Using Your Introvert Tendencies to Succeed in the Work Place with Richard Newman

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Finding Founders. Today, we'll be breaking down how to use your introvert tendencies to succeed in the workplace. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Richard Newman into EO Fire Studios. Richard is the author of Lift Your Impact, Transform Your Mindset, Influence, and Future to Elevate Your Work, Team, and Life. He's an award-winning expert in leadership, communication, storytelling and influence, and the founder of UK Body Talk Limited, the global leader on communication training.

0:42And today we'll be talking about lessons you can learn as an introvert. We'll talk about how you can use introverted tendencies to your advantage in the workplace. We'll talk about why people struggle to succeed even if they work really hard, they're missing a key ingredient, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Richard and our sponsors. The Product Boss, hosted by Jacqueline and Mina, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Product Boss helps you take your physical product sales and strategy to the next level to create your dream life.

1:14With episodes like, Can I Have a Successful Product Business as a Side Hustle? Listen to The Product Boss wherever you get your podcasts. I remember that state of constant overwhelm with my ever-growing to-do list too. My solution, hire a VA and start delegating. Learn how to optimize your time with Belay CEO's latest book, Rise Up and Lead Well, where she shares the exact framework she has used with her own assistant to maximize productivity. Text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E, to 55123 to get your free copy. Richard, say what's up to FIRE Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with?

1:55Yeah, thanks, John, and hello to Fire Nation. So for me, something that a lot of people believe about being successful that I disagree with is about being the hero in your business. So simply put, you have to stop being the hero in your business in order to succeed. Now, what does that mean? Well, in my team and my company, we've helped over three companies now win over$2 billion through applying this in their businesses. So to give people a simple example around what does this mean to stop being the hero in your business to succeed, one company, we helped them win a contract, which just with one piece of advice, helped them win$800 million worth of business.

2:36And so they had been working towards this contract for 18 months. And it was a contract to get a new building built on the bank of the river thames and they've been working all the way through it they'd done you know all the various documents leading up to it they had competed on price and logistics and ability to do the job and they'd got down to the final three but they'd found out that they were in third place and this is going into the final pitch and we'd worked with their team in the uh that the weeks coming up to this final pitch to make sure it was working well but on the final day the ceo flew over from the u.s to london and we found ourselves in this boardroom with 20 executives on the leadership team around this table.

3:15And we were preparing and rehearsing this final pitch. And the CEO got up to do his bit. And after he'd been speaking for about five minutes, I thought, I have to stop this. And I said to him, look, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but you don't think you're going to win tomorrow, do you? And there was deadly silence in the room, why did you interrupt our boss? And the boss said to me, no, we're not going to win. And then again, everyone was sort of looking at each other like, well, what are we going to do now. And I said to him, I want you to tell me why you think you're not going to win. And then I'm going to give you a piece of advice that will turn this all around.

3:45And he said, well, I'll tell you why we're not going to win. The reason we're not going to win is that Jim on our team has had a difficult interaction with one of their panelists. And so they have now said that they're not going to give us the job and they've given us all sorts of reasons, but it's basically because of this challenge that we're having with a member of our team and it's deeply unfair. So I've had to fly in from the US to try and fix the situation and look after my company. And I said to him, is it fair to say that you see yourself as the hero of this situation? He said, yeah, I have.

4:13I've had to come in here as the hero in the final hour to try and figure this out. And I said, well, how do you then see your team and your company? Is it fair to say that maybe you see them as the victims of the situation? He said, absolutely. We're the victim of an unfair decision, an unfair situation. And I said, well, tell me this then. If you see yourself as the hero and you see your company here as the victim. What do you see that panelist as being? What part of the story are they playing? Is it fair to say that you'd see them as the villain of the story? And he said, yeah, I do. They are the villains.

4:46They should be giving us this work. I said to him, look at this objectively. Do you think if you ask someone to give you$800 million and you treat them like a villain, are they going to give you the money? And he said, no, no, they're not. So I said to him, okay, what if we do this? What if you change this whole situation for this pitch around so that you're no longer the hero, the person on the panel who is the main decision maker, they are the hero of the entire pitch. They said, well, how do you do that? And I said, well, very simply what you do, you've got to go in positioning them as the hero.

5:19You need to understand what are their challenges, what are their goals and how are you going to get them there? And you step in as the mentor. And by being the mentor in this situation, then suddenly you're going to be able to transform this situation. And we worked on it with them and they went from third place to first place and won the deal. $800 million, Fire Nation. I think you can understand the importance of this mentality. And as I mentioned in the intro, we're talking about using your introvert tendencies to succeed in the workplace. And one thing that really blew me away when I launched Entrepreneurs on Fire, I was interviewing all of these authority figures and influencers, and I was speaking with them at conferences.

5:57And so many of them that I was like, these individuals must be extroverts. I mean, they're always just out there sharing their voice. They're just always at the center of attention. They were all identifying as introverts. And I was really surprised by that. And, you know, we all have introvert tendencies. Like I have some introvert tendencies. I'd like to spend time by myself from time to time, but I'm definitely an extrovert when it comes to the overall picture. So it really does surprise me. And the more that I kind of continue going forward in this industry, the more I was saying, wow, like it is incredible that a lot of people don't realize that these authority figures, these influencers they look up to are actually introverts.

6:33And so it's holding them back because they're thinking they can't become that because they're an introvert as well. And it's just not the case. We'll be talking about that today, because you Richard specifically grew up struggling with communication. I mean, you were shy, you were an introverted child and you were on the autistic spectrum. You now teach communication. How did this happen? Well, I think for me, from an early age, I really felt like an outsider. I always struggled with communication. And from the age of about four or five, I almost felt like I was in a glass bubble trying to connect with people and struggling to do so.

7:08And because I was struggling with it, around about the age of 16 or 17, I started to study it. And I thought, I absolutely have to overcome the challenges that I have here to figure out communication. and because of that I ended up by the age of 25 having read about 200 books on communication and so I knew much more about the the theory behind it and various processes that I could use in communication than other people but I was using them from the perspective of a nature documentary host so other people if you imagine people like a herd of wildebeests and you have a documentary host looking at how they're interacting with each other when the interactions go well and when they don't and they're looking at it scientifically that's how I've looked at human interactions myself, which led me to the point in 2016 of publishing some peer-reviewed scientific research in the journal Psychology that showed there's certain things that human beings can do, and entrepreneurs absolutely need to know about this, that if you say the same words, you wear the same clothes, but you slightly change your behavior, you can increase how many people you convince with your words by 42%.

8:11You can get 44 % more people believing that you're a good leader, And you can get over 57 % more people voting for you in an election if you understand the small changes of behavior that work on for all human beings from all different parts of the planet that we tested this on more than 2 ,000 people involved in our study. And in essence, what it came down to is simply that you need to drop your armor. You need to drop poor habits that you have built up over the course of time and reconnect with how you were born to communicate, the way that you were born to connect with other people. And once you do that, you're able to free yourself up to lift the people around you and create an elevated state in them by the time you leave the room with simple changes that you can make that lead you to be much more successful.

8:55And Fire Nation, I really hope you're understanding this process because this is how you're going to be able to use your introvert tendencies, if you have them, and almost all of us do, to succeed in the workplace. And because of the early struggles that we've talked about, your struggles with communication, how you were shy and introverted and on the autistic spectrum, you learned lessons that others did not. We just talked about one or two of those right now, but share another one. What's something else that you learned that I think a lot of people would find valuable that are listening today?

9:24For me, as a path into communication, so to let people understand what it means for me being on the autistic spectrum is very simply, if you look at banter in conversation. Banter to me as an outsider looks like two people insulting each other and then laughing in each other's faces. And as you can imagine, when I try doing that, it doesn't work and people get deeply insulted. And so I had to think for a long time, what is it about this part of communication that I'm missing? And then suddenly I realized, and this became the theme of my latest book, that the insight is very simply the word lift.

9:55So lift means that when people are having banter with each other, the intention is that the other person is lifted or in an elevated state by the end of that interaction. Their intention isn't mean if they're doing true banter, their intention is positive. And so when you apply that to all sorts of communication, whether it's a conflict resolution meeting that you're going into or an interview or a pitch that you're doing, your aim should always be the following, that by the end of that interaction, the person you're speaking to moves from a negative or a neutral state to a positive or a more positive state because you have applied everything in your body language, your tone of voice, your words, all the way through to lift that person.

10:34And if you do so, it transforms your impact on others and also transforms your legacy. Fire Nation, this is powerful stuff, especially when you can understand that, hey, I want to leave, I want to have people leaving conversations with me feeling better about themselves, feeling excited, walking away, maybe even kind of scratching their heads being like, why is it whenever I'm talking to fill in the blank, I leave that conversation just feeling happier and better about myself. Like I love that phrase lift. And we have a lot more things to talk about around this topic when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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12:14So what did I do? I hired a VA and started to delegate. Lucky for you, our friends at Belay. Know the demands on business owners all too well, and they're here to help. Belay has highly vetted talent to help you with the numerous tasks you have on your plate. And because they've been helping business leaders like you for over a decade, they really know their stuff. Belay intentionally pairs clients with US-based fractional virtual assistants. I'm talking talent that can handle all of your administrative tasks. So you have the time and energy to grow your business and to help you get started. Belay is offering Fire Nation, their ebook, Rise Up and Leadwell for free.

12:49In this ebook, Blaze CEO provides the framework she's used with her own assistant to maximize productivity and strike the work-life balance we all deserve. Learn how to optimize your time with an assistant today. Just text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E to 55123 to get your free copy. Rishi, we're back and so many people have introverted tendencies. I actually would be pretty curious if, you know, there's not 99 plus percent of people that at least have some tendencies that are on the introverted side of things. So how can we talk about using these tendencies to our advantage in the workplace? So the first thing I would say is that if you are introvert, and it's important to know that it's a spectrum.

13:33So between being introvert and extrovert, there's a full spectrum there. And some people are in the middle being ambivert. So introvert, sometimes extrovert, other times. I'm 99 % on the scale of introvert. So if that's you, then here's a few things that you can do to be more productive. Firstly, when you're going into meetings, there are lots of meetings set up for people to do sort of brainstorming, think out loud and so on. And that just doesn't work well as an introvert. As an introvert, you need to have that creative, thoughtful reflection time by yourself. So I'd always encourage people to be thoroughly prepared for meetings so that you do your thinking before the meeting takes place.

14:07If you're leading a meeting for your team and you've got introverts and extroverts, then that means that if you want to have a brainstorming session, you need to have two separate areas. So the people who are extroverts, you keep them together to bounce ideas off each other. Because if you send them away to be quiet, then they're not going to be able to be as creative and as productive. Whereas for the introverts, you need to give them a quiet space and say, look, you've got 15 minutes to go and have a think about this and then come back when you're ready and you've digested the information. So that's the first thing to do.

14:35Secondly, with all the virtual meetings that we've got these days, people end up booking 20 meetings a day into every second you have free in your calendar, and it can be incredibly draining. So I encourage people to book in do not disturb times in their calendar, or you can use something else if it's appropriate in your business. And when you do that, you then have deeply focused, creative time where there is no interruption, no distraction of any kind, and people know not to call you unless the business is burning to the ground. and so by doing that you get to be much more productive at certain moments of your day whatever time of day works for you and the third thing that i say about introverts is that you have the power to listen very deeply i had the experience of this when i was 18 years old i got to go and live in a tibetan monastery in the foothills of the himalayas for six months and i couldn't believe the power of listening that i learned from these monks where they were clearly not doing what people do day after day which is just listening to think what should i say next and is this person right or wrong.

15:33They would just very deeply listen to me. And they'd say, ah, when I was speaking to them and then have a long silence and then reply to me. And so you can do this as an introvert, deeply listen to people. Think about the words, focus on, are they saying negative words or positive words, emotional words? Are their words getting more positive or more negative? What are you listening to in their tone of voice? What are you hearing from what you see in their body language. Listen as deeply as you can to them and then take a moment to go away and reflect on it before coming back with any decisions so that you can make the right decision each time.

16:09Fire Nation, we're really going to be digging deep right now on working hard because Richard, let's be honest, working hard, a lot of people think is the single ingredient to success. But then so many people are struggling, even though they're working really, really hard, they're just not attaining that type of success that they want. They're not really finding the results that they feel like they deserve or that their work should be producing. What are they missing? What's the ingredients that they're just not getting? There's two things that you need to reach the level of success that you want to get to.

16:45And one of these pieces is very often missing for people if they're not finding that success. So the two things to focus on are pivotal and pedestrian actions, pivotal and pedestrian actions so pivotal means that you often get some people who say i'll be successful if only i can get on oprah that would be a pivotal moment for them or they think i must get gary v to endorse my product or i must get on jld's podcast because that'll be a pivotal moment in my career but what they're not doing is earning the opportunity along the way and some people have never even worked out what that pivotal moment would be for them so some interesting research that came out with the Max Planck Institute in the early 2000s is that they dropped people in the middle of a forest and they said, see how far you can get from this starting point in six hours.

17:29And with no landmarks around them, the average that they managed to get was two miles in six hours. When you think that, you know, people would run the New York marathon in maybe three and a half hours and that's 26.2 miles. The average they got was two miles. And so when you don't have any visible landmarks of where you're heading, you don't have a North Star you're heading for, then you're never going to achieve it so you've got to make sure you've got that sense of that's the pivotal piece that i want to achieve but the second thing you have to do is do the pedestrian actions every single day that are going to go in that direction now some people are just doing the pedestrian things they've decided okay i'm going to just work super hard on these pedestrian things and eventually i guess success will fall from the sky but it won't you've got to make sure those pedestrian actions are heading you in a specific and certain direction towards the north star that you'd like to have as your outcome.

18:19And only by putting those two pieces together, pivotal, a pivotal direction and pedestrian actions that get you there, that's how you're going to reach the success that you'd like to achieve. Fire Nation, what are you doing on a day-to-day basis to put these two together? Pivotal, pedestrian, how are you making those two part of your day-to-day to mix that secret ingredient in to combine it with hard work to get to your success? Now, Richard, we talked about a lot of great stuff today. We talked about your early struggles and lessons you learned from that. We talked about how we can use introverted tendencies to our advantage.

18:53We talked about being pivotal and pedestrian as a great secret ingredient to our success to combine that with working hard. What do you want Fire Nation to walk away with? If you could sum up the theme of our conversation today, what do you want to make sure that we get? I think what's critical right now for people to understand is that our confidence in communication, our ability to connect with each other has gone down since the start of the pandemic, the lockdowns and all the virtual communication that we do. So I'd really like people to understand that if you want to live a meaningful life, you've got to focus on the connections that you have with other people.

19:26Even if you've struggled with communication, like I used to in the past, to stick with it, to study it, and to purposefully apply it every single day so that you build more deep and meaningful relationships with the people around you. Because only by so doing, When you reach the certain levels of financial success or material success that you're going to achieve, it's only going to mean something if you've built those relationships and really focused on your communication every step of the way. Give us a call to action, Richard. If we want to connect more with you, what do you have for Fire Nation?

19:57Where do you want us to go? So if you've enjoyed this and you want to go much deeper with it, then you can find more information at liftyourimpact.com forward slash the book. So liftyourimpact.com forward slash the book. and there you can find out more information. And you can also, if you fill out the form on that page, you can get the first 25 pages of the book completely for free. So you can start moving forward in the direction that we've been talking about on the show. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with RN and JLD today.

20:29So keep up that heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Richard in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. and Richard's book is Lift Your Impact. Transform your mindset, influence, and future to elevate your work team and life. If that's interesting, go to that URL that Richard mentions. Thank you, Richard, for sharing your truth, knowledge, and value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you, brother, and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Richard for sponsoring today's episode. And Fire Nation's successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals.

21:08That is why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days. And we're talking step by step. Visit thefreedomjournal.com and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. The Product Boss hosted by Jacqueline and Mina is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Product Boss helps you take your physical product sales and strategy to the next level to create your dream life with episodes like, can I have a successful product business as a side hustle? Listen to The Product Boss wherever you get your podcasts.

21:40I remember that state of constant overwhelm with my ever-growing to-do list too. My solution, hire a VA and start delegating. Learn how to optimize your time with Belay CEO's latest book, Rise Up and Lead Well, where she shares the exact framework she has used with her own assistant to maximize productivity. Text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E-2-5-5-1-2-3 to get your free copy. Thank you.