Designing with Your Ears: Julian Treasure on Listening, Leadership & Leveraging Sound

Lottie Bazley: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a brand new episode of the Aspire to Inspire Podcast. My name is Lottie Bazley, internal communications manager at Staffbase. And today’s guest is someone whose voice quite literally has changed the way the world thinks about communication. Julian Treasure is a globally-renowned speaker, author, and advisor on the art and science of listening and speaking.

With five TED Talks, including the sixth-most viewed of all time, Julian has reached over 150 million people with his message about the power of sound in business and in life. As the founder of The Listening Society and Julian Treasure Ltd., he works with CEOs, teams, and event leaders to elevate how people communicate, whether on stage, in the boardroom, or through brand experiences. In this episode, we will explore why listening is one of the most underdeveloped leadership skills, how sound influences behavior and culture, and what leaders can do to recover when things go sideways in public. Julian, welcome to the Aspire to Inspire Podcast. It’s an honor to have you with us today.

Julian Treasure: Thank you so much. It’s a great pleasure to be here. Thank you, Lottie.

Lottie Bazley: Of course. Thank you so much. Before I get into it, I just wanted to check. Have you done your vocal warm-ups?

Julian Treasure: Of course.

Lottie Bazley: I also did some after having watched the TED Talk. There’s no pressure now. I’m really like, “I’m doing a podcast on speaking and listening,” so no pressure at all. Are you happy for us to get straight in?

Julian Treasure: Of course. Yes, please.

Lottie Bazley: Fab. So you have spoken and written extensively about listening as an active skill and have just released a book that explores the profound impact of sound on every aspect of our lives. And you did kindly send us a sneak peek last week, which I did have a little read off over the weekend. And I’ve since been doing some intentional listening, so noticing all the individual sounds I’m hearing at once. So let’s start there then. What do you think most leaders still get wrong about listening, and why is that such a critical miss in today’s workplace?

Julian Treasure: Let me answer this the other way around, because it’s important to understand that listening is crucial in all our relationships. So this is universal. This is at home just as much as at work. It’s very, very important for leadership as well. And in fact, the research shows that most leaders are not great at it. In fact, only 8% of people in a very big study rated their leaders as very good at listening. So there’s a lot of people out there who are leading, but not particularly good at listening.

Now, why would that be? Because most people don’t even realize that listening is a skill. It’s conflated and confused with hearing, which we do automatically. So hearing is a capability. We all do that, although one in four of the world’s population has got damaged hearing sadly and there are many millions of young people joining those ranks now because of headphone abuse. So that’s a really big problem, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.

We hear. It’s automatic, sound enters your ears. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s as automatic as your heart beating. You’ve been doing it since you were in your mother’s womb. Hearing is the first sense that you develop. Of course, the mother’s heartbeat is the first thing we experience. And it’s also our primary warning sense because you can hear what’s behind you, and you can hear in the dark. The eyes don’t work in either of those two situations. So hearing goes very deep, very fast, but listening is different.

Listening is where you select certain things to pay attention to, and then you make them mean something. So my definition of listening is making meaning from sound. And you can take that on, of course, into a more full definition of listening, which involves responding to the other person, analyzing what they’re saying if it’s a conversation, of course, and responding effectively and letting the person know they’re heard and responded to and so forth. It’s a complex process. It’s not a capability. It’s a skill. It’s work. And if it’s not taken seriously as a skill, which in most organizations, it isn’t.

So everyone listening to this, ask yourself, “Do we train on listening? Do we have a question about listening in our 360s? How good is this person in listening? Do we reward good listeners? It’s taken for granted. And actually, the research shows that as a result of this kind of numbness, this disregarding of the power of the skill of listening, leadership lacks it a great deal. And we’re seeing two things resulting from that. One is disconnection, disengagement, because teams who aren’t listened to don’t feel engaged. And the cost is absolutely astronomical of that. There’s a huge study, which was done in 2023 by Gallup and tens of thousands of people. And they estimate the cost of disengagement in organizations to be $8.8 trillion a year.

Lottie Bazley: Wow.

Julian Treasure: $8.8 trillion. That’s non-trivial. Now, that’s disengagement. And the other big cost, of course, is poor communication if people aren’t listening at work, and this is not just leaders, this would be across teams, there’s miscommunication. There is misunderstanding. There’s conflict. And the cost of poor communication is estimated to be around a day a week per person working.

Now, that adds up to another $1.2 trillion a year in America alone. Goodness knows what these numbers are if you run them out to the entire world. So that’s around $10 trillion a year of cost, largely coming from poor communication, poor leadership, which is not listening to people. So listening is absolutely critical. It’s profitable. It’s essential. And to me, it’s the foundation of all good leadership.

Lottie Bazley: I like that. And it’s one of those things where often, it’s difficult, I think, sometimes to pin monetary figures to something like engagement. So that’s a really interesting study that’s happened there. And one of your core beliefs is that sound affects outcomes, which I think in itself is a really powerful phrase, and it feels like the heartbeat of your new book, “Sound Affects.” So how does sound actually shape relationships or influence decision-making, or even something like brand experience?

Julian Treasure: Well, this kind of epidemic of not listening, the numbers show that listening is declining and has been for some time. And we can talk about the causes of that at the moment, but this numbness to sound means that we are surrounded a lot by not very pleasant and not very effective sound. And there’s a blasé assumption that this doesn’t matter very much. But actually, and as you say, this is at the core of my book, “Sound Affects,” and all my work, in fact, for the last 20 years, sound profoundly affects us, even when we don’t notice it, even when we are ignorant of that or just oblivious to it.

Therefore, sound affects us. First, it changes our bodies. So any sudden sound will immediately have an impact on you. It’ll put you into fight-flight response because, as I said, hearings are primarily warning sense. So anything, a car backfires behind you, by the time your cortex has interpreted that and said, “Okay. Well, that was a car. I’m not in danger,” too late. Your subcortical systems have all leapt into action. We process sound 20 times faster than we process sight, especially sudden sounds.

Lottie Bazley: I can say that as someone is very jumpy as well. I’m a very jumpy person. 

Julian Treasure: There’s a reason for that. It’s self-preservation and it’s genetic. We’ve been evolving for three million years or something like that. And all through that time, any sudden sound is probably danger. So that’s the response. So physiologically, sound changes our heart rate, breathing, hormone secretions, brainwaves. Everything about our body is affected by outside sound. You can calm yourself down. Sound can help or hurt always with these four ways. So you can, for example, play beautiful, gentle surf sound if you ever have a problem sleeping. And that’s a beautiful sound to go to sleep to. So it can help or hurt physiologically.

The second way sound affects us is psychologically, changes our feelings, our mood. You only have to think of music to prove that to yourself. You can play a song that’ll make you happy. You can play a song that’ll make you sad. And it’s not the only sound that changes our feelings. Actually, in 20 years of audio branding, I deployed birdsong a great deal in commercial spaces. We now know that nature sound is good for us in the sense that it’s relaxing, it decreases stress, and it decreases fatigue.

We put birdsong, for example, into BP service station toilets all over Europe. Also they made them look nice, so they had vinyls of sunflowers and things like that. Customer satisfaction to the whole service station experience went up by 50%. And the birdsong was mentioned by a lot of people because you don’t expect it when you walk into a toilet. We all know service stations aren’t necessarily the zenith of human experience.

Lottie Bazley: Not the most pleasant place.

Julian Treasure: Yeah. Well, in this case, they were much, much more pleasant. And I think the surprise factor and the delight of experiencing nature sound in a toilet was very powerful. So birdsong makes most people feel comfortable, secure. It’s also a great sound to work to, by the way, because it’s nature’s alarm clock, time to be awake. And it’s a sound we’ve had around us ever since we’ve been on this planet. The birds have been here much longer than we have.

So it’s a sound we automatically set aside. We can work to birdsong. If you put headphones on with music, that’s different. Music’s quite an intense signal. It’s very dense, full of information. And it’s designed to be listened to. So in a noisy office, you might prefer with headphones on to listen to music. You’re replacing one distraction with another. You’ll have more fun, much more pleasant, but you won’t necessarily be more productive because music is designed to distract and take your attention away.

The third way sound affects us is cognitively, which is what I’m just coming on to there. Noisy offices are a disaster. And this is one of the areas where managers, leaders, office designers, architects I talk to a lot. I just did a talk a few months ago to a thousand American architects about designing with the ears because they don’t. They train five years. They might spend two days on sound. And the result is noise is around us in offices, schools, hospitals. All sorts of places are not fit for purpose because they are so noisy.

Noise is the number one problem in offices by miles. And it reduces people’s productivity by up to two-thirds. Now, if you’re happy with your workforce being one-third as productive as they could be, just stick them all into an open-plan office, and let them get on with it. It’s okay up to a point for collaboration. But even there, actually, the latest research shows a lot of people will email somebody opposite them rather than talk because we don’t like being overheard. It’s intimidating. You know we’d rather have private conversations.

And in an open-plan office, there’s no such thing. Plus, of course, if there’s somebody behind you talking about their great night out last night, you can’t think. You’ve only got bandwidth for 1.6 conversations. And the one in your head you’re trying to listen to gets drowned out by this noise behind you. You have no earlids. You’re programmed to listen to language. So it’s the most distracting sound of all. And that is going on over millions and millions of square feet in the world.

And there are millions of people whose life is miserable because they’re trying to think, write, work, calculate in space, which is just inappropriate. There is a movement towards a better way of doing this. It’s called activity-based working, where we design different types of spaces with different soundscapes. Perhaps quiet working space. Maybe a peaceful, serene soundscape in another one. Nature sound, maybe.

And we encourage people to go to the right space for the kind of work they want to do and the kind of person they are, because we now know with neurodiversity that some people prefer different environments to be at their best when they’re working. It may be you’ve got neurodiverse people who are really struggling in a noisy office. Activity-based working, a good thing.

And then the final way sound affects us is it changes what we do. It changes our behavior. There’s a wonderful study, which I talk about in the book, which was done some years ago by some academics. They had two gondola end-displays of wine in a supermarket, identical visual displays, French wine, German wine. All they did was to alternate a sound condition. On day one, a bit of French music. On day two, a bit of German music. You keep that going for weeks and weeks and weeks alternating.

So what happened? On the French music days, French wine outsold German wine by five bottles to one, which may not be surprising. It does tend to sell more in the world. However, and it’s a huge but, this, on the German music days, German wine outsold French wine by two bottles to one. Now, that is a massive shift in consumer purchasing behavior. Interestingly, almost nobody noticed the music. This is sound influencing our behavior at a subconscious level. So sound affects us this powerfully.

I really think we need to start listening to become more conscious about those effects and to start taking responsibility for the sound we make and the sound we consume, whether that’s as a human being in your family, in all your relationships, in every way you go, or as a leader of an organization where perhaps you are designing sound environments for hundreds or even thousands of people. If you’re not thinking about the way the sound is affecting them, you are really doing them a disservice.

Lottie Bazley: That’s fascinating. And I guess it seems obvious now you’re saying it that sound affects us subconsciously with the whole German-French wine thing. But as soon as you say it, you’re like, “Well, yes, of course.” Like you say, you have no earlids. We’re just taking it all in as we go along. And I want to ask you actually, so you were talking about birdsong being played in the background and helping productivity. So in my home office, I sit with Radio 2 on in the background all day. I deliberately don’t wear headphones because I do find that distracts me, but background, how is that? Is that good, bad? How might that be affecting how I’m working? Should I be playing birdsong instead? What’s the deal?

Julian Treasure: I’ve become very careful about making broad prescriptions for people, because one of the big truths about sound, and this is something which most leaders don’t understand, most people don’t understand actually, and it’s an absolutely critical transformative realization. Everybody listens differently. Most people make the assumption, “Everybody listens like I do.” They may not make it explicitly, but that’s how we go about.

So you’re effectively talking to yourself the whole time, which is not wildly effective. We all listen through a set of filters, which are the culture we’re born into first, the language we learn to speak, and then the values, attitudes, beliefs we pick up along the way. And then in any given situation, we might have intentions, expectations, emotions going on, and assumptions, particularly about what’s going on in somebody else’s head.

So all of that, all of those filters create what I call a listening. So you have a listening for me right now. I’m speaking into your listening. And if I just assume you listen like I do, that’s very dangerous. You’re going to miss the target an awful lot. Whether it’s one-to-one or you’re walking onto a stage in front of a thousand people, there’s a listening you’re speaking into. And it changes from person to person, audience to audience, and over time as well. It’s not fixed.

So when it comes to becoming responsible for the sound around you, you need to really understand your own listening. And I’m not very prescriptive about this. I mean, personally, I like silence when I’m working. Radio 2 might work really well for you. You’re habituated to it. So maybe it’s comforting and it’s something that helps you to work. I’m sure there’s somebody in the world who can work really well to loud death metal music. That’s not me, but I’ve learned that making rules about this to people is very wrong because we’re all different.

So I would experiment with things. You could try birdsong. If that makes you happy and productive, wonderful. Try different things and see what works for you. And that’s my advice to everybody when they say things like, “Well, what sounds should I have for this, that, or the other?” Try certain things. The important thing is to become conscious of the sound around you. And there’s an exercise in which I use now in my talks and which I talk about in the book called “savoring.”

And the trick to savoring is simply in any space that you occupy, close your eyes and taste the sound. You’re very careful about what you put in your mouth. And you’ll spit something out of it. It doesn’t taste good. But we’re so unkind to our ears. We let them be assailed by all sorts of unpleasant sounds. So it may well be. If you close your eyes in any room in your house and listen, I would ask three questions. Is this sound making me happy, is this sound healthy, and is it helpful? So three H’s: happy, healthy, helpful. Is it helping me to do what I want to do in this space?

You may well find that there’s that buzz that’s been there for years and you’ve ignored it for years, but it’s not good for you to have a noise like that. So maybe you can do something about it. Maybe you could put in some new sound that’s really going to enhance the experience in that room, whatever it is. It might be, as I said, gentle surf in your bedroom. It might be birdsong in your workplace. I mean I’m a big fan of nature sound now also because of the research showing that it’s extremely good for us as well as being productive. So that’s the answer, I’m afraid, Lottie, is you have to work it out for yourself. But try different things and see what works.

Lottie Bazley: I will. I absolutely will do that. I’ll be experimenting with all sorts of noises coming out of my little Google speaker this afternoon. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. So to go back to the book, “Sound Affects,” that came out two days before we recorded this conversation. First of all, congratulations on that. As I said, I had a little sneak peek through the weekend. And even just in the first few pages changed the way . . . I don’t think I’ve ever thought about sound. Now, all of a sudden, I’m super conscious of it. So really enjoying it so far, but for everyone else, could you maybe just give us a bit of a sense about what the book is about? And actually, was there anything that you discovered or learned yourself whilst you were going through the writing process?

Julian Treasure: Oh, so much, yes. Well, the book, it starts off by talking about sound and why it’s important and what it is really, because, as you said, and I get this an awful lot when I do talks and podcasts and, well, anything really, people go, “That’s obvious, but I’d never thought of it before.” This is our relationship with sound. It is suppressed. It’s kind of being knocked off. We don’t teach children how to listen. How mad is this? We teach them reading and writing, but not speaking and listening.

If we taught children first how to listen, how much more of their education would they receive? And what a different world we have if everybody knew how to listen consciously? That’s the word I use a great deal. And that’s really what the book is all about. It’s closing that gap. It’s bringing sound and listening back into the realm of consciousness where, at the moment, it’s, for most people, completely unconscious.

As I just said, in open-plan offices, there are billions of people in this world who are being damaged by the sound around them. And they’re doing nothing about it because they’re unconscious of that effect. Over 50% of the world live in cities. So the book starts off by exploring what sound is and what hearing is and what listening is and how that all works, which is, I think, fascinating, and then moves on to a grand tour of sound, the sound we experience and some sounds we don’t experience, too, starting with the sounds of our planet.

So the Earth has a great deal of sound, has had ever since it was formed, actually. We go right back to the formation of the Earth. But when you think of sounds that many people enjoy, rain, my favorite sound of all is gentle summer rain on leaves outside the window. I think that’s gorgeous. But bigger sounds, big waterfalls, crashing ocean waves, volcanoes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, there are all sorts of thunder. You know there are all sorts of quite big sounds that the Earth makes and we have a tour through those.

And then we go through the sounds of other living things. Geophony is the sound of the planet. Biophony is the sound of living things. And that’s where I discovered so much in researching the book from the loudest creature in the world, pound for pound, which is a tiny, little snapping shrimp about the length of the digits of your finger. But when it snaps its big claw, it creates a bubble, which cavitates and collapses and creates a sound that’s four times louder than the loudest rock concert ever recorded at source. Quite a mighty little beast.

Lottie Bazley: Powerful shrimp.

Julian Treasure: Yeah, really powerful shrimp. And it stuns its prey by doing that. That’s how it catches things right up to the biggest animal on this planet, the blue whale, which I find enchanting, entrancing, magical, and, using the word in its proper sense, awesome. I go on a lot about language inflation, and how can a pair of trainers be awesome? Well, a blue whale sound is awesome. It’s subsonic.

A lot of it’s well below what we can hear, but even the bit we can hear. I love doing this in talk. I was just in Mexico last week talking to 6,000 people with a huge sound system and played them the sound of the blue whale, which made the whole building vibrate was fantastic. It’s so low. They can communicate, or they have always been able to communicate over at least 1,500 kilometers with that low-frequency sound.

Lottie Bazley: Wow.

Julian Treasure: Sound travels much faster in water than in air and much further as well. Now, sadly, due to 60,000 ships moving about at any given time, their range is reduced by 90%. And that’s serious for them because they’re solitary animals. They are very spread out. And if the ocean has become a fog to them, they can’t hear anymore. So it’s hard for them to find each other to mate, to congregate, to communicate, which I think is very sad.

And then the book talks about anthropophony, the sound of us, which is not a great story, I have to say. We’re a noisy bunch and increasing numbers of us all the time. So we’re getting noisier and noisier. As I said, half of us live in cities, which breaks my heart, really, because that means there’s four billion people who never experience nature sound in any meaningful way, which we were designed for millions of years of evolution. It’s been quite quiet, wind, water, birds. That’s what we’re designed to experience.

And in just a few hundred years, we’ve moved from that to very, very noisy urban environments, which are not what we were designed for at all. It’s not surprising there’s a great deal of stress and ill health arising from that. Anthropophony, obviously, there are saving graces, Mozart, and beautiful sound design by a small number of people, and some real experts working in film sound, game sound, things like that. Musicians, of course, sound engineers. I talk about the latest technology in sound in there as well.

And then we move on to cosmophony, the sound of the universe. Most people think space is silent. No, it’s not a vacuum. It’s a very diffuse plasma, the same plasma that was there in the very beginning of the universe. And very, very low-frequency sound has no problem traveling through even intergalactic space. So space is full of sound. In the book, you can go to a website and hear some amazing sounds like the sound of a black hole. It’s shifted up so we can hear it, but it is the spookiest sound you will ever hear, I think, so all of those things.

And then the last chapter of the book is about one of the most important sounds of all, which is silence, that sound which we’ve lost the relationship with hugely. And it’s very important to reclaim that. It’s a paean to listening. It’s a plea to listen in a world that’s forgotten how. And it gives a lot of good reasons to listen because sound is wonderful and amazing, and so powerfully impacts us all. It’s really important to become conscious of that.

Lottie Bazley: I love that. Thank you so much for going through that. Funnily enough, it just reminded me of a memory that I have deep down in my brain. When I was a kid, my grandma took me to a gift shop in Cornwall. She said, “Oh, you can have one thing from the gift shop.” And randomly, for whatever reason, I chose a whale song CD. That was what I wanted. And for whatever reason, that, as a kid, resonated with me. So maybe I’ll give them whale song a try this afternoon when I’m trying to figure out what is the perfect working environment for me.

Julian Treasure: Yeah, a lot of people like it. And of course, that’s the song of the humpback whale you’re talking about, which is fairly extraordinary. They once recorded a humpback whale singing for 23 hours. So there’s a reason they sing. I talked to my old friend, David Rothenberg, who’s a professor and a jazz musician, professor of philosophy and music and a jazz musician, who plays his clarinet with whales, birds, all sorts of animals. And he is absolutely adamant that animals have an aesthetic, that birds don’t sing just for territory or baiting or whatever it might be. They sing because they love it, and so do whales. So very interesting. One day, we’ll decode these things. I’m sure AI is working on it now. They’re trying to decode the language of whales, wolves, all sorts of animals. We’ll see.

Lottie Bazley: Very cool. Very cool. So to a point then that you made just now on being conscious of the noises that we make as human beings. When I was watching your TED Talk, “How to Speak So That People Will Listen,” you talk about this toolbox, so thinking about things such as pace and register. And as I was watching that, I was thinking a bit about authenticity.

So someone like me, for example, who doesn’t have a particularly low voice, I know you said that people tend to vote for politicians with a lower voice. I am naturally a very fast speaker, as you might have come to understand. How can I and other people use these tools, for me, personally, to slow down, to lower my register without becoming inauthentic, or people thinking like, “Why has Lottie suddenly started talking like that?”

Julian Treasure: Well, authenticity is very important. It’s one of the four foundations I talked about in that talk of powerful speaking. Honesty, authenticity, integrity, and love, by which I mean wishing people well. So I would never go to being inauthentic. But once you get that point we started with, which is you’re speaking into a listening, and you’re conscious of that and you start to ask yourself the question, “What’s the listening I’m speaking into?” you have a range. You’re not fixed in any particular way.

You can resonate your voice higher up. I can speak very high and jolly, or I can go right down into my chest here and get much deeper. Well, anybody can do that. You can practice doing these things. Yes, it’s true that we tend to assume that deep voices are more important. And there’s a reason for that, that large things have deeper voices than little things. So you want to be more worried about an elephant than a mouse. And that’s, again, genetic. That’s come about from a very, very long experience of being on the planet and assigning significance to depth.

And there is this correlation. But your voice is perfectly deep. I mean we’re all given equipment we start with. I would say, I’m going to be speaking to 2,000 CEOs in Copenhagen next week and I’ll ask them this question. I always do. “How many of you use your voice at work in a significant way?” All of them will put their hands up because they do media. They stand in front of rooms. They stand on stages. They try and inspire people. They’re pitching for money from investors, all sorts of aspects. They’re leading teams.

So okay, the next question is, “How many of you have had formal vocal training?” About three out of 2,000. And I just go, “What is going on, guys?” If your voice is significant, this is the instrument we all play, train it. Practice. Go get a coach. Work with a vocal coach. And you’ll discover things you never knew you could do with your voice. Now, you may decide that you want to make it deeper like Margaret Thatcher did. She decided that she wanted to have more authority and she worked with a vocal coach to pitch her voice down by at least two tones.

Lottie Bazley: Oh, wow.

Julian Treasure: That’s in the book as well. And so you may decide that you want to do that. I think she ended up sounding rather inauthentic down here, you know.

Lottie Bazley: Great impression.

Julian Treasure: Perhaps that’s not where you want to go. But the key thing is to speak into a listening and be sensitive to that. So if you’re talking to somebody who’s very slow and likes to be quite measured in their delivery, and you come in there and start talking like this, you’ll just overwhelm them immediately. It’s a question of being kind, sensitive, and the important thing is get the ball over the net.

Make sure that the person can actually receive. This is a dangerous area to go into, but there’s still a great deal of sexism around in boardrooms, for example, where men will talk over women or disregard what they’re saying. And the female vocal range is kind of devalued, which is tragic. And some women, therefore, do work on deepening their voice in order to be more present in the main traffic lanes, if you like.

I mean we need to challenge all of that, of course, but it’s a question of, you can’t change the listening you’re speaking into. People often say to me, “Somebody I know really doesn’t listen. How do I get them to?” But you can’t just tell them you’re a terrible listener. You can make appointments. You can make contracts with people, which is very powerful. “Lottie, I’ve got something really important to say to you. Can you give me five minutes of your undivided attention? If not now, when would be good? Tomorrow at 10:00? Fantastic.”

So if I then start delivering my message and you start doing your email, I think I have a right then to say, “Lottie, sorry, you did say you were going to give me five minutes of undivided attention.” That works even with somebody who is a terrible listener and always distracted. So it’s fair to make a contract like that. But you have to speak into the listening that you’re given. You can’t change other people’s listening. You can change yours, which is very powerful, moving your listening position around and asking, “What’s the best place I can listen from in this conversation,” which may be very different, for example, if you’re listening to your son or daughter at home, five-year-old, just had a problem at school.

You want to be listening from empathic, listening with your heart, really being with them, as opposed to somebody at work who’s having a bit of a whinge about somebody else. Maybe you’re saying, “Okay, what’s the value in this? Can I train this person how to respond better?” And you’re being much more critical or evaluative in your listening position and not so much from the heart.

So I think what you just said is a fair question, but you have a huge range in all sorts of areas. And the reason I talk about that focal toolbox is that most people don’t know they have one. And once you become aware of the tools like prosody, for example, let’s pick one at random. Prosody, the sing-song of speech, your intonation, and the gaps between the words, your pacing, that’s prosody. Well, once you understand that that’s a tool you can work on, you can practice just as you would go to a gym.

So if I’m somebody who’s got very monotonous prosody and really speaks on almost one note the whole time, and we all know people like that work on it, read some poetry and really, really go mad and really exaggerate. That is exercising the muscles. So next time you speak, you’ll have a bit more range. With volume, with prosody, with all sorts of pace, you can slow right down to make an important point. Even if you speak quickly, it’s more dramatic if you do that. Or you can be really excited and speed right up and deliver like that.

The important thing is, as with everything I’ve said, really, this is a conversation about becoming a more conscious human being. Conscious of sound, its effect on me, its effect on you, its effect on the audience. Conscious of my voice, how I’m using it. Conscious of my listening, where am I listening from, what listening am I speaking into? It’s all about becoming a more conscious human being. And that is very, very important as a leader, being a leader and sleepwalking through stuff, and assuming everybody’s just the same as me, and they like what I like and they don’t like what I don’t like. It’s so dangerous. You are going to piss people off, disengage them. $8.8 trillion later, that’s what we get.

Lottie Bazley: I’m definitely going to use that five minutes listening, contracting with my husband because I’m terrible for that. I’ll just walk into a room, and he’ll be in the middle of doing something. And I start talking, and then I get irritated that he’s not been listening to what I’m saying. So I’m going to start saying, “Hey, give me five. When can you give me five?” I really appreciate that.

So to go back to one of the points you made about CEOs, I guess we’ve talked about how they can use their voices very intentionally. And we’ve talked a lot about listening on the one-to-one perspective. But in this whole disengagement study that you were talking about earlier, I think something that springs to mind is that when you are leading a business, you’re often having to listen to hundreds or thousands of voices. How can you be good at listening to that many people?

 Julian Treasure: I have a tool for this, which actually came about after the book, although I do talk in the book about some of these aspects, because there is an epidemic in the world right now of being right. I definitely talk about this in the book. And it’s a big problem because there’s an assumption that it’s all a zero-sum game. “I’m right, you’re wrong. That’s the way it works,” or, “You’re right, I’m wrong.”

Well, that’s not true. Two people can be right and have very different views because they’re right in their own perspectives. Given their own experience, their filters, as I was talking about earlier, their belief is perfectly reasonable. Everybody does things for a reason, a perfectly good reason to them. And one of the big problems with the world today and particularly the way the internet and social media are driving us is this extreme polarization, where we’re making people wrong the whole time.

Now, the tool I have for doing conflict much better and dealing with variations in people or people we don’t like, people we don’t agree with, it’s called PAVE. The P stands for paraphrase, which is “So, Lottie, what I understood you to say is this, did I get you?” So I’m making sure I received what you sent, which is very often not the case with people who are very different or speak in a different way or have a different attitude.

Sometimes we misinterpret what they said very badly. The A is admit. That means let it in. Let them be right. Even if you fundamentally disagree with what they said, put back the outrage, the commentary, the, “Wow, rubbish,” that is going on in your head. Let that settle and let it in. Just let them be right. That means you can move on to the biggest thing I think missing in the world today, and possibly in many leaders, validation.

That sounds like, “Lottie, you know what? I don’t agree with what you just said, but I completely understand why you would think that.” That’s very different from, “Lottie, that’s crap. That’s just rubbish,” because the only thing that’s going to result from making you wrong like that is conflict and disconnection, disengagement, maybe the end of a relationship, whatever it might be.

And having done the validation, you can then empathize, which might be, “So, Lottie, I get this. If that’s what you believe and that’s what happened, I can see why you’re upset about this. I wouldn’t have been upset about it. It wouldn’t have been a problem for me. I can see why you are upset about this because you’re not me. You’re different.” So paraphrase, admit, validate, empathize. It’s a very powerful way of dealing with difference.

And we have to do that. We are now acknowledging diversity in all sorts of ways in the workforce. And I think one of the most important forms of diversity in the workforce is diversity of perspective, opinion, thinking. If you surround yourself as a leader with clones of yourself, well, we see what’s happening when you do that in America and in Russia right now. You’ve got leaderships in both those countries, where they’ve surrounded themselves with yes-people who just agree with them about everything.

And it’s very fragile to have a leadership like that. Because if you’re wrong, there’s nobody to say, “Hang on. Have you thought about this possibility or other perspective?” Nobody says that. Everybody’s just on the same train heading in the same direction. And if it gets derailed, it’s going to be a mess. In the case of Trump, you disagree with him, you get fired. In the case of Putin, disagree with him, you get thrown out of a window. So people don’t. They don’t like to do that.

And when you create that, it’s a monoculture of opinion. That is such a fragile way to run a business. You need people who are going to say in a meeting, “Hang on. Have you thought about this?” 

Lottie Bazley: Yeah.

Julian Treasure: They’re different. We need diversity of opinion to have a robust and powerful leadership team. So you need to be able to listen to those people even if you don’t like them, even if they’re the kind of person you would never want to socialize with. You don’t really enjoy their company. They could be just the most important person in that meeting because they’re going to say something different.

I have a friend called David Firth, who wrote a great book some years ago called “The Corporate Fool,” which was about the old practice that kings and queens used to have like a jester, a fool, who was the one person who was allowed to take the piss out of the king or queen and prick their vanity bubble, and bring them back to Earth. That’s a very important role, to have people who, “Aren’t we getting a little bit vain here? Aren’t we getting a little bit obsessed with this one thing,” and so forth, who will say the unpopular thing. So that’s a very important aspect of listening is the ability to listen to difference.

Lottie Bazley: Yeah, I really appreciate that. And like you say, it’s that kind of diversity of thought and opinion that helps deliver the best outcomes because you’re seeing things from everyone’s perspective. So we’re running out of time, but I have a couple of more questions for you, Julian. And your work and coaching, you’ve coached many leaders at the very highest levels. From what you’ve seen, are there any communication habits that really separate effective leaders from the rest?

Julian Treasure: Yes, I think listening is the key one, listening to everybody. I don’t mean that you take it all in. I don’t mean you waste your whole time being passive and listening, but being able to listen to everybody. I talked to Hyrum Smith, who’s dead now, sadly, but he was the founder of the FranklinCovey organization with Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits guy. And he had an experience, he rated listening as the number one skill of a leader.

And he said there was a guy in their production line who has an idea for a new binder. And if they hadn’t listened to that guy, they would have missed a $30 million opportunity because that’s what it’s turned into. It was just a regular guy on the production line. He said, “Well, what about this?” Now, typically, that would be, “Oh, don’t get too big for your boots. Go back to work. What are you talking about?” But fortunately, that guy had a leader who was a listener.

So I do think conscious listening, careful, conscious listening is so critical for every leader. And then the other aspect of it is work on your voice. Go and get some vocal training, because if you want to inspire people, sell, influence, lead, your voice is critical for that. So both sides of the coin are skills. They both need to be worked on and acknowledged as important skills. And if you want to become a listening organization, that’s a whole different conversation. That’s non-trivial. You won’t get that by sending out an email saying, “Next week, we’re going to be a listening organization.”

No, you have to consider the culture, the behaviors, the channels that are available, the way you treat people, the way you recruit, train, reward, remunerate. And it has to start from the top of the organization. We’ve all been in organizations with what I call “dragon leaders,” shouty, aggressive people who don’t take bad news well. What ends up happening there is that they have no idea what’s going on in their company, because nobody’s giving them the bad news. You have to know the bad news in order to know what’s going on. And people start making up good news as well. I’ve seen that happen, too. So i t’s very important to be open and accessible in that way.

Lottie Bazley: Thank you. So for our listeners today then, myself included, is there one daily thing that we can do to improve our speaking or our listening that we can start from today?

Julian Treasure: Well, I’ll give you one for each then. So the listening practice I would recommend to everybody is to get some silence in your life, three minutes twice a day. It’s like a daily dose. The world is so noisy around us. If you can get three minutes of silence a couple of times a day, it might mean lock yourself in a bathroom, a closet, whatever it is. Many of us are assailed by noise the whole time. Our ears go numb. It resets your ears, recalibrates them, and it redefines your baseline for sound because silence is the baseline.

It’s a very important sound. It’s the gaps between the words that make everything make sense. Without silence, it’s all cacophony. So that’s my strong recommendation to improve your listening. Very simple, very good for you. And if you find it difficult, that is telling you, “You really need to do this.” I know a lot of people who live in cities and go to the country and go, “Oh, it’s so quiet. I don’t like it.” That’s a problem. We really need to reestablish our relationship with silence.

For speaking, well, I would say do the vocal warm-up exercises, which anybody can see in my TED Talk, the one I’m speaking where I do them on stage. So there are exercises for the lips, the tongue, the lungs, and also for the voice. The one I will do, if I can’t do any others, is the siren, which is very useful before you go on stage. You have to find a quiet place to do it in, although I do often do it while the audience are clapping for the previous speaker and I’m about to go on stage. You go, “We-or.” The “we” is as high as you can go. The “or” is as low. Should we do that together, Lottie? You go “weee-ooor.”

Lottie Bazley: Weee-ooor.

Julian Treasure: There you go, that’s the siren.

Lottie Bazley: My dog is probably outside like, “What’s going on in there?”

Julian Treasure: You can’t do that in public very often, but it is very powerful. It will tend to shift your voice down a little bit. And it also reveals to you any discontinuities in your voice that you can then work on simply by doing that. It lubricates and loosens you up. So that’s a very powerful one to do if you have to do any public speaking.

Lottie Bazley: Wait for someone else to clap, and then do your little we-orl on the sidelines.

Julian Treasure: Absolutely, yes.

Lottie Bazley: Love it. Well, I have one very important question for you, Julian. Do you have a favorite sound? We’ve talked a little bit about whales and birdsongs, but have you got a personal favorite go-to?

Julian Treasure: It definitely is the sound of summer rain on leaves outside a window when you may be lying in bed and listening to it. It’s absolutely beautiful at night, the rain at night. So that’s my favorite sound. I must actually put recordings of things like that into “The Listening Society,” which is my online community, which I’m intending to be a force for listening in the world. Just opened its doors. I invite everybody to join. Actually, I’ll send you a link, giving everybody a free week to go in and test it out.

Lottie Bazley: Oh wow, thank you.

Julian Treasure: So you can put that in the show notes. “The Listening Society” is going to have a range of beautiful sounds that you can download and use. But it’s also full of research papers, research results, podcasts I’ve done in the past, I’ve recorded with people, and all sorts of aspects of sound and listening, and training courses. All my training courses are in there, the ones that have trained 150,000 people. So I invite everybody to come in there. And I will put the sound of gentle rain in there forthwith because it should be.

Lottie Bazley: Fabulous. Thank you so much. Well, I’m definitely going to go and get my three minutes of silence later on today, but I’m also going to try, I’m going to turn off Radio 2, I’m going to try whale song, I’m going to try a birdsong. I mean I can just open the window. We’re in the UK, so it’s raining a lot of the time here anyway. But t hank you so, so much for your time today, Julian. I really, really enjoyed the conversation.

Julian Treasure: Me too.

Lottie Bazley: And I hope our listeners did, too. Thank you for joining us today for Aspire to Inspire and be sure to join us again. Thank you so much, Julian.

Julian Treasure: Thank you, Lottie.