistic people can communicate brilliantly with other autistic people. And neurotypical people can communicate brilliantly with each other. It's just when they get together, there's there's a mismatch, there's a challenge. But I found that, you know, from even from my perspective, you know, I've come at this from being so shy, I used to be, when I was a child, I was the typical sort of child that would hide behind the parents legs, but doing that probably for too many years to the point where it was weird, when you need to stop being so shy, and get out there. I'm also extremely introvert. So when I say extremely, you know that there's a range from introvert to extrovert, I'm 99%. On the introvert side of things, which, you know, in my translation of that the definition I like best is that I recharge by being by myself. Whereas my wife is highly extrovert. She recharges by being with others. And so, you know, I've had people through this 120,000 people we've now trained, that are quite a common objection people have at the beginning of training on communication, they'll say, look, it's alright for you, Richard. But I'm an introvert. And I'm shy, and I've never been good at communication. So this is never going to help me. And I'll say to them, Look, I've done it, you can do it. There's no question about this, you can get there. And I'm going to give you simple strategies, things you can do today and tomorrow. And in this meeting in that meeting, and actually find that introverts love it even more, because I give them some strategies they can write down they go, that's it. That's that's the way of doing things. I'm quite happy with that. So yeah, in my experience, I've never come across somebody and 120,000 people from 46 countries over 20 years. I've never found someone where I thought, okay, you should probably leave the class. This is never going to get anywhere. Everybody manages to get there. And you know, it's one of those things where the more that you practice it, the more that you study it the more you invest in yourself in that area. You get to see this, this moving forward. So I always like to say to people have that growth mindset. You know, because sometimes you see this with kids kids where they go to have their first game of tennis. And they see other kids hitting the ball over the net. And they don't they say, Well, that's it. I'm not good at tennis, forget it. I'm just, I'm never gonna play tennis. And but when you encourage them and say, just give it another go, just keep going, keep seeing if you can get there. Or is a good reminder, Michael Jordan has people often talk about was cut from his high school basketball team because he was deemed not to be good enough. And he just went away and worked at it and became the greatest basketball player on the planet. So I always say to people, if you're not good at something, you're in a great position to go and study how to be great. And to build up the skill and have greater pride when you get there.

Wendy Hanson  15:37  

Yeah. Oh, that's a great story. That's great. And I didn't know that about Michael Jordan. Yes. Very, very interesting. So what are some of those strategies? Because I love what you said, especially introverted people, you know, if you give them the 123, this is something that I can do, you know, what are some of those strategies that people can use to be better communicators?

Richard Newman  16:00  

Yeah, so when we work with people, there's really three major areas that we're working with them on. So firstly, there's the nonverbal side, the body language and the tone of voice. The second area that's important is content, which could be storytelling strategies, but also thinking about visual aids. This is something we work on a lot with people because we say, Look, just think about this, really simply, if something's called a visual aid, it should be two things, it should be visual, and it should be an aid, it should help the audience and 99% of slides ever made. They're not visual, they're just a bunch of words with some bullet points. And they're not an aid. They're just, they're just a script or a leave behind document. So you really got to think about visual aids. That's the second piece of the content, the story. And the third piece, though, that we also work on with people is that I've noticed for many years, sometimes people say to me, Look, Richard, I know what to do with my body language, because you've coached me, I know what I'm supposed to say in this situation. I just can't do it. And at that point, we thought, okay, we have to add in the third area, therefore, of mindset, we've got to get people to a place where their mind is allowing them their emotions as well, or allowing them to get to that place where they fulfill their potential and exceed what they've been doing before. So, you know, maybe to talk about one area that the people love to use to improve communication, you can do it in emails, documents, phone calls, conversations everywhere, is storytelling. And it's been talked about a lot. For the last 10 years, particularly anyone who's sort of in business would have heard that buzz term of, oh, we need more storytelling in our business. But sadly, it's not done very well, by a lot of people. I was talking to Robert McKee, who's called the godfather of storytelling in Hollywood. And he was saying that the funny thing is, if people go and listen to an orchestra, playing a piece of music, they don't leave the room going well, I think I could compose something like that. But when when people hear the term storytelling, they go, oh, yeah, I've heard some stories. I'm probably a really good storyteller. And so he says that there's a framework around it. It's not about having a formula, there's just a framework around this. And so it's a really nice way in for everybody to learn around communication, I'd always say study storytelling and understand that storytelling is not. And this is a key differentiator, storytelling is not telling people about your weekend, or looking for interesting anecdotes. And sometimes I have people saying to me, but where do I find interesting stories? Do you look through history books and find out these extraordinary things? I say to them, no, no, no, storytelling, is very simply the way the human brain wants to receive information. So to break that down real quick, really simply, there's three areas of your brain that you need to captivate, in order to be engaging people with storytelling, which is the survival mind, the emotional mind and the logical mind. If you engage those three areas in that order, that means that you're using the power of storytelling to engage someone and communicate your message in a way that they will understand why they should care. They know what they're going to gain from it, they care enough to listen, and they're actually going to take action

Wendy Hanson  19:04  

on that and say those three again, so that

Richard Newman  19:07  

they are the survival mind. The survival mind is really looking out for, you know, am I going to die in the next few minutes? How critical is this? And just notice this week, if somebody says to you, yeah, can we just push the meeting, we're gonna have quitters push it back a couple of weeks. Essentially, their survival mind has said this is not important enough for me to worry about. I've got other things I'm dealing with that are more important to my survival of my job or my targets or whatever I'm dealing with. So the survival mind you have to engage to get people to listen, the emotional mind needs to be engaged because the emotional mind might be thinking, Okay, this is important, but what am I going to gain from this? You know, what, why should I be excited by this? What can I imagine or picture as you are talking to me, and then finally, the logical mind? And if you look at those three, just think back to the meetings that anybody listening has had in the last couple of weeks, you'll realize almost every meeting spent 99% of the time being logical, and you come out of that meeting, through death by PowerPoint or death through sort of examining various bullet points in the agenda and the spreadsheets, and you need two cups of coffee before you go into the next meeting, because you've got this cognitive fatigue. But that doesn't happen. If you go and watch a really exciting movie, you don't sort of come out of it after 45 minutes going guys, can we just take a breather for a second, I just got a, that's a lot to take on board. So instead, stories are engaging those three parts of the mind. But you can do this if you need to go into a meeting. And, you know, you don't have $100 million dollar budget to blow things up and do actions tough for a story, you just got to talk about a spreadsheet with the Board of Directors, you can still turn it into storytelling structure, which is where you engage the survival, then the emotional, then the logical mind. So as an example, if you're going to share, say, an update with somebody, then they need to know, what's the context behind this, why should I care? Why is this update? Even important to me? I've got you know, 2000 emails that are coming each day 20 people trying to have a team's meeting with me today? Why should I listen? And so what you do with that update is you say okay, let's first of all position this in terms of pain and pleasure. That's what the survival mind is looking out for. Where you say, Hi, thanks for the meeting. Today, I'm really pleased that we're here. Look, last time we met, I remember that you spoke to me about this challenge. And this major concern that you're dealing with right now, straight away the person minds, the person's mind says, we're going to talk about something I care about something that is a concern. For me, this is already the most important meeting of the day, I'm listening. And then you say to them, Look, I understand a big concern you had was around the money being spent on this project, the time being spent over there. And you know, ultimately, if we don't go in the right direction, this could cause cause even bigger problems later down the line, again, the survival mind saying, Listen, you got to pay attention, this is important. And then you can come across to the emotional mind. And you can say, Look, just imagine if I was to share with you something here that would allow you to save 45 minutes per person in this building. Every week for the rest of this year, if I could just go through a couple of numbers that would give you a highlight on where we're at a different change that we can make in our processes that would achieve that, would that be useful for you? It's worthwhile asking the question, because the person says yes, give me your spreadsheet. So instead of going, Okay, here's the spreadsheet. And here's the time charts for people who work in the building, it's suddenly got much greater relevance because you've gone survival mind emotional mind. And now I'll give you the logic, you go through that logic. And the rule that everyone will be familiar with, I'm sure listening to this is the rule of three in storytelling. And that applies when you go through the logic, because you get to the logic, and people could very easily switch off because you'll say, Okay, here's my 17th spreadsheet that I need to be sharing with you right now. They think, Oh, my God, how many spreadsheets are there. But if you can boil it down into saying, Okay, I'm going to share with you some logical stuff, I'm going to break it down into three areas, this area here, this area here, this area here, everybody thinks great, I can pay attention. Because we love things that come in threes, we like Ready, steady go. We nobody ever stands on the side of a swimming pool and says, let's jump in on the count of seven who stood on the count of seven, we do on the count of three. So we love things that come in threes. And so you can literally take anything you like and transform it with that power of storytelling. And so I'd say to people, don't hold back, use storytelling every day, think about for every email, phone call conversation, use that power of storytelling, and then you start to connect with someone and make sure that they care about your information.

Wendy Hanson  23:41  

So give us another example. Because I want people to be able to get this in their head and be able to say, okay, you know, this is it first I do this, first I look at this survival mind, then I look at the emotional mind, then I look at the logical mind, and I want to be able to hit those three. So I have to write an email to somebody, and I want to engage them in the email and not bore them to death. So they read this email. How would you use storytelling in that context?

Richard Newman  24:08  

Great. Yeah. So so nice and simple on this one. And this is something I encourage people to do we actually have, there's a team, a big telecommunications company we worked with, we trained 50 people to use, every email they sent to each other would be done using storytelling. And that if if you'd sent an email that wasn't using storytelling, it could be rejected. I mean, you know, if you if you just reply to say, yes, Bob, I will, that's fine. But everything else can be storytelling. So this is how you do it. You start the email by saying, so let's say it's a, it's a project update, and you need a decision from your boss. Maybe it's that kind of email. And so you start it by saying, Hey, Bob. So just so you know that the concerns that we've been having around this project are this, this and this. So you deal with that concerns piece the person goes, that's why I should care. This is why this could be critical to my survival or the team then new sales, what we're really aiming to gain in the future. What we'd love to get to is to achieve this. And what will be good about that for you, Bob is this. So the person goes, Wow, that sounds good. And then you say, look, here's three things that we're looking at doing. We're thinking about going this way, this way, or this way. Here's the options that you've got, I'm gonna lay out the logic and the evidence behind this. And then at the bottom, you then say to them, what I really need from you right now is this one thing. So you don't say I want 10 things you say what I really need right now is this one thing, you might need 10 things but just tell them what the first one is. And here's the magic that really transforms everything, you then take that one thing, you copy it, and you paste it into the subject heading. So when the person reads the Subject Heading should say, by 1pm, need decision about Angela? And they go, Wow, okay, I've got to act on this. I should, I should make sure they read this and act on this email by 1pm. I'm already into it. It's almost like you know, a trailer of coming attractions like, wow, this is amazing. I want to get in there. And you go, okay, by 1pm decision, fine. I already know, I've got primed for this email, I get in there. I'm reading it in the hallway, I'm thinking, Okay, I need to make a decision, you've got to make a decision, I'm going to make a decision, I'm ready. Here's my decision. And so nobody's ever the opposite of what people are tending to do day to day. And this is what nobody should be doing is you look at your email inbox, and you look at the subject heading, you think, what is this email for? I mean, do they do they just copy me in? Was this part of an email trail? I don't even need to be part of anymore. Did they need anything? Maybe this was just like a yes, email, or I don't know if I need to read it. And then you open and you go, Oh, no, I should have read this two days ago. And then they needed a response from me. And I didn't realize, and sometimes you read the whole email, you think I still don't know why I was sent this email. So you can transform that just by using that power of storytelling.

Wendy Hanson  26:45  

I love that. It reminds me of begin with the end in mind, put in your subject line, what you want to have happen. And then make sure again, you're talking about their survival piece, like why is this going to be really important to you? And how is this going to make you feel like what's going to what's going to really come out of this, that's going to be different. And then the logical mind, and and I love the power of three, we all know, it's some kind of a mystical thing of the power of three. But to remember that piece, that's that's some very good. Yeah. Very good logic in that way. Now, we're doing where a lot of us are still on Zoom, or another platform most of the time? And how do you look at even body language? When when we're in a remote world so that people are really using all the possibilities of communication skills? Tell me a little bit about that? Yeah, it's

Richard Newman  27:43  

a fascinating question. I know that there's a couple of things that have come up over the last couple of years, a common question I've had is, you know, how do you do the body language stuff when, when you're virtual. And, you know, for me, it's been amazing to be able to be in that virtual space. Because usually, if you're speaking to a boardroom of people, just think about how far away the furthest face would be from you, maybe they might be like six meters away from you, something like that. Whereas here, when we're doing it virtually no, there's not anybody that is ever further than a meter away. So the ability to read what's happening on their face, is, is much better, because it's much closer to you. So that's already an advantage. But the piece that you need to think about from your perspective, is to make sure that you're sort of setting things up correctly for success. So, so think about it this way, I'm sure people can relate to this, that during the last couple of years, someone has been hired at the company that you work at, and you've never met them face to face, until recently, and you suddenly meet them face to face. And they're either two feet taller or two feet shorter than you actually thought they were going to be, because of what the presence is that they have on camera. And so there's remarkable things that you can do on camera to build up your positioning your influence. There's a few things that we took early on in the pandemic lockdown, we've actually got four people on our team who work for the BBC, and have done for many years. So we said to them, how do we do this? How do we present on camera use our body language effectively? And so they said, Okay, there's a few things. Firstly, you need to think about the rule of thirds. And the rule of thirds simply means that your eyes should be 1/3 down from the top of your shots. Now, most people are encouraged anyone at home, or anybody listening to try this out, is go on to the next zoom call you're on and just check where your eyes are, for most people, they are either halfway down, or in fact in the bottom half of the shot. And so all we're really seeing is you know, the person's wall or the person's screensaver, or you know, the person's ceiling behind them. And so we can barely actually see them. And what that also gives us is we get these floating head meetings, where all you can see is the person's head you get like how are you going to read the body language that you can't even see their shoulders or anything else? So if you look at how TV because our news anchors are framed, you'll notice that we can see their head we can see their shoulders and also the initial composition of the shot, you can see the person's hands, even though TV anchors don't tend to use their hands that much, you can see the hands, they are there ready to go. So I'd encourage people to frame themselves such that their eyes are 1/3 down. And also they're in a position where if they gesture, the gestures can be seen on camera. So you can do some palms up gestures, you can do some palms down gestures, and people can see those and get more of a physical interaction with you. So that's critical to be able to do. And of course, as in addition to that, I'd encourage everyone, if they haven't done it so far, if they haven't worked it out, get light coming towards you. So there's still so many people who just have, you know, strong lights or big windows behind them, and you can't see their face, because they're sort of in silhouette, they look like someone who's in the witness protection program, and you can't really see them on the call. So you won't have the light heading in your direction. But the other interesting piece that's come out of this pandemic, is there's now some people going back into the office, and they haven't interacted with other human beings face to face that much for about two years. And so I've noticed that there's a little bit of a nervousness, a stumbling as people are starting to sit with each other and think, how do we normally do this? How do I engage with the person who's actually here with me. So we've been giving people some coaching around that just to settle them back into that, that sort of flow, the ebb and flow back and forth with the chemistry of being in the same room as somebody. But this is something that, you know, if you make small adjustments around your posture, around your gestures, around eye contact, you can start to build that rapport back up. It's just like, when the pandemic first started, I didn't drive my car for three months, because we weren't allowed to go anywhere. And then I got back in the car, and I was like, What are these pedals for? Again, what do we need to do here? So it's just it's like getting used to these pieces again, so we can then start to get in rapport with each other as we used to be? Yes,

Wendy Hanson  32:02  

it does take some time. But it helps to have some, some strategies I loved the third, your your head, like eye contact should be up there. Because we are on so many meetings where you're not seeing things, and to be able to be more expressive. There are people that I have that I have never met, and I've been on Zoom, and I feel so close to them. I have to remember that, while I've never really hugged them, that's a criteria I use. Yes. Oh, I haven't met them in person. And we can we Yeah, I think we're going to be well as BetterManager. We are a global company. So we are always going to be in this realm. And we want to make sure that we can take advantage of all these things, and really hear, you know, communicate well be able to listen well. And we talk a lot about that in coaching. So this has been really, really helpful. And I love going back to the framework, the survival mind, the emotional mind and the logical mind. I think those are things to really think about when we're we're doing when we're when we're you hear about storytelling, and there's so much to storytelling. So this was kind of a good intro. So if people wanted to learn more about what you do, Richard, what's the best way for them to reach out to you?

Richard Newman  33:18  

Yeah, if people want to learn more, that there's so much more that I'd love to be able to share. We are at UK body talk.com. And if you go to UK body talk.com There is a resources page where we got loads of sort of videos, articles, around more stuff on storytelling, and around body language, a whole range of different pieces people can get access to there. You can also find me on LinkedIn, that's the main place I am on social media. So that's Richard Newman, from Body Talk LinkedIn, and on Instagram for more fun stuff. I'm at Richard Newman speaks.

Wendy Hanson  33:52  

Okay, well, those sound like great places for us to go and get some more additional information. Thank you This was this was so helpful today. And I hope the introverts that are out there, and people that just have always had a little bit of a hard time, like picking up these cues, are able to learn some things today, and know that they're not alone. Everybody goes through challenges, and we just have to know how to get our ways around things. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today. Richard,

Richard Newman  34:22  

thank you. Thank you.

Wendy Hanson  34:24  

Take care, everybody have the best day ever go out and communicate clearly to people and make sure that you're showing up with what shows up on your face needs to match your language, your intro, intonation, all of that. So just see, just see how you're showing up. You may want to ask a friend, what do you think about this? Ask a colleague, you know, how am I showing up when I go to these meetings? So thank you all. Thank you, Richard. Take care everyone have the best day ever.

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