Raamon Newman is the Co-founder / CEO of New Mavericks, a leadership development consultancy based out of Los Angeles, USA and Sydney, Australia.
He is the co-author of the book: The Science of Protection: How Leaders Gain an Unfair Advantage to Create Stellar Success. Over the last 25 years he and his business partner Paolo D’Angelo have been globally trusted Leadership Breakthrough Protection Partners to over 60 top CEOs & execs of multi million and billion revenue companies.
FMM: When did you realize a calling, to help protect leaders’ achievement and progress?
Realizing my calling to serve leaders in protecting their achievement and progress was an evolution. I was on a full-time meditating program as a full time meditating monk for 10 years meditating eight hours a day for 10 years. We had to come up with a monthly financial amount in order to cover our room and board. I had sponsorship for the first year, I actually only intended to do one year, then I decided that I wanted to do another year but I needed to get support financially to do that because my sponsors said they would only do it for one year.
I ended up actually teaming up with a fellow monk. His name’s Paulo D’Angelo who’s my business partner, we’ve been working together for over 22 years, and he came to me and said, “Look, this is what I do to support myself on this program.” He’d already been there for like five years. And he said I could work with him and find business leaders, we could support on a deeper mental level so they have greater mental capacity and vision to make the best decisions by de bunking their stresses, realizing the greater level of truth about what’s going on in their situation so they inspire more support to be victorious for everyone sake not matter what situation they’re in.
We teamed up and I brought in some business leaders that I knew and we started having calls with them. We’d meditate from 7am – 12pm, have lunch and we had our afternoons free to work on personal or other life supporting projects, and then we’d meditate again in the evening for a few hours. This is how it all started.
FMM: Over the last 25 years, you and your business partner Paolo D’Angelo have been globally trusted Leadership experts. Share your background.
I realized I had a real purpose and knack for supporting and developing leaders when I went to New York City, after I left that monastic environment in 2007. I was in NYC doing a acting program for 2007 – 2008, when the global financial crisis was going on. I was doing an acting program abecause I wanted to reintegrate back into the world. Acting is all about great connecting with others. I did spent a lot of time connecting with myself meditating full time. So acting was a way for me to bring out that deep connection to self and extend it to others through the acting experience. So, the financial crisis was going on, and I realized wow, a lot of these very experienced intelligent smart leaders have caused a financial calamity for themselves and their companies and the entire economy. I saw all the stress that was creating in the city with people getting laid off and all the uncertainty and I realized that they had the same problem that I did as a competitive athlete. I burned out as a competitive athlete in my early 20s because I was so focused on outer achievement and progress, that I wasn’t really taking care of myself on the inside, my inner development in terms of my ability to recover, to develop my mental capacities and inner strength. And so even though I’d done very well, on the outer development level, having been a top three nationally ranked athlete, I burnt out because I wasn’t taking care of that inner side of things.
There and then I realized that was my calling, that I had to support business leaders in their inner development as the basis and foundation for protecting and enhancing their outer development. So over the last 25 years, Paulo and I, we’ve been globally trusted leadership development experts and partners to leaders of multi million & multi billion dollar companies. We able to do this because of the background I mentioned above of being a competitive athlete who burnt out, Paolo was a competitive body builder before becoming a monk at 25, and then becoming a full-time meditating monk for 15 years, 6 of those years up in the Himalaya’s.
Through this training and experience, we gained a lot of insights, a lot of awareness about what really allows people to not only achieve and also protect themselves and that achievement in the process so that they can continue to achieve as much as they want for as long as they want.
I realized in that environment of being a full time meditating monk, the value of what that represents for the world. Monks around the world represent that silent, peaceful, coherent quality, and that they’re enlivening those qualities from that deepest level of life, that level of consciousness, the unified quanutm field, which is beyond our conscious and subconscious mind, to benefit and uplift, everyone in the world. So that was why I went from just coming into one year to end up doing 10 years because it was such a profound, noble purpose. That I felt around that until I felt like I wanted to integrate back into the world and contribute on a more hands on service level, which is what we’re doing now with top business leaders.
FMM: You have worked with 60 top CEOs & execs of multi million and multi billion revenue companies. How have you enhanced their CEO Midas touch?
We’ve enhanced CEOs Midas touch by improving their leadership performance, because leadership performance makes or breaks a company’s business performance. Business performance is on the conscious level of culture and strategy and execution of that strategy. Leadership performance, which is primarily about accuracy of decision making on a subconscious level, drives business performance. Making great decisions comes from having the clarity, coherence, capacity, creativity, and being a good catalyst and being able to capitalize on situations and opportunities because your environment and the people in it support you. What drives leadership performance is developing what we call leadership consciousness. Leadership consciousness is all about the quality of your consciousness, the amount of awareness and perception you have, the amount of settledness and silence that you have to have good energy, to be in tune with what is good and evolutionary, for yourself and for others, and to really have a grasp of the deeper knowledge and truth that will enable you to be fulfilled in yourself. The reality is achievement is a byproduct of your fulfillment.
Yet fulfillment is not something you achieve, fulfillment is something you experience through your mind being settled and your heart being open and expanded and content. This is what fulfillment really is and this is the basis from which all leaders really should function from in order to enhance and protect their and the team’s achievement and progress.
We have special time and field tested proven techniques and technologies that raise leadership consciousness, which improves leadership and business performance, that we apply specifically to our CEOs situation so everything they do is more supported and they get those lucky breaks that either neutralizes and dissolves negativity or obstacles they may be facing and enhances positive things they want to see happen.
FMM: Share your greatest client story.
Our greatest client story is working with a CEO over the course of the final 10 years of his career. He had taken the helm of his company when it was about doing $8 million in revenue and over the space of his 35 year career he grew the company close to 8 billion and in the last 10 years of this tenure.
We helped him help the company grow from 1 billion to a 7 billion in that time period. We felt through our work with him that we’d helped enhance his leadership performance which enhanced the business performance. We actually had an experience the first year we worked with him where he had the best year of his career at that point and he won CEO of the Year for his country. At the end of that year, he said, “Guys, I want a break”. We said, “Why do you want to break?” and he said, “Well, I want to see if it’s just me or is it us working together that allowed me to have this great year.” We thought okay, that’s very fair and practical, as a CEO, you want to see what’s causing the effect. And so we said yes, let’s have a break and we left him with one question. “You have to work out why you won this award”. Five months passed, and then we checked back in with him and said, “How’s it going?” And he said, “it’s not going great. My deals aren’t working. And I don’t know why. And so we asked him, “Have you answered that question that we left you with?” He said, “No, I haven’t even thought about it.” This is a common CEO problem, they get so busy and preoccupied with outside progress they don’t take enough time to reflect deeply about the truth that will protect and enhance their progress”. So, we revealed to him that when he, or anyone, wins an award like that then they have to make it about something greater. They have to focus on a greater purpose and develop themselves to another level and they have to help others develop themselves to another level because they’ve already satisfied their own individualistic ego. They have to extend themselves to supporting others in developing and growing. There’s actually a book I came across recently called “Death by Ego” by David M. Carlson and it talks about how too much overconfidence and hubris in a company will literally destroy a company, so he was having that moment for himself. He breathed a sigh of relief when he heard the reason why he had to work out why he won this award and said, “That makes a lot of sense. Can we keep working together? So we did and the company grew to $3 billion in a few years.
The next thing he had to deal with was an opportunity to double the size of the company from 3 to 6 billion through a reverse merger acquisition, his smaller better performing company acquiring a larger, less performing company. He approached his major shareholders to get support to do this and they said, “No, we don’t want to do this. It’s going to ruin the performance of the company, the culture of the company and the stock price”. So he comes back to us and says, guys, I know we have to do this, but my major shareholders are not supporting me. This is another common CEO problem in that they have a vision for something, but somehow their environment and the people in it don’t get it and they don’t support it. So he came back to us and we said, look, you can continue to debate and argue and force and push and try and get them to see this or we can just work on you owning this reality more fully, more clearly inside yourself. He agreed to working on himself first. Owning the reality you want to create is a key thing a CEO has to be able to do because when they see it clearly in themselves they’ve created the basis for creating it outside themselves. Then it’s easier to create and transfer and project what they see outwardly to others. So we did that for a few weeks and then he went back to talk to the major shareholders again. We helped him with the presentation and what to project and the major shareholders all said “ok, yes, let’s give this a go!”
This wasn’t because they got the idea. It was because they could see he believed and owned that he was going to create this new reality for the company. So that was the first obstacle, the second obstacle was making the deal work, which involved long hours, tight timeframes, many multiple go no-go hurdles, and many possibilities for stress. He said despite all this he felt like he was the eye of the storm, calm and relaxed, and as a result, the deal fell into place.
This is what happens when a CEO is the eye of the storm, they have a strong coherent leadership consciousness, that clearly knows the reality they want to create and because they’re so clear about it, they become a coherent magnet to attract that reality and create it outside of themselves.
The company continued to grow and he evolved on to being chairman of the company. By the end of his tenure, when he retired in 2019, he was inducted into his country’s Business Hall of Fame.
FMM: What would people be surprised to know about you?
It would be that I was a top competitive athlete who burned out and I went from being extremely outward and athletic to becoming a full time meditating monk at the age of 25.
I was gonna do that for one year and ended up doing it for 10 years, because it was such an empowering purposeful experience that was serving my evolution and that of the world that I just kept rolling with it until it reached a natural fulfillment.
FMM: Tell us about your book, The Science of Protection
The book was inspired by Tony Robbins when Paolo was listening to him talk about the science of achievement, which is focus, massive action and grace. This is definitely a very simple and powerful formula for achieving. Then we realized people can do this and then somehow they crash and burn, or they get corrupted or diminished in some way in their health or wealth or their relationships so they can’t protect and build on it. We realized that the value of protection had to be there also, which is not outside protection based on contracts or insurance or security or cybersecurity or anything like that. That’s all reactionary. That’s after the fact. We’re talking about averting the problem, the danger, the loss before it arises. This proactive inside out protection is the highest form of protection. Nobody really wants to suffer or see others suffering, especially leaders with great responsibility so we felt this protection had to be enlivened in leaders’ awareness again. When you think about it, the primary role of any great leader is to be able to protect themselves and the people and the progress they want to experience. So the book is really about the inner dynamics, how protection is actually a neurophysiological reality in our brains, when we have a very coherent brain, a lot of coherence between our prefrontal cortex, which is where we make our very important strategic decisions and planning and execution and our amygdala, which is the fight, flight, freeze part of the brain, which is actually the lowest function of the amygdala.
The highest quality of the amygdala, when it’s in coherence with the prefrontal cortex, is vigilance, the ability to have foresight to be proactive, to not be fearful or in doubt, but to know what is required next, in order to protect progress unfolding.
FMM: “We’re talking about proactive universal inside-out based protection.” Explain.
Proactive inside out protection is actually a universal force of nature that creates, maintains and dissolves based on what is good for the whole to survive and thrive and evolve. Protection is universal in nature, even the planets are organized with an intelligence so they don’t smash into each other. There’s an innate ability when we’re in a good state of mind that we are naturally protected to grow and evolve ourselves while we’re enjoying ourselves.
When we lose connection to that coherent force of protection we can cause injury or damage to ourselves or others or our environment. So protection is kind of hardwired into us. It’s a universal force of intelligence that we want to have lively in our awareness. This is what the book really goes deeply into.
FMM: What are the key questions that your book answers?
The key questions our book answers is really what are the steps of how to protect yourself and others as you achieve and progress so you can continue to do so for as long as you want without suffering. We answer what is protection? Why is it important? And how do you go about it? We’ve seen many CEOs and executives of very top companies like Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Samsung Nintendo Apple Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Fonterra, ESPN Fox News, Papa John’s Survey Monkey, Theranos and Tata Motors have actually had to step down or exit their roles due to stress induced performance and health issues, conflict, unethical, inappropriate behavior, and unfortunately, unexpected death and suicide.
So the science of protection is a six step journey to help ensure your achievement and progress is based on the firm ground of universal protection through the components of:
1. Purification, which gives you the clarity and simplicity to know what’s going on.
2. Coherence, which enables you to unify things within yourself and with people in your environment.
3. Leadership state, that creative, awake, alert state of mind to avert problems, and threats and see opportunities as soon as they arise.
4. Capacity, to handle any situation or circumstance, whether it’s a great challenge or a great opportunity.
5. Spontaneous right action, to be a great catalyst that inspires your environment to want to gather around and support you and your vision.
6. Deserving power, to capitalize on opportunities by having that deserving that allows you to fulfill what you want because we all want things but at the end of the day, we only get what we deserve.
The more we have that good merit, that good energy, then we naturally deserve what we want and we’re protected in getting what we want. We always hear the story, people achieving things or teams winning things because they have some deservingness because of the effort they put in mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually, to bring about that result.
FMM: What’s next for you?
To continue to do what I do to serve more leaders in really evolving themselves to so their inner development at least matches their outer development, to help them realize fulfillment is the ultimate goal. Achievement comes and goes, so the ability to be fulfilled and letting your achievement and progress be a byproduct of you being fulfilled in who you are and what you do is really the highest. Really serving leaders so they clearly understand and experience this as the basis of making great decisions for everyone..
Being fulfilled means we’re not so caught up and attached and stressed by our achievement and progress. We want to bring this out in a big way to the masses because ultimately everyone is the CEO of their own life. So taking all this knowledge that we’ve learned over the last 25 years working with top CEOs and bring it to the masses to help everyone to funciton more like a leader and be less of a follower because they have the mental capacity and are empowered to think and decide what is best for themselves, rather than deferring to things outside themselves that may or may not be in their best interests.
We have a couple of app ideas that we’re looking to bring out to really give the masses access to this wisdom of leadership for themselves. So whatever they’re doing in terms of leading themselves, their family, team or company, they’re able to be in that highest state of leadership and vibration.
The universe doesn’t really respond to what we want, it responds to our vibration, meaning our good mental and emotional energy, so the more we’re able to take care of our energy and our vibration to be in a good state of mind and heart, then the more we’re able to attract the things that we want and deserve to experience.
