JULIAN TREASURE - SECRETS FOR POWERFUL SPEAKING AND LISTENING

Full transcript of episode with Julian Treasure​​​​​

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JONATHAN LØW

Welcome to a new episode of Extraordinary. I'm your host, Jonathan Løw, and as always, we promise you extraordinary guests and down-to-earth conversations. Today's guest is Julian Trescher.

 

Julian is a five-time TED speaker and author of the bestsellers How to Be Heard and Sound Business. Julian, thanks so much for joining Extraordinary. Great pleasure to be here.

 

Thanks for asking me, Jonathan. And now we are talking, but actually this recording is all about listening. And I love this topic because when I started a company 10 years ago, I decided to name it Listen Louder.

 

And it was actually an invite or reminder to myself that I tend to sometimes speak too much. And when I then listen, then I listen to reply in order to actually understand or get into dialogue with people. So I think I've improved for 10 years, but just listening to myself now, I keep on talking.

 

So that's why I will ask you, why have you become so interested in and passionate about listening?

 

JULIAN TREASURE

Well, first of all, I'm a musician since childhood. And I do think musicians listen in a slightly different way to non-musicians. If you're playing in a band or an orchestra, you have to have a very attentive, multi-track form of listening.

 

You're listening to everybody else at the same time. If you're not doing that, you won't play very well. You won't be a good member of the team.

 

So I took that. And incidentally, not surprisingly, it's been established now quite well by neuroscientists that musicians have quite a lot of neural advantages. They've got slightly bigger brains.

 

There's a part of the brain that's more developed. And they're also, they tend to be better at a whole range of things like manipulation of numbers, complex tasks and so forth, which if you think about what, for example, a violinist is doing in an orchestra, they're reading a code on a piece of paper, which is very complicated. And at the same time, they're listening to all of the other instruments.

 

And at the same time, they're performing some incredibly complicated physical movements with their fingers and arms and so forth. And doing all those things at the same time, well, that's going to stretch your brain. So it's not surprising to me.

 

So I had that kind of musicians listening from a long time ago, and I had a long career in marketing, producing magazines and so forth. Then I started a company called The Sound Agency because all the way through my career in marketing, dealing with brands, I had been noticing that the world doesn't sound very good and that many organizations are making sound that is very counterproductive, unpleasant noise, generally. Because noise is like the exhaust gas of the world, really.

 

It's seldom designed. There aren't many architects who design the way they're building sound. They think about just how they look.

 

And we don't teach listening at school at all, which is mad to me. I mean, absolute nonsense. If you taught children first how to listen, how much more of their education would they understand and take on board?

 

But we don't, for some reason. So we've kind of lost contact with it, and that was very clear to me. So I started The Sound Agency.

 

That was an audio branding company. I ran it for 20 years, asking the question, how does your brand sound? And this has now become much more common in branding, although it's still the minority who have an audio logo that you would recognize, something like which many, many people would associate with Intel.

 

I don't think many people could draw Intel's logo, but a lot of people could go, oh, yeah, da-da-da-da. So that's what I did for 20 years. And along the way, I got to do the TED Talks, and it was around the time of the third TED Talk, I had this kind of Damascene revelation, which is the reason these organizations aren't very good at sound and aren't listening is because the people in them aren't listening.

 

And so I did my third TED Talk on listening, and then the final one on speaking, because I then reflected the other side of the coin is also not taught. So these primal skills, speaking and listening, the things that we've been using for hundreds of thousands of years to communicate, you know, writing was only invented less than 5,000 years ago. So for the vast majority of human development, we've been speaking and listening.

 

That's how we've conveyed knowledge, wisdom, built relationships, kept ourselves safe. I mean, hearing is your primary morning sense. It used to be absolutely fundamental, as it is for most living beings.

 

You know, if 10,000 years ago, you were going into a cave to spend the night, you better be listening. Well, now I see people cycling around towns with headphones on, and I think, hmm, maybe we've lost contact with that primal need to be listening to the world around us. So that's a long-winded answer to your question.

 

That's, you know, where I ended up. Now I teach the skills of speaking and listening. I speak about them.

 

I do workshops on them. And my passion now is to persuade the world to listen, because that, to me, is the huge missing element in the way we're seeing the world move now, which is all very frightening to me.

 

JONATHAN LØW

Why do you think that we talk so much? Is it, again, a primal survival skill? Is it a cultural thing?

 

And have you, like, in all your work with listening, met cultures where it's, like, very different from, for instance, the U.S. or Europe?

 

JULIAN TREASURE

Well, it is interesting that, you know, not only do we not teach speaking and listening at school, and we don't train on them very much in organizations, we don't certainly reward. How many organizations are there who reward good listeners with higher pay? None, I would say.

 

But these are very, very important skills that fashion our outcomes in life. And, yes, you know, I think that's one part of it, but the imbalance also between speaking and listening, as you rightly say, is severe. So I can give you two bits of evidence for that.

 

One is personal. My TED Talk on speaking has been seen by at least five times as many people as my TED Talk on listening, which I think says something about our desire to be heard, which is much stronger than our desire to listen. And that doesn't work too well in the world, you know.

 

What's the point in being a brilliant speaker if nobody's able to listen? The other evidence for this is a very interesting piece of work that was done some years ago called the Organizational Listening Project by Professor Jim McNamara in Australia, and they assessed a whole range of organizations from very small to very large, and their finding was very damning. They found that, essentially, most organizations listen incredibly poorly, or even not at all, and that these organizations, on average, were devoting at least four times as much resource, money, effort, energy, to outbound communication as they were to inbound or internal listening.

 

And that's not a surprise. Again, when you say corporate communications, what do you think of? PR, advertising, marketing, social media, all outbound, outbound, outbound.

 

Very few organizations have got structures or policies in place to listen to their employees effectively, so there's an awful lot of people out there working in companies who don't feel heard and have learned just to shut up, essentially, because that's what happens if you don't listen to people. They eventually just shut down. I think of the lost ideas, engagement, passion, loyalty, and, actually, that survey found that there's a serious bottom-line effect of this because the organizations that were ranked as the better listeners had better staff and customer loyalty, they had higher staff and customer retention, they had better results in almost every way.

 

The organizations ranked as the worst listeners had more crises, criticism, complaints, and so forth. So listening pays if you're an organization. And quite apart from that, as an individual, listening is how we learn.

 

Pythagoras apparently used to erect a screen in front of the teacher for his first-year students who were called akousmatikoi because he believed that seeing the teacher was a distraction from the real business of learning, which was listening to the teacher. So listening, it is how we learn. It's how we lead.

 

How can you lead people you don't understand or listen to, really? That brutal, terrible style of leadership is not very productive in the long run. Listening is how we sell.

 

I mean, any great salesperson will say to you, if you ask them what's the most important part of the sales conversation, if they know their trade properly, they'll say, oh, it's not the speaking, it's the listening. That's where we learn how to solve people's problems and how to match what we have against their needs. Listening is how we build relationships.

 

I mean, what's the most common complaint in relationships? He or she never listens to me. So understanding listening is absolutely critical for our happiness, effectiveness and well-being in the world.

 

And sadly, for most people, that understanding doesn't exist. Listening is almost universally confused with hearing and most people think it's a capability. It's just something you do, like breathing or your heart beating.

 

Well, that is not true. Listening, unlike hearing, is a skill. It's work.

 

It's effort. It takes conscious control. It's a skill that you can practice and master.

 

And the people who do master listening have got huge advantages over people who are completely unconscious about it.

 

JONATHAN LØW

Yeah, and even in like outbound marketing, I would say that in order to make yourself understandable, you have to understand people first. You know, that's no matter if you talk about lean startup or prototyping, pretotyping, all of these methods are built upon the idea that we need to understand people better, understand our market better, before we start with all our long conversations and marketing and storytelling and all of this. So that made me really curious when I work with Listen Louder and I'm thinking, what is going on here?

 

So we know, like you said, a good salesman asks questions, almost like makes the buyer convince themselves through asking questions, but still we do the opposite to what would be like the ideal, both for ourselves, our relationships, our marketing, our sales, our innovation. Have you dived deeper into, is this essentially, you know, is it survival? Is it ego?

 

You have to work with like your ego. What answers have you found to why we continue to speak so much, send so much sound into the world?

 

JULIAN TREASURE

Yeah, I think ego is very much involved in this because the ego wants to be noticed and affirmed and approved of. And it thinks the best way to do that is to impress people. And actually I talk about two human tendencies, which are very damaging to our communication skills, especially listening.

 

And those are, the first of those is kind of that, it's looking good. Everybody wants to look good, of course they do. But if it becomes a driving force behind our communication, it makes our outbound and inbound very ineffective, particularly listening, because, you know, if you're trying to look good the whole time, you're probably doing what you said earlier, something I call script writing, which is while this noise is going on in front of me, that's you talking, I'm composing my next brilliant bit of monologue, which tends to give rise to the kind of anyway interjection, which is dismissive, rude, you know, upsets people when you just throw them aside and go off on a tangent of talking about what you want to talk about because it makes you look good. It's something you know about and so forth. So that's something to look out for.

 

And so is, you know, for example, have you met an I know person? Professionally unimpressible. I know, I know, I know.

 

Again, it's demeaning to somebody who's excited about something and gets the, oh, yeah, I know. It's kind of a joy kill. Or competitive speakers who have to be bigger, better, best than the last person.

 

All of these things are about looking good and they're not helpful in building relationships because they are about setting yourself up and diminishing somebody else, as is the other really significant human tendency, which we are now seeing really rampaging across the world and creating everything from bad relationships to war. And that is making people wrong or being right, being right. Because, of course, the easiest way to be right is to make somebody else wrong.

 

And we're now seeing that in politics. We're seeing it in business. We're seeing it in the media.

 

We're seeing it in sport, you know, in every field. And particularly, of course, social media with pylons and social media shaming and so forth. It's all, if I'm saying this person, this is outrageous, this person should be punished, you know, I'm setting myself up as better.

 

So I'm better, that person is being judged. I'm right, they're wrong. And the American author and therapist, Harville Hendricks, a wonderful man, said, you can either be right or be in a relationship.

 

And I think there's a lot of truth in that. What's the most common complaint in relationships? As I said, he or she never listens to me.

 

Or people who, and he said, he added, and you can't cuddle up with being right at the end of the day. So we need to be careful about that one. And unfortunately, it's becoming an addiction across the world.

 

And, you know, the confusion of opinions with facts, this table thumping about being right about things. And look at what's happening with, you know, the current war that we've got in Europe, which is all about a bizarre, fallacious version of history, which is being propagated by a small group of people who unfortunately have control over, you know, a country. And being right about it and making other people wrong and making up all sorts of stuff.

 

We see it in America. Now we see it, we've seen it in the elections in the UK, all over the world, in politics, everywhere. You're seeing this addiction to being right.

 

You know, science has a different attitude to hypothesis, which is, you know, there are no facts in science. There are just currently the best explanation for something. And people are endlessly trying to disprove it and find a better one.

 

That's the progress of science. And if we held our opinions perhaps as lightly as scientists hold hypotheses, the world would be a much happier place, I think. You know, politicians go off and have talks.

 

I wish they'd go off and have listens instead.

 

JONATHAN LØW

I also sometimes wonder if we've become, also from a personal point of view, afraid of forces and also of silence. Like, for instance, when we do this episode, I also find myself, on the one hand, trying to truly understand what you're saying and, like, engage myself in understanding your points. And then at the same part, another part of my brain is preparing the next question, because in this kind of social context, if I sit and wait for, like, 20 seconds after you have spoken, it will be an awkward, potentially, podcast session.

 

And then you go on the social media, and there are no pauses, no breaks on TV, no pauses, no breaks in meetings, no pauses, no breaks. So it's kind of become a cultural norm that if I now was to sit and wait for 20 seconds, even maybe the listeners would become impatient or awkward. But then I think, again, so I share your vision about more listening, but it also seems like a really tough journey.

 

Like, even our brains are becoming wired to one constant sound.

 

JULIAN TREASURE

Yeah, that disturbs me greatly that young people are unhappy if they haven't got two or three inputs going on at the same time. So, you know, we get addicted to overload and more, more, more. There are countervailing forces in the world, I'm glad to say.

 

There's a global movement, Shinrin-yoku, which is forest bathing, where people are going into quiet, natural environments and being with particularly trees. Although you could do beach bathing or mountain bathing just as easily, anywhere beautiful, if you just go and be there and listen to it and absorb it, that's a great antidote. Sadly, over half the world's population now live in cities, and that means they're very divorced from natural sound, which research, unsurprisingly, is now establishing is good for us.

 

Wind, water, birds. Those three, and obviously the gentler versions. I'm not talking about hurricanes or, you know, hundreds of corvids cawing.

 

So the more beautiful versions of these sounds, bubbling brooks, the morning chorus, gentle wind in leaves, those kind of beautiful sounds, they're good for us. We now know that they reduce stress, they produce happy hormones instead of, you know, cortisol and noradrenaline, which we're dosed with so often by sudden noises or unpleasant sound around us. One of the big reasons we don't listen, of course, is noise.

 

It's a killer. It's devastating the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world who can't sleep at night because of traffic noise, aircraft noise, rail noise, whatever it is, construction noise, or just the noise of people moving about. I mean, I don't know if you've ever been to, you know, I don't want to pick on anybody, but I was in Mumbai a couple of years ago.

 

My goodness, the noise there, because people drive with their hand on the horn, because there are thousands of scooters with blown exhausts, you know, the noise in the streets is deafening. And, you know, if that's the backdrop to our lives, we get used to not listening, to suppressing. I travel in London from time to time, although I now live in a much quieter place, which is the islands of Orkney off the north coast of Scotland.

 

But when I go down to London and I go to, for example, Waterloo Station, there's a Bakerloo Line station there where the tube comes in on a curve. And as the train comes in, the wheels, of course, are straight. They're screeching around this curve and they make the most appalling high-pitched, high-frequency noise, which is, I mean, I've measured this at 120 decibels.

 

And I have my fingers in my ears because it's agonising. And I look down the platform and everybody's just standing there and even just continuing shouting their conversations. And I think, why do you not understand?

 

This is damaging you. This is hideous. This is not OK.

 

But people adapt. You know, I see people having a conversation next to somebody drilling, and I think, why don't you just move? But we don't, do we?

 

So we're used to bellowing conversations in loud restaurants, where, incidentally, the research shows that the noise is stopping us from tasting our food as well. Because if you overload one sense, it tends to distort or reduce the ability to use other ones. So that's some research by Charles Spence, who's an expert in cross-modalities.

 

So, you know, we have to pay attention to this. We have to start listening to the sound around us. You know, we have schools where children can't listen.

 

We have hospitals where people can't sleep. We have offices where noise has been the number one complaint for years and years and years, because we're open planning the entire world. People can't think.

 

They can't do solo working, because there are people around them talking, and it's the most distracting sound of all. You know, we're programmed to decode language, and you have no earlids, so you are really damaged. I mean, the research shows that we can be as little as one-third as productive in an open-plan office, if we're trying to do quiet working.

 

So, yeah, coming back to your original point, I adore silence. Now, I'm not saying the world should be silent. That's not a solution to anything.

 

But the first and most important exercise that I give people in trying to... who are keen to improve their listening skills is to reacquaint yourself, make friends with silence again. Give yourself a couple of bouts of silence a day.

 

Just a few minutes will recalibrate your ears, reset you, allow you to listen afresh. And listening afresh is a wonderful thing to do. Otherwise, we are like frogs in that pan of water.

 

You know, the noise goes up and up and up, and we don't really notice until we realize that we're bellowing at everyone, and our shoulders are around our ears, and we have a headache and we're tired. And, you know, the long-term effects of that kind of noise are extremely damaging. It increases our chances of heart attack, stroke, all sorts of illnesses.

 

So, for example, teachers who are working in noisy classrooms are probably shortening their lives by doing that. We need to pay attention. We need to start listening.

 

JONATHAN LØW

I actually made an intentional pause here just to test the listeners and their anxiety levels. So, I have two points to the very interesting stuff that you just said. So, the first one was just a personal experience.

 

Yesterday, on a cafe here in Denmark, we have something called Espresso House, it's like Starbucks. You go and you buy something, and you have a meeting or just to sit and relax. And I bought my typical chai latte, which I like and normally really enjoy.

 

But then I did this bad thing called multitasking. So, instead of just drinking it, I also had to call my insurance company and solve something with them. And then I got on hold.

 

And then, speaking of sound, they have this absolutely terrible waiting tone. And it plays the same thing for 30 seconds, and then it starts over again. And there was no notification on when the nightmare was ending, and it actually took 24 minutes.

 

And my strategy was to get this over and then drink my chai latte. But since it took so long and it would get cold, then I had to drink it at the same time. And I didn't enjoy it at all, because there was this constant sound in my ears.

 

So, they are so closely linked, our senses, but we don't normally think about it. So, that was to the audio and food and experience part. And then with the other thing about practicing, I've had the pleasure of writing the foreword to two books by an American called Simon Sinek.

 

He's pretty well known for a book called Start With Why. And then he's written a book called Leaders Eat Last. And one of his very concrete tips, which I like in that book, is if you're a leader and you go into a meeting, your most important first task is to speak last.

 

And I've really practiced that, because I don't have a natural tendency to do it. I like to lead the meeting, because I'm supposed to be a leader. But really being a good leader in that meeting is shutting the beat up and letting others share.

 

Do you have other great ideas for people sitting out there realizing, well, I might even become a better human being by becoming better at listening, but even if I don't think that much about it, at least it will be good for my career. But what should I do? Because it's not natural for me to listen.

 

I tend to speak.

 

JULIAN TREASURE

Well, yes. Let me just very quickly talk about telephone sound, because you raised that. And it's something I've been working with for years at the sound agency.

 

I don't do it so much anymore. There are bits of consultancy here and there. But it's appalling.

 

I think billions, if not trillions of dollars, are lost every year by terrible telephone techniques, which normally go press one for this, press two for that, and don't give us the option we want, don't allow us to talk to a real person, don't tell us how long we're going to be on hold for, and play awful distorted sound. The number of organizations that play kind of jolly rock music or loud pop music, which just is completely distorted by the telephone system, is unbelievable to me. So there are rules about these things.

 

I could go into them at length, and they could save most organizations huge sums of money. But these things are designed by technical people. They're very seldom visited by the CEO of the organization, who doesn't have the experience of slamming down, well, you don't slam them down anymore, but cutting off the call in frustration after 37 minutes or getting cut off even worse after 37 minutes when you've been on hold, yeah, it's bad.

 

Let me talk about a couple of things about listening which are fundamental and which will help people. The first, and I've said listening is a skill, so that's the very first thing to realize. And as soon as you realize that, you're opening a door to a whole new world of, hey, there's a skill, I can practice, I can master, there's a new thing here.

 

JONATHAN LØW

That's good news, you know.

 

JULIAN TREASURE

The second thing to realize about listening is that your listening, like mine, Jonathan, yours, is unique. Every human being's listening is unique. And the most common mistake that most people make, and it's part of why I think we talk too much, is assuming everybody listens like I do.

 

So if I talk in the way I normally talk, which I understand, everybody will get that. No, they won't. Because everybody listens uniquely.

 

Because we listen through a whole set of filters, the culture we're born into, the language we learn to speak, the values, attitudes, beliefs that we accrete along the way. And in any given situation, our intentions, expectations, emotions, assumptions about what's going on, maybe in other people's heads, all of these things color and change our listening. So it changes over time, through the day, and situationally, and it changes from person to person.

 

So if you want to be a powerful speaker, and not just waste your words, there's a very important question to ask yourself. And that question is, what's the listening I'm speaking into? What's the listening I'm speaking into?

 

Automatically, if you start asking yourself that question, it sensitizes you to the other person. And it allows you to be more empathic and more on their wavelength. Because really, it's all about getting the ball over the net to the other person in the best way that you can.

 

And that may not be your habitual way. Now, most people have listening filters which are set solid, so they're kind of in a bunker. And the other part of this is, of course, if you become conscious of your own listening filters, you can maybe find there's a door in the back of the bunker and move to a different listening position, and ask yourself, where would be the best place for me to listen from in this conversation?

 

These things are fluid. And in fact, the core of my work, all my work, my consultancy, training, coaching, speaking, and so forth, is that listening and speaking are not a straight line relationship. It's not I speak, you listen, straight line.

 

They're in a circular relationship. Because the way I speak affects the way you listen, the way you listen affects the way I speak, and on and on. And that happens inside of a context which we need to be conscious of as well, and that's about listening to the sound around us.

 

You wouldn't want to propose marriage in a noisy Starbucks, probably. Is it appropriate? Is it helpful?

 

Is it the best environment you could have? And there's another little exercise I can recommend to everybody listening to this, which is whether you're at home or at work, wherever you are, the environments you habitually occupy, close your eyes, listen, and ask yourself, is this the best sound I could have around me for what I want to do here? Is it helpful?

 

Is it healthy? Does it make me happy? Those three questions.

 

And you can start to design the soundscapes through which you move in your life. That's a very powerful thing to do as well. So there's a couple of aspects of listening which perhaps will allow people to move to a more conscious relationship with it.

 

You said at the beginning about consciousness, about being more present, about is this part of that kind of approach? And I think very much, yes, it is, because as you start to actively explore the process of listening to the world around you and to other people, you become a more present, more conscious human being. And that's a very good thing in my book.

 

JONATHAN LØW

I've also reflected the last three, four years, quite a lot about my intention and how that affects my ability to listen. So for instance, if I book a meeting and I want to sell them a product or a service or whatever I do, is my intention going into that meeting to close that sale, which would be like from the entrepreneurial and business world where I come from would be the natural take on that meeting. But that tends to drive you into a direction where the person you sit with becomes more like an object or a tool on your journey to convincing them.

 

And the same if I post something on LinkedIn, which I do quite a lot, is my intention to get likes and people interacting with it, which tends to be the dynamic you want on social media. Or do I have a, I don't want to call it a juror, but maybe a more authentic to myself intention of actually giving people something and inspiring them. And if I have the last intention, then I become much less vulnerable to people wanting to argue and oppose with me because I've written it from another kind of intention.

 

So I actually am interested in listening to them. And the same with the sales meeting. If I see the person and not just the object, then I'm actually also interested in it.

 

And then I've begun discovering that the two approaches where you're interested in the person and where you write something that you truly believe in and not just to get interaction, then you become much better at the listening and interacting part. Does that make sense to you? It's just my personal reflections.

 

JULIAN TREASURE

Complete sense. And, you know, I talk about in the TED talk I gave about speaking, which is the one that went completely ballistic and got, I don't know how many million views now. It's quite daunting to me to think of that, but it's amazing.

 

I talked about the four foundations for powerful speaking, which also are in play when you're listening, and they are honesty, which is being clear and straight in what you say. Authenticity, which is what you're talking about, which is being true to yourself, being yourself, not trying to impress people or be somebody else. Integrity, which is doing what you say.

 

And love, which is wishing people well, doing things for their benefit. And you were just talking about intentions. I think in any conversation, or if you're on stage presenting or at the front of a room, any conversation, any speaking like that, there are three intentions that you have to be conscious of.

 

First, there's your intention for you. So as you say, in a sales meeting, your intention is close the sale. Well, that's clear.

 

That's perfectly acceptable. That's what you're trying to do. There are two other intentions.

 

There's your intention for the other person or the audience. So you're going to take them on a journey. You're going to move them from where they are at the beginning to where they are at the end, which may be a realization.

 

It might be transformative. It might be amused or entertained or educated them. Something has changed.

 

Otherwise, the meeting hasn't been very effective in terms of you doing something with them. There's a third intention, which you have to guess, and that's their intention for them. So they may have an intention for you as well, of course, but that's less easy to know.

 

But their intention for them is something that's very important to be aware of. So as you say, you need to be empathic going in. Is this person, you know, really interested?

 

Or, you know, are they just there because somebody told them to be there and they're actually aggressive and very anti the whole thing? You know, I've been in sales presentations in both of those two situations, and you behave very differently. If you're aware of those things, you really do understand that they're, you know, they require different handling.

 

So your intention for you, your intention for them, their intention for them. If you become clear about all three of those things, you can create a meeting that's very, very productive for both people or for everybody.

 

JONATHAN LØW

I think that was some very good and concrete advice. And then I don't know if it was an audio notification, but we are already running out of time, which is frustrating for a person like me who loves to listen to people who speak intelligently about both speaking and listening. But we have to respect also our viewers and listeners' time and also maybe then invite them after they've had these bit more than 30 minutes of inspiration and listening.

 

Then maybe just finding a few minutes where they can be in complete silence so their brain will be allowed to digest what they just heard and not swipe on to the next podcast or social media story.

 

JULIAN TREASURE

That would be lovely. Also, let me just quote Scott Peck. He said, you cannot truly listen to another person and do anything else at the same time.

 

When I talk about consciousness in listening, we can't listen that intently to everybody all the time. It's just not possible. The key thing is to ask yourself to be conscious of the style of your listening.

 

So maybe I'm cooking and you call me and we're just having a general chat and I can put the phone next to me and carry on cooking and I can give you partial listening, which is very common these days. Now, there's nothing wrong with partial listening if you are conscious that's what you're doing. But if you're calling me up and you're in grief or incredibly upset or you really need advice, then I shouldn't carry on cooking.

 

Either I stop cooking or I say, Jonathan, I'll call you back in five minutes. I'm just going to put all this down and go somewhere where I can listen to you because that needs a much more direct and completely focused form of listening. So as long as we're conscious of what we're doing, that's the key thing.

 

And listeners, I wonder when it is, when was the last person, the last time you gave somebody your complete 100% undivided attention? Try that one as well.

 

JONATHAN LØW

Very good piece of advice. And to the people watching this on YouTube or other video platforms, they can see your website link if you're listening to it on Spotify or other places. It's juliantreasure.com, is that correctly pronounced?

 

JULIAN TREASURE

Yeah, very close. It's with a charming Danish accent, but it's juliantreasure.com, yes. And what a last name to have.

 

JONATHAN LØW

Thank you so much, Julian, for taking the time to talk on Extraordinary. Really appreciate your time and again being reminded about the importance of becoming better at both speaking and listening.

 

JULIAN TREASURE

Well, it's been an absolute joy, Jonathan. Thanks so much for having me and I hope everybody got something out of this. Listen.

 

JONATHAN LØW

Thanks for listening to this episode of Extraordinary. Remember to subscribe to our channel to get notifications when a new episode goes live. Also visit www.extraordinary.media and sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss a new and inspiring episode. We wish you an extraordinary day.

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