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

I think it was Chase Bank that found that their autistic employees are 40% more productive doing the same role as neurotypical people.

Whoa, were you meditating with the monks like every day?

But I lived in a room just above the monastery, just above the temple, and 5am every morning for six months.

And then they're hitting instruments.

And I found out after about four or five months, they'd never had one lesson for how to play their instruments.

They just thought they had the instruments were in the temple.

They thought they were supposed to use them.

No, I love that.

Because normal people scare me personally.

Like, if you're not a little weird, like, if you're too normal for me, I don't like that.

Welcome to the Digital Social Hour, guys.

I'm your host, Sean Kelly.

You're my co-host, Wayne Lewis.

What up, up, what up?

And our guest today, Richard Newman.

Hey, good to be with you.

Out here from the UK, man.

That's right.

Yeah, just phone in.

Man, phone in.

I haven't slept at all.

I got some sleep, but you can't sleep much in Vegas.

Nah, you can't.

You gotta gamble instantly.

You gotta start losing money as soon as you got to sleep.

Yeah.

Is this your first time here?

Third time in Vegas.

Yeah.

Third time ever?

Yeah, yeah.

Came here a few years ago before the pandemic.

What's it like in the UK?

What are you doing over there?

So it's yeah, it's pretty good.

It's pretty busy at the moment.

We're having a good hot summer at the moment, and business is really picking up.

So, yeah, it's good.

What type of business?

Uh, so, so, my business is uh communication training, and I've been doing this now for 23 years, and it's been a big shift over the last few years.

We went from doing everything in person to suddenly everything was virtual, and now we're back about 50-50, but we travel all the way around the world doing what we're doing, and we get about uh 2,000 events booked for our team per year.

Holy 2,000

per year, yeah, so

What's what's the math one now?

That's six a day.

Five, six a day.

So that's discretion though.

We've got 20 people on our team.

Okay, okay, okay.

Yes, we travel all over the world to do these events.

And sometimes, if we're doing it virtually, we can be doing events sort of say three or four events per person per day,

taking in different time zones.

But then if I'm flying out, like I've got a job in LA tomorrow, then I have to fly out, do the job, fly back.

Wow.

And what type of events are these and what services are you providing for them?

So

it's all about communication training.

So we're doing things around presentation skills, storytelling, confidence and mindset for people, conflict resolution has been a big one recently as well.

So anything around helping business communicate.

So one of the areas we work on is, say, helping a business win sales pitches.

So for example, there was a client that we worked with a couple of years back.

They came to us because they're a big construction company and they were winning about one in four of their sales pitches.

And they came to us and they said it'd be a really big deal for them if they could start to win about one in three.

That'd be a good industry average.

So we worked with them over the course of a year and we were giving them two or three days of workshops before each major pitch.

And we're working on storytelling and team dynamics, the whole piece.

And we got them by the end of that year, they'd won every single pitch, so 100% win rates, and got them about $1.5 billion of new business.

So what were they lacking?

As far as communication go,

what were they lacking?

So

when they go up for these big pitches, essentially they get measured on, which is what every business gets measured on, which is what's your price can you do the job and then a behavioral assessment so do we want to work with you on this major project over the next couple of years and so they were finding that that was really the only place where they could stand out because everybody's cutting down their price to try and get it everybody can do the job but can you stand out with your behavioral assessment and so we're working on them to make sure they were a really solid team they understood how to really pitch their message strong storytelling behind the message because a lot of people get stuck in details they go too much into sort of cognitive overload with details and graphs and bullet points so we got them a really solid story good objection handling skills questioning and listening skills to build rapport build a relationship with people good body language in the room so that they would come together as a really cohesive team to make sure that people think they stand out they've got the best behavior therefore they're going to get the job that's awesome because most pitches suck like most pitches suck but most people don't work on their pitches either they kind of just stick to kind of one template or one style and actually sit so how did you actually get into that Yeah, so well long story for me.

So this goes all the way back to when I was four years old.

I was going to school at kindergarten level and enjoying school.

And then before my fifth birthday, we moved house and I went to this new school and suddenly my earliest memories there are of really struggling to connect with other kids.

And I felt like I was living in this sort of glass bubble and unable to connect with anybody.

And that went through my childhood up through my teenage years.

And it got to the point where I was around 16 years old where I thought I really need to get a handle on this.

I don't know.

Are you someone that doesn't have life insurance?

Why leave anything up to chance in a worst case scenario?

Luckily, Policy Genius makes finding the right policy simple and their team of licensed experts are on hand to help you through it.

Life insurance gives your family a safety net that they can cover expenses with so they don't have to worry about money while getting back on their feet.

I've had friends and family members that have passed away without life insurance.

It's definitely left us with financial instabilities.

Even if you already have a policy, it may not offer enough protection for your family's needs and it may not follow you if you leave your job.

With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $2.92 per year for $1 million of coverage.

Some options offer same-day approval and avoid unnecessary medical exams.

Policy Genius knows how valuable your time is.

Their technology makes it easy to compare life insurance quotes from America's top insurance in just a few clicks to find your lowest price.

Policy Genius has licensed award-winning agents who can help you find the best fit for your needs.

They work for you, not the insurance companies.

They don't have an incentive to recommend one insurer over another so you can trust their guidance.

Policy Genius is for parents, caregivers, and anyone else who has people who depend on them.

They simplify the process of getting life insurance so you can protect the people you love.

They got thousands of five-star reviews on Google and TrustPilot.

Your loved ones deserve a financial safety net.

You deserve a smarter way to find and buy it.

Head to policygenius.com/slash DSH or click the link in the description to get a free life insurance quote and see how much you could save.

That's policygenius.com/slash DSH.

I don't know why, but I'm struggling.

And I didn't realize at the time, but I was highly shy as a child.

I'm very much introverted and I'm autistic.

And I didn't get diagnosed with being autistic until.

Yeah, I got diagnosed last year.

Wow.

What style?

I mean, what kind?

So, yeah, it's a good question, Peter.

Yeah, like there's a lot of different variables.

I'm learning so much about them.

Because we kind of view autism in like one kind of concept in a sense of you know what they show us but there's a lot of different styles of autism there really is yeah so the spectrum of what it means to be autism autistic it has really expanded over the years so back in the 80s and 90s if you're diagnosed autistic it was very specific but now they've expanded what that range covers why do you think that is why is it autism when it I think it's just being uh there's a greater understanding of what that means at this point, but more things are being encompassed, but it can be a little bit confusing because it's a bit like saying that you're European.

So, you know, people who live in southern Italy are very different than people who live in the north of Norway, so it's different.

So, for me, being autistic simply means that I see communication through a different lens.

So, neurotypical people, they can communicate, they can pick up on signals easily.

It's a bit like a fish being in water.

They know how to breathe underwater, they know how to exist underwater.

And I'm on the outside thinking,

how does that happen?

That doesn't look like my sort of frame of reference.

So, that's been really valuable for me because I've always been able to approach communication through this different lens of looking at it, thinking, what is it that a neurotypical person is doing that helps them to succeed?

And what is it they do when they don't succeed?

And how can I break that down?

rebuild it, make it work for myself, and then teach that to my clients.

So then a neurotypical client can come to me and say, I want to have more Gravitas.

And I'll say to them, okay, here's the building blocks of Gravitas.

This is what somebody does when they have it and somebody does when they don't have it.

Let me give you those building blocks.

Or I get get them to show me a presentation and I'll say, okay, these three parts of your style are missing.

We need to work on those pieces.

And that's something I've been able to observe by having that outside lens.

So to come back to your question about autism, it's something that's always been a benefit for me.

Almost like a sort of a superpower of being able to see things through that different lens that I can analyze communication from a different perspective.

Wow, so you've been able to use it to your advantage because I feel like some people get diagnosed and they see it as like a hindrance almost.

Yeah, they should call that a superpower.

I think it's not autism.

I think they should kind of have a space where you have a superpower.

Yeah, I mean,

there's certainly, you know, some people really thriving.

It does depend on who you are and where you are on the spectrum.

But I think it was Chase Bank that found that their autistic employees are 40% more productive doing the same role as neurotypical people.

Whoa.

And they said that the autistic population in their company could learn how to do something new in the space of a few weeks that would take other people months to to do.

Wow.

So

I have to understand the concept of autism because that sounds like an efficient person to me, right?

But they just lack certain personality traits, so they automatically identify them as autistic because they're not normal.

Yeah, so to get, if you want to get a negative stigma around it, I believe, or like, not like a negative stigma, but like

a disability.

That's how we view it in a sense, versus like a

disability.

It is something that I had to really start to understand when I started to get this sense that maybe I was autistic.

I just got some ideas about it over the course of a few years, things that I was hearing.

I thought I'd go for a diagnosis.

And it is something where you need to get it really done properly.

So the person who did it for me was the head of diagnosis for children and adults in Scotland for 35 years.

And she went through like a big form, 10-page form, looking through your childhood, and then a four-hour consultation to really understand.

And so for me, though, explaining to people what it means to be autistic, in my case, the best example I can give is that banter is something that still slightly baffles me.

So banter to me looks like two people insulting each other and then laughing in their faces.

And so if I try that, it doesn't go very well.

But the key concept that I found behind it to figure out, well, how does that work for neurotypical people?

What am I missing?

And the key part of it that I've talked about in my recent book is lift.

So the concept behind banter is that whatever you're saying to the other person, your intention is that by the end of that interaction, they'll feel lifted by you.

They go from a negative or a neutral state to a lifted or a more positive state.

And so if you speak with that intention in mind, then suddenly you can lift that person no matter what you're doing in the interaction.

So if that's your intention, then you can also apply that to doing a business pitch.

You can apply that to an interview, speaking to a team.

If you have the intention of lift, then you can be a much more effective communicator, whatever other principles you're using.

Yeah, and you're a great communicator.

You said you used to be an introvert, right?

Well, still very much highly introverted, which means to me that...

I can't tell.

So I enjoy going on a podcast.

I enjoy speaking on stage and teaching.

But the definition that I go by for introvert or extrovert is that if you're introvert, when you are recharging, you like to spend time by yourself.

And if you're extrovert, you like to spend time with other people.

And so my wife is highly extrovert.

I'm highly introvert.

So I go traveling for work.

I come home on the weekend.

Her ideal weekend is go and have seven social events with different people.

And my ideal weekend is put my hoodie on and stay in my room.

and not do much otherwise.

I guess that's kind of Sean a little bit, huh?

That's kind of Sean.

Sean is an intro.

He talks to everybody, but he can be to himself, too.

There's a switch, I think.

I can turn it on when I need to talk.

Yeah.

But I prefer to be alone most of the time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that would be true for an introvert.

Yeah.

So it's not, introverts aren't people that sort of dislike others or dislike communication, but there's just like, where does your energy come from?

Yeah.

So tell us about your

book.

Yeah.

Lift your impact.

So I wrote Lift Your Impact based on the last few years because I've been running this training company for 23 years.

And up until just before the pandemic, people would ask us about public speaking, presentation skills, storytelling, keynote speaking, that sort of thing.

And then something really fundamentally shifted these last few years where the three biggest challenges we found people have is they talk about being stressed, much more stressed, there's more demands, they're getting thousands of emails and 20 different Teams calls on a day, or you guys are recording like nine podcasts in a day.

There's so much that's being put on people at the moment.

And then people homeschooling their children and trying to share Wi-Fi with everybody at home as they're working at home.

So stress has been huge the last few years.

Also, loneliness.

People are spending less time together and have less depth in their relationships.

There's more transactional relationships, much more conflict happening in the workplace.

And the third piece is that some people are still showing up at the same steel and glass buildings, but they have a lack of purpose, a lack of meaning behind it.

And so I wrote this book to address those three areas.

So that firstly,

people can have a really powerful mindset so they can thrive and really be a rock in the storm no matter what's happening for them.

And then, secondly, once you've got yourself really secure, then you need to interact with other human beings, which is the challenging part.

So, then you need to lift your influence through storytelling, body language, questioning, and listening skills.

And then, when you've enhanced that level of your influence, you then need to think further about your legacy to give yourself a sense of meaning and purpose about what you're doing.

Where is this heading, and what's going to be left after all the work that you're doing?

So, if you go through mindset, then influence with others and then focus on your future, then you can lift the impact you're having daily and have a more fulfilling life.

I was watching something yesterday and they talked about how

we live in a lonely world right now.

Most men and women are lonely.

There's a difference between being alone and lonely.

And why do you think that is?

Well, they actually blamed it on video games.

Social media media.

Yeah, so it's funny.

A question has been asked to me for many years saying, do I think that communication training will be less interesting in future?

Because, you know, more people are just going to be on their phones or separate.

And I've said, no, communication training is going to be much more important in the future because people are having less face-to-face times.

Not face time on a screen, but actual face-to-face time with each other.

And so the skill set that we used to have where...

If you think about kids, you know, going back 20, 30 years ago, they'd have a sleepover and they'd just be talking and giggling all night.

Whereas these days, what do they do?

They get together and they're all on their phones.

Or they're on their headphones and that's asleep over there up on a game all night.

That's it, yeah.

And so then they're actually not used to the day-to-day reading of the other person.

So it's a little bit like, if you imagine a surfer, if you just practice surfing by having a surfboard on the beach all the time, that's a bit like what people are doing with communication, where they're on a headset or a screen.

They're not actually on the ocean.

So if you're on the ocean face-to-face, like reading people, reading those subtle cues, knowing what works and what doesn't in communication, just like actually getting out there on the ocean and riding the waves.

And so people are getting less skilled with that, and therefore there's that sense of loneliness.

People are going into the workplace and feeling that they don't connect with other people, that they're not being understood, they're not cared for, they're not respected or appreciated, and there's much more conflict happening.

And so people need to understand then, well, how do you build a deeper state of a relationship when you're not seeing each other at the coffee break every day?

How do you get to that place of having a meaningful relationship that therefore builds a more effective business and a more fulfilling life?

And also, mental health issues are at an all-time higher now as well.

Do you think that's attributed to social media and lack of connecting with others as well?

I think that's definitely part of it.

That we, you know, we need to be together.

And I think that multiple studies have shown that the fundamental aspect that allows us to thrive is connection with other people.

So if we don't feel that as a baby, then we get what's called failure to thrive-that sense of failure to feel connected with another human being.

And so, you know, later in life, if you don't feel cared for, needed, appreciated, respected by your tribe, important to your tribe, then you have that sense of, you know, what is the point to my life?

And then you can get people feeling depressed or suicidal or just that sense of loneliness of not feeling needed by their tribe.

So we do need to have that sense of community.

So I think that that's definitely attributed to by the pandemic, the lockdowns where we weren't allowed to be together and people being more on a screen and less with someone face to face.

Did you struggle with these issues growing up?

You mentioned you felt isolated as a kid.

Yeah, so I mean I found, you know, in my era, I grew up in the era before the internet,

before email and all this sort of stuff.

And so

I did still struggle with that sense of how do I build a connection with another human being.

And so that's what made me so fascinated about it.

So I was mentioning earlier, age of 16, I thought I have to do something about this because I want to feel connected to people, I love people.

And so I then read around 200 books on communication over sort of between the age of 16 and about 22.

I was reading everything like body language, tone of voice, storytelling, stage presence, anything that would be useful.

And I then, at the age of 18, when my friends were going off to university, I thought I wanted to do something a little bit different, do something good for the world.

And I went off to live in the foothills of the Himalayas where I was living in this little tiny Tibetan monastery, which is kind of near Darjeeling, where the tea comes from, but like a four-hour taxi drive from there.

And I was teaching English to these Tibetan monks.

And I lived with them for six months and the big challenge being that when I got there they didn't speak any English at all so they spoke Tibetan Nepali and Hindi and I spoke a bit of French and a bit of German but we didn't actually have any language to connect with so we had to just connect non-verbally and that was something I found really powerful was like when I first got there they sat me down in their kitchen And they gave me a cup of Tibetan tea, which is pretty horrible stuff.

Never tried it.

It's tea with butter and salt in it.

Yes, really not that.

That's gross.

Yeah.

So I was sipping this thinking, this is going to be a long six months.

We can't speak to each other and I'm drinking this.

And then over a course of about an hour of sitting with them, I thought, wait a second, we actually understand each other.

The words don't make sense, but non-verbally, we are really connected.

You had to read them.

Yeah, we had to read each other and therefore we had to connect with each other beyond words.

And we got to the point of understanding enough about each other.

And by the end of the six months, they could all then have a good conversation with me in English.

I managed to teach them through body language.

But it really gave me that respect for understanding and connecting with someone beyond the use of words.

To the point where recently I went to a retreat in Italy.

It was an amazing experience.

And on one of the days, they said, we're going to have a silent lunch.

You're not allowed to say a single word to anybody.

Wow.

And for me, as an introvert, I loved it.

We sat there and we were actually with each other.

Rather than this surface-level chit-chat of, oh, how are you?

And what's the day?

How are going all the day?

And like all that stuff.

Suddenly, we were really with each other.

And I felt like I suddenly understood people in a way that I hadn't understood them with that chit chat.

And that's what I'm always aiming to do when I teach people about communication is to say the words need to be good, but underneath that you need to think, how am I connecting with this person?

How am I communicating, expressing myself beyond words?

Because that is so pivotal to how we all connect as human beings.

Absolutely.

Were you meditating with the monks like every day?

No.

Do you know, it's funny, because it took me a long while to figure out their language and understand how they did things.

But I lived in a room just above the monastery, just above the temple, and 5 a.m.

every morning for six months, I was woken up with this sound of,

and then they're hitting instruments.

And I found out after about four or five months, they'd never had one lesson for how to play their instruments.

They just thought they had the instruments were in the temple, they thought they were supposed to use them.

They knew they had to do it at 5 a.m.

So, but what I did gain from the monks is they had this incredible way of being each day.

So when I first got to the monastery, they had never had hot running water.

There was no internet back then.

They occasionally had electricity, but we had a power cut most days.

We had a phone in the monastery that worked for maybe five minutes per week.

So completely cut off.

And yet they had these incredible smiling faces every day.

Beautiful smiles, every lesson that I was having with them at breakfast, where they sort of barely slept on a really hard bed.

And suddenly they're up and they're beaming.

And it gave me this appreciation, which

has come all the way through my life of you know really understanding how lucky we are with all the privileges we have and comfort that we have in the West and sometimes we get all these comforts and if you think about the the comfort zone of most people is very small where they think I only want to do things in my comfort zone you bounce outside that comfort zone suddenly think oh that feels like pain whereas with them they they were able to be happy having no creature comforts at all and so I always come back to that in times of stress thinking they were able to have this beautiful mindset with nothing around them just through that sense of peace and connection with each other and connection with something higher than themselves.

So you can always come back to that.

If you're dealing with the day-to-day stress of like, how many people did liked my post on Instagram?

Yeah, right, right.

These sort of things, you can just come back to what is it that really matters.

So did you have a hard time talking to women at one point?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Fairly easy.

Yeah, so certainly.

How did you work on that?

So I think that that for me was practice.

And actually, actually, I'll give people a tip on this one.

So I was speaking to somebody when I was in my early 20s, saying, look, I'm really struggling with this.

I see my friends going off and having girlfriends.

So this was now we moved from 16 to your early 20s.

Early 20s.

You're still struggling with it.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So

when I was 18, I went off to the monastery.

I then studied acting for a few years at a London acting school and I learned how to do things like have more stage presence and storytelling and so on.

And I was, you know, I was having dates and so on, but I just thought, I really want to find the right person and so I met someone who gave me this huge piece of advice that I encourage everyone to do she said what I want you to do is to write down a list of a hundred things that would describe your perfect woman your perfect partner

a hundred things and don't stop at 99 make it a hundred and so you got to get really specific when you do that and so to give you an idea one of the things I wrote down was

Someone who likes to stand on the front row at concerts because I had friends back then who'd like to sit at the back and I'm like why are we here?

We could watch this on the TV.

You're the front row guy.

Yeah, I'm the front row kind of guy.

So I thought, okay, I want someone who wants to do that with me.

Otherwise, this relationship's not going to be as fun.

And so I wrote this hundred things.

Then you have to write down from that, okay, what are the top things they absolutely have to have?

The top things they absolutely cannot have, otherwise you won't be in a relationship.

And then you write down, well, 10 things that I'm going to do to find this person.

So what am I going to do to work myself?

And one of the things I wrote down is, I will go to every social event I'm invited to anywhere in the world, no matter how hard it is for me to get there, I'm just going to say yes.

And so I committed to doing all these things.

And I also decided that I would only go on a second date with someone if they met the list.

If they didn't meet the list, there's no second date.

All hundred things?

Yeah, yeah.

No, I have to meet all these things, otherwise there's no second date.

And so I then, and I would read it every day, and I read it every day for the course of eight months.

And then I met the person.

I met my wife.

And

she had everything apart from one thing, which was, and I haven't specified it, I've written down on the list, lives nearby, but I didn't specify that.

So lives nearby in the States is like running within four hours or something.

So for me, she was a few hours away, but everything else she was.

And literally, she walked towards me, my brain was saying, This is it.

This is the one.

This is the person you're going to spend the rest of your life with.

Because I knew because I was laser-focused on that's what I'm looking for in a partner.

And so therefore, it made the rest of the conversation that much easier.

Before you even talk to her, yeah,

yeah, yeah,

so how did that list how does that checklist go of a hundred things so are you just talking to her like okay one two

how does that like how does that work like yeah what is it like does she know about the list yeah so the funny thing is what are you showing to her i i it was

like look

some people do that first date

So on I it was on our sixth date, I think it was, where I was paying for lunch and I just got my wallet out and the list was in there.

And I said to her, oh, you should just take a look at this list.

And I went to pay the bill, pay the check.

And I came back and she was like, oh, that's nice.

She wrote a list about me.

And I said, no, I wrote this list eight months before I met you.

And she's like, what?

So suddenly she knew that, you know, I'd obviously been looking for her.

I was serious that this was a big commitment on my side.

Yeah, I was manifesting at its finest.

That's crazy.

I've never heard anything.

Forbes Riley did that, too, with her boyfriend.

Yeah.

Really?

List of 100 things.

Yeah.

You gotta try that, Wayne.

That's too many things.

I can only think of like five off the top.

I'm like, you gotta be this, this, that, and the third.

But I guess that's more in-depth, I guess, right?

Because it kind of gives you the full package.

If you think about it, if you describe someone

in a way in the mind.

Yeah, if you describe a person physically, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, then you just got 25 of each of those things.

You just sort of go through the list and you think about, well, what kind of person do I like?

I like a little bit of this person, a little bit of that person.

And these are things I definitely wouldn't want to have.

Then suddenly 100 is quite an easy list to get.

You can just pull a little bit from every person that you've dealt with and add that person whatever you liked about that person to the list yeah i feel like that's a lot easier yeah yeah okay now did she

you got diagnosed with autism last year right yeah did you how did she take that news she she was the one who encouraged me to get the diagnosis oh really so she's she's from a medical background and so she's more familiar with this and uh i was talking to her about some struggles i was having with communication she said i think you should maybe go and get diagnosed and I said really because I just didn't understand what autism was back then like you said it's kind of confusing.

It's really expanded what it is and what it isn't.

And so,

and a little breakthrough that I had also was.

A couple of years back on my podcast, I interviewed this lady who's a specialist in early childhood communication.

And she was saying that essentially 90% of people in their childhood, they will communicate perfectly well.

Then you get around 2.5% who have a permanent challenge, like permanent hearing loss.

And then it's the other 7.5% that she would deal with, that they would have some sort of challenge that they could work on, where they might be able to sort of improve their skills with it.

And as she was talking on the podcast, she was describing who fell in that 7.5%.

I thought, that sounds like me.

And I was driving her to the train station after the podcast.

And I said, I think I'm in that group.

And she said, a bit like you said earlier.

She said, I can't believe that.

There's no way.

You know, you like communicating.

You're a good podcast host.

And I said, no, I really think I am.

And so I shared those suspicions with a couple of people around me.

My wife said, you should go get diagnosed.

And I'd really encourage people, if they think that they might be autistic go and get yourself diagnosed because it could be that you are or it might be that there's something else yeah and getting the diagnosis for me was a huge revelation where it was almost like You know, a moment where suddenly like a big surprise happens in a movie and suddenly it makes sense of everything that you've seen in the prior sort of two hours where you're sort of rolling through your mind of, oh, this is why everything happened.

It was the same thing for me with this diagnosis of thinking, oh, this is why I react like this in this situation.

That's where I was struggling here.

This is why I like these kind of things.

And it was making sense of sort of the prior 44 years of my life.

That's crazy because I say Elon and Mark Zuckers.

A lot of entrepreneurs I feel like have a little bit of it.

Yeah.

Well, I think that it makes sense for people to be entrepreneurial who are somewhere on the autistic spectrum because you just you permanently live outside the box.

I think I saw somebody recently online talking about this saying being autistic means that living out of the box is a way of life.

There's no part of being in the box.

You know they put so much of a negative stigma on it even in school like the kids who have autism are in this special class and they go to lunch at a certain time like it's it's kind of like a taboo thing.

They treat them like as if they're like like mutants in a way and really made fun of for sure.

I remember bully them and I'm in my school.

Yeah, it wasn't good.

That's why it's kind of, I feel like it has a negative stigma and then we lack understanding of it just because we kind of place, oh, he has autism that's exactly what he is that's exactly what it what it is and it's like no so much well I think I think knowledge of that is now thankfully expanding to the point where people realize actually this is you know there's so much neuro

neurodiversity out there and it's actually a benefit for a company not just to have you know diversity in different forms but neurodiversity is key because you get loads of people thinking differently seeing the world differently and suddenly they can make something that is much greater

and I've always encouraged my kids to to think outside the box as well because if you think about, you know, the majority of people, I often say to them, the majority of people are

unhappy, poor, they are unhealthy and lonely.

That's the majority of people who are there.

So why would you not think outside the box?

Thinking outside the box means that you're more likely to be in a place where you are healthy, wealthy, in good relationships, doing something that matters to you because you've decided not to go the main central path.

Absolutely.

And having some part of neurodiversity helps you do that because you don't see things the same.

You don't approach things in the same way.

Yeah, no, I love that because normal people scare me personally.

Like if you're not a little weird, like, if you're too normal for me, I don't like that.

Because they're holding back their true selves.

Yeah.

Fit into the

fact.

That's the fact.

It kind of appears too perfect.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And fitting in is one of the things that we do where it's really about tribe survival, where we think, you know, I need other people around me to survive.

If I do what they do, then I'm going to fit in with them and therefore maybe I'll be safe.

But it's actually giving you this undercurrent of anxiety of thinking, but if I am my true self, if I express who I really am, then maybe I won't be liked anymore and I don't have value in this group and there's huge fear behind it.

Whereas if you start from that place of who am I really?

What do I want to be?

And I always talk to people about thinking about what are your key values in life?

What are the principles you want to live your life by?

Because when you know them, you get internal validation and you don't need the external validation from other people.

And people can do this exercise really quickly where they work out what are my top three principles in life is it that you care about putting your family first is it integrity in everything that you do what what is it for you and one of those things for me as an example is to be a good parent

It's always been there, and oddly, it's been there as a principle for me since I was about 10 years old.

I thought, one day I want to be a parent and I want to be a great parent.

I want to be the kind of parent that is there on sports day and is there, you know, for when they're doing a show at school and there to connect with them and make sure that they are well looked after and have a great life.

And so that's guided me in my decisions about who I would spend time with, what I would choose to do in my career and so on.

So if people figure out what their values are, they can suddenly make career decisions, relationship decisions, and feel good about themselves, even if they don't get the job when they go to an interview, because they can think, okay, that may not be in alignment with my core values.

I don't need to impress them because I'm heading in this direction.

This is my true North Compass.

This is who I want to be.

I'm going to head in that direction based on my values.

Love that.

Yeah, everyone should have clear values written down.

Yeah, and then

pick the right tribe to be a part of so you're not blending with the wrong

tribe that doesn't fit you.

So that way you're always comfortable in your true self.

Yeah, well, people say your vibe attracts your tribe, and it really will only if you think, what are my values and you live in accordance with that?

And then suddenly, when you're showing up as that person, the right tribe is going to come towards you.

Rather than trying to fit in with whoever happens to be around you, decide what your vibe is going to be, and then those people will be drawn to you.

Gotcha, yeah.

Richard, it's been a pleasure, man.

Where can people find out more about you and what you're working on?

So, people can find me on Instagram at Richard Newman Speaks.

They can also go to liftyourimpact.com forward slash the book, and they can find out more about the book.

And also, my company, if people are interested, is ukbodytalk.com.

Okay, that's for the consulting stuff.

That's for the consulting, yeah.

Six events a day, bro.

All right, crazy, that's crazy.

All right, guys, thanks for watching.

See you guys next time.

Peace.