Julian Treasure On How to Speak so that People Want to Listen
In this fascinating talk, Julian Treasure pinpoints just how important it is to pay attention to speaking powerfully, listening consciously and designing soundscapes in our world that sound beautiful, where understanding is the norm, and not something that is alien and unreachable.
Watching this video has made us realise that we need to acknowledge the amazing tool box we have for our voices, which can increase the power of our speaking. There’s factors such as register, timbre, prosody, pace, silence, pitch, and volume that all have a great impact upon the way you can capture attention and be engaging with whoever you are talking to, be it on a stage or an intimate one-on-one conversation.
We don’t all automatically have deep and rich voices, both associated with authority and power, but we can train the ways in which we speak.
Julian acknowledges the bad habits everyone can fall into that hamper our ability to speak powerfully and listen consciously:
The 7 Deadly Sins of Speaking
Gossiping
Judging
Negativity
Complaining
Excuses
Lying - Embroidery & Exaggeration
Dogmatism - the confusion of facts with opinions
However, he also addresses the 4 cornerstones we can all stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and actually make a difference:
Honesty, to be clear and straight
Authenticity, be yourself
Integrity, be your word
Love, wish them well
Easy to remember, this spells out HAIL, which fittingly means to greet or acclaim enthusiastically.
In our eyes, there definitely needs to be more enthusiasm for speaking in this world! More room for listening, and certainly more room for understanding. We’re going to try replacing some of those 7 deadly sins (however tempting some of them may be!) with more Honesty, Authenticity, Integrity, and Love and see what happens. And not just when we’re focused on getting our own way either…!
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Words by Lottie Franklin