Speech Summary: How to speak so that people want to listen — Julian Treasure

“The human voice. The instrument that we all play. It is the most powerful voice in the world. It is the only voice that can start a war or say ‘I love you’. And yet people have experience that when they speak, people don’t listen to them. How is that? How can we speak powerfully to make a change in the world?” (Julian Treasure: How to speak so that people want to listen: TED 2013)

There are a number of habits that we need to move away from. Julian Treasure shared 7 common mistakes that we can all fall into, and he called the list “7 deadly sins of speaking”.

1. “Gossip: Saying ill of someone who is not present. We all know perfectly well that the people gossiping, five minutes later, will be gossiping about us”.
2. Judging
3. Negativity
4. “Complaining: People complain about the weather, sport, politics, about everything, but actually complaining is viral misery. It is not spread sunshine and lightness in the world”.
5. Excuses
6. Penultimate: Exaggeration becomes lying, and we don’t want to talk to people who are lying to us.
7. “Dogmatism: The confusion between facts and opinions. If people convey their opinion as if they were facts. It’s difficult to listen to that”.

Fortunately, there are four powerful cornerstones that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make a change in the world.

1. Honesty
   Being true in what you say, being straight and clear.
2. Authority
   Standing in your own truth.
3. Integrity
   Actually doing what you say, being somebody that people can trust.
4. Love
   Not the romantic love, but the love that wishes people well.

Let me put this content to close. This is where we are now. “We speak not very well to people who simply aren’t listening in an environment that is all about noise and bad acoustic. What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in an environment which actually fit for purpose? Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously, and designing all our environments consciously for sound? That would be a world that sounds beautiful, and one where understanding will be the norm, and that’s an idea worth spreading”.