Nobody's Really Listening | Julian Treasure | Sean's Learning Adventure

What if the biggest communication problem today isn't how we speak, but how we listen? In this conversation, I sit down with Julian Treasure, one of the world's leading experts on listening, communication, and human connection, to explore why so many people feel unheard despite living in the most connected era in history.

We dive into how social media, constant distractions, and noisy environments are quietly destroying our ability to truly listen, and why that has consequences far beyond conversations. Julian explains how poor listening fuels loneliness, polarization, broken relationships, ineffective leadership, and even costs businesses trillions of dollars through miscommunication. He shares practical tools like the RASA listening framework, discusses why silence is an underrated communication skill, and reveals the habits that separate great leaders from average ones.

If you want to become a better communicator, build stronger relationships, lead more effectively, or simply connect more deeply with the people around you, this episode is packed with practical insights you can start applying immediately.

What's one conversation in your life that could completely change if you spent more time listening and less time preparing your response?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Listening is is the b the basis of the whole thing. You know, I I always talk about a pyramid in in my teaching. Listening, if you imagine a pyramid with three tiers, listening is the base. You can't communicate well if you can't listen. You can't be a good speaker if you can't listen, because you need to understand the people you're talking to every time. The middle tier is powerful speaking. So the bottom tier is conscious listening. That's the phrase I use, and we can unpack that in a moment. The middle tier is powerful speaking, and the top tier is presenting, where, you know, that that's kind of more formal and it's a sk it's a separate skill entirely, platform skills, being able to stand on a stage and hold an audience. So that's the stuff I focus on most of the time. And it all happens inside of a context, of course, which is the sound around us, which is how I got into this in in the first place. But the bass is listening, and it's the most forgotten skill. I mean, most people don't even realize it's a skill. It gets collapsed with hearing. Hearing is a capability. You don't have to do anything to hear, it's automatic. If you as long as you haven't got damaged hearing, which is now one in ten of the world's population. But if you hearing is just automatic, listening is a skill. It's a mental skill, it takes work, and if you're not conscious that you're listening, you're probably just hearing. And that's a different thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:31

Welcome everybody back to the Sean Trey Show. I'm here with an amazing guest today. Would you like to tell people who you are and what you do?

SPEAKER_01 1:39

By all means, yes. Well, thank you for inviting me, Sean. I'm Julian Treasure. I am a writer, speaker, and trainer on the subject of or four subjects actually, primarily conscious listening, powerful speaking, masterful presenting, and also effective business sound, by which I largely mean designing healthy and productive sonic environments for people. So those are the four things I I uh talk and write about. I have five TED Talks which have collectively been seen more than 140 million times on TED.com and the TED YouTube channel. Um one of them is the sixth most viewed TED Talk of all time. And I have three books, uh, Sound Business, How to Be Heard, and Sound Effects. And these days I travel the world delivering keynotes and workshops to take this message out into organizations, hopefully, largely. And um also I'm launching a new course this autumn called The Sound Leader, which we can talk about perhaps later on.

SPEAKER_00 2:45

I'd love to talk about all of it. I don't know if we have enough time, but I'm I'm excited and I'm you know fascinated at the same time. But I I want to I've got a question for you. Like, why do you think so many people feel unheard today, despite being more connected than at any point in human history?

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Aaron Powell Well, it's an interesting one, isn't it? And I think the answer there there's a clue to this in the fact that my TED talk about speaking, which is called How to Speak so that people want to listen, has been seen by six times as many people as my TED talk about listening. So I think largely the answer to your question, Sean, is you know, everybody, well, most people at least are conscious of the need to express themselves, of you know, the importance of speaking, having a voice. Being heard is a different thing. And the reason that most people don't feel heard is because nobody's listening. That's that's the problem.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Right. We play like we're listening, but we're we're thinking about what we're gonna say. We're thinking about what we want to do, we think about where we want to take the conversation. And, you know, I I've been guilty of this many, many, many times. And I try to work at it, but I think that there's just constant distraction. There is constant distraction around us. There is so many, there are so many things competing for our attention between not just like, I have to be very careful. I work in media and content. And there are certain social platforms that if I even open it up to go and do an activity that I need to do, I'm gone. I'm just like, I'll look back and I'm like 10 minutes later, I was like, what was I doing? And I have my my my my project management software open and I see it right there. And I was like, where did that rabbit hole come from? But you know, when it comes to listening, it's even worse.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Absolutely. Well, we're all victims of the algorithm in that way, aren't we? And uh the tech is a big reason why listening has declined. All the evidence shows that listening is in decline. I call it an endangered species. Uh there are a lot of misconceptions about it and it's being uh eroded by huge forces. Tech is one of the biggest. I mean, there are some huge organizations who are spending billions and billions of dollars to seize your attention and mine at all times, because that's their currency, that's their product. So, you know, they're they're pretty powerful and they're very good at it. And, you know, like you, if I go onto YouTube for more than 30 seconds, the algorithm puts something up that it knows I'm gonna go, oh, that's interesting. And the rabbit hole has opened up. So we have to be very careful and marshal our attention because listening requires attention. But there are other reasons why we don't listen. The world is noisy. We're a noisy bunch, and there are more than 8 billion of us and growing. Uh some of the, you know, half of humanity lives in cities now. And cities are very noisy places. In my book, Sound Effects, I've got a table of the noisiest cities in the world. Dhaka in Bangladesh is number one. The noise level, the average noise level, is 119 decibels in the streets of Dhaka. That's rock concert loud. How people can survive in that, I have no idea. But listening becomes something you don't want to do in a situation like that. You get used to blacking out the noise around you, just blanking it. And of course, then people put headphones on, and we all go into little bubbles of our own curated sound, which is very understandable in noisy offices or noisy streets or noisy, you know, tube trains or whatever it may be. But it cuts us off from other people. So there are a lot of reasons that we don't listen. They're all becoming more and more powerful as time goes on. And the problem is that listening is fundamental. It's the base of all human relationships, and it's the most powerful form of connection that we can form with another human being. And you can see the effects of not listening in all of the evidence we now see of increasing rates of loneliness, depression, anxiety, suicide, especially among the younger people, among digital native generations. So it's a major issue, and of course I don't even have to mention polarization, which everybody, I'm sure, is already thinking about as I speak. Polarization in politics, polarization in society, violence, hatred, you know, uh objectifying other people, dismissing them, demeaning them, uh all of this kind of stuff can be solved by listening. And unfortunately, it's not something we teach our children at school for some strange reason.

SPEAKER_00 7:33

100%. 100%. And I I don't know why. I mean, it it I wonder if it's that the people that are teaching don't have those skills as well. They've never been taught, you know? And as we've drifted away, maybe people have forgotten those things. But I want to ask you like, what are the consequences of a society that has forgotten how to truly listen? What starts happening?

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Well, as we just touched on, polarization happens, uh, demonization of people who are different. I think, you know, if you want to boil it down to one thing, it's that difference becomes a threat. Because we can deal with difference by understanding people. You know, if I'm living next door to somebody with whom I fundamentally disagree, which can happen in a democracy, and you know, if there's 51 of them and 49 of me, their can't the country gets run their way, not my way. I have to understand them. And we have created a kind of fiction that there's a zero-sum game here, which is if I'm right, you're wrong. If you're right, I'm wrong. But that's not true. You can have two people with very different points of view, and they can both be right because of their own perspective, background, their own appreciation of the world. You know, we are different people. And being able to hold that, being able to understand that somebody can disagree with you and also be right, even if you feel you're right, that is the secret to unlocking so much of the conflict that we have in our societies, where people are judgmental and dismiss anybody who disagrees with them. And of course, this is all made worse again by the internet, by the echo chain chambers that get set up where people just surround themselves with views that are similar to theirs and don't ever encounter or understand or attempt to understand different views. You know, there's a there's a very powerful technique that I teach in uh in my classes, which is validation. And what that sounds like is Sean, do you know what? I don't agree with what you just said, but I can absolutely see why you believe that. Now that's so different from Sean, that's crap. Which is where we go in modern society. Sean, you're wrong. That's rubbish. And if if if I respond in that way, the only thing that's going to happen there is escalated conflict and divisiveness. And that's where we are in society now. So I think that's the fundamental schism that we're dealing with. Cracks are appearing all over society because of the lack of willingness of people to validate different points of view, to live with people who are different. And that's so dangerous.

SPEAKER_00 10:31

I wonder about that all the time: being a father and trying to teach my daughter how to connect. One of the things that is a non-negotiable for me, with for my daughter and my nephews, is that at the dinner table, when we go out to eat as a family, the phones are put away. They are not able to sit there on devices, they're not able to stare down and try to converse because they don't. They just stare at the device and try to eat. And I say, you know what? If we're here and we're doing something social together, sit down. And my nephew's like, what am I gonna do? And I said, talk to the person next to you. You know, ask them a question. Tell them something. Tell them about this cool thing you learned. I'm not saying that the phones are bad. They have so much knowledge that these kids can tap into. My nephew knows so much about science that at his age I had no idea. My daughter uses YouTube to find cool patterns and things that she wants to create. But the danger is that when we come together, that we stay there on those devices and not stare at each other. But you know, I wanted to ask you this because you'd be surprised, or maybe you wouldn't be surprised, at the number of people that come on my podcast and talk about loneliness. They talk about the challenges people face, even though we are surrounded. And I want to ask, like, how much of loneliness and division and polarization we see today is actually a communicate communication problem.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

I I think the vast majority of it, to be honest. And um, listening is is the the basis of the whole thing. You know, I I always talk about a pyramid in in my teaching. Listening, if you imagine a pyramid with three tiers, listening is the base. You can't communicate well if you can't listen. You can't be a good speaker if you can't listen, because you need to understand the people you're talking to every time. The middle tier is powerful speaking, so the bottom tier is conscious listening. That's the phrase I use, and we can unpack that in a moment. The middle tier is powerful speaking, and the top tier is presenting, where you know that that's kind of more formal, and it's a sk it's a separate skill entirely, platform skills, being able to stand on a stage and hold an audience. So that's the stuff I focus on most of the time, and it all happens inside of a context, of course, which is the sound around us, which is how I got into this in in the first place. Uh but the bass is listening, and it's the most forgotten skill. I mean, most people don't even realize it's a skill. It gets collapsed with hearing. Hearing is a capability. You don't have to do anything to hear, it's automatic. If you as long as you haven't got damaged hearing, which is now one in ten of the world's population. But if you hearing is just automatic, listening is a skill. It's a mental skill, it takes work, and if you're not conscious that you're listening, you're probably just hearing. And that's a different thing. And there are many ways of listening. I talk about listening positions in my work, and you know, you mentioned one earlier, which is uh the one Stephen Covey made famous, listening to respond, which is what an awful lot of people do most of the time, really. You know, while you're talking, I'm composing my next brilliant bit of monologue, and I call it speech writing. Uh so I'm not really listening to you, and it often gives rise to the anyway interjection where I just dismiss what you were talking about and move on to what I want to talk about, which is it is dismissive, and people get upset if you do that to them, um, certainly if you do it regularly. Uh because we we all want three things in this world. We want to be heard, understood, and valued. Right. And listening does all three of those things. So that's why listening is so important. But there are many ways to listen. And the reason I use the phrase conscious listening, I mean, many people have come across what people talk about as active listening, and that's not what I teach. It's one way of listening. It tends to be a little bit performative, I think, when it's taught in management training seminars and so forth. You know, tick the box, look at the person, respond, repeat back what they said, and try to do something about it later, you know, and then you've tick the box for active listening and you move on. I think it's a much bigger issue than that, listening. Listening is a step to consciousness. It's a very important part of enhanced consciousness and of being more present as a human being. And there are many ways to listen. The key thing is to be conscious of how you're listening and ask yourself, is this the best way I can listen right now in this conversation with this person? And then move yourself into the appropriate listening position. Now that's what I call conscious listening. There's nothing wrong with distracted listening, you know, if I'm tapping away at my phone, uh, you know, I'm uh when people tap away and they're saying, I am listening, well, it's it's not a very deep form of listening, that it's distracted listening or partial listening. And it's fine if some if you're having a bit of banter with somebody, or you know, they're telling you a little joke, or it's it's very light and frothy conversation. But if somebody is pouring their heart out to you, or it's something complicated or very important, that's the time to go, well, one second, let me just finish this, I'll put it down, then I can listen to you. And that's moving your listening position to something that's more appropriate. Being unconscious about that gives rise to so much miscommunication in the world. And we know now that that has such a cost in conflict and also in business. I mean, there's a survey recently that found that miscommunication is costing American business, wait for it, $1.2 trillion a year.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

That's insane. Because, but you think about it, it makes complete sense because we are sitting there and you know, yesterday I had a miscommunication with someone, and it resulted in some pretty big problems because both people were in here, not paying attention out here. And when I think about that, um, it could have been fixed, it couldn't have been avoided if we simply had of listened to where the other person was at and where they were coming from and what they were saying. But everyone was too caught up in their own space and their own thing and their own stuff. And I think that one of the secrets that I'm learning is that if I really want to communicate well, I have to slow down and focus on one thing at a time. I'm trying to do this. I used to think I could multitask. I am realizing that I cannot. And I don't think anyone really can. And I think that's a, you know, if you want to do I I had a project management guest on, and he said that if you want to do something well, you do it one thing at a time and you go all the way to the end. Because if you try to balance all this different stuff, it you can't. You just can't. You will get distracted and you're doing 50% of what you could be doing. You know, and that's a danger.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Well, we know that multitasking is impossible in the brain, but what what you do is you flit from one thing to the other thing very quickly, bouncing back and forth. And uh y that can happen at a slower pace with, you know, butterflying around with 50 tasks you've got to do today, and you're jumping from one to the other every few minutes, which again, you know, some people can work that way, but it may not be the most productive way. I'm I'm a big fan of focus, as you just described. Uh, you know, when I write a book, I just kind of lock myself away and the world doesn't exist for quite a long time. My family have to put up with it. Um so yeah, I think focus is very important. Um, but communicating is about getting the ball over the net, isn't it? So whether you're talking or listening, this is a transaction and it requires both ends to be there, which is why so many people don't feel heard because they they're talking to somebody who's not listening, and then they they get obsessed about the sending end of this. It's like with education, you know, we're obsessed about the sending of education. How good are the teachers? How good is the curriculum? We don't ever think about the receiving of the education. So can the students hear? Well, most of them can't because acoustics in schoolrooms are terrible. So we've got a hearing problem in the first place. And then do we teach them how to listen? No, they don't even know it's a skill. And so huge amounts of that very carefully curated education. It's like, you know, spraying a sprinkler all over a garden and missing the flowers completely. It just gets wasted because we are not focusing on receiving. Receiving is critical. So, you know, I have tools which I teach on both ends of this uh delivery. And the receiving, you know, there's a very simple way you can improve your receiving in a conversation. It's a tool I call rasa, which stands for receive, appreciate, summarize, ask. R-A-S-A. Appreciate, summarize, ask. Receive means paying attention to the person. And that generally means eye contact, which is very important and it helps you to listen far better if you're not looking around or doing something else. Appreciate is the little noises and gestures that we make to show that we are actually in the conversation. So as you're doing or eyebrow raises, head bobs, you know, whatever it may be. Summarize is critical. So when you finish speaking, I go, okay. So what I understood you to say is this. Did I get you? And that means I'm confirming that I received what you sent, which is always, not always the case, very often not the case, because we filter stuff through our own perception and so forth. So that summarize is a big check. And it's important, you know, if you're having a long conversation, you can do that to lock down bits of the conversation. It's the word so, which is a very important word, especially in a meeting. So we've all agreed that. Now can we move on to this? And if you don't have a so person in the meeting, it can be a very, very long meeting. And then the A is ask, of course, questions ask all the way through, ask at the end. Ideally questions which uh start with W, you know, the why, what, which, when, where, who questions which do not permit the answer yes or no, and are a great way to engage somebody when you're trying to build a relationship with somebody. And there's a wonderful magic phrase you can use at the end of what they've said, which is tell me more about that. That is a wonderful phrase because everybody likes to feel interesting. And if you finish speaking and I go, sure, tell me more about that. That's really interesting. You immediately have a little surge of probably endorphins or you know, some sort of uh happy neurotransmitter which is going, ah, he likes me, he's interested, this is good. You know, we all like that. And it can really help to make a conversation flow and to build a relationship. So that's rasa. It does work.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

Can you tell me more about that? Is Beautiful, and it's one of the most powerful things that I can think of because when my daughter comes in, and right now she's on summer vacation, I try to I have my own business and I try to balance the time with her with being present with her. Um but yet I get full sometimes, and I have to tell her, um, slow down, give me a second. I can't I gotta finish this and I'm coming, and I turn to you. And I do that with all of my staff, actually. I say, give me a second to let me finish this, and then I will come and give you my attention. And when I give my daughter my attention and she tells me something, I have two options. Option one, thank you for telling me that, and then turning back to the work. Or option two, going deeper and asking more. And I'm not perfect at this, but now that you bring it up, I have noticed that when I say, can you tell me more about that? The lights shine, the smile emerges, and it just this connection happens. It's a deeper connection than just, yes, let's do it. Um, okay, thank you for that, and moving on, you know, and I think that that's powerful. But like, I want to ask you about mistakes because I know I make a ton of them, but I'm sure we all do. But what is the biggest mistake, the communication mistake leaders make that quietly destroys trust inside their families, teams, or organizations?

SPEAKER_01 23:21

Yeah, it's an imbalance and an over-emphasis on speaking. And I actually think there's an inverse relationship between seniority in organizations and listening. And there are quite a few reasons for that. First of all, as you get senior, you're supposed to know stuff. So you're much more inclined to be telling people things than asking questions. There's a humility aspect to listening. Um, because when I'm listening to you, I'm saying, at this moment, Sean, you're more important than I am. And leaders have a problem with that, because as you get very senior in an organization, your ego builds and gets rather inflated, and you're the most important person in the room. So you should be the person talking, not them. So I think that all of these kind of influences tend to mean that leaders don't listen well. And we know that's true. There was a s a study recently, um, I think it was by LinkedIn, of 14,000 employees. Only one in 12 of them rated their leader as a very good listener. So that's 11 out of 12 saying they're not a very good listener, which is not great. And the results of that are devastating in business. Because you get people who eventually shut up. If you don't listen to somebody who's bouncing out, you know, around being tiggerish and having lots of ideas, if they don't get listened to, they eventually go quiet and then they leave. And they may be the best person you ever had, you know. That's what happens to people. They get disengaged and they get demotivated and they they don't bother. And the the cost of that globally is estimated to be $8.8 trillion a year to global business, the cost of disengagement. It's massive. You may think you've got different problems, high staff turnover, conflict in teams, or shoddy teamworking, or mistakes, or uh all these sorts of things. To me, they're all one problem, wearing different clothes. It's a problem of listening. And if you have a leader who's not listening, that culture tends to propagate all the way down through an organization. So to create a listening organization, it's very important that you have uh a commitment to listening at the top and some sort of back channel, you know, so it's not just management giving a town hall for 50 minutes and having two pre-arranged questions and then calling that communication. And that's that's one way. And we're very, very tempted to communicate in that sort of one-to-many way all the time. Yep, done. The new mission is out there, everybody understands it. Well, no, they don't. And you haven't given them, excuse me, you haven't given them an opportunity to ask questions. And it may even be that asking questions is stigmatized. Well, you mean you didn't understand that? That's perfectly plain. What are you talking about? So if you kind of stigmatize people who pipe up and say, well, that wasn't very clear to me, then you're never going to get the pushback. You won't get the understanding that, whoa, so almost everybody has said they didn't understand that. We need to rephrase it. But if you've got this kind of omerta, it's not permitted, you have to pretend that you've got everything first time, otherwise you're you're thick, then you can be communicating the absolute rubbish and you wouldn't know. And you never find out what's going on, what's really going on in the organization. If you don't have the back channels, if you don't encourage uh stuff to come up, which may be great ideas, or it may be, you know, the first signs of a really big problem, which if ignored is going to be, you know, potentially terminal. So many, many reasons for not listening. Leaders are not good at it, and there's a massive cost. So I'm I'm trying to work a work on a more positive spin on this. I'm trying to work out what is the return on listening. You know, we all know ROI. Well, I want there to be an ROL. Because at the moment, this is hidden. And my problem is that we have a world in denial. You know, almost everybody thinks they're a good listener, and almost nobody is. So there's this huge gap that nobody's aware of. And this is the wall of denial that I'm booting the whole time and trying to make holes in so that people understand this is a critical skill. And there are so many advantages to learning how to do it well.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

I have a question for you then. You know, we've talked about the problems and how things are not necessarily going right right now. But how do we change it? What is conscious listen can't even talk today. It's one of those days. What does conscious listening actually look like in practice? And and why is it so powerful and how do we do it?

SPEAKER_01 28:18

Well, I think in a perfect world, it starts at school. And you know, I'm I'm it it's very difficult to change educational curricula. Uh we have seen signs of movement. In the UK, they're starting to teach something called orasy, which is a parallel to literacy. But unfortunately, what they mean by oracy is the ability to speak. Well, that's very important, but it's only one side of the coin. It's the middle tier in the pyramid, not the base. So they're not talking about teaching children how to listen. That's the start. If we start to teach children how to listen, we can transform the world in a generation. If that's not done, then we have to take older people and transform their understanding, which is my mission, my life is my mission is to regenerate the world's listening. So that is going to involve persuading CEOs and leaders, ideally also political leaders, of the importance of listening and of the sanctity of it, the the critical element that it is in a successful society slash organization, slash team, slash family. So that's what I'm setting out to do, but it's a huge task. And you know, I really welcome anybody who wants to get on this bandwagon with me. Um and you know, I've had some success. The TED Talks have been seen 150 million times or whatever it is. Uh so you know, that's good, but it's still a drop in the ocean compared to the world's population. And the number of people are completely unconscious of the need to listen well and how to do it. Uh training, you know, obviously, training is going to be the way to do it in organizations. It's very interesting, isn't it, that listening is acknowledged as an important skill when people are recruiting. So they always put good listener near the top of the list of things you want for somebody when you're recruiting them. But the moment you've got them, it's forgotten. It's taken for granted. So we've got somebody who's a good listener in inverted commas, and we don't have to do anything about that. We don't rate them. It's not in the 360-degree review. There's no question about is this person a good listener? There's no reward for being a good listener. I mean, does any organization pay people more for being good listeners? I don't think so. So the it's kind of immediately forgotten about not trained and so forth. We need to train. We need training programs on listening. We need to understand the return on this. So, for example, we know that the most successful salespeople listen twice as much as they speak. The least successful salespeople speak twice as much as they listen. And that's coming from research in the field of thousands and thousands of B2B sales calls. So, you know, there is a return on this. When we have people who really understand the importance of listening and can do it well, they sell more, businesses are more successful, teams work better, people are more engaged, there's less mistakes and miscommunication. So somehow we have to get this message into the mainstream of leadership and have people understand that it's it's not innate. Listening is not a capability. It's a it's a very important skill that needs to be invested in everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 31:49

I 100% agree. I think it's interesting to see how people can do that. You know, I do it with my daughter. I try to slow her down. And one of the things we try to do is just to simply be more mindful. And one of the ways that we're doing mindfulness is just to breathe, just take those moments where we're not putting things out and we're allowing things to come in. But you know, I want to ask you like, how can you tell when someone is genuinely listening versus simply waiting for their turn to speak? How do you know if they're just sitting there biting their time, you know?

SPEAKER_01 32:23

Well, uh, you don't. And I I would also say there's no future in going around telling people that they're not very good listeners because we all like to think we are, and you'll get a pretty abrupt response if you say to somebody, do you know what? You're a terrible listener. So um what you can do with people who are poor listeners is make appointments to listen for them to listen to you. So, Sean, I've got something really important to say to you. Can you give me five minutes of your undivided attention? And if you say yes, then we have a contract. And everybody likes to be true to their word. So if you start doing your email in my five minutes, I think I have a right to say, Sean, oh, you did say five minutes of undivided attention, is that okay still with you? Not now? Well, maybe later, what time would be good for you? You know, make an appointment to listen. That's a good way of dealing with many people in the world who don't listen uh inveterately. You know, they they talk, talk, talk, or interrupt or uh just don't take things on board. Um so that's that's that's one important thing uh which can improve the situation in a business. Um I think silence, you you you talked about silence, that's very important. And many people don't have a very good relationship with silence. And it's critical not only for listening, because of course listening requires you being silent, but it's also very important for speaking. One of the biggest problems or mistakes that I see people making when I'm training people, you know, I train people who've got TEDx talks coming up, or uh people who've got an important talk that they can they've got to give. And very often I'll find when we start working that they gabble. They don't feel comfortable stopping. Now, just that little stop I did there, you know, it's half a second. I can I can stop for far longer than that. But you know, when you're talking about radio or broadcast media, people feel uncomfortable because it's called dead air. But if you're on a stage and you're speaking and you make an important point, you can just stop and let it settle like that. Now, people who are uncomfortable with silence don't feel comfortable doing that, and they'll fill that with anyway, so uh, you know, and you move on, or you have all the filler words, the ums and uhs, and you know what it means, and all of those things which fill every gap. And if it's all filled, you know, there's no light and shade, there's no uh dynamic to the talking. It becomes just a stream, and it's very hard to keep with people's attention. So silence is a hugely important tool, and it's of course critical for listening. So I do recommend, dear listeners to this, give yourself three minutes of silence a couple of times a day. Just sit quietly. You don't have to meditate, you don't have to do anything else, just sit with the silence, and your ears will recalibrate, you'll be able to listen afresh, because you've stopped the noise for a little bit. And it's also connecting you with something that's very important, which is to be comfortable with silence. And that's something that many people who live in cities particularly feel uncomfortable with. You know, they I know a lot of people who come into a quiet room and they want to put something on, you know, put the TV on, put put put music on, or let's start talking, or you know, can't deal with this. They come to the country and they go, Oh, it's so quiet. Well, it's great to be comfortable with that, because it's the baseline for all sound. And it's you know you have to have the valley in order to have the peak.

SPEAKER_00 35:59

I want to ask you this question. If you could teach every 10-year-old one communication skill, it would transform their future, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 36:08

I think it would be to understand the complex nature of listening, to understand this is a wonderful uh kind of organic process that you can really start to investigate and master. You can go very, very, very deep into listening. Um I think if I boiled it down to one thing, it would be um one of the most important things I teach about listening again, which is that every human being's listening is unique. So your listening, Sean, is different from mine. We listen through a whole set of filters, these build up through our whole lives. I won't go into what they all are now, but if you understand that nobody listens like I do, you're not making the most fundamental mistake which most people make when they're speaking, which is assuming everybody listens like I do. They don't. It's not you. And if that's your assumption, you're basically going around talking to yourself the whole time, which isn't very effective because it's not you. Now, if children can understand that, if we can teach children that everybody's listening is different, every human being's different, and to embrace that difference and not see it as a threat to their existence or their ego, we would be in a very different situation where we can start to learn from people who are different. Oh, I don't agree with that, but maybe there's something in that that I could integrate into what I do believe, or, you know, wow, that's a fascinating, different perspective. Wow, they may be right. So it it's a much more inclusive um you know, the Greeks used to have thesis, antithesis, and synthesis came out of putting those two together. A much more synthetic in that way life where we start to take the best out of everybody instead of dismissing anybody who's not us as an idiot. I think that would be the biggest thing I would teach children is to listen for the listening that they're speaking into or that they're dealing with and to respect it.

SPEAKER_00 38:12

Aaron Powell Where can people go to learn more about you and what you do and what you teach?

SPEAKER_01 38:16

Uh well I have a website, of course, studenttreasure.com. Um I have a Substack newsletter, which is not quite as regular as I would like. I try and do it weekly, but it's more like fortnightly, uh, where I post about sound, listening, speaking, and presenting. Um and um also I am active on social media, so I'd be delighted if people want to connect with me on LinkedIn particularly, um, then I do get to see some of that stuff and I do respond there. Uh and as I say, I've got a my new course, The Sound Leader, which is aimed at squarely at CXOs, this one. Uh it's going to be a cohort of just 12 people this autumn for you. Um and uh it is a live course, which is kind of unusual, but I think this is going to be really effective. So it's just 10 minutes a day with me live, Monday to Thursday, and then an hour of Q ⁇ A on Friday for eight weeks. And I'm going to be teaching everything I know to that group of 12 CXOs to turn them into masterful communicators and managers of sound. And uh I'm very excited about that. Um the reason I'm I'm squarely focused on CXOs is because I believe if I can show this and teach this to people who are running big organizations, then it's a big rock into the pond. And a lot of ripples move out from that. So I'm actually having a substantial impact in the world and changing the world, changing the happiness, effectiveness, and well being of thousands of people, not just one. So that's important.