7 Deadly Sins of Speaking with Julian Treasure.

Henry Lopez (00:15):

Welcome to this episode of The How of Business. This is Henry Lopez. My guest today is Julian Treasure. Julian, welcome to the show.

Julian Treasure (00:23):

Thank you, Henry. Nice to be here.

Henry Lopez (00:24):

We’re going to chat with him about what we’re going to entitle Seven Deadly Sins of Speaking and how Julian, how he helps leaders to listen more consciously, speak more powerfully, and use sound more consciously for deeper connections with customers and employees, which leads to enhancing both leadership and business outcomes. We’re going to discuss the seven deadly sins of speaking, as I said, which is inspired by a TED Talk, one of several very popular TED Talks entitled How to Speak So that People Want to Listen. To receive more information about The How Business, including the show notes page for this episode and how you can continue supporting my show and receive exclusive content and discounts through a Patreon membership, please visit the howwoodbusiness.com. So Julian Treasure is a sound and communication expert, author, and international keynote speaker. His five TED Talks have been viewed more than 130 million times.

Henry Lopez (01:29):

And one of them is the sixth most viewed all time. He has been widely featured as a sound and communication expert in the world of media, including Time Magazine, The Economists, The Times, and many international TV and radio stations and podcasts. He has been honored with both Toastmasters International’s Golden Gavel Award and the International Listening Association’s Special Recognition Award. He’s the author of a couple of books, including How to Be Heard: Secrets for Powerful Speaking and Listening and Sound Business: How To Use Sound to Grow Profits and Brand Value. Julian lives and joins me today from Kirkwall, Scotland. So once again, Julian Treasure. Welcome to the show.

Julian Treasure (02:16):

Well, thank you very much and looking forward to the conversation.

Henry Lopez (02:19):

Yeah, this is going to be an interesting one, and I’m going to try to keep us on time here because there’s so many different directions I wanted to go as I was doing the research, Julian, but a lot of fascinating stuff. But I thought I’d start with this question. What inspired this vision, which I understand you have? I believe your vision in part is quote, “To transform the world by inspiring people to listen consciously and speak powerfully.” How did you arrive at that vision?

Julian Treasure (02:46):

Well, that’s right. I’ve been a musician all my life, I suppose. So I think musicians listen in a slightly different way to non-musicians. You have to, if you’re going to play in a band or an orchestra, you have to, first of all, have a very attentive listening. And secondly, you have to have a multi-track listening where you are conscious of a number of different people playing at the same time. And that training, I suppose, of being a musician gives one a slightly different take on the sound of the world, or at least it did for me. So I started to realize in a long career through 30 years in marketing that the world organizations are making a lot of bad sound, a lot of noise that doesn’t help them. And so when I sold a magazine business that I’d started back in 2003, I wanted to do something about that, to bring the two halves of me together, really, the music and listening side and the marketing side.

Julian Treasure (03:46):

So I formed a company called The Sound Agency, where the basic proposition is to ask companies, how does your brand sound? Which many of them hadn’t thought about. They had a great big brand book full of logos and typefaces and colors and so forth, and absolutely nothing about sound at all, which is a bit crazy because we experienced the world in five senses, not just one. And in fact, there’s a whole scientific community now investigating what’s called cross-modal effects where one sense affects the others all the time. This going on. So it’s, I think, a really big miss to focus exclusively on visual in branding, in marketing, and in communication generally. And we’ve got so seduced by the visual in the last 30 years. All the innovations we’ve had in communication have been visual. They’ve been text-based from email through to IAM and STS. And the whole thing is about looking at a screen and using your fingers and your eyes, which kind of takes you out of the world to a degree.

Julian Treasure (04:55):

Interestingly, writing’s only been around for 5,000 years. We’ve been using complex conversation for probably 100, maybe 150,000 years. Language has been around that long. So I guess it was a process in me of realizing that most people aren’t listening very much and that the world therefore doesn’t sound very good. And when I started the sound agency, I asked the question, “Does this matter?” And did a lot of research. And yes, it does because sound affects us powerfully. It affects our bodies, our feelings, our minds, our thinking, productivity, and also what we do. So our happiness, effectiveness, and wellbeing all changed by the sound around us and how well we can communicate with other people. And it became a bit of a mission then. The sound agency was about helping organizations to listen better and make better sound. But after a few years, I realized that actually, hey, organizations are only people.

Julian Treasure (05:58):

It’s just the people in the organizations who aren’t listening.

Julian Treasure (06:01):

Hence, my first TED talk was about the four effects of sound. And then I moved on to one about listening, one about designing spaces, which architects do purely for the eyes, unfortunately. And the last one about powerful speaking. So it became much more about engaging people in this conversation as individuals rather than talking to organizations. It’s about talk about a listening company, but is that really a thing? I mean, companies don’t listen. People in companies listen or don’t listen. So that’s really where the conversation is for me now. It’s about transforming the way things happen in the world with listening. And Henry, I would say never have we needed listening more than we do now.

Henry Lopez (06:49):

Sure. Yeah. There’s so much noise. I kind of suppose that some of it goes back to certainly in business from that perspective. The louder you are, the more attention you get, the carnival barker, let’s make sure I stand out and so much of that still persists. And then as you’ve touched on, in today’s world where there are so many inputs, I think a lot of times as businesses, we think we have to be the loudest to be heard, right?

Julian Treasure (07:17):

Yeah. And that’s a mistake because if everybody’s doing that, you just end up with an incredibly loud noise where it’s very hard to distinguish anything. And I think to a degree, that’s what we’ve created in the world, isn’t it? Where there’s this petition for attention. I mean, after all, we’ve now got some very major organizations vying for our attention, trying to grab every last minute they can of our attention. Attention has become the primary currency in the world, really. And it’s very unfortunate that we’ve, at the same time as that’s going on, we’ve all gone a bit unconscious about our ears and about our control over what we are paying attention to. And my proposition, which is, it’s an important thing to realize is that listening is not the same as hearing, is that listening is a skill, not a capability. And as a skill, it’s something that we can master, practice, become excellent at, and become more discerning in.

Julian Treasure (08:20):

Because when you listen, you’re doing two things and you hear everything. Hearing is your primary warning sense because you can hear what’s behind you and you can’t see what’s behind you.

Julian Treasure (08:31):

And it also goes, it activates neurons far faster than vision does. So hearing is your primary warning sense. It’s always on. Even when you’re sleeping, listening’s different. In listening, you’re doing these two things. First, you’re selecting certain things to pay attention to. And second, you’re making them mean something. So my definition of listening is making meaning from sound, and that’s a conscious thing. And the more conscious one becomes about listening, the more we can start to pay attention to more productive things and take control of what we are consuming, the sound that we’re making and how that’s affecting other people.

Henry Lopez (09:14):

Yeah. Yeah. And you touched on a couple of times on spaces, physical spaces. And that’s something that for me I’ve become so conscious of. And I attribute it to just I’m getting older and so noises bother me, but it just seems like every restaurant I go to as an example, they’re just loud. And part of it is part of what you spoke to. And I think that that’s not necessarily thought of in the design, but I think that to me, that’s an example of how we’re all have succumbed to this, I guess, symptom of screaming louder than the next person.

Julian Treasure (09:54):

Yeah. There’s a thing called the Lombard effect, which is well known among acousticians. So if we’re sitting in a restaurant next to each other and you start speaking loud, I have to speak louder to be heard. And then you speak louder and you have this upward spiral until inevitably everybody in the room is shouting.

Julian Treasure (10:14):

And that is what happens in badly designed restaurants where there’s no soft surfaces, there’s nothing absorbing the sound at all. I don’t know if you’re in New York, but I remember once a few years ago, I took my fiancé to PJ Clark’s in New York and it was a place my dad took me to when I was young and I thought that’d be nice. It’s the place where one more for the road was written. It’s an iconic New York bar come hamburger place. We walked in and I have never encountered such a wall of noise in a restaurant. It was unbelievable. I took out my phone, which has got a sound pressure level meter on it, of course.

Julian Treasure (10:57):

105 decibels in there. Wow. Now that is, it’s getting on for rock concert levels and it’s absolutely damaging for the people who have to work in there for hours to be dealing with that night after night. They’ll have hearing damage, not to mention that the research shows that if you’re in more than 65 decibels regularly, then you are increasing your risk of heart attack and stroke. And even teachers are doing that. So in badly designed classrooms where the kids are all shouting, it may well be the case that teachers are shortening their lives by working in that environment. So yes, I think we have to pay much more attention to the spaces we’re designing. We need to design for the ears as well as for the eyes. And that’s something which really at the moment is almost unknown. Architects train for five years and in that five years, they can spend as little as one day on acoustics.

Julian Treasure (11:56):

Interesting.

Henry Lopez (11:57):

Yeah. And that’s why you’ll see restaurants try to patch the situation, fix the situation with acoustic panels or so forth to try to fix what has been designed poorly. Yeah.

Julian Treasure (12:09):

Absolutely. Yes.

Henry Lopez (12:10):

All right. So the health issues, as you’ve articulated, are there, but if we start to look at it from a business perspective, from your perspective and experience, what are some of the reasons or some of the reasons that matter is why listening is so important from a business perspective?

Julian Treasure (12:29):

Well, apart from the obvious one, which is listening to your customers, and I guess with social media, companies are getting somewhat better at that. They watch Twitter and it’s easier to get feedback from people to a degree, not so much through the phone. And I think that’s a huge area where business losses are absolutely astronomical. Press this, press two for that. I mean, how many people listening to this have slammed the phone down or terminated the call in frustration at one of those systems where none of the options is what you want. You can’t speak to a real person, you can’t reverse, you get stuck in a blind alley or the call ends with, “Thank you, bye-bye.” You haven’t said anything. So those kind of systems I think are not very good at listening. They tend to be designed by technical people and not secret shopped or listened to by marketing people very much.

Julian Treasure (13:24):

And then if you do get through, it’s very often to a call center thousands of miles away because that’s the cheapest way to do it where people have a script and they’re not allowed to move away from it and they can’t answer your question and so forth. So I think on the phone, listening is very poor and the two greatest lies in the world are perpetrated daily, aren’t they? Your call is very important to us.

Henry Lopez (13:49):

Yet we’re going to route it to the least paid person on our payroll.

Julian Treasure (13:54):

Yep. And we’re experiencing higher than normal call volumes. Sure. Yeah, right. So we just laid off our call center staff and we’re on a skeleton staff now after COVID and we’re not recruiting them again. So the turnover in those call centers can be as high as 80% a year. So these people are having to deal with angry customers who’ve been in one of those terrible systems for ages and on hold for 15 minutes and they’re angry before they start and they’re even more angry when they get through. And then the call center people have a miserable life call after call, can you imagine it dealing with angry, upset people and without much capability to do anything about it.

Henry Lopez (14:36):

But Jillian, if I might interrupt, I mean, all organizations are doing this because of the cost of it. I mean, you take an organization like Google, for example, to get through to a live person is almost impossible. So what are they not getting then as to the impact of this on their business?

Julian Treasure (14:58):

It depends entirely, I think, Henry, on the lifetime value of a customer. If you are talking about a low value transaction where people don’t tend to hang around long and there’s not a lot of loyalty, I can completely understand a mechanistic system where you kind of just don’t value people very highly. But if you’re talking about something where a customer’s lifetime value, take a company like Apple, for example, I mean, I’m a big Apple fan, always have been, and God knows how much money I’ve spent with Apple over the years. My lifetime value to them is very high. Unfortunately, they’re not bad at this, and I do tend to be able to get through to Dublin or wherever it is I get rooted to.

Julian Treasure (15:42):

But that’s the key question is how much do you value loyalty and what’s it worth to you? What’s a lifetime value? What’s it worth to find a new customer when you really upset one of your existing customers with a system like that? And I’ll give you an example to the other end of it, British Airways, for example, and probably, I mean, I’m calling them out, but probably most airlines who laid off huge numbers of people in COVID obviously because their revenue just disappeared and they haven’t really got them back on again. And it still takes 20, 25 minutes, even for travel agents to get through to British Airways and discuss travel arrangements with them. Well, they are losing so much money. The social media about their communication is so rank that thousands of people are just going elsewhere. And these are people who spent, goodness knows how much money.

Julian Treasure (16:38):

Flights are not cheap. Lifetime value, probably 100, $200,000 or something. Bye-bye.

Henry Lopez (16:45):

Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s happening. You speak about it. My wife is a travel consultant, so she’s experiencing that on a daily basis. Okay. So the other thing I want to shift to is you talk about these filters that come into play, if I’m following correctly, but you’ll explain it to us, these filters that impact how we are able to listen, right?

Julian Treasure (17:10):

Yes. I mean, listening is important at every level in a company from leadership through to working with people and communicating, briefing, managing projects and so forth. And to the environment we work in, it’s now known that we’re a third as productive in noisy open plan offices as we are in quieter spaces when we’re trying to do knowledge work. So there are massive implications all over the place for not listening, not hearing what’s going on around you. We listen through a set of filters, absolutely. And if you’re ever involved in public speaking, which I expect you are, and many of the people listening to this probably are, it’s very important to understand a fundamental truth about listening that very few people get. That is, every person’s listening is unique,

Julian Treasure (18:01):

As unique as your fingerprints. Your listening, Henry, is different from mine and different from persons in the world. Why? Because we develop these filters and we listen through them all the time and they’re individual. So the culture you’re born into, the language you speak. And when I say culture, it could be family, tribe, group, city, region, country, whatever it is, layers of that. The language you learn to speak, the values, attitudes, and beliefs that you accrete along the way, which will be different from mine, parents, teachers, friends, role models, you pick some up, you cast some away and you have your set. And then in any given situation, you might have intentions, expectations, you might have emotions going on, you might have assumptions about what people are thinking or what’s going to happen here. So listening for any individual changes through the day and listening changes from person to person.

Julian Treasure (19:01):

So if you’re speaking to one person, there’s a listening you’re speaking into. If you’re speaking to a thousand people, there’s a kind of combined listening you’re speaking into. And any public speaker will know the listening’s very different at 9:00 AM to just after lunch at 2:00 PM, for example. So the question to ask is, what’s the listening I’m speaking into? And if you want to be a powerful speaker, that is the first and most basic and most important question to ask. What’s the listening I’m speaking into? And by asking yourself that question, you start to pay attention to it and pick up all the little signals that you possibly can. And that is how you can hit the bullseye instead of missing the target all together.

Henry Lopez (19:48):

Brilliant. And we’re going to break that down here in a second with these seven deadly sins. But that means that to me then as a leader in a business, the more I know about how the team, the people that I’m leading and inspiring and managing how they listen, the more I know about that, then the more effective I can be in communicating with them. Yes?

Julian Treasure (20:11):

Definitely. It’s very interesting that listening is one of the biggest attributes that are demanded before people recruit people. So it’s known that by HR people and so forth, they will say, “Well, we want a good listener.” And they might even interview on that. And the moment the person gets the job, it’s completely forgotten about. I mean, how many organizations train people on listening? How many organizations reward people for listening? Well, how many appraise? If you do a 360, is the question, is he or she a good listener? Is that in there, in that appraisal? Normally, no. So it seems to have just become a forgotten skill once people are taken on.

Henry Lopez (20:56):

Yeah. Well, and I think we also, I know I’m guilty of this, we lump it into, are they a good communicator? At least that’s how I see it usually. Yeah,

Julian Treasure (21:05):

It’s too broad. You see communication has got so many aspects to it. And I fundamentally believe that in order to be a great speaker, you have to be a great listener first. Otherwise, you are, as I said, missing the target, you’re misunderstanding people. I mean, as you said, how can you run a team if you’re not listening to them and if you don’t understand the way they’re listening to you?

Henry Lopez (21:29):

Right. Right. So let’s break down these seven deadly sins of speaking. And as I read through them, Julian, certainly that can be applied to the traditional speaking. I’m speaking in front of a group of people, but I think that a lot of it, if not all of it, applies to even if I’m one-to-one speaking with someone, what are your thoughts there at a high level before we get into the seven sins?

Julian Treasure (21:54):

Yes. You know what? I think that there is not a difference between speaking to one person and speaking to 10,000, other than the volume and being attentive to the listening that you’re speaking into, which is more complex with a big group. Of course. But in terms of what one is doing and the mistakes one can make, I mean, they’re very, very similar.

Henry Lopez (22:14):

Okay. All right, Julian. So let’s break it down the seven deadly sins. Number one is gossip or speaking ill of someone who’s not present. I got to think this is probably more of an issue for people when they’re speaking one-on-one or in a small group, but tell me about how gossip can be a deadly sin of speaking.

Julian Treasure (22:35):

Well, I would take issue with there if you listen to politicians, I think. Ah, good point. Good point. Speaking ill of somebody not present is very much-

Henry Lopez (22:43):

That has become culturally acceptable now, has it not?

Julian Treasure (22:47):

Unfortunately, yes. And even companies get into slagging off, as we would say in the UK, the competition from time to time, it’s never very attractive and often it’s untrue and people know that. So there is this unfortunate slide into negative discussions of people not there in all sorts of areas of life, but it definitely in one-to-one communication or one to a small group, it’s very common. And gossips are not trustworthy people, are they? That’s right. Because people know that you’re not trustworthy. They won’t share things with you. It’s not a great way to be. So yeah, that’s the first deadly sin. And I would say with all these deadly sins, I’m not literally saying ban them. I am saying if they become things that you practice a great deal or things that are very common in your communication, they’re like holes in the bucket and you lose power.

Julian Treasure (23:47):

You lose the power of your communication by indulging over much in these things.

Henry Lopez (23:51):

Yeah. Well said. Well said. Judging. So what do you mean by judging?

Julian Treasure (23:56):

Well, there I’m not talking about discernment, which obviously is very important. I’m talking about being condemn naturey, being aggressively judging. I mean, we’ve all worked for bosses who never have a good word to say about it and nothing’s ever good enough. I always say this, this is like the parent whose child comes home and says, “I got 95% of the test.” And the parent says, “What happened to the other five?” Nothing’s ever good enough and habitually finding fault is it’s wearing to be around. It’s also not a great thing for business. I mean, I can tell you a very short story about that, which damaged me. I sold my business to an advertising agency in the UK, which was run by a guy who was terrifying. He wouldn’t take bad news well at all. Shooting the messenger was very common. And what happened over a period of years was that people stopped giving him bad news.

Julian Treasure (24:49):

In fact, they started to invent good news. And the net result of that years down the line was that the agency’s financial results had to be restated because there had been a complete load of bullshit, if you don’t mind the phrase, going on which had got all the way into the accounts, claiming accounts hadn’t been lost when they had or claiming they were winning things when they hadn’t. And unfortunately, my sale was locked into a share price that got slaughtered by that. So I had personal experience of how being calm den natury and negative like that and angry and not praising people and particularly not being able to listen to bad news is just death for a company.

Henry Lopez (25:35):

Yeah. And we’ve all come across that, Julian. It seems like that. I’m not going to say it’s common, but I’ve seen so many people in business, especially people who maybe come from a corporate environment where that was maybe not fostered, but certainly not eliminated. I think people think that sometimes that’s the way you have to be in business.

Julian Treasure (25:57):

Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if you ever saw the film Whiplash where J.K. Simmons plays a terrifying character called Terrence Fletcher, who’s a drum teacher, and he comes out with this phrase, “There are no two more harmful words in the English language than good

Henry Lopez (26:16):

Job.” Yeah, perfectly summarized. All right. Negativity is maybe somewhat related here, but what do we mean by negativity as it comes to speaking?

Julian Treasure (26:27):

Well, the litmus test for this, for anybody who wants to check in and see how they do here is how often do you use the words no or not? Some people fall into the habit of doing this. It becomes endemic, it becomes the way they are and it’s wearing, again, to be around somebody like that. And I talked a true story on the Ted Stage about this. My mother at the end of her life became very, very negative about everything. Her worldview basically was everything’s awful. And so I came in to see her in hospital where she was recovering from a wrist injury and gave her the paper and I said, “Oh, look, it’s October the 1st today.” And she said, “I know, isn’t it dreadful?” Well, if October the 1st is dreadful, what hope is there really? And we have to go away and recharge our batteries.

Julian Treasure (27:11):

The sun’s out, it’s going to rain later. Oh, come on.

Speaker 4 (27:15):

Right.

Julian Treasure (27:17):

It is just tiring to be around

Henry Lopez (27:19):

People. It’s draining. It’s draining, but it’s also, I think, an easy habit to fall into, Julie. And I think we’ve all found ourselves going that way and having to check ourselves on that, right?

Julian Treasure (27:31):

Absolutely. Yes. So being aware of the nos and nots, how often do you say yes? There was a greater advertising campaign when I was buying media back in the early 80s. It was a garage type business and their slogan was, the answer’s yes. Now, what’s the question? Love that. Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but I think it’s good to be somebody who says yes a lot.

Henry Lopez (27:56):

Yes, open to the possibilities, open to looking at things from a positive perspective.

Julian Treasure (28:01):

Definitely. Definitely that.

Henry Lopez (28:06):

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Henry Lopez (29:38):

All right. Complaining is number four, which you say is a form of negativity. Well, why do you highlight that specifically, complaining?

Julian Treasure (29:46):

Well, complaining when you can fix something like the food’s bad, send it back. Absolutely. But when it’s complaining about the management, the weather, the government, sport, things you can’t do anything about, it’s just Viral misery. And it doesn’t help really. It’s not achieving anything other than making other people feel bad. So again, it’s something that perhaps is best left unsaid. I mean, what’s the point of it?

Henry Lopez (30:14):

Right. And it also doesn’t show much leadership. In other words, it’s saying all these outside influences and there’s nothing we can do about it. And so it’s easy to complain about a third party or some other entity.

Julian Treasure (30:28):

Yeah. And it can become a really big habit for some people to complain all the time. All

Henry Lopez (30:33):

Right. Now relates to then excuses as number five or not taking responsibility, right?

Julian Treasure (30:41):

Yeah, very much so. This comes from one of two drivers, which are really behind all of these things. And this driver is wanting to look good. So people who make excuses don’t want to be seen to have failed. And again, I think this is corporately very destructive. The great thing to do when you failed is to say sorry. And this is what I’m putting in place to make sure that doesn’t happen again. Now let’s move on and learn from it. And mistakes are very important. If you’re an innovative company, certainly they are. You have to be willing to make mistakes and to fail in order to keep trying new things. And then you get to the success. Even products like Post-it Notes, that was a mistake, wasn’t it? Somebody was trying to make a very strong glue and came up with this thing that we now find very useful.

Julian Treasure (31:29):

So making mistakes is important. Allowing mistakes up to a degree, not repeating them, but allowing them up to a degree is maybe important in your business. Making excuses, blaming somebody else. You never learn anything, do you? If it’s never your fault. If it’s never anything to do with you, you’re not to change, you’re not going to grow, you’re not going to adapt, you’re not going to become better at doing whatever it is that you’re doing. So yes, excuses I think are in the way of growth and innovation a lot of the time.

Henry Lopez (32:00):

Yeah, agreed. It’s so common. I mean, I talk about this often on this show in other contexts, Julian, because I think that we arrive at this point on this subject. And maybe again, me being older now, I see it more, it seems to me, the lack of accountability. But I think that it’s a result of the indoctrination that our system applies to us, schooling and university perhaps. And then we say that mistakes are okay, but the truth is that what we learn, especially if we’ve spent any time in the corporate ward as an employee, is that that’s not really true, is it? Our managers don’t want us to make a lot of mistakes. In school, we’re taught not to make mistakes. We got to get the good grade. And I think that carries over then into how we feel about what we do, how we behave when we make a mistake.

Henry Lopez (32:55):

What are your thoughts

Julian Treasure (32:55):

There? I agree. I think attaching this stigma to mistakes is a mistake. We need to allow people to and learn. I’ve got an eight-year-old daughter and she’s very keen to get things right first time, unfortunately, which means it’s quite a child to teach her a skill. I have to go through the four stages of learning, unconscious incompetence. And then you move to conscious incompetence where you know you can’t do something that you want to do. Then you practice and you become consciously competent. And then eventually you become unconsciously competent and you do it in your sleep. Driving, for example. The first time you or I drove, our hands were glued to the wheel, every muscle was rigid. But now when driving, we’re thinking about anything but driving. So that process is something that people need to understand. And there are mistakes along the way. We don’t get anything right first time generally, or very few people do.

Julian Treasure (33:56):

Even when champions picked up a tennis racket or a golf club or whatever it might be. And a lot of them had to learn certain things. Not everybody is a genius out of the box. So yes, that forgiveness, that humility, I think, and that generosity to others is very much part of being an effective team. I’m not talking about being soft. I’m not talking about there never being anything wrong, but I am talking about if somebody’s making a genuine effort and they fail, then how can we help them to succeed next time is the question, not you’re bad.

Henry Lopez (34:33):

Yeah. And as leaders, I mean, you touched on something there that’s very subtle and important. As leaders, I think we have that hesitancy to show that we’ve made a mistake, but when we do, it’s so much more powerful. Now, not to be mistaken with what people want from us next is, “And here’s what we’re going to do about it. ” And so those two things go hand in hand. All right. So we’ve been talking about the seven deadly sins, gossip, judging, negativity, complaining, excuses. Number six is lying and exaggerating. So tell me about that.

Julian Treasure (35:05):

Yeah. Well, this is, again, coming from looking good, isn’t it? Yeah. Exaggeration is something that creeps into language very, very regularly. And I’ve just done it there with very, very regularly. We feel the need a lot of the time to amplify, to make things bigger. And unfortunately, that causes a thing I call language inflation where we lose words. And once upon a time it was okay for us to be excited. Now we have to be super excited, don’t we? And maybe in a couple of years, we’ll have to be super duper excited or hyper excited or something. Words like fantastic, amazing, extraordinary used to mean something, and now they all just mean good. And don’t get me started on the word awesome, which unfortunately, your country has taken right down into just being good. A pizza is awesome. How do you describe an amazing sunset?

Julian Treasure (36:00):

Always supposed to be fear and wonder. And I don’t think pizzas really do that to you, do they?

Henry Lopez (36:07):

Yeah, there’s no doubt about that.

Julian Treasure (36:09):

Yeah. Exaggeration. I mean, there’s a good exercise I recommend to anybody to take on for an hour or a day or however long you want to do, which is to say exactly what you mean without the hyperbole, without the exaggeration, without the readies and amazings and all that sort of making things bigger. And of course, if you start on that road, it is a bit of a slippery slope and it’s easy to … I’m sure we’ve all claimed to have read a book we haven’t read or seen a film we haven’t seen just to keep this conversation flowing, but it can be a slippery slope down that road to lying and getting caught in it. And lying becomes a web and it’s not a great place to be. So I’m a great fan of honesty, tempered with love. I mean, I do talk about the four foundations of powerful speaking, which we can talk about maybe in a moment.

Henry Lopez (37:00):

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Julian Treasure (37:01):

Honesty, completely unbridled honesty may not be necessary all the time. “Oh, you look awful today.” It’s not really necessary to say that, but honesty is very important and exaggeration and particularly lying, they are big holes in the bucket.

Henry Lopez (37:18):

Yeah. And it comes back to, we’ve touched on it a couple of times, that trust then in the listener from the listener’s perspective, even though it might be subconscious for them, I think we all are susceptible to, I don’t know if I quite believe this snake oil salesman that keeps barking as to why this is so great, right? I think we all have a natural filter towards that. All right. Number seven, let’s complete it here. Number seven is dogmatism, which I believe is the confusion of facts with opinions, but tell me why this is such a sin.

Julian Treasure (37:51):

Yeah, it’s a lot of table thumping. This one comes from the other driver. I just mentioned looking good as one of the big drivers. The other driver is being right. If there’s one thing we like more than looking good, it’s being right. And the easiest way to be right is to make somebody else wrong. And being right has become such a huge thing in the world. It’s been massively accelerated by the internet and social media. So you have people going out there going, “Oh, look, thousands of people agree with me. ” Yeah, but millions don’t, but you don’t look at them. You go and hang out with the thousands who do agree with you. And then we get all these cabals, these silos of extreme opinions where people who never would’ve met in the past are now hanging out together and reinforcing often very ludicrous, unfortunately, views, sometimes violent.

Julian Treasure (38:41):

And so dogmatism very much is the confusion of facts with opinions. They’re two different things. Today is Tuesday. As we record this, this is a fact. Nobody can argue with that. However, opinions are so different and so varied. It’d be a wonderful world if we asked people’s permission before giving, “Would you … I’ve got an opinion about that. Would you like to hear it?

Julian Treasure (39:09):

” “No. “”Oh, well the shame. It was such a good opinion as well.”

Julian Treasure (39:13):

But I grew up in a family where there was a lot of table thumping and stating of opinions as facts. And then what results is argument, polarization, disagreement. And because of the being right thing, that’s a slippery slope as well. We tend to demonize people who disagree with us, make them wrong, which makes us writer. And the bottom of that slope of depersonalization and demonization is disagree with me and I’ll kill you, which is the ISIS solution to the world. And that’s not a world I want my little eight year old growing up in. So listening is really important in this context. And there’s a great quote by your former President Barack Obama who said, “I will listen to you, especially when we

Speaker 4 (39:58):

Disagree.”

Julian Treasure (39:59):

Well, sadly, that is becoming a rare thing these days. People want to listen to people they agree with and they want to attack people they disagree with and the internet is making that worse and worse, unfortunately. So the being right thing. I mean, Harvel Hendricks, who’s a counselor and author in America, said a great thing. He said, “You can either be right or be in a relationship.” I love that. Truth in that.

Henry Lopez (40:29):

Yeah. Excellent. All right. Well, thanks for sharing those thoughts on these seven deadly sins that if we think about, at least if we’re conscious of, and especially if there are particular ones here where we have developed a habit, if we can start at least being conscious of it, being aware of it and starting changing that, it’ll make us that much more effective. And then as you highlighted, we’re not just talking about speaking to a room full of people, but it can be individual speaking or within our businesses speaking to our small team of employees or partners or vendors or whatever other associates we might speak to, these are things that we can apply to make us that much more effective, right? The cornerstones you touched on, I just want to finish off the other three quickly. You touched on, and you used the acronym, HAIL rather, H-A-I-L.

Henry Lopez (41:23):

Honesty, you spoke to authenticity. I think a lot of that has come out in what you’ve been sharing here on these sins about being yourself, not exaggerating, taking responsibility. But what else do you want us to know about authenticity?

Julian Treasure (41:39):

Yes, it is about being yourself, really. I mean, I’ve seen many people come onto a stage and kind of pretend to be somebody they’re not. And it’s a bit painful a lot of the time because people can sense it. It’s so much more relaxing to be yourself and trust that you have a good message, you’ve got something important, you’ve got a gift to give to the person or the people you’re talking to. And if you want to train yourself in delivering it effectively, that’s something everybody can do.

Julian Treasure (42:07):

So there’s no reason to feel unconfident in being oneself. If communication is a challenge, there are ways to improve. And that can be get a voice coach, a speaking coach, an acting coach, whatever it may be, somebody who can help with the delivery side, what I call the vocal toolbox, all these amazing things you can do with this incredible instrument we will play, the human voice. I have spoken on stages to 2000 chief executives and I say, “How many of you speak in public?” 2000 hands go up. How many of you have had formal vocal coaching? Six. I mean, why?

Henry Lopez (42:47):

Amazing.

Julian Treasure (42:47):

Amazing. Unbelievable. If your voice is important to you in life, which is anybody who sells, tries to influence, lead, inspire, inform, teach, whatever it may be, if your voice is important to you in life, go get a vocal coach. For goodness sake, this is an incredible instrument and it’s as complicated to play it well as it would be with piano or violin or anything else. And there are a few people who are self-taught geniuses, but in the main, most people who are very good at anything have a coach. And the reason is that you can’t see your own game and a coach will always be working on that extra 1% no matter how good you get. There’s always that extra 1% to go to. And my goodness, in my experience, the vast majority of people haven’t mastered the basics of public speaking, let alone the high level, how you stand, how you breathe, what you do, how you prepare.

Julian Treasure (43:47):

These are essential things and how you use AIDS, all of these kind of things. I mean, how many times have you seen somebody stand on stage and they’ve got to slide behind them with bullet points on and they turn around and start reading off the screen? I’ve seen that so many

Henry Lopez (44:04):

Times. Oh, so many times. These are the basics that … But it’s interesting, Julian, how, and this is even, again, those people who raised their hand, a lot of them, if you had asked, and I’m sure you sometimes do, is it one of the things you most dread? Many people will put it above the fear of death. So we have this fear, and I don’t know where it comes from, perhaps you have some thoughts on quickly as to where this comes from, that we just, most people dread speaking in front of a group of people.

Julian Treasure (44:35):

A lot of people do. And the main reason for that is that they haven’t practiced. So I would be very frightened if you told me I’ve got to play piano on the Albert Hall stage tomorrow to a thousand people. Well, I’m not very good at the piano. I would be very upset and nervous. So doing anything for the first time or when you’re not completely capable is somewhat nerve-wracking. And if you’re going to do it in front of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people who are staring at you, that makes it that much more daunting, doesn’t it?

Speaker 4 (45:06):

Yeah, it does.

Julian Treasure (45:07):

We don’t like looking bad, we don’t like failing. But I have to say, most people’s fear would be losing their way, for example, drying on stage. I’ve seen people do that on the TED stage many times. And what happens, the person stops and starts going red and looks flustered and gets a bit sweaty. And what happens, somebody in the audience will start clapping and the audience will clap and give them a round of applause and say, “Don’t worry about it. It’s okay. We’re here. We’re not going anywhere. Take your time.” So unless you’re on open mic night at a comedy club or something and people enjoy the terrible scenes, most audiences aren’t like that. Most audiences actually are there. They want to hear what you’ve got to say.

Henry Lopez (45:53):

And they see that vulnerability and they connect with it, right?

Julian Treasure (45:56):

Yeah. Big time, big time. And so it would be fine in that situation to say, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve completely forgotten what I’m going to say next. Please bear with me. I’m just going to go off stage and get my notes and I’ll be right back.” And people will go, “That’s fine. I understand.” Could have happened to me.

Henry Lopez (46:14):

Absolutely.

Julian Treasure (46:14):

So remembering that people are actually on your side is a really big thing. This isn’t a thousand lions or tigers. This is a thousand people who are listening and wanting to get the gift you’re about to give them. So I think there’s a lot of fear of the thing which is based on kind of a nightmare scenario that really doesn’t happen. I’ve had almost anything that can go wrong, go wrong in public speaking, and it’s always okay in the end.

Henry Lopez (46:47):

And always a lot better. I always tell people, “It’s always a lot better than you thought it went.” Even for myself, I’ll record episodes sometimes and I’ll think, “Huh, that wasn’t very good.” And then I’ll listen back to it and I’m like, “It wasn’t that bad.” Yeah, absolutely. But why is it that most people, at least initially, I have found, seem to not like the sound of their own voice?

Julian Treasure (47:10):

Well, that depends if you mean the sound they listen to when they’re speaking or the sound they listen to when it’s recorded and played back to

Henry Lopez (47:15):

Them. Correct. And I think that’s the key to it, Julian, is that because we don’t hear ourselves that way, it’s foreign to us.

Julian Treasure (47:22):

Yeah. Yeah. Mostly you hear your voice through bone conduction, through your scalp.

Julian Treasure (47:28):

And that tends to emphasize the lower frequencies. It doesn’t carry high frequencies. So most people will think their voice is deeper than it really is. And when you hear it back, often there’s a tendency to go, “That’s squeaky. That’s not me. Sounds thin.” But yep, that is the real you that people are hearing. And if you want to work on your voice, then it’s very important to record yourself. I mean, I would say that’s my biggest tip to anybody who wants to become an expert speaker. If they can’t afford a coach or they don’t want to coach, coach yourself, you can do it so easily now. Phones on tripods or just sitting on a bookcase or something, put a phone up and video yourself speaking and play it back. Couldn’t agree with you more. Oh my goodness. I didn’t know I did that thing. Yeah.

Henry Lopez (48:16):

It’s the most painful thing, yet the most powerful thing you can do to help yourself with speaking as well as communicating. Yeah. And it’s cringeworthy. I mean, I’ve been doing this for a long time as you have, and I’ll watch a video of myself and say, “What am I doing with my eyes? Oh my God.” Sometimes it’s cringeworthy, but it’s the most powerful thing, I think, in getting better and better at what you do as far as communicating goes, as far as speaking goes.

Julian Treasure (48:41):

Definitely. And you know what? I love talking on stage now because it’s the moments in my life when I’m in front of a thousand or 5,000 people or whatever it is that I feel most conscious because I have to be. Every gesture, every movement, every breath, every glance, everything is conscious because I’m in a conscious connection with a lot of people who are conscious they’re looking at me and I love that. It kind of elevates my-

Henry Lopez (49:10):

Yeah. And you’re performing, right?

Julian Treasure (49:13):

Yes, to a degree you are. I mean, I always advise people to go to Toastmasters. I do have a slight concern about the level of performance that’s involved in that style of speaking. As long as it’s naturally you, that’s great, but we’re not actors. I’m not an actor. And I think being consciously yourself and conscious of the gestures you’re using and so forth is great. Forcing yourself to be somebody else is perhaps not so great because it’s less authentic

Julian Treasure (49:48):

And I’m a great fan of authenticity. So if you’re a quiet person and you don’t gesticulate much, then speak in that way and people will bear with you. You can work on these things if you want to change as a person, but pretending to be somebody that you’re not on stage is not so great. And likewise, if you’re a tiger pacing around the stage and you’re full of animation, well, that’s you, so pace. So I think we’re all different. The important thing is to be genuine in yourself and try not to distract people from what you’re saying. So I’ve seen people do the little walk of death round and round and round on a stage. You’ve probably seen them do that as well, or just lean from one side to the other and then lean the other way and keep doing that. And then the audience are going, “Is he going to do that again?” “Oh yeah, there he goes.

Julian Treasure (50:37):

“And it becomes a distraction from what you’re saying. So that’s the only really important rule is not to distract people.

Henry Lopez (50:46):

Right. Got it. All right. Let me wrap up quickly and then we’ll move on because of time, these four powerful cornerstones. And again, he uses the acronym HAIL, H-A-I-L. Honesty, authenticity, integrity, and love. And you were just speaking to authenticity again, but let’s keep moving here. We’ve been chatting about things that you cover in the book. Again, the book, you have a couple of books, but specifically How to Be Heard, Secrets for Powerful Speaking and Listening, and Sound Business: How to use Sound to Grow Profits and Brand Value. But what would you like our listeners to do if they want to learn more from you and on this subject?

Julian Treasure (51:32):

Well, by all means, come by my website. We all find, at the very least, you can download a really interesting film that I made with an American speaker coach expert called Neil Gordon, where we pull apart my TED Talk about speaking. And if you stand on the TED stage to speak about speaking, that’s putting your head above the parapet big time. Sure. And I did it well. And so the question we were asking is, why did I do it well? Why did it work? What did I do right? What could people learn from this and put into their own speeches and talks? So that’s a free download on my website, and I think it’s really interesting. I’ve got a course which people can check out if they want to go really deep into this. I have a seven and a half hour course on all of this stuff.

Julian Treasure (52:19):

And then there’s the book, as you’ve mentioned. The website is juliantreasure.com. So it’s easy to remember, juliantreasure.com. And for anything about business, my company is the soundagency.com, which helps businesses to listen and make better sound.

Henry Lopez (52:35):

Excellent. All right. Speaking of books, is there another book besides your two that you would recommend?

Julian Treasure (52:42):

Well, I think there are two in the context of running a growing business. One is personal really about being a better organized person, and that’s indistractible by Near Isle, which I think is a great book in this world of constant distraction where, as we talked about, there are lots of companies grabbing our attention left, right, and center. It’s very, very easy to become unfocused, to get distracted, to waste enormous amounts of time, which is such a precious commodity. So I think that’s a great book for anybody who wants to be really productive in the face of this tidal wave of attention grabbing stuff. And the other one I think is a beautiful book called Quiet by fellow Ted Talker, Susan Kane. And what Susan’s done there is to emphasize the importance of allowing introverts to deliver great value to a company. We can all get seduced by this story that extroverts are the best because they’re louder and more confident and more go ahead and so forth.

Julian Treasure (53:48):

But the people who are quiet in meetings often have a huge amount of value to give, and it’s really important to allow them to do that just in the same way that we need to allow … We think about neurodiversity and allowing different types of people to contribute to organizations by designing environments which are more inclusive and forgiving of different people’s tolerances. And half the world getting on for are introverts. I’m an introvert, believe it or not. I mean, I stand on stage and speak in front of thousands of people, but I am introverted. And so I think it’s really important that that huge goldmine of talent and genius and contribution is not submerged by the noisy people. And that’s what Susan’s book is all about.

Henry Lopez (54:40):

Yeah. Lovely. I have not read that. I’m an introvert as well, so fascinating stuff. All right, Julian, we’ll bring it to a close here. What’s one thing you want us to take away from this conversation, especially from the perspective of a small business owner and trying to learn from this to become what I’m calling a better leader because you are better at speaking and whether it’s one-on-one or to a group, maybe a group of employees or whatever it might be, what’s one thing you want us to take away?

Julian Treasure (55:11):

Well, I think it’s got to be that listening is a skill. Listening is an incredibly important skill for anybody running a business and for all the people who work in the business. So I do intrigue you, work on it yourself as a leader, train people on it, reward people who are good listeners, appraise people on it. Make it a significant part of your company to be a good listener is such a powerful thing in life, and it’ll help people to sell, to speak more powerfully, and also it’ll transform your customer service if you truly start listening. So listening as a foundation for successful business, I think is the thing I’d love people to take away.

Henry Lopez (55:51):

Yeah, that’s brilliant. It’s a skill that … And so what that indicates is we can get better at it. We can develop it and then should be one of those foundational skills that we do get better at. The other key takeaway for me amongst everything was your point about what’s the listening I’m speaking into and asking myself that question before I start speaking. Absolutely

Julian Treasure (56:14):

Crucial, and it transforms everything.

Henry Lopez (56:17):

Where do you want us to go again to learn more?

Julian Treasure (56:20):

Juliantreasure.com, and look forward to seeing any of you guys there. And thank you so much for the chance. This has been a great conversation, Henry.

Henry Lopez (56:28):

Thank you, Julian. I appreciate you joining me today. Thanks for the insights and for sharing. This is Henry Lopez, and thanks for joining me for this episode of The Howa Business. My guest today, again, was Julian Treasure. I release new episodes every Monday morning, and you can find the show anywhere you listen to podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Spotify, or at my website, the howofbusiness.com. Thanks for listening.