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How To Unlock the Hidden Potential in Any Conversation with Julian Treasure

Lace Gilger
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In this episode we show you the power of listening, teach you to transform how you listen, and unlock an incredible set of communication skills that almost no one uses or understands with our guest Julian Treasure. 

Julian Treasure is the chair of the Sound Agency, a consultancy firm that advises worldwide businesses on how to effectively use sound. Julian has delivered 5 TED talks with more than 100 million views about listening, communication, and the effect sound has on the human brain. His latest talk, How to speak so that people want to listen, is in the top 10 TED talks of all time.  He is the author of the book Sound Business and How To Be Heard. His work has been featured in Time Magazine, The Economist, and many more.

  • Hearing is a reflex. It’s like breathing or your heart beating. You hear everything to the extent that you’re physically able to. 

  • Sound affects you before your process it consciously.. and we respond faster to sound than we do to sight. 

  • Listening is two key things

    • Selecting what to pay attention to 

    • Making those sounds mean something

  • It’s a grave and common mistake to think that everyone listens like you do. 

  • Listening is an action.. but it’s more than an action it’s a skill. It’s something you can become better at. 

  • Most people think no work is required to listen. 

    • Ask yourself: What’s the listening I’m speaking into?

    • Are you speaking to one person? Are you speaking to someone who is elderly? Are you speaking to an audience of hundreds of thousands of people?

  • There are two components to communication… Sending and Receiving. 

  • As a society we often focus primarily on the sending side.. hearing and listening is an underplayed card.

  • The best speakers are almost always very good listeners.

  • It’s not enough to send the message, you have to make sure it gets received on the other side. 

  • You have filters that shape the way you listen.

  • The spectrum of Critical Listening vs Empathic Listening

  • Speaking and listening are like a yin and yang - they are in a dynamic circle and interrelate to one another. 

  • Spend time thinking about the current listening filters that you have in place. Your language, your culture, your family, etc. 

  • Speaking right after lunch is the “graveyard slot” 

  • Self awareness, consciousness is a cornerstone of this 

  • What should you do if you’re scared of public speaking?

  • Listening is the sound of democracy. We have to be able to live in civilized disagreement. 

  • If you want to be a powerful communicator you must rid yourself of these two habits

    • Trying to look good… it’s too shallow. 

    • Being right. 

  • The four keys of powerful public speaking:

    • Honest

    • Authenticity

    • Integrity

    • Love

  • If you know everything what are you going to learn? Not much. 

  • It’s scary being a human being.

  • Looking good and being right make you feel better. But you have to let go of those drives to grow as a human… they inhibit communication and growth. 

  • How do you formulate and articulate your ideas with clarity and power? And get them accepted. 

  • Have an intention when you’re speaking and communicating with other people. 

  • Is content or delivery more important in being a really powerful communicator? 

  • “Say Say Say”

    • Say what you’re going to say: “This is an email asking you for this, this is the reason.”

    • Then say it.

    • Then say what you said. 

  • The powerful “RASA” framework:

    • Receive, appreciate, summarize, ask 

  • Summarizing is like closing doors in the long hallway of a conversation. 

  • “I would like to speak about this, because…”

  • There are probably billions of people who have never had the experience of being truly listened to. True listening is almost a form of meditation. 

  • It’s giving someone a great gift to give them 100% of your attention. 

  • “Tell me more is a great first question”

  • What is biophilic generative sound? And how can we use nature sounds to improve our working experience. 

  • “Wind water and birds” are the cornerstones of biophilic background noise… gentle waterfalls.. babbling brooks.. and birds singing. 

  • The sound of water is an important, pure, beautiful sound. 

  • Generative sound.. similar but not the same. 

  • “Biophany” the sound of nature. 

  • What kind of work do you want to do? Concentration, collaboration, communication? You need a different soundscapes. 

  • Sound changes your body in many ways. 

    • Heart rate

    • Feelings

    • Cognitive impact

    • Behaviorally

  • Take responsibility for your own soundscape. 

  • If an office or a retail store had a terrible smell. It would be a serious problem. Yet we tolerate terrible soundscapes every day. 

  • What to do if you’re in a bad soundscape?

    • Move

    • Block

    • Accept

  • Homework: Ask yourself what’s the listening that you’re speaking into?

  • Homework: Go and listen to someone that you love, and really listen to them, don’t do anything else, don’t be distracted, give them your 100% attention. It’s an amazing gift to give. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we show you the power of listening, teach you to transform how you listen and unlock and incredible set of communication skills that almost nobody is using or even understands, with our guest, Julian Treasure.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, which was a business-focused episode of the Science of Success, we shared how to recruit extraordinary talent and build a remarkable culture for your business with our previous guest, Dee Ann Turner.

Now, for our interview with Julian.

[0:01:37.6] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest coming back to the show, Julian Treasure. Julian is the Chair of The Sound Agency, a consultancy firm that advises worldwide businesses on how to effectively use sound. He’s delivered five TED Talks with more than a 100 million views about listening, communication and the effect of sound on the human brain. His latest talk How To Speak So That People Will Listen is in the top 10 TED Talks of all time.

He’s the author of the book Sound Business and How To Be Heard, and his work has been featured in Time Magazine, The Economist and media outlets across the world. Julian, welcome back to the Science of Success.

[0:02:15.2] JT: Thank you, Matt. I’m delighted to be back here.

[0:02:18.1] MB: Well, we really enjoyed our initial conversation with you and I know you’ve been doing so much stuff since we last spoke a couple years ago and it’s great to have you back on here. I’d love to hear what have you been up to since three or four years ago when you came on the show originally.

[0:02:32.6] JT: Well yes, the book How To Be Heard is one of the major things I have managed to achieve in that time. That was published and has been very successful. I created an audiobook actually, which I recorded here in a little studio in Orkney, which is where I live, a little island off the north coast of Scotland. Actually, that audiobook won both of the major awards for best business audiobook of last year, the Audie and the other one, which the name escapes me at the moment. It’s a set of initials.

I mean, that was very wonderful and very honored to have won those awards for the book. It’s a lot of fun reading it. It would’ve been a weird thing to have somebody else enact to come in and pretend to be me reading a book, so it just didn’t feel right. That was a big thing.

Created a new course, which is online now, which I think we probably talk about later on. The TED Talks have just gone on climbing and climbing. Yeah, as you said a 100 million. I mean, that is a big number. It continues to daunt me when I think about a football stadium full of people looking at me. It makes me very happy, because the talks are about becoming conscious. I really believe now there's a ripple effect, because everybody who listens, or watches one of those TED Talks will be listening a bit more consciously and more conscious of sound than what they say and how they listen. That ripple effect, hopefully will make a difference out there in the world.

Then finally, The Sound Agency has been very busy too. We've just launched a new thing called mood sonic, which is sound for office spaces, designed to improve well-being and productivity for I guess, there are a lot of people listening to this who have to work in open-plan offices and find it so difficult to concentrate in those spaces. Well, there's a lot of evidence now that they're actually pretty bad for us. The noise in the midst, the number one problem. We've addressed that with some biophilic generative sound. Again, I guess we can talk about what that really means in a little while.

[0:04:35.5] MB: Yeah, I definitely want to dig into that. Let's come back to this fundamental concept that you mentioned a moment ago, this idea of conscious listening. What is conscious listening and how can we be more conscious listeners?

[0:04:48.5] JT: Well, there's a great confusion I think for many people if they ever think about listening at all, which is to collapse hearing and listening. They're very different things. Hearing is a reflex. It's like breathing, or your heart beating. It's something that happens all the time. You hear everything to the extent that you're able to and to the extent that you're hearing is perfect. You hear everything from 20 Hertz to 20 kilohertz. You can hear an incredible range. It's about a trillion times from the quietest sound you can hear to the loudest sound you could tolerate, before it's actually really damaging.

You hear a sphere all around you 360 degrees. I mean, you can't see all around you, but you can hear all around you. It's your primary warning sense, that's why because you can hear things behind you, it goes very deep very fast right into the very lower parts of the brain, pre-cortical. Once you become conscious of the sound and it's already had effect by that time, sudden sound will have an effect on you before you process it consciously and we respond faster to sound than we do to site, by the way. Once you consciously perceive it, that's where listening starts.

With listening, what you're doing is two things; you're selecting certain sounds to pay attention to. You don't pay attention to all of the sound around you all of the time. Then you make those sounds mean something. Now that's where listening becomes really interesting, because we all do that in a slightly different way. One of the biggest things that I talk about a lot in terms of conscious listening is understanding that my listening is unique, so is yours Matt, so is everybody listening to this right now, all of your listenings are unique. It is a grave and common mistake to make the assumption that everybody listens like I do. That's at the root of a huge amount of miscommunication in the world.

People don't listen like I do. Only I listen like I do. I need to be conscious of that and of the fact that I'm speaking all the time into a listening, which is different from mine. Once I start to appreciate these nuances, two things become possible; one is I can be more sensitive to the listening I'm speaking into and that's a huge secret to powerful speaking, effective speaking. The other one is I can be conscious that I'm actually doing something when I'm listening. It's an action. More than that, actually it's a skill. It's something that I can work at, perfect, become better at. Just in the same way if I want to play the piano or play golf, I have to learn these things, so I have to practice and I have to become better at them. Well, it's the same with listening. It's a skill.

Unfortunately, for the vast majority of people on the planet they think it's natural and no work is required, that we all do it in the same way. That's very untrue. That's what I mean by conscious listening primarily is understanding that I'm actually doing something when I'm listening. That's the biggest opening to understanding how to listen better.

[0:08:10.2] MB: Such an important point. I really love the idea that it's a grave and common mistake to think that everyone listens the same way that you do. I see that so frequently and it's really as you said, at the heart of so many communication problems.

[0:08:27.5] JT: Definitely. Definitely. Once you get this idea, I talked about it in the book, in the course and with you – and when I'm doing talks to audiences, that once you get the idea, you speak into the listening, whether we're in a one-to-one conversation, or whether it's one-to-many, whether I'm having a chat my with my family, or whether I'm standing on stage talking to thousands of people, there's a listening. If it's one person, that's a personal listening. If it's a lot of people, it's a compound, a gestalt listening, which comprises all of the individual listenings.

Once you start asking yourself that question, the key question, what's the listening I'm speaking into? That is such a great habit to be in, just asking yourself that question all the time. Then you become immediately attuned to it and you're able to speak in a more appropriate way. I mean, to give you an example, I might be speaking to somebody who's elderly and who has a slow pace, somebody who speaks like this. If I'm speaking really quickly, that's my natural style, it's just going to pressure them. They're going to feel overwhelmed and assaulted almost.

If I am listening to the listening, if I'm asking myself what's the listening, I can slow down and I can speak in a much more appropriate, empathic, sensitive way, and I will get the ball over the net far more times if I'm doing that, than if I carry on in my natural style assuming everybody's like me.

[0:10:00.0] MB: That's a really interesting way to phrase it, what is the listening that you're speaking into. I've never quite thought of it that way, but it makes sense to contextualize all of your communication to whether you're addressing that one person and what are their proclivities and how do they listen, or whether you're addressing an audience of hundreds or thousands of people.

[0:10:21.6] JT: Definitely, because there are two components to communication out there. There’s the sending and there's the receiving. We do tend to focus rather a lot on the sending. I mean, to give you an idea, my TED Talk on speaking has been seen by I think five or six times as many people as my TED Talk on listening. Well, that says something doesn't it? We're very focused on sending and hearing and listening as a sense, a very underplayed compared to speaking. It's a natural thing, I suppose. We want to make a mark, or we have more control perhaps over what we direct out. Maybe it's seen as more of a statement of who we are.

Generally, I have found and I think it's true from history that the best speakers are also very good listeners, because they're listening to the listening. They're conscious of who it is they're speaking to. Therefore, they speak in a more effective and appropriate way.

[0:11:20.0] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that connection between listening and being a powerful speaker.

[0:11:28.1] JT: Well, I interviewed several people for the book and it was a consistent theme that if you want to be really powerful in speaking, it's not enough simply to send. That's a little bit like if you're playing tennis, just whacking the ball over the net without paying any attention to where the other player is. If you want to send, if you want to have a rally for example, a friendly rally, you want to hit the ball towards the person. If you want to win the point, you need to hit the ball away from the person. You need to know where they are. It's just the same in speaking.

It's not enough simply to whack the ball over the net. What you need to do is to make sure it gets received at the other side. That is very much about understanding who you're talking to, the culture, the age, the background. We have these filters that we listen through. Not only can you become sensitive of those filters in other people, you can become more sensitive of those filters in yourself, which allows you to start consciously playing with them. There are things I call listening positions, which are very powerful ways of doing that. They have metaphorical places to listen from many stances or ways of listening, if you like.

To give you a couple of examples and I do these things in workshops. I mean, this is a really good example of how powerful listening is in its effect on speaking. One scale of this would be critical to empathic. Critical listening is something that we use a great deal in business. It's very useful. It's assessing, analyzing, discarding, what's in it for me? Or do I agree with that? Or where is this going? Or can I get this conversation to move in that direction? There's this little voice in the head going all the time.

Well, that's fine for business, but it might not be appropriate when you go home and you're with your family. Unfortunately, many people get rather stuck in a listening position like that and it becomes their default modus operandi. Well, if you become conscious of your listening position, you can move it and you could say, “Well actually, perhaps I would be better off in this conversation, because somebody's upset in front of me,” rather than telling them, “You shouldn't be upset. This is not reasonable.” This is a small event. Don't worry about it. Actually what I could be doing is going, “I really understand how you're feeling,” and just being empathetic, empathic.

I do that exercise in classes from time to time. I get half the room to go out, each working in pairs. Half the room goes out. The ones behind, I brief them to listen critically at the beginning, which is to say marking the person out of 10 in how well they're doing this. It's a really hard critical listening. Then when I say change, they move into empathic listening, really seeking to feel the other person's feelings. Then I bring the other half in and tell them to persuade their listening partner to go to their favorite place in the world on holiday this year.

They're very passionate about it and they start talking. It's like pushing water uphill. It's walking into the wind. It's really hard speaking into that listening when somebody's just sitting there, stony-faced, mocking you. The moment I say change, the whole dynamic alters and the person speaking suddenly finds that the conversation is lubricated, it's easy, it flows, it's exciting. They're getting feedback in the style of the raster exercise I talk about in my TED Talk, where there's this feedback for this little noises, appreciative noises and they're being given – There's a feedback loop established where the listening is drawing them out. That's a great way of explaining the relationship.

Speaking and listening are in a circle and it's a dynamic circle. The way I speak affects the way you listen, the way you listen affects the way I speak and the way I speak affects the way you speak, and the way I listen affects the way you listen. Now if we're not conscious of that, then we're doing ourselves a disservice. That's at the root of many people's frustration where they say, “Nobody ever listens to me. Or my thoughts across, or I can't make the difference I make because people just – they talk over me.” A lot of the time, that's at the root of it, not listening to the listening.

[0:15:59.3] MB: Tell me a little bit more about how we can start to try on these new listening positions, or even if we're stuck in a particular listening position, how we can start to move out of that.

[0:16:11.2] JT: Well, the first access to it which is one of the exercises that we do in the course and I think it's in the book, the first access to it is to become conscious of your filters. It's actually to spend a bit of time thinking about what the filters are that you have in play. Those filters come from the language you speak, the culture you're born into. I don't mean that in the broadest sense. I mean, that all the way up from yes, possibly, your nationality, but right down to the street you live in, or the micro-culture of your family, or group, or your friends, or the community that you're born into. Those definitely affect your listening as you grow up.

Then you accrete values, attitudes, beliefs along the way from your parents, from teachers, from role models, from friends and you select some and you discard others. That's where your road to this conversation has been different from mine, Matt, because you have selected different ones to me. I have no doubt.

Then situationally, we have expectations perhaps going into a conversation or any situation. We might have intentions as well. We might have emotions going on. There are things that change. Your listening changes all the time. It's not only different from one person to the next, but for each person, it's different through the day.

I often get assigned this speaking slot after lunch, because they know I'm reasonably proficient at this. That's well-known in the speaking world as the graveyard slot, because just after lunch everybody's gut is working hard, lots of blood is going to the gut, everybody's feeling sleepy, less engaged. It really is quite hard work to speak in that slot. You have to again, know that’s the listening you’re speaking in to and adjust your energy level and the interest of what you're talking about and engage people that bit more, because otherwise, it can be pretty – a pretty hard slog to connect with people.

That is the first thing to do is to become conscious of your own listening filters. Then once you're conscious of the filters, you can be asking yourself, and a lot of this is simply about being a more aware human being. It's about awareness. It's about mindfulness. It's about consciousness of what am I doing right now? Going through life on autopilot automatically in a sleepwalking state, I think is a great shame, because there's so much to experience. That's part of the message I have about sound as well, because sound is so rich and fascinating and amazing. Most people pay very little attention to the sound around them. Architects certainly do in the designing spaces, where they just focused on how things look, not on how things sound. Hence, my TED Talk about designing with the ears, as well as the eyes.

I think there’s this is tremendous richness in becoming more conscious every moment. It's one of the reasons why I love speaking on stage, because I think when you're speaking on stage, you're very, very conscious of everything you're doing, at least if you take it seriously and you really work at it; how you're standing, the gestures you're making, the connection with the audience, the feedback from the audience. It's a time of great richness of consciousness and it's not a time to be half asleep at all, because there are hundreds of people looking at you. It's important. You have something to say. You have a gift to give them.

That's one of the reasons why I love that experience. I know that's different from many people who actually have a fear of standing up in front of people and talking. Well, for those people, practice makes perfect. There are cures for nervousness and so forth. It is an amazing experience if you want to become a more conscious human being.

[0:20:13.3] MB: It's amazing how important self-awareness is to underpinning consciousness and really giving you the ability to look at yourself and figure out, “Where am I struggling? What am I doing? What biases do I have? How am I acting and being?” In any situation, whether it's listening, or even throughout our lives. It's amazing. Self-awareness is such a critical skill, such an important tool for all of these things.

[0:20:42.0] JT: Rather rare, I think in the world. Unfortunately, we're seeing politics which really started on my side of the Atlantic and then went over to yours; politics of shouting, of polarization, of caricature. That's a long slippery slope. The media involved in this, is this merry dance of politicians speaking in sound bites, because they get interrupted so rapidly by aggressive attack journalists and the journalists getting more and more impatient, so we get this shorter and shorter attention span.

The old idea of rhetoric, or reasoned debate completely gone really. Now we're dealing with diplomacy in 90 characters or a 140 characters and it's all shouting, which is very sad. I mean, politicians go off and have talks. I wish they'd go off and have listens, because I think listening is the sound of democracy. For democracy to exist, we have to be able to live in civilized disagreement. There's a great quote by Barack Obama. He said, “I like to speak with people, especially when I disagree with them.” There aren't that many people who have that attitude.

I think the Internet and the way we now learn things is making this more extreme, because we don't browse. We don't go out there and examine all the possible arguments for a proposition. We go out there to seek justification for our point of view, to look for people who agree, “I knew I was right about this.” Unfortunately, you get people more and more entrenched, hence trolling and so forth. People, this is hatred. It comes from one of the two big things, which I talk about a great deal, which are two of the biggest holes in the bucket if you want to be really powerfully received by people.

There are two habits, which I think are massively destructive; first, looking good. We all like to look good. If you’re standing in front of a room full of people and your focus is on looking good, it's so shallow. People can tell. I've seen TED Talks where it's clear the person has been so rehearsed and is so mannerized that every gesture has been programmed and considered. It doesn't feel right. That's why I talk about the four keys of powerful speaking, which spell the word HAIL, honesty, authenticity, integrity and love. The authenticity is really important; just being yourself. I think that's a big part of the idea of public speaking.

The other really destructive habit I think, and that's the one I'm talking about when I'm talking about politics and polarization is being right. We are getting addicted to outrage. Outrage is very significant, because the easiest way for me to be right is to make somebody else wrong. If I engage in modern media a great deal, there’s a huge amount of making people wrong. Who's to blame? This is disgusting. This is disgraceful. This is outrageous. I am right. They are wrong.

Being right makes us feel better about ourselves, but unfortunately, it's such an adversarial way to be and there isn't. You can't be right all the time. In fact, if you want to be a learning conscious human being, it's very important to be able to say, “I'm wrong, or I don't know those rare words these days.” There's an awful lot of I know people. Have you met those? It's very difficult if you're around somebody who is professionally impossible to impress. “I know. I know. I know.” If you know everything, what are you going to learn? Not much.

Being right, looking good, those are two things to look out for. They give rise to what I talked about in the TED Talk, the seven deadly sins are speaking. It's all based on fear fundamentally. We are fearful entities. It's scary being a human being, many ways; worrying about what people might think of us, or I'll be doing the right thing, or which knife do I pick up, or how do I behave here, or how do I address this? There's a lot of scary stuff just in social interaction, let alone the millions and millions and millions of people in the world who are seriously scared, because they live in war zones, or they don't know where their next meal is coming from.

It is scary being a human being. I totally understand how looking good and being right make us feel better. I do think it's a big part of being a conscious human being to be aware of those drives and to resist them as far as possible, because they are not good for communication, they're not good for listening. Listening is the doorway to understanding and that is something we need a lot more of in the world today.

[0:25:33.3] MB: I couldn't agree more with both of those things. In many ways, those are two of the fundamental challenges that inspired me originally to create this podcast. There's so many people that are focused on being right, instead of trying to find out what's true. They're focused on looking good, instead of improving and learning, and many ways, echoes the classic fixed mindset from all of Carol Dweck's research. Those are such important challenges.

You bring up a tremendously valuable point, which is that they both of those things inhibit you from learning, they inhibit you from growing, they inhibit you from really understanding other people and being able to communicate with them.

[0:26:15.2] JT: Definitely. I mean, my whole purpose in life is to grow each day. As long as I can put my head on the pillow at night and say, “I learned something today, or I learned how to not to do something bad, or I learned how to say something better, or I had a new thought, or had an idea growing,” that is surely purpose. I think those two habits are enormously damaging to anybody who wants to grow.

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[0:28:11.6] MB: I want to change directions a little bit and talk about some of the other themes and strategies from your work that I think are really important and interesting. One of them is formulating ideas with clarity and power and getting them accepted. How do you think about crafting, especially in the context of what we were just talking about in the world where there's so much noise and so much shouting, how do you think about really powerfully communicating and developing ideas?

[0:28:43.8] JT: Well, there are systems for that of course. A lot of it is coming from the original question we talked about, what's the listening I'm speaking into? The first thing to consider is whom am I speaking to? What are their needs? Intention is very, very important in this. There are several intentions at play when you're speaking to anybody. There's my intention for this conversation. I need to be clear about that. There's their intention for the conversation and I don't know that. I have to guess it. There's my intention for them as well. What is it I want them to get out of this conversation? It's not all about what I want to get out of it.

I've got my intention for me, my intention for you or whoever I'm speaking to, and then I have to guess your intention for you. You may have an intention for me as well, but that's even harder to guess. That is the trick, because if you're guessing what the other person's intention is and if you're clear about your own intention, you can align. That really is where powerful communication comes from. It's consciously aligning.

I think you can make contracts with people. Matt, do you have five minutes I need to talk to you? Well, that's a contract. If you say yes, then I know I have got your attention. It's amazing how often we simply barge particularly an open-plan offices, how often we barge into people's spaces and start yammering away when it's really inappropriate. No wonder they don't listen. They're trying to do something else. We are an intrusion.

As Professor Jeremy Myerson said when I was doing a BBC radio documentary on open-plan offices called The Curse of Open-Plan he said, “There are no rules for this environment of open-plan. The postman doesn't come barging into your house and dump your mail on your living room floor, but that's how we behave in open-plan very often.” It's a Wild West environment. That intrusion I simply doesn't work. 

Obviously, you need to be clear about the content. I asked Chris Anderson actually, the head of TED. When I interviewed him for my book, I asked him whether he thought content or delivery was the more important aspect of being a really powerful communicator. He said, “Well, they're both important. If forced to choose, content is more important.” Because if somebody is saying something blindingly brilliant and they're not a very good speaker, you bear with them. If somebody is talking rapid nonsense and presenting it in a brilliant way, that's just irritating. It's a shame.

I think that's true. There are many ways of designing content. I'm a great fan of the old essayists, maxim say, say, say. Say what you're going to say. I have a contract with you Matt, do you have five minutes? What I'd like to talk to you about is this and I'm hoping that we can agree that. You know what the context is for the whole thing, so you're feeling comfortable. You might say, “No, I don't want to talk about that.” In which case, we don't waste our time.

Incidentally, that's a huge mistake that is made by probably billions of people worldwide in e-mail. They give you all the background first. Dear such-and-such, this happened, this happened, this happened. About 17 paragraphs down, you get to, “So, I'd to ask you for this.” That's wasted, because I haven't got there. I just switched off ages ago. You need to start the e-mail with, “This is an e-mail asking you for this. Here's the reason.” There's a context and I think that's a very important thing as part of the contract of communication.

That’s say, say what you're going to say, then you say it. Then at the end, you say what you said. To summarize, the word ‘so’ incidentally is very important. I put it into RASA, that receive, appreciate, summarize, ask. Summarize is so a little word which is really powerful. Summarizing is like closing doors in the long corridor of a conversation. What I've heard you say is this, is that. Right. Yeah. Or in a meeting. What we've all agreed is this. Now we can move on to that. If you don't have a so person in a meeting, it can be a very, very long meeting indeed, going around in circles.

I think say, say, say is one of the most effective ways of ensuring that you communicate well, with a contract with the person to listen and maybe give them a reason. I'd like to speak about this, because it's going to give you this or it'll give us this. There's a there's a benefit here to both of us. Obviously, self-obsessed prattling is not going to be the most powerful form of communication. If it's all about me and I simply want you to admire me, again, we're back to looking good, aren’t we? That's not a great place to generate from.

[0:33:45.5] MB: A number of really powerful strategies and frameworks. I really like the say, say, say framework. Tell me a little bit more about RASA and what that is again and how we can implement that.

[0:33:58.2] JT: Yes. It's a strategy more for listening in conversation, but it affects both sides of a conversation. The R is receive, and that is actually looking at somebody. It's amazing how much fur or partial listening we do in the modern world. We often have a device in our hand. We're tapping. “No, I am listening to you.” “No. You’re texting somebody. That's a different thing. It's not listening.”

Scott Peck, the American author said, “You cannot truly listen to another human being and do anything else at the same time.” I absolutely agree with that. Do you know? I think there are billions of people on this planet probably who've never had the experience of being truly listened to. Partially listened to when I'm cooking or when doing something. “Yeah, I'm listening to you.” The radio is on, or I'm thinking about something else, or whatever it may be.

True listening, the R is looking at somebody and doing nothing else. It's a form of meditation almost. Not preparing my next brilliant bit of dialogue, not thinking, not judging, assessing, all of that stuff, simply listening to the other person. That involves body language as well. Facing them. It's very often the case that you're talking to somebody and their feet are pointing out at the door, or they've got the hand on the door handle. It's not a great place to be. Or they're slumped over looking at the floor, or they're supporting their head. I mean, that's always a warning sign in talks, which fortunately, I haven't seen that much, but I mean, I've seen a bit of it.

If you're speaking to a group of people, if there's a lot of people supporting their heads, the eyes are starting to go, you know that you need to up the energy level. Maybe it's that graveyard slot. The R is very important. It's giving somebody a great gift to give them a 100% of your attention.

The A is appreciate. It's little noises like, “Oh, really.” If you're in front of them, raised eyebrows, nods, bobs of the head, gestures, little mirroring, gestures, which show that you're with them and which oil the conversation. The S as I've said is So, the word so. Summarizing, so that you close those doors and you move on down the corridor with them. The A is ask; ask questions before, during, after. It shows engagement and it allows you to tease things out and to help co-produce the conversation. “The aspect you've mentioned that I'm really interested in is this. Could you say more about that?” You can actually help to make the conversation more interesting and help the person to give you better value by steering it in the right direction.

It's a very daunting thing to talk to somebody who's sitting there in stony silence just staring at you and doesn't give you much feedback. That's RASA.

[0:36:47.6] MB: Perhaps I'm naturally biased in this direction being a podcast host, but to me, asking is such an important part of listening in any conversation. It's amazing how much you can learn if you really consciously listen and then ask the right questions.

[0:37:05.8] JT: Definitely. People love talking generally. People love talking about themselves or about what they're interested in. For those people who many people over the years have approached me and said, “People wouldn't listen to me. I can't get into conversation.” The best way to start is to ask. Ask interesting questions. “Really?” Show interest. “That's interesting. Tell me more.” Tell me more is a great first question, if you like. I mean, it's not really a question. It's an instruction, but it acts in the same way, doesn't it?

It's that drawing people out. Then they feel excited, like they've got a great listener and they're having fun and so forth. Then they're much more likely, even if they're not dedicated to conscious listening, they're much more likely to be receptive when you start to speak.

[0:37:50.1] MB: I want to come back to something you talked about much earlier, the blight of the open-plan office and the concept of, and I may mispronounce this, but biophilic generative sound. I don't know if that's exactly how you said it or not, but tell me a little bit more about that.

[0:38:06.7] JT: Spot on, Matt. Spot on. Biophilic means based around nature, so in the same way that people are bringing the outdoors, indoors in a lot of modern office design with plants and planted walls and that thing. It's good, because we like being surrounded by living things, by organic things, by nature. Pictures or projections of forests, or beaches or whatever, tend to make people feel good. In just the same way, you can do that with sound.

In fact, I think it's pretty weird to do it without sound. If you're having a forest, or a garden wall or something in an office, why not have some nature sound associated with it? It's biophilic sound. Biophilic sound largely in offices is based around water of various kinds. There are three key elements to biophilic sound, WWB. I call the wind, water and birds. All of them, things that people like a great deal. I'm not talking about the extreme varieties. This isn't arctic gales. It's not the cawing of crows. It's obviously the more pleasant and not a huge water, but trickling, babbling brooks, or gentle waterfalls.

There's a reason why people have water fountains installed in houses, in hot places, it's to listen to it. Because simply the sound of it – you don't dive into the fountain. It's quite nice to look at. The sound has an effect all the time. It's the sound of refreshment in hot countries, it's the sound of life apart from anything else. Get far from water, you're in big trouble.

The sound of water is a very important, pure, beautiful sound. We are what is it? 70% water, anyway. It's a key sound. Water transmits sound far better than air does incidentally, about twice as fast. We use water a great deal. Now there's been research done especially by Professor Hongisto in Finland on using biophilic sound, largely water sound, as a sound to mask conversation. It's quite effective.

Typically, if you want to create privacy, or privacy as you would say in an office, people will install artificial noise. I am not a big fan. Actually, the research is starting to back that up, that my instinctive feeling, it's not healthy. The filtered brown noise, or pink noise, or white noise, filtered noise of which I'm not a great fan. The thing, it's filtered brown noise, pink noise, white noise. It's [inaudible 0:40:44.9]. That sound gently delivered through ceiling loudspeakers all day. You cease to become aware of it and it does mask out conversation. It masks out unpleasant, or unwanted sound to a degree, but it's artificial. It's not pleasant.

The research is starting to show that it does fatigue people. It's like when the AC goes off at the end of the day in an office and everybody's shoulders go down, “Oh. I didn't even know that was on. Now I feel released from some prison or something.” Hongisto has shown that it's possible to use biophilic sound to improve privacy, to mask unwanted conversation and at the same time, that it's much more pleasant for people.

Incidentally before anybody asks, the old thing about running water making everybody want to go to the toilet is an old wives’ tale. It's not true. There's no scientific evidence for that, whatsoever. You don't have to go to the bathroom the moment you sit by a stream. We use that sound, birdsong, some tonal elements and we do it with a generative system. That is a system, it's algorithmic, it's a computer and it makes sound in real-time. It's not a recording. It's actually created in real-time, like a texture. It is like a river going past. Looks similar all the time, but it's never the same.

It mimics a lot of natural scenarios, which are probabilistic, stochastic. If you're in a forest, the birds don't all sing at once and then stay silent for half an hour. There's a random distribution and that's exactly the thing that we mimic. These are sounds that have been around for a lot longer than we have on this planet. My old friend Bernie Krause, one of the world's nature sound recordists talks about biophony, the sound of nature, and anthropophany, the sound of people, and geophony, the sound of the planet. We're talking about a combination of geophony and biophony and using that in a sophisticated, scientifically validated way to create environments in open-plan offices, which are health giving, as opposed to health damaging and which improve productivity, because they aid concentration in places where people find it very hard to concentrate.

We call it mood sonic. Now there's a website, moodsonic.com. We're just putting our first installation next month in a big office in the US, which we're very excited about. Seven floors of office. It'll be onward and upward from there. We've got lots and lots of big companies really excited about this. It's a big thing for us, this mood sonic. I really think it's going to make a big difference to millions of people.

[0:43:30.7] MB: It's so interesting. I'm a bit of an audiophile myself and always like to have some sound. Often, my wife makes fun of me, but I listen to essentially running water, bird sounds, nature sounds. I'll put on a YouTube video just on a second monitor that's just a stream running, or something like that. I love having those sounds in the background, so it's so fascinating that there's starting to be some research around that being really positive for people and having that in their environment.

[0:44:01.7] JT: Definitely. It's no surprise, because noise has been known for some years now to be the number one problem in open-plan offices. If you look at the Leesman index, or any of the any of the people who are assessing people's quality of life in in these environments, in which we spend huge parts of our lives. There are people who spend a third of their lives or even more in these environments. Well, the sound of the built up spaces that we've created is not great. That's what my TED Talk about Do Something With the Ears was all about. We spend the majority of our life indoors and yet, most of the rooms were in are designed without any heed to the way they sound at all. That's a really big issue. I think architects need to start listening a lot more than they have in the past.

Mood sonic should make a contribution, I think to standard offices. Incidentally, that's not the only thing we need to change. We need much more quiet working space in modern offices. We need to think about the new way of doing it, which is activity-based working, where you have different environments in the office building and you encourage people to move to the environment that facilitates the work they want to do, whether that's concentration, contemplation, communication, whatever it is, collaboration. Open-plans, fine if you're doing group work in collaborative way, but that poor person sitting the desk over there, while we're all shouting, is unable to think. That's where you need the differentiation.

[0:45:38.5] MB: Tell me a little bit more zooming out slightly about the broader importance of crafting our soundscapes, because it seems that's such an underutilized and misunderstood component of health and well-being and productivity.

[0:45:55.6] JT: Oh, absolutely. Sound affects us in these four powerful ways, that I defined in my original book Sound Business. I haven't had any reason to change and that was back in 2007, I think. Physiologically, sound changes heart rates, hormone secretions, body chemistry, brain waves, breathing. There are many rhythms in our body which are affected by the sound around us. It changes our feelings, our mood. Psychologically sound is changing us all the time; we know that music is the most obvious example. A lot of people find birdsong reassuring, because we've learned when the birds are singing things are normally safe.

The third way is cognitively, so you can't understand two people talking at the same time and that's what we've just been talking about in offices. You can't have somebody talking behind you and listen to the voice in your head when you're trying to write. It's very difficult. Then finally, behaviorally, which is that's the work we've done at The Sound Agency. A lot in retail is to create more pleasant retail environments sonically. I mean, it would obviously be stupid to have a shop or a shopping mall with a terrible smell in it. I mean, that’s dumb isn't it? It's amazing how many shops and shopping malls have got terrible sound, and it has exactly the same effect, which is we leave, or we leave faster than we would and we have a bad time and we're stressed and fatigued. It's just not intelligent design.

With all of that power, sound is affecting us all the time. This is where I come back all the time to listening consciously, because if I'm listening consciously and I'm aware of the effects that sound is having on me, then I can take responsibility for the sound I consume. More than that, I can take responsibility also for the sound I create. That's really where I would love everybody to get to, I mean, anybody listening to this. That's a tremendous place to be.

As a conscious listener, we are more responsible for what we're putting into the world, the sound we're making, whether it's speaking in a powerful way, or whether it's not upsetting people around us, by sodcasting with music, or with my sound, or whatever it might be. Even more importantly, I can take responsibility for the sound I consume. If I'm in some noise, I can move.

I talk about an MBA in dealing with sound. If it's nasty noise that you don't like particularly, the M is move. If you can't move and you're in an office or somewhere and you can't move, the B would be block, and that's put headphones on. Ideally if you're working, I wouldn't suggest playing music through headphones, because that's just replacing one distraction with another one. Music is very distracting. It’s very dense sound. Well, most of it is, unless it's specifically designed to be background.

Then if you can't block it, you haven't got headphones, or for whatever reason, the only thing left to do actually is a spiritual adjustment, which is to accept it. Because when you're in noise, a lot of the productivity loss comes from the anger. “I can't concentrate in this ridiculous scenario.” Well, if you actually say, “All right. I'm here. I'm just going to do my best.” The anger goes and suddenly, you're able to do far better than you would with all of that resistance going on. It's move, block, accept.

[0:49:16.1] MB: I love the analogy of smell. If you're in an office that had a horrible smell, or a store that has a terrible smell, something would be done immediately to fix it. Yet, we tolerate terrible sound escapes across our lives in many, many different areas.

[0:49:29.6] JT: True.

[0:49:30.4] MB: I'm curious, for listeners who want to take action on what we've talked about today, who want to concretely implement it in some way, what would one piece of homework, or action step be that you would give them to start taking action on these topics?

[0:49:44.4] JT: I think a couple of things. First of all, start asking that question what's the listening is. It's one of the most powerful questions I could have give anybody. If you get into the habit of asking that question, it can transform your communication skills. That's one thing. The other wonderful thing I would suggest everybody to do is after listening to this podcast, go and listen to somebody that you love and really listen to them. Look at them, don't do anything else. At the same time, give them your 100% attention, then you may find people going, “What are you doing?” Because they're not quite used to you being like that. It's an amazing gift to give. I do encourage people to give that gift and keep on giving that gift, because it really can transform things.

[0:50:31.1] MB: Where can listeners find you, your work, the course and everything that you're doing online?

[0:50:37.2] JT: Well, I have a website, juliantreasure.com. There’s a lot on there. You can get a little mini-course of video exercises in listening there. Absolutely free. You just put your e-mail address in and we send them to you. The course is at speaklistenbe.com. I think that's on a fairly big offer at the moment, so it's roughly half of the original price. It'd be quite a good time to go by this, www.speaklistenbe.com. That's nine chapters, seven and a half hours of content from me, a video and audio content. Lots and lots of downloadable exercises, everything I know pretty much about speaking and listening skills is in there.

The Sound Agency if anybody's interested in mood sonic, or design sound for business, that's www.thesoundagency.com.  Or there's also moodsonic.com now as well. Those are the four URLs. Do check them out and I’ll be delighted to hear from anybody.

[0:51:35.8] MB: I'm curious personally, is there any plan or opportunity for mood sonic and the soundscapes you're creating, especially I love the idea of them being algorithmically generated for people who may not be in an office space, or want to listen to those on the go, is that available to listen anywhere?

[0:51:53.4] JT: Not yet, Matt. I would say with the emphasis on the yet. We've got very, very exciting plans. The technology we've developed for these generative soundscapes is world-leading and we're moving it on a pace this year. We've got a really significant development budget on it. We're looking at this sound becoming intelligent, responsive, even artificially intelligent. We're very, very excited about that. One of the obvious spin-offs of that would be to deliver it through some app, so that people can access generative sound of this kind through a device and have it in their home.

I love the idea of a baby cries and automatically, a lullaby or some soothing sound comes on through a nearby loudspeaker. That responsiveness and design of appropriate sound is where we're heading and we're very excited to be on that journey.

[0:52:43.2] MB: Well, you've got at least one person here who's very interested in that. Either way Julian, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this knowledge. It was great to have you back on the Science of Success.

[0:52:54.3] JT: Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me. I hope this has given some benefit to some people and we got some more listening out there in the world. Thanks so much.

[0:53:02.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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