Raamon Newman is the co-founder and CEO of New Mavericks, a leadership development consultancy based out of Los Angeles, USA, and Sydney & Melbourne, Australia.
Over the last 20 years, Raamon and business partner, Paolo D’Angelo, have been globally trusted “Leadership Breakthrough Protection Partners” to over 50 top CEOs & executives of multi-million and billion revenue companies. They’ve helped these leaders protect and enhance their and their team’s achievement and progress through optimizing their mental capacity and leadership skills to know what is required to inspire more support for what they envision.
Raamon is a former top three, nationally-ranked track athlete, 2-time national cross country team winner, 4-time state championship winning rugby player, entrepreneur, 10-year full-time meditating monk, Meisner trained actor & philanthropist for peace projects and youth education. He’s a graduate from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, with a Bachelor’s of Commerce in Marketing.
While engaged in acting training in NYC during the 2008 global financial crisis, he realized a calling to help protect leaders’ achievement and progress through deeper inner development of their leadership capacity and awareness. This helps them make the best decisions which protects the interests and success of everyone. This has become his passionate life purpose.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up writing a book?
I was born and raised in New Zealand and spent the first two decades of my life being a typical Kiwi, sport obsessed kid. I excelled in running and rugby, winning national and provincial titles in both sports. At the end of my teenage years, I attempted and missed qualifying for the World Junior Champs by a couple of seconds in the 1500m and got serious respiratory and digestive problems resulting in burnout.
I felt I’d lost my soul’s purpose in life of becoming a professional athlete. After going through a few months of depression and trying to numb the pain by eating and drinking more I realized, “I required deeper more profound knowledge of how my mind and body really works.” I left New Zealand, after graduating from the University of Auckland with a Bachelors in Commerce and Marketing, to do my big OE (overseas experience).
I decided to go check out MIU in Fairfield Iowa as they had a more holistic education system that I was looking for. They encourage the use of TM (transcendental meditation) as it is shown to help develop brain coherence and learning. I learned this simple and effortless mental technique after burning out to help recover.
After a few years working and studying there I’d developed a huge hunger at the age of 25 to deeper develop myself and with the encouragement of a friend I was directed to a program in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina where I could meditate full time, 8 hours a day / 7 days a week. This was the real deal when it comes to silent monastic living, with over 300 men from different countries, ethnic backgrounds and religions around the world. I was initially only going to commit for one year and then go off and live a worldly life again. But that didn’t happen because tens of thousands of hours of deep silent meditation and 10 years later I was still there. You could say I got a bit addicted to the experience!
At that 10 year mark, I felt my cup of inner development was full and overflowing and wanted to return and re-integrate with the world again, to see how I could serve with my new level of awareness, silence, coherence and energy. My no-holds barred reintegration entailed going to New York City for a six-week summer acting program that later turned into two years. This just so happened to be during the global financial meltdown 2007-2008, where I felt there was a lot of stress and chaos going on in the city.
Between my athletic and monk experiences, the acting, training, performing and the financial meltdown, I felt a calling well up inside of me to serve leaders — to help them develop their inner mental capacity to make better decisions that protect themselves and those they lead as they achieve and progress. This coincided with teaming up with my business partner who has had a similar journey to myself, being an athlete and then a monk for 15 years, six of those in the Himalayas.
Over the last two decades we’ve worked with over 50 CEOs and executives, most of them for 5–10 years, helping them work through the pressures and challenges of their role and have more support for what they envisioned. We’ve witnessed and helped some great success stories.
We helped a CEO grow his company from $1B to $7B in seven years in a tight margin, competitive industry when he was initially struggling to make bigger deals happen. He went on to secure a multi-billion dollar deal, the biggest in his company’s corporate history, which he credits to the support he was getting from us. He retired in 2019 and was honored by being inducted into his country’s business hall of fame. We helped a leader break through from barely breaking even to 8x his franchise operation and go IPO within 5 years.
We’ve also seen leaders get undermined by unexpected events like conflict with investors that forced a founder to leave his own company only to go on to start a new company and outperform his old one with a few years. We’ve witnessed a leader lose an $80 million business, which we forewarned him about 9 months earlier but it fell on deaf ears. Fortunately, he came back and asked our opinion of what was required to bounce back and we helped him regain his 8-figure fortune within a few years. We had one client who was achieving like he’d never achieved before only to have a sudden stroke. We’d been warning him for 2 years to give more attention to his health (he would hear and feel this but never did anything about it). Fortunately, he was able to bounce back to near 100% coordination based on some special recovery processes to which we introduced him.
These and other experiences were the catalyst of our new book The Science of Protection: How Leaders Gain An Unfair Advantage to Create Stellar Success. The book gives leaders insights into how to protect themselves and those they lead as they strive to achieve. The unfair advantage is not something that comes from external control or manipulation, it comes from greater inner development of your own unique intelligence that no one else has.
I’ve resided in Los Angeles for the last ten years and continue to serve leaders & investors of publicly-listed companies in the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand.
What do you hope your readers take away from this book?
The biggest hope we’d like readers to take away is that admits all the pressure, stresses and chaos of leadership and life that there is an underlying universal force of intelligence that protects us as we achieve and progress so we don’t have to suffer from the negativity that often comes up when we’re trying to make a difference. This protective intelligence/consciousness is so orderly and coherent that it creates, maintains and dissolves based on what is good for us and everyone to survive, thrive and evolve.
When you’re able to align your awareness, thinking and feeling with this value of protection (like your immune system protects you from diseases when it’s functioning normally) then you’re awake, alert and coherent with what is required to protect and enhance your and everyone around you achievement and progress; be it with health, wealth, happiness, relationships and/or reputation.
The book is re-enlivening the primary duty of a leader to protect and enhance the progress of those they lead. This has been lost sight of in our age of accelerated change, as we’ve seen over the last two decades top CEO’s and executives aged 30-60, from top companies such as Deutsch Bank, Goldman Sachs, Samsung, Nintendo, Apple, JP Morgan, Fonterra, ESPN, Fox News, GE, Papa John’s, SurveyMonkey, Tata Motors and more, having to step down or exit their roles due to stress-induced performance and health issues, conflict, unethical or inappropriate behavior, and unfortunately unexpected early death and suicide.
We’ve seen the #metoo movement, toxic workplaces and discrimination in the workforce coming to the surface. This points to a lack of human and leadership development; business problems are really human problems. As we develop the mental, emotional and spiritual capacity of leaders and those they lead, then these problems naturally subside and more fulfilling, productive and protected progress can unfold.
Over 80% of organizations anticipate a shortfall of leaders in the next 5 years. Over 80% of organizations say it’s important to develop leaders at all levels. Yet, only 5% have fully implemented leadership development training at all levels.
These statistics show organizations realize the value and importance of people but lack the implementation to actually developing their people. This is usually because the process and objectives of business supersede the subjects, which is ironic because a business can’t exist and improve without people who think, decide and act better. We hope readers will come away with a better understanding of why spending a small amount of high quality time working on themselves and their people, to upgrade their awareness, coherence and clarity, will enable them to better work on and in their business.
The use of the word protection in leadership sounds like it’s adverse to taking risks, which is what leaders have to/should do?
The opposite is actually truer in the case of The Science of Protection. Protection in the context we’re using is offensive, not defensive.
When you have protection, meaning a strong coherent mind, nervous and immune systems, you can actually take on more, you have more ability to discern the right calculated risks to take, where you won’t lose or get corrupted or diminish in your health, wealth, happiness, relationships and reputation in the process. Through having protection from the inside out you can actually accomplish as much as you want for as long as you want.
Protection gives freedom because your thinking and actions are aligned with nature’s intelligence and what’s good for the whole to expand. The nature of life is to expand and progress and all we have to do is be in tune with this orderly nature, just like the sun comes up every day and does its thing without causing problems, it only nourishes everyone and things with its light and warmth. This is how leaders have to be because they have the most primary influence on the performance of a company.
One of the richest men in the world and greatest investors of all time, Warren Buffet, leads and invest based on protection because he says to all the CEO’s of the companies he invests in:
“Rule#1 Don’t lose money, Rule#2 Follow rule #1”.
The book is not about reactive, outside-in protection like insurance, legal contracts, body guards, security surveillance systems or cyberware. These are useful but they’re limited, after the fact, usually when the damage is already done.
The book is about proactive, inside-out protection that enables you to not be affected, diminished or corrupted by stress, fear, pressure, negativity, vices or incoherences that cause costly mistakes, losses, and missed opportunities. This is activated through the six components of The Science of Protection which are purification, coherence, leadership state, capacity, spontaneous right action and deserving power.
The overall purpose of the book is to give leaders a more heightened awareness & support to proactively see opportunities, avert danger, suffering & harm before they arise, so their achievement, progress, interests & success are highly protected & enhanced moving forward.
What were the top three mistakes you made publishing your book and what did you learn from them?
Not spending enough time in the macro planning stage was one mistake. We had all this knowledge from the last two decades working with leaders and we just wanted to get it out into a document. So, we had to go back and reorganize it into a more orderly structure, which took more time. Maybe this was necessary in order to find the new theme we were bringing out because we didn’t know what that was at the start. There is a bit of an organic process you have to allow to release something original.
Printing the first batch of 50 books too soon was another mistake. Best to receive and fully read the sample paperback copy first because you can pick up on more things as opposed to editing from a screen.
I also should have collected endorsements sooner so they could be incorporated in the first print runs. So, give people you want an endorsement from the e-book version as soon as you can and follow up to get their endorsement in a couple of weeks, even if they haven’t yet had time to fully read the whole book, most people get the gist and quality of it reading the first 25 pages.
When will you consider your book a success?
Just getting the book out is a success at this point. We spent 3 years putting this together on a part-time basis, so just having a finished book that represents our thinking and life’s work so far feels great. In terms of building on this success, I would say the next step is getting as many leaders as possible to absorb this understanding about protection as the basis of leadership achievement would be great.
If we can get 10,000 leaders of publicly-listed companies to read the book, that will be an exceptional milestone. Having 20 of these leaders inspired to work with us this year to fully implement our Leadership Breakthrough Protection Program would be the next great milestone, because every self-respecting leader does require a behind-the-scenes counsel who can really help them unfold their full potential so that their role as a leader is more enjoyable and fulfilling.
Over the next 10 years we’d like all leaders, especially of publicly-listed companies, to have adopted and implemented the science of protection as the foundation to protecting and enhancing their science of achievement. Great sages have said the cause of pandemics is greed, individual and collective greed of leaders and citizens. The science of protection helps avert and purify greed so we can avert things like what we’re going through now with COVID-19.
This snippet below is from the first chapter, The Universal Force of Protection:
A Global Alpha coherent brain, which we’ll discuss in more depth in chapter 4, is a highly integrated world-class brain. The author of World-Class Brain, Harald Harung, describes it this way:
“A world class brain has one feature that makes it stand out: More integrated functioning. A world-class brain works in a more coherent, relaxed, wakeful, and efficient way. Plus, it has more intensely happy and fulfilling peak experiences and a greater moral sense, making top performers happier, more intelligent and effective.”
That means every single piece and part you are working on will naturally become even more right, strong, and positive, just by you focusing on your inner connection and development. Protection is freedom from everything that doesn’t matter, from everything that weighs you down, and from everything that negatively diminishes your life and your business.
You are responsible to yourself, to your business, and to your people to expand your personal capacity, to ascend to this new level of leadership, to gain protection, and to protect those around you. Protection is the long lost, under-recognized role of a leader. Without protection, achievement becomes more difficult (dangerous even, given the risk of one unfortunate event destroying years’ worth of achievements). This is greater than any act of compassion towards your people because, with protection, you will automatically create an environment where they can flourish in security.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
Our biggest challenge has been communicating the value of what we do to leaders because we work on a very subtle, yet powerful, unseen level of their mind and awareness to help them be more awake to what is going on and what is required of them. The mind is abstract, yet everything starts from this unseen value of the mind. So, the book has been a great vehicle for overcoming this challenge. It’s like our blockbuster content where people can take a deep dive into the value of what we do and come out with a broader understanding of how things work from the inside out.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before publishing your book?
I’d say knowing all the people you require to have on your team to bring the book to market. I didn’t realize we needed both a copy editor to guide the structure of the book plus a proof editor to check all the grammar and spelling. Then you need a book formatter / publisher who works out how best to present the book internally and externally. We designed our own cover with our book formatter but you can also hire someone with this specific expertise. Then there’s finding someone who knows how to build a book website that digitally presents the book in its best light.
Get really clear on who you are and what you represent as a unique creative intelligence in this world. Any book is just a reflection and expression of the consciousness of the author(s). I’ve realized and been told also that my role in this world is to be a wise protective counsel to leaders and people, even my name means that. The more you know who you are as a person and leader, the more the book will just flow out of you as long as you create the time and space for that to happen. There’s a lot of things and distractions that can stop this flow from happening so you have to be consistently disciplined in putting time into it every day or week, otherwise, the book gets stuck inside you and may never come out which would be a great shame for you and the world. So, it’s about getting yourself in the right space on the inside. My business partner, Paolo D’Angelo, said it best:
“There is no outside, because the outside is always a reflection of the inside”
How can we get in touch with you?
Thanks for asking. It’s been a joy to answer your pertinent questions, thank you for the opportunity to share about the book. To learn more about The Science of Protection and what leaders are saying go to ScienceofProtection.org. If you’d like to discuss how you can implement the Science of Protection into your leadership then feel free to check out NewMavericks.com or email us as support@newmavericks.com to start a conversation. You can also find me on the following social media LinkedIn, Instagram. Science of Protection is available on Amazon.
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