All language subtitles for 005 Highlights Interview Human Connection Expert_en

Human connection is you know, it's twofold, Arwa, for your time.

Not a lot of people covered the other side of what is happening right now, whether you're an extrovert

or an introvert.

The science shows we all need.

It sounds awful, but I'm not surprised.

No.

One thing I mean, I'm going to sound like Gary V here.

I am fired up right now.

Success without service is hollow.

That needs to be some element of giving back.

Fascinating.

That's it.

Everybody wants five figures we can get.

But if you're allowed to hug your frickin team, then long term, right?

Yeah, very long term.

Hi there.

And welcome to a new episode.

Today we have a human connection speaker with a Simon hang.

She is awarded multiple times in twenty twenty.

She was named as one of the top ten public speaking coaches globally by Yahoo!

She has many accolades, but I'm really excited to just have her on.

Tell her about her.

Ask you about your journey.

Of course, Simon, please introduce yourself.

Where might the people know you from?

Hi.

So I'm based here in Singapore.

You might know me from my social media profiles on LinkedIn and Instagram, the like.

I used to be a broadcaster as well for many, many years for the likes of Virgin Radio.

And I was on CNN all these other things.

But most recently, since about two years ago, I speak to organizations globally on the topic of human

connection.

I define personally human connection as that wonderful, energetic exchange that we've all experienced

when we can feel, see and discover ourselves in another human being.

Human connection is vital in on a much deeper level than just presenting for us.

So when we perceive ourselves to be alone or with socially distanced, we have this fight or flight

response.

We get stress hormones through our body like cortisol.

And that's actually OK is an evolutionary response.

It tells us, hey, we need to go out and connect with people.

Your loneliness is just your body saying, hey, for your wellbeing to get some oxytocin, dopamine,

feel good hormones, you need to go meet people.

But where it's dangerous is if that fight or flight response is chronic over a long period of many years.

So those stress hormones are being released chronically in your body.

It's very, very important that you have strong human connections.

So you can see the difference that, yes, public speaking is important.

Public speaking is the structure, the external capsule, I call it, of what I do.

But the message, the medicine inside that capsule of human connection is far more important to our

survival.

I have never associated stress with loneliness, but I know how it feels in my soul, in every crevice

of my body.

I know how loneliness creates stress now that the doctor has told me it was a link.

And then when I started speaking of human connection, I was like, Oh, so this is logistically, pragmatically

why when we're lonely, the brain creates a stress response.

Now I get it.

But at that time I didn't have any of that knowledge.

So I actually started think I was going crazy and I wasn't talking to any people my age.

I would spend all of my social time with older people in the nursing home visit when I visit my mum.

So let's use that as an analogy for the life of a startup founder.

You are spending every minute in your office working crazy hours.

You have interaction with people who work for you.

Now, that's very different to people who are your chosen friends, where there isn't an additional

level level of complication to that relationship.

The antidote to that problem is really that you need to cultivate friendships outside of your startup.

You need to have friends, connections beyond the workplace.

But how would you convince someone in the first three years they kind of know it's important, but they're

an introvert.

They're happy with what they're doing.

They're getting a lot of positive feedback from the growth they're experiencing.

How would they go about making that connection?

Asking from a perspective from someone who isn't social?

I believe whether you're an extrovert or an introvert, the science shows we all need connection if

someone's really driven first three years of their business and their primary concern is not to be connected,

but it is to drive the growth of the business.

Just think, how much information have you learned simply by the act of doing this podcast?

OK, so if they could see the leverage in their own growth from making human connections and the benefit

to their business, it's a two fold return on investment for that hour you spend with someone who's

cleverer than you or knows more than you about a particular subject, not only if they are like minded

person, you're going to get inspiration, connection, feel good hormones like dopamine and oxytocin,

which is a social bonding hum when you're going to get that.

But you're also going to get between the lines of the conversation.

Incredible tips on how to do your business better if your mind is making the.

Actions with what they're saying, you're also getting things that are going to drive the growth of

your business, the best inspiration I get for ideas for the social media, content marketing for the

business or keynote speeches, anecdotes for things.

It's all from those accidental moments, walking the dog, watching something we're missing that.

So human connections also fantastic for problem solving and innovation.

How would you handle a virtual business or how would you tell them to connect better and create moments

like that?

I just moderated a panel with the president of Microsoft Asia and he was talking about they've given

because it's a virtual environment, everyone's working from home what they've done to allow people

to have human connection within their families is they've just given everyone five extra leave days

a year and they gave them a full Friday off.

Also, a large proportion of their work is in India.

And obviously India has been hit tragically by covid.

So allowing people to spend more moments with the human connection within their home is still a way

to get more feel good human connection.

And you're doing it safely as well.

The aim is just to get people introverted or not to have a little bit more of what we were used to pre

covid for their mental health and their well-being.

There are three Aubert's of loneliness, OK, the first orbit is called intimate loneliness and this

is a yearning for a partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever you like.

The next orbit of loneliness is relational loneliness, and this is to do with close friends and family.

So these are people who might be yearning to mend family ties that are fractured or who feel they were

abandoned by their family.

These people who are lonely for good friends because maybe they have really good family members, but

they don't really have friends outside the family that orbits really important.

And the final orbit is actually all to do with what you've done.

It's start up funding event, and that's called collective loneliness.

That's people who have the other orbits but are yearning for a group of people who share their mission

and their purpose.

So if we can align all three of those orbits, we are well on our way to becoming the highest integration

of ourselves.

A lot of, you know, tech industry especially talks about family and everything, creating within your

business.

How realistic is creating a family in your business?

I've spoken for a lot of organizations and I think it's very I think it's very different, depending

who you're speaking to on the team.

But I admire that it's a culture that is being cultivated as a mandate, should not be about projecting

an image of family or projecting an image of a certain culture.

The mandate should be asking your employees, do they feel connected with the company's mission, with

their own well-being and health, with their relationships at the home, that they're having to probably

work from home from right now and with a sense of of connectedness with their intimate partner.

That's the real they're the real questions.

Having such a physical career, you have to go somewhere.

What did you do?

How were your first months?

Like what?

Yeah.

Could you elaborate?

Maybe.

Sure.

I'm a big believer because I've seen how little I've had to struggle for for example, for coaching

clients or speaking gigs versus people who haven't built an online presence.

I talk obviously about EastWest communication, also the intersection of mental health and a lack of

human connection.

And people can only come to me for that because I put out so much content about that.

And so if you want to be found in a time of mass retrenchment, the easiest way is just devote a day,

a week to batch recording that content and just getting it out there and trying to not get it out there

to promote you and your services, but get it out there to enrich other people's lives with the guys

that you're okay to give away your best stuff for free.

Don't you feel like you put it out and it just vanishes into the sea of billions of other content pieces?

No, my guess is maybe the content that's going out is more self-serving than others driven.

If you can just weight it towards more others driven.

It doesn't matter what you look like, what age you are.

If you're adding value to your particular niche, find out who your audience is.

Check your insights.

You're going to see traction.

How can you take what's different about you and then a subject matter that you're an expert in that

might have already been done before and you put that perspective onto it.

My speaking mentor speaks on creativity and innovation, and in his keynote speech, he says, you know,

creativity is not a whole new idea.

It's an amalgamation of two or three existing ideas.

That's it.

And build your niche around that.

I don't think it's inauthentic if we're talking from a business point of view, I don't think it's inauthentic

to target a part of the market that we can, as the definition I said earlier, was that we can see,

feel and discover ourselves in that connection.

When your followers can see themselves reflected in you, in the way you talk, in your values, your

story, your vernacular, your appearance, when they can see themselves reflected, well, then, of

course, they're going to follow you.

Why?

I absolutely love newscasting and the Internet is that you can really speak about things you're passionate

about and not worry if you deter people who don't resonate with that message.

I would like to hear from your perspective.

How is it like as a woman to start a business?

You're probably talking to other women founders.

What were some pitfalls you were going through?

How did you get through it?

Could you kind of shaped the first year?

How was it for you?

I found it very interesting, the reaction to when a woman is ambitious about figures and putting it

out there.

So that's one takeaway that I can tell you, is that it's not definitely not as accepted.

And on the other hand, I think that there is a lot of camaraderie that I found and I found women online

who were similar age, similar scale of the business.

And I started in covid throughout that whole year just videoing with them.

And we just catch up online and so I can have that cohesion.

And there privately we can talk numbers and we can talk online products and Facebook ads and share resources.

That is a beautiful place that just stopped me from feeling very alone on the journey.

And the last point on the difference between the genders that I perceive in all of this is when I watch

my partner and I watch a lot of his friends.

Talk about materialistic things, and I don't know what they're also different generation to you, a

case of the 40s and 50s and this whole rhetoric about having purpose, social impact, being of service,

that's millennial like that.

They don't have that.

Like for them, it's like, how much did I take home?

Did I get a bonus?

Did I buy the car?

Do I have the pretty girlfriend?

Like, it's so different.

And I find that very alienated you.

Govardhan both the accountability group and the women.

How often do you do it?

Would you guys talk about and also the most important part of which is you are hanging out with essentially

competitors.

From what I understand, the girls were the ones that told me, hey, this B2C courageous speaking thing,

they gave me confidence to buy the name courageous speaking dotcom.

They you know, we share resources all the time, online courses and things like that.

And it's been life changing.

I can't tell you how important it is.

Only one of the other women in the group speaks on communications, the same stuff as me.

But my biggest point that I think I mentioned really early is that as a speaker or someone moving in

the expert space, the number one valuable thing besides having thoughts because you're meant to be

a thought leader is that you have a regional perspective on whatever topic.

So we're both coaching and communication.

But the human connection slant that I bring to my public speaking training is different from her linguistics

background.

I think when you've been raised in a very competitive environment, like I was raised in a hugely competitive

household, it sends you to fight a flight where you perceive people as your competition, where they

don't have to be, and how fruitful my life became when I stopped being competitive and I started being

collaborative.

The amount of recommendations, resources that I've been sent by wholeheartedly helping others envy

is the road to what you want to do next time you see someone on line, your advisor, that is just the

arrow telling you to get off your butt to do something that you actually admire them.

And that's not my quote, by the way.

It's by Glen and Dawn Mountain, who's one of my favorite authors.

So my biggest advice is to go from competition to collaboration.

In your case, human connection is your number one focus.

If she wasn't mature, I'm pretty sure you've had examples like that in the past.

How do you deal with that?

Your job is to be compassionate once you find out whether they're going through a hard time or not.

The next step is to self preserve for you and your business.

So represent your business well.

Make sure that you leave it diplomatically because you may have to bump into them.

You may have to see them again, and you might be in the same office at an investor that you both want.

You might be sitting there.

You just want it to be as little energy draining for you as possible later on.

And then, of course, leave them like an opening later on.

If they come back and they do apologize, leave them that opening and be gracious and accept it.

Realize that the whole speaker thing, the speaker business setting that up, how is that different

than, for instance, any other business?

I mean, the first priority for any speaker is like get good at speaking, get really good at your message

and executing that message.

That's the most important thing definitely in the current economy.

Get really good at speaking on camera.

You need to be really good at communicating your messages online.

You need to have a book for credibility.

You also need to be an online course creator.

That's changed everything for me.

Then you have coaching, which is like one on one coaching, and then of course, your keynote speeches.

So that's kind of how the experts like Bryn Bouchard suggest to do a speaking business.

And definitely in my experience versus the old business model, I think it's a much better tactic to

financial stability and variety.

I would get bored if I just did speeches and nothing else.

I love the connection of giving back to people and watching people grow and change through coaching

is it's priceless.

It's amazing.

I love that.

I think based on that, we can definitely wrap up because it's been a ton of golden nuggets.

Oh.