Read the full transcript of communication coach Richard Newman’s talk titled “How To Speak: 3 Secrets To Increase Your Personal Impact” at TEDxUniversityofBristol 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
RICHARD NEWMAN: Thank you. So, what is human connection? And why does this matter to us so much? And also, when you speak, do you feel heard? Do you feel seen? I’ve been searching for the secrets of human connection for over 40 years, and it was just a few weeks ago, here in Bristol, that I feel like I finally pieced it all together, which is kind of weird, because I’ve been teaching communication for decades. There’s a little hidden ingredient that I was missing.
Now, very few people know even why I’ve been teaching communication all this time. I’d love to share the secrets of all of this with you here today. When I was four years old, my parents moved house, we went to a new area, and I went to a new school. And I remember this first day in that school so vividly.
I was sitting there at this tiny table, talking to the other children, but they didn’t talk with me. They just turned and laughed at me. And I remember being in that classroom, feeling so utterly alone. I started sobbing uncontrollably, thinking, “Why can’t I connect?”
I was starving for connection, but I just couldn’t make it happen. And I started to wonder, “Is there something different about me? What am I missing here?” And it was years later before I started to put this together, because I was a shy child, I’m highly introverted, and I’m also autistic.
Now what this means to me is that I have some challenges day to day with communication. So for example, when I was a teenager, and I was trying to join a conversation, a conversation to me would look like a 12-lane superhighway of traffic, with the traffic going 100 miles an hour in both directions, and I was looking at it thinking, “Where’s the on-ramp?” And eventually, if I figured out there was a little break in the traffic and I said something, people would just turn to me and say, “Yeah, okay,” and keep on talking.
It got to the point where I started to feel like my voice might never be heard. My ideas might never be known. And so I decided that I would study communication. I went on this mission where I started reading dozens of books on communication and got to over 100 books, reading them on every different area of communication I could imagine.
Living with Tibetan Monks
And then I decided to go here. I went to live up in the foothills of the Himalayas, where I was living with these Tibetan monks teaching them all how to speak English. And the big challenge being that there I was, cut off from the outside world for six months, living with a group of people who, when I arrived, didn’t speak a single word of English. And so I had to use my body language and tone of voice just to be able to connect with them.
It was an amazing experience. And when I came home, I then started to study acting. Now, this was a huge breakthrough for me. It’s amazing.
In acting, there’s a script, and the other actor would say their line, and then they would stop talking. And then it was my line. And I’d say my line, and the director would say, “Okay, stand here, move your arm like this, and give it some emotion.” And I’d go for it, and I’d feel connection with the other person on stage, and I’d feel connection with the audience.
And I started to think, well, maybe this is it. Is there some kind of secret formula where you can take storytelling and body language and emotional presence and put it all together in day-to-day life, and maybe that would be connection? I’m going to share with you exactly how this works, with the secrets of head, hands, and heart.
The Power of Storytelling
Let’s talk first about head.
Chris Anderson, who’s the head of TED Talks, he says that a great speaker can unite an audience by transmitting an idea from their mind into the minds of everybody who they’re listening to. And Yuval Noah Harari, in his TED Talk, he said, the reason that we’re the dominant species on the planet Earth is not because we’re somehow more powerful, because frankly, you couldn’t outrun a squirrel, but we’re more dominant because we have the power of story to galvanize millions of people to work together.
And then there’s many more TED Talks about Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey and so on. And Joseph Campbell came up with the 17 stages of the hero’s journey, 17 stages of a story.
Now that’s all very well if you’re going to create a three-hour Hollywood epic, but it’s not so useful for an everyday conversation. So what are you supposed to do there? Well, for the answers to this, I started to look to the 1900s, where Paul MacLean came up with the theory of the triune brain, the three-part brain theory. And he said there’s three essential parts of the brain that you need to engage with if you want to connect with someone. There’s the survival mind, the emotional mind, and the logical mind.
Now in storytelling terms, if you engage these three areas in this order, then you can compel people to listen to you. So you start off with current challenges around survival, then an emotionally better future, and then logically, how do you achieve this?
Now let me give you a few examples that hopefully you are aware of and you can relate to.
So firstly, let’s look at Harry Potter. In the world of Harry Potter, they engage the survival mind at the beginning because we see Harry suffering at the hands of his brutal aunt and uncle living under the stairs. Then Rey in Star Wars, we find her starving on a desolate planet. And Barbie, we find her suffering with cellulite and flat feet and fear of death.
Then we go to the emotional mind. In the emotional mind, we see Harry discover he’s a wizard and he goes travelling off to the magical world of Hogwarts. And Rey discovers the Force and she goes travelling off in the Millennium Falcon. And then Barbie discovers there’s a real world and goes travelling off to make everything perfect again.
And then finally, the logic kicks in and our brain says, “Okay, how exactly is Harry going to defeat the Dark Lord of Death? And how exactly is Rey going to defeat the Dark Lord of Death? And how exactly is Barbie going to defeat her dark thoughts about death, I guess?” I mean, it’s the same story, but just with a couple of ingredients changed.
Now if you use this when you’re telling a story, then you can really compel people to listen to your ideas. But that in itself isn’t enough, because your ideas will not speak for themselves. You have to do it. And so therefore, we need to look next at your physiology.
The Importance of Body Language
Now as an autistic person, I had been analysing people’s non-verbal behaviour for decades, trying to figure out the magic formula for how you could get a better connection with people. And then when I finally thought I was onto something, I built together a scientific research study, which was published in the journal Psychology, and worked with UCL, University College of London, and specifically Professor Adrian Furnham, who’s the head of psychology there. They’ve been working in the field for many years, one of the most well-regarded psychologists in the world. We spent 18 months working on designing this study so it could be the most rigorous, irrefutable study we could come up with.
We involved over 2,000 people in this, people aged from 18 to 65, men and women, people from loads of different backgrounds, so we could prove that this was truly universal, and we tested it in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. And what we were testing was essentially, can you change a couple of aspects in your non-verbal behaviour? If you move away from what most people do day-to-day, and shift across to a more effective method, would that change your ratings for various things like how confident you are, how charismatic you are, and so on? Can we make that change universally?
It turned out that you can do it, and the results were quite startling, way beyond what we thought. I’ll just give you a couple of the examples now. Now, just imagine this. You can go into your next conversation, the next person you meet with, the next team meeting you go to, and you can increase how inspiring people think you are.
You don’t have to change your words. You don’t have to change who you are or what you’re wearing. You just change a couple of key areas of your communication through your body language. You can increase how inspiring people think you are by more than 25%.
And honestly, when we ran the study, we were hoping for maybe a 5% shift would be good. 7% would be fantastic. This is way beyond what we thought. Now what about being a good leader?
Now you might be the leader of a team or a department, but sometimes you just want to be seen as a thought leader in a conversation. This one went up by 44%. You’re the same person. You say the same words.
You’re wearing the same clothes, but you can shift this with a couple of key areas of your communication. And lastly, this one blew me away. Think about getting people to vote for you in an election of any kind. We found that you can shift this one by a 57% increase just by changing a couple of things that are dead easy for everyone to use, and it works universally.
Now I’m going to share with you what this looks like with a couple of examples now. So to do this, I need you all to be upstanding. So everybody, please stand up for a moment. Put down what you’re holding.
I’m just going to copy my body position. So I’d like you to stand with your feet completely together. Feet together. Sort of standing rigidly, feet together down here.
Now in this position, the science tells us that you are seen as a low status pushover. Now what does this mean? Let’s get some common sense tests behind this. I’d like you to take your left hand. Left hand, that’s it. The one on this side. I’d like you to place it on the shoulder of the person next to you, and in a moment, you’re going to give them a shove to push them over. One, two, three, go.
Push. There you go. The whole audience falls on the floor. So you’re all deemed to be a pushover. It’s very easy to push over with a light nudge. Why? Because gravity’s working against you, because you have a high center of gravity in that position. Now just take a look at this.
If you just move your feet slightly to get about feet shoulder width apart, take any tension out of your knees, in this position, gravity’s working better with you, giving you more gravitas. So again, try it out. Just place your hand on the shoulder of the person nearest to you, and give them a little nudge. See how they feel?
Notice they feel stronger. The whole audience is still standing. So suddenly gravity works with you, you have more gravitas, and it’s a better position universally. It doesn’t matter what your gender is, your age, or your background, it gives you a greater sense of gravitas.
Now we’ll try the next bit sitting down. So everybody take a seat. Thank you for doing that. Now importantly, I wanted to say on this piece, there’s a well-known TED talk that talks about body language and power posing, where they’re talking about shifting your body to make you feel better.
What we did in this study was the exact opposite. We wanted to take a look at what happens when you stand or sit in various different positions, and how does that impact the other people, therefore impacting your connection, not just how you feel.
The Power of Hand Gestures
So for another part of this, we looked at hands. Now your hands are so important, because if you look at some research behind this, Susan Goldin-Meadow at the University of Chicago, she found that when you’re gesturing more frequently, it speeds up your cognitive processing, so you can say more intelligent things.
Also, there was a great study done by the Science of People on TED Talks, very relevant for today, where she said if you take a look at a TED Talk that’s got over a million views, and another TED Talk on the same subject that’s got just a thousand views, the one that has millions of views has got at least twice as many gestures, and sometimes three times as many. So we know they’re good for connecting with people, and they’re good for your thoughts. But the question is, how should you gesture? Let’s try a few out.
Firstly, just put your hands down by your side, and imagine you’re just sort of gesturing below your waist height here. We call this penguin gestures. This is just sort of low-level, limp gestures, and it looks appalling and gets the worst possible ratings. Don’t try it.
Now, just try this one. Bring your hands up, keep your elbows against your sides. This is called T-Rex gestures. So T-Rex arms are pretty useless, and it looks like you’re fairly useless in this position as well.
However, try this. Keep gesturing, and just move your elbows slightly to the side, if you can, from where you’re sitting there. That’s great. Now, in this position, if you keep your elbows away from your body, which most people don’t. Most people do this. You keep your elbows away from your body. If you’re doing palms up, then it gives the impression of an open message, such as, “Nice to see you. Do you have any questions?”
Now, try it palms down. If you go into a palms down position, imagine that you’re pushing something heavy away from you. In this position, it’s great for doing a strong, closed statement, such as, “This is definitively the best answer. I need that by two o’clock on Friday,” palms down.
Now, if you’re congruent with this, then suddenly, this allows you to be more connected with people. They give you better ratings. But this in itself isn’t enough. We’ve got to make sure that we also think about heart.
Connection Requires Vulnerability
You can’t just tell a story and wave your arms around and expect people to connect with you. And this hit me profoundly just a few weeks ago, when I was rehearsing part of this TED talk, and I said to people I was speaking to, “What did you think?” And they said, “Well, frankly, Richard, we just didn’t feel connected with you.” I said, “That might be a problem, because the theme of the TEDx event I’m at is connection.”
So I think we might need to work on this. So we started workshopping it, and very quickly, I found myself on my knees, sobbing uncontrollably. I thought, “Why am I doing this? This is weird.” I haven’t sobbed like this for over 40 years, since that first day at school when I was four years old. What’s happening? I suddenly realized what it was. So back then, that pain that I felt as an autistic child growing up, I repeatedly felt rejected.
I felt ignored. I felt left out. And so I decided to make a choice, and maybe it’s a choice that you have made. I don’t know you, but maybe during your life, you’ve had struggles. You’ve had pain. You’ve had rejection of some kind. And when that happens, we all have a choice. You can choose to venture forth and risk the pain of rejection over and over again.
Or you can make the other choice, which I made. You can choose to put armor over your heart to avoid that pain. And that’s what I’d been doing. And as a result of that, I was feeling disconnected and numb in those associations with people.
So I’m here to let you all know to please take your armor off. Whoever it is that’s hurt you in the past, whatever happens, don’t let them take you away from you. Instead risk showing up. Risk the pain of rejection, because it’s far better to risk that pain than never feel truly alive.
And connection, if we’re honest about it, requires courage. It requires humility. It requires vulnerability. It requires showing up and being seen for who you really are. And why does this matter so much right now? The reason being, if you go back a few years, remember the pandemic, where we’re all walking around and wearing those masks, how difficult it was to connect with people? Well, these days, people are still wearing an emotional mask. We have to take them off, because we’re craving human to human connection.
And it’s so much more important now. In the course of my lifetime, I have never seen a more divided world. There are wars escalating around the world. There are people and politicians who are getting more divisive with each other.
And it’s time that we made a change to this situation. And it’s just possible that if you are willing to share this message, to share your voice, share your heart, if you let your body talk, if you use the power of storytelling, then maybe you can bring people together. You can help families come back together. You can help teams pull in the same direction.
Maybe you can even help countries to unite with each other. And if you do that, if you share your heart and share your voice, then maybe you can tilt this world in a more positive direction. And that’s what I believe is an idea worth sharing. Thank you all so much.
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