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Episode Host: Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, small business coach, and the host of The How of Business podcast show – dedicated to helping you start, run, grow and exit your small business.

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Related Podcast Episodes:

Episode 448: Julian Treasure – Deadly Sins of Speaking

Episode 233: Oscar Trimboli – Listening Skills

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Transcript:

The following is a full transcript of this episode. This transcript was produced by an automated system and may contain some typos.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Welcome Back, Julian Treasure

Henry Lopez [0:12]: Welcome to this episode of The How of Business. This is Henry Lopez, and it’s my pleasure to welcome back on the show Julian Treasure. Julian, welcome back.

Julian Treasure [0:21]: Thank you, Henry. It’s a delight to be here.

Henry Lopez [0:23]: Same for me. The conversation we had last time was several years ago. Julian was on Episode 448, and that’s been one of the most popular episodes I’ve had on this podcast, for good reason, as you will soon find as we listen to Julian share his experiences and techniques on listening. Last time, on Episode 448, we focused more on what we called the seven deadly sins of speaking. So today he’s back to share more on the other half of that communication, if you will: listening, and why most leaders, including small business leaders, are not doing it well, what that can cost us, and how to fix it.

You can find all of the resources, including the show notes page for this episode, and I’m going to have a special offer from Julian’s new app that you’ll find by accessing a link on the show notes page for this episode. You can also learn more about my one-on-one and group coaching programs at thehowofbusiness.com. I also invite you to consider joining The How of Business community on Patreon, and subscribe wherever you might be listening so you don’t miss any future episodes.

Let me tell you briefly about Julian. Julian Treasure is the author of Sound Business, How to Be Heard, and Sound Affects, and an international keynote speaker on conscious listening, powerful speaking, and healthy, productive business sound. He’s one of the most watched TED speakers of all time, and when you watch one of his talks, you’ll quickly understand why. He’s joining me today from Kirkwall, Scotland. So once again, Julian Treasure, welcome back to the show.

Julian Treasure [1:54]: Thank you, Henry. It is lovely to be back, and particularly to turn the coin over and talk about the other side of communication.

We Are Losing Our Listening

Henry Lopez [2:01]: Exactly. So I want to get right into it. Your mission, I believe, in part, is to re-engineer the world’s listening. Why?

Julian Treasure [2:11]: Well, I’ve just redone my website, and we put a big banner headline on the top of it, which is “We are losing our listening,” and that’s the problem. There are many, many reasons for this, but the research all bears it out. Attention spans are getting shorter. People are more distracted. Listening is declining, and that has all sorts of knock-on effects.

Before we get into the effects on business, which is really what we need to focus on, because that’s who’s listening to this podcast, they’re also human beings. Listening is critical in our relationships, in the way that we connect to other human beings, and in the way we connect to the world around us: the natural world, and even the man-made world. So we’re seeing effects of the decline of listening happening all over the place. I think it’s 70% of young people, 16 to 25 year olds, who are reporting that loneliness is negatively affecting their mental health.

Now that is a direct result, I think, of the shift in human communication from what we’re doing now, which is absolutely primal. We’ve been evolving for maybe 3 million years, and Homo sapiens about a tenth of that, 300,000 years, we’ve been on this planet. For about half of that time we’ve had language. Before that, for all of that 3 million years, we were using sound, just as all animals do, to communicate anger, fear, warning, love, whatever it might be. But then we invented language, and that’s been the way that humanity has developed for all of that time, until just 5,000 years ago we invented writing. And to be honest, probably only two or 300 years ago did everybody read and write. Until that time, it was really the province of the elites. So for almost the entire development of our species, we have used what we’re doing now to learn, to connect, to grow, to be aware of what’s going on around us, for all our communication needs. For a tiny, tiny proportion of that time, we’ve been using writing to do that.

And in the last 30 or 40 years, email, then text and instant messaging have really overtaken speaking and listening, to the point where we now have what are called digital natives. I guess many of you, dear listeners, will be those, because if you’re forming businesses, you’re probably young and you probably grew up with screens. The research shows that many, many people who’ve done that feel more comfortable texting than they do speaking. There are innumerable surveys now showing that employers are getting frustrated because they interview people who don’t feel comfortable speaking one to one and don’t know quite how to express themselves, and that’s got a lot of implications that we can work through in a moment.

So in society, loneliness, anxiety, depression, even suicide: these are skyrocketing among young people. In organizations, teams and their managers are pretty dysfunctional because of this. And in society, we’re seeing the effects of this working out really devastatingly in polarization, demonization, mass caricaturing of people, and hatred, unfortunately, which is becoming more and more common as a response to anybody who’s different. We seem to be losing the ability to listen to people who are different and to accept them, even if they’re different from us.

So that’s a long answer to your very first question there, Henry. We are losing our listening, and it’s having huge consequences. And I think we’ll probably want to zoom in on the business ones for this particular conversation.

Henry Lopez [6:26]: Yeah, it is so impactful. Thanks for sharing that to set the stage and set the tone. I was writing down all of the different areas, thinking from a business owner’s perspective. It’s how we learn. It’s how we connect, whether it’s our partners, our constituents, our employees, our customers. But you also mentioned the awareness piece, which I think is so important for a business owner, because part of our responsibility is to listen to what the market is telling us, what our customers are telling us, or we might be listening to identify an opportunity in a market that we might want to solve. So listening comes in in obvious ways, but also in maybe not-so-obvious ways, in how it impacts the effectiveness of a business owner.

And going back to the loneliness piece for individuals: loneliness, despite all of this connectivity. We’re lonelier than we have ever been before we had smartphones, which is such an interesting thing.

What Is Conscious Listening?

Now, as we start to dive in further, you talk specifically about what you call conscious listening. We talked about this on our last call, but can you define that for us again as we start to break this down from a business owner’s perspective? What does conscious listening mean?

Julian Treasure [7:37]: Well, it’s being conscious that you’re doing something, and that there are different ways to do it. Listening is a skill; hearing is a capability. Everybody can hear, unless you’ve got damaged hearing, which is sadly getting on for one in 10 of the world’s population now. But let’s leave that aside for a moment.

You hear everything, and it’s a very primal sense, for two reasons. First of all, you can hear what’s behind you. I don’t know about you, but I’m not very good at seeing what’s behind me. And you can hear in the dark. Your eyes don’t work very well in either of those two situations. So hearing is our primary warning sense, which means sound goes very deep, very fast. It affects you profoundly. So that’s hearing. It’s natural. It’s a capability. It happens all the time. Your ears are working even while you’re asleep.

Listening is different. Listening is conscious. It’s a skill, and it’s a skill that you can practice and master to great advantage. Unfortunately, we don’t treat it like that. The vast majority of people on this planet have never been aware that listening is a skill that you can actually work on. They conflate it with hearing, and they think it’s just natural. Everybody listens; it’s just something that happens. No, it’s not. And when you separate those two things out, you start to realize, hey, there’s a thing here that I have never worked on consciously, and that has got huge implications for the way I connect with other people, whether it’s leading or communicating or inspiring or selling. All sorts of business activities rely on how well you listen, particularly leading.

The Wall of Denial

And unfortunately, the research bears out pretty much what I’m saying, because there was a big survey done recently that found that only one in 12 employees rate their leader as a very good listener. Now that’s quite shocking. It’s shocking, but not surprising, because tell me how many organizations have intensive listening training programs. Some of them will do speaking, because they recognize that when you stand on a stage, perhaps that’s something you need to develop. I think last time we talked about that. Not many of them do, and I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve seen walk onto a stage and think they can do this. Would you go on stage at Carnegie Hall to give a piano recital, having never had a lesson and never done any practice? Obviously mad. And yet that’s what people do all the time when they walk on stage and speak.

But listening, even more so, is a wall of denial, because people kind of collapse it with being a nice person. If I say, “Henry, do you know you’re not a good listener?” Ooh, that’s a bit insulting, isn’t it? That’s a bit upsetting, because we think listening is part of being a nice person. So we all think we listen well. Almost nobody does, and that is the wall of denial that I’m beating my head against all the time, trying to establish this performance gap, which almost nobody accepts or acknowledges. And it’s very hard to solve a problem that people don’t think they’ve got. So that’s why I’m delighted to be speaking with you today, because conscious listening is a huge miss, and the cost of missing it is astronomical.

A Word From Our Sponsor

Henry Lopez [11:04]: This is Henry Lopez with a brief break from this episode to share a special offer from our show sponsor and trusted service partner, Oostas. Oostas specializes in digital marketing services for small business, including websites, SEO, social media management, and pay-per-click advertising. You know how important it is to promote your business online, but the world of digital marketing can be confusing and expensive. That’s why you need Oostas, a digital marketing company you can trust and who are dedicated to helping small business owners. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Oostas and their founder, Adam Kirk, for several years now, and they are my trusted service partner for websites and digital marketing.

Oostas really understands that every business has distinct digital marketing needs. That’s why they take a results-driven approach to all your digital marketing. They start with a comprehensive analysis of your business, your goals, and your target market, and then they develop a tailored digital marketing strategy that’s designed to take you where you want to go online.

Oostas is offering a special discount for The How of Business podcast listeners. Just let them know you heard about Oostas on The How of Business podcast, and you can schedule a no-obligation consultation with Oostas to see how they can help you with your website and digital marketing needs. To learn more and to take advantage of the special offer, please find a special link to Oostas on the show notes page for this episode at thehowofbusiness.com.

The $10 Trillion Cost of Not Listening

Julian Treasure [12:35]: I mean, the latest research really floored me. When you work out the cost of leaders not listening very well, just think about this. It’s very predictable. People are disengaged. If you’re a leader of a team and you don’t listen to them, then they will eventually stop having those ideas or putting their hand up or trying to contribute in meetings. They just give up, and eventually they leave.

And of course, there’s miscommunication. If we have teams not listening, and leaders not listening to their teams, people make mistakes, or they have to get things repeated because they didn’t quite understand. Those two things alone, miscommunication and disengagement, are having a devastating effect. There was a recent study which found that miscommunication in America alone is costing a day a week per employee on average through all of these mistakes. That adds up to $1.2 trillion a year, in America alone.

Disengagement is even bigger. There’s a study on disengagement, and that’s the effect I was just talking about: people not bothering, working less hard, higher sick days, absenteeism. Eventually they leave, and you have to pay to replace them. The cost of that was coming in at $8.8 trillion a year globally to business. So add those two together. One’s only American, the other one’s the world. At least $10 trillion a year because of not listening. I can’t think of another aspect of business which has got such a massive impact and is so hidden and so unacknowledged by leaders.

When you think about why a leader doesn’t listen, you can think of a lot of reasons, perhaps ego, because leaders are supposed to be the people who know stuff. You’re supposed to tell people things, aren’t you? Not ask questions and humbly listen. And listening is humble. If I’m listening to you, Henry, I’m saying, “Henry, you’re more important than I am at this moment.” So there’s a humility in listening. That’s one possible reason why leaders don’t listen. The second is the job itself, because you’re supposed to be telling people and so forth. And the third may be the kind of people that we promote, who tend to be the louder, more extroverted, expressive people who speak a lot more than they listen. There’s Susan Cain’s wonderful TED talk about the power of introverts. Not so many introverts get promoted to high positions, because they’re quiet and they don’t shout about things, so they often get overlooked.

So for all those reasons, I wasn’t surprised by that one in 12 statistic. I was shocked by the outcome of that globally: trillions and trillions of dollars being wasted because of leaders not listening.

“I Know Where I’m Going”

Henry Lopez [15:30]: I want to go back to the other thing, Julian, that I think can lead a business owner, as a leader, to not listen. There is some truth to the fact that I don’t have time, nor is it often productive for me to spend time listening to everybody’s opinions. While it’s important, and I get some pieces of information that are valuable, it can slow me down, or I know where I’m going. Do you understand what I’m trying to express there? I’m not saying that’s a valid excuse, but could that be what leads me to not listen the way I should to my team?

Julian Treasure [16:13]: Yeah. Well, it’s definitely a strength for a leader to have a plan, to know where they’re going, to be able to articulate that powerfully and effectively, inspire people, and get everybody on the same page. Those are all great things. Of course, the downside comes if your plan’s not right, or if there is a mistake there, or if you’re missing something. It’s fine to be a kind of Steve Jobs character if you’re Steve Jobs and you’ve got a genius for spotting what’s needed in the market, how to deliver it, and how to inspire people for that. But if you’re a Steve Jobs type character and you’re wrong, you’re driving everybody over a cliff with you.

Henry Lopez [16:53]: Yeah, that’s catastrophically wrong.

Listen Like a Squirrel: Danger and Opportunity

Julian Treasure [16:54]: Totally. So it is important to check in, and you mentioned the reasons for listening there a little bit. Imagine a squirrel. A squirrel is fast. It’s strong. It’s a good little animal. And it’s listening all the time. If you look at a squirrel, it’s always attentive, listening in every way it possibly can, and it’s listening for two things. It’s listening for danger, and it’s listening for opportunity. A business is no different. You need to be listening for both of those two things: danger and opportunity.

I remember a conversation I had some time ago with Hyrum Smith, who sadly is no longer with us, but he was the former CEO of the Covey organization. He told me a story about a guy on their binding line who had an idea, and fortunately he had a manager who was listening and didn’t say, “Get back to your station, don’t get ideas above your station.” The manager listened to him, said, “That’s interesting,” and they tried it. It was an idea for changing the way things were working, and it saved them millions of dollars.

The key thing is, yes, you need to have direction. Yes, you need to be inspiring people. Yes, you need to be able to articulate a plan, and being blown about by the wind is not the answer. But you do need to listen, because if you have been wise in your recruitment and you’ve recruited excellent people, they will have ideas. And the strength of any team is in its diversity. I’m talking about diversity of opinion, of knowledge, of perspective.

I’ve fallen prey to this in the past, when I started my organization. There’s a strong temptation to fill your team with people like you, because you get on with them, and you all think in the same way. “That’s great, let’s do this.” “Yeah, that’s great, let’s all do this.” You need somebody in the team, and we did have somebody in the team, who would go, “Hang on, you can’t do that because…” And everybody goes, “Oh, boring.” And then you look at it and you go, “Oh, he’s right. That would have cost us a bundle of money if we’d gone that way.” So you really do need to have that diversity and be able to listen to different ideas and to challenge. That’s one of the most important things in being an effective leader: not killing people who come up with different ideas or challenge you, so you can assimilate it and deal with it. It goes back to this idea of being able to listen to difference, really.

I have been in organizations which have been run by what I call dragon leaders, where it’s bad news, shoot the messenger. “I only want to hear good news.” Well, that’s no way to run anything, because if that’s the way you run something, you don’t know what’s going on at all. You have no idea. In the organization I’m thinking of, the guy was so ferocious that people stopped bringing the bad news and started inventing good news, and the whole thing was completely warped out of all perspective. He had no idea what was going on in that organization, because nobody would entertain the idea of walking into his room and giving him anything that was going to be upsetting.

Henry Lopez [20:00]: I’ve found that in those environments, the talented people, the good people, go elsewhere.

Heard, Understood, and Valued

Julian Treasure [20:04]: Absolutely, because there’s a joy in working, isn’t there? I’ve worked for great managers where you have an idea and you go and see them, and they’ll listen intently to your idea and at least give you the respect of saying, “You’re intelligent, you’re contributing.” If it’s not appropriate, they say, “It’s a great one, but we can’t do it because of this, this, and this.” But you still feel valued. There are three things every human being wants: to be heard, understood, and valued. And you do that with your team by listening. Listening does all three of those things at once.

If you dismiss people, or you’re always talking, if every meeting is a platform for you to spout on and tell everybody what’s going on, you are squashing those people. You are actually disrespecting those people and inhibiting their growth. And they’ve probably got interesting things to say. If they haven’t, what are they doing there? How did you recruit them? If you’ve recruited well, then you’ve got a fund of excellence there, particularly if it’s challenging. So all of this is very, very important as a leader.

Choosing Where You Listen From

And being conscious, coming back to my phrase, conscious listening: there are different places to listen from. Being conscious in your listening means asking a very important question, which is, “Where’s the best place for me to listen from in this conversation or at this meeting?” You can listen from a critical position, analyzing and assessing. You can listen from an empathic position, where you’re listening with your heart and really feeling somebody’s feelings. You can be analytical. You can be creative. It’s very boring if you’re attempting to have a brainstorm and you’ve got a very analytical person in the room. That’s not the role of the brainstorm, is it? A brainstorm means all ideas are good ideas. Every idea is accepted. Well, that’s a listening position.

So this starts to give you an idea that there are different places you can listen from, and it’s very powerful when you get that listening is a conscious process. Most of us have built a bunker through our lives, because we all listen through a set of filters, and those filters accrete as we get older. You end up with a kind of static, normal listening position where you normally listen from. Well, the good news is there’s a door in the back of the bunker. You can come out and move around to another listening position entirely, which may be far more productive in this conversation or in this meeting.

Building a Listening Culture

Henry Lopez [22:33]: Okay, so what I was going to ask you, I think this partially answers. When you observe companies, small businesses, where the leaders are doing this well, yet they’re busy and dealing with all kinds of challenges and problems, and time is limited, this focus on the position going into a situation, whether it’s a meeting or a conversation with somebody on the line, whatever it might be, is critical. What else do you find is helpful to create those opportunities to listen as a leader?

Julian Treasure [23:05]: Well, first of all, it’s having a culture where it’s acceptable to listen and to make time for listening, which actually respects listening as an important skill that everybody should have. Perhaps build it into people’s 360s: how good is this person at listening? I don’t know many organizations that do that.

Also, I think it’s having channels which permit listening to happen and communication to come back in different ways in an organization. Let’s say you’re announcing a big change to the organization and you speak. There are 100 people listening to you, and I can guarantee that at the end of your talk, there are 100 different versions of what you just said out there, because they’re all listening through their sets of filters, and they’ve all heard different things. Some people hear great opportunity, other people hear threat and danger, other people hear boring corporate nonsense, whatever it may be.

As a leader, if you’re speaking to one person, there’s a very interesting question that you can ask: “Okay, that’s what I wanted to say. Why don’t you tell me what you’ve picked up from that? How did you receive that? What do you think of it?” You get them to reflect back, and you’ll be amazed at what they heard, which isn’t what you said at all. So in a meeting of 100 or so, particularly if it’s change management, which is scary for many, many people, you need to give them a mechanism to feed back. That may be some channel which allows them to feed back opinion, even if it’s anonymously. However it works, you then get a groundswell of honest feedback from people. If you ask at the end of the meeting, “Okay, has anybody got any questions?” you’ll get the extroverts. You’re not going to get the introverts, so you’re getting a kind of skewed version of what people have heard. All the media and all the channels that you can create are useful, especially the ones that get the quieter people to feed back as well.

So creating channels: very important. Having a culture of listening: very important. You might also think about the environments that you’ve got people in. Is the office really noisy? Is it a shouty place? Are people able to quietly listen to each other? Do you have quiet working space? Do you have sufficient meeting space where people can have confidential, quiet conversations? All of these things make a difference. And you don’t create a listening organization overnight. It’s not an email that goes out tomorrow saying, “We’re going to be a listening organization next week.” It’s a bit tougher than that.

Henry Lopez [25:45]: For example, the Monday morning sales meeting is often very transactional: what does the pipeline look like? It’s very prescribed. I often tell people, especially with their leadership team, to have those standing meetings. Even if we have, quote unquote, nothing to talk about, you’re creating a space within which you can listen, and your team members know they can speak. Because what happens, I find also, Julian, is that your leadership team kind of learns, “Okay, I don’t want to bother Henry with that right now. I don’t want to bring that up now, because we’re busy or we’re talking about something else.” And they never get around to having a space where they feel comfortable sharing that.

Better Meetings, and a Radical Idea

Julian Treasure [26:21]: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And of course, meetings are one of the biggest wastes of time in corporate life, aren’t they? Because we have these rituals. All meetings are an hour. Why? Some meetings you can do in 10 minutes. Meetings very often don’t have a stated purpose at the beginning. Always do that: “We are here to do this.” If possible, have a timekeeper, or have somebody managing the process of the meeting, and it doesn’t have to be the leader.

And here’s a radical idea for you. If you are the leader, how about having some meetings where you say nothing? You could actually say, “Right, guys, in this meeting I am going to sit quietly and let you run the meeting.” Wow, the ideas that you might get out of that. People will be very discombobulated at the beginning, because it’s not what they’re used to. It’s scary. But if you can get into the habit of doing that sometimes, or at least for parts of a meeting, you are enriching the whole organization enormously.

The Master Conscious Communicator App

Henry Lopez [27:18]: Agreed. All right, so you have now developed this Master Conscious Communication app. I’m hoping you can introduce it and tell us why you developed it.

Julian Treasure [27:28]: Well, as I said, one of the challenges I’ve got is this wall of denial in the world, where almost nobody is a good listener and everybody thinks they are. So that’s the big thing to beat down, and I can do that to a degree with things like this, Henry. This is a joy. But we’ve got an hour here, and once people have listened to it, they move on with their lives and get on with other things, and everything evaporates. This kind of thing evaporates. I can stand on stage and do a talk to thousands of people, and it has a huge impact on them there and then. But three weeks later, what do they remember?

So the important thing, I think, is practice. It’s like anything. If you go to the gym once, great, that’s not going to change your life. Go to the gym three or four times a week, and that does change your life. So everything is about habit and practice to me. What the app is, effectively, is a kind of course. It’s AI driven, so it morphs to whatever anybody wants, whether it’s speaking, listening, presenting, any or all of those things. But more than a course, it is daily practice. There’s an AI coach in there which is based on all of my work, all my books, 20 years of work, and it’s there in your pocket, able to answer questions. You might wake up at three in the morning and go, “I’ve got this talk tomorrow, and I’m really nervous about it. How can I make it really effective?” Or, “I’m pitching this.” And it’ll come back with advice. It’s always available, which is certainly not true of me. And there’s only one of me. That’s the other big challenge I’ve got in the world: scaling me. I want to have a big impact. I want the ripples in the pond to be spreading. I want listening to be regenerated in the world. It’s so important, and it will make a big difference in life.

Henry Lopez [29:19]: And what I love about it, in part from a financial perspective, is that it’s very affordable. It’s less than $1 a day, and we’ve got a special offer on top of it. If you use the link that’ll be on the show notes page for this episode, just go to my website, thehowofbusiness.com, search for Julian Treasure, and you’ll find it. Julian is generously offering us a 25% discount when you use that link, on a course that’s already very reasonably priced. It’s $89 a quarter, so very affordable, plus you get the 25% off. And like you said at the beginning, this is a skill that we have to develop. So I’ll have a link to that on the website, thehowofbusiness.com.

Two Simple Listening Habits

All right, excellent. Thanks for sharing that. I think, always with these types of things, it starts with being aware that I need to get better, that I need to develop the skill. You said that, but what else? What is a quick, simple listening habit that I can implement that will have an impact on improving my conscious listening skill?

Julian Treasure [30:20]: I’ll give you two, if I may, Henry.

Henry Lopez [30:22]: Yes, sir.

Julian Treasure [30:22]: The first one is the absolute simplest one, which is to get into the habit of taking a deep in-breath before you speak. The other person finishes speaking, and you take that second for a deep in-breath. Of course, it’s good for your voice as well, because your voice is only breath, so you’re fueling up to speak well, and it will tend to defeat some of the less effective vocal habits like vocal fry, where you’re talking like this. So if you take a deep in-breath, your voice is going to be much stronger. But also, in that second or two that you take the in-breath, you may realize the other person’s still talking. It really helps with the interrupting habit. It also gives you that moment to focus and then respond. So that’s the first one.

RASA: Receive, Appreciate, Summarize, Ask

The second one is a tool which I developed many years ago, and I haven’t improved it. I’ve looked at it, I’ve kicked it, I can’t improve it, and some people have told me that it saved their marriage. It’s such a good tool for listening. RASA. It’s the Sanskrit word for juice, R-A-S-A, and in this context it’s a simple little four-letter acronym.

The R is receive. That means pay attention to the person who’s speaking. Not doing something else. Not tapping away on a phone. Not looking out of the window. Not looking for the next, more interesting person to talk to. Actually look at the person. Pay attention to them.

The A is appreciate, and that signals that you are actually in the conversation. It’s affirming that you’re paying attention: “Ah, really? Aha!” Eyebrow raises, head bobs, smiles, nods, little noises, and all that kind of thing. So that’s appreciate.

The S is probably the most important step of the whole of RASA: summarize. “So, Henry, what I understood you to say is this. Did I get you?” Or, “So, guys, we’ve just, I think, all agreed this. Am I right? So can we now move on to the next item on the agenda?” If you don’t have a “so” person in a meeting, it can be a very long meeting. Using “so” in a conversation, you’re kind of shutting doors behind you as you walk down the corridor of the conversation, locking things down. “So that’s done. Okay, now we move on to this.” Very important word: “so.” So, summarize.

And the second A is ask. Ask questions, ideally the W questions: why, which, what, when, where, who, the ones that do not permit the answer yes or no.

“Tell Me More”

And I’ll give you a rider to tag on to the end of RASA, which is a wonderful little phrase that is probably one of the most valuable little things anybody can have in conversation, and that is just three words: “Tell me more.” “Henry, tell me more about that.” If you say that to somebody, they kind of light up, because we all want to be interesting, and we all want to have people engaged in what we’re saying. When you hear, “Henry, tell me more,” do you not have a feeling in your tummy that goes, “Oh, that’s good. He likes me. He’s interested”? So it’s a fantastic phrase to open people up, to really oil a conversation and make everything flow, and to connect with somebody. So: RASA, receive, appreciate, summarize, ask, and “tell me more.”

Henry Lopez [33:47]: Love that. Those are great, actionable tips. With “tell me more,” what I’m immediately thinking of is how I have used that in the past in a sales environment when we’re doing discovery. How powerful that is. Like you said before, it applies to all types of communication, but sales in particular.

And going back to your first tip on the breath, a really good sales manager that I had in the early ’90s taught me, as he was teaching me to be better at presenting in small group presentations where people would ask questions, to count to three in my head before I answered a question. It was a particular challenge for me, because I would hear the same question over and over. But for that person, in that group, they think it’s a great question and it’s unique. I just had the quick answer, and counting to three felt like an eternity until I got used to it.

Julian Treasure [34:36]: Oh, absolutely. Silence is very important, of course. Listening is silent. You have to be silent to listen, and that includes in your head. Ideally, try not to be speech writing, which is creating your next brilliant bit of monologue while somebody’s talking. That’s not listening, really. That’s speech writing. So you have to be humble, you have to be open, and you have to trust that your mouth will know what to do when it comes to your turn to speak. And that little pause that you mentioned, it’s such a brilliant way of respecting somebody. You may have heard the question a thousand times. “Ah, great question.” You don’t have to be insincere about it. Even if you just pause and answer, they feel respected. They feel that there’s a connection there.

Validation: Dealing With Difference

Henry Lopez [35:19]: Even if I don’t agree with what you said, I could say, “Interesting, Julian,” and then go on. That’s what validation is.

Julian Treasure [35:27]: Absolutely. You’ve just touched on a very, very important part of all of my work, which is about dealing with difference, and that’s validation. What does validation sound like? It sounds like, “Henry, I don’t agree with what you just said, but I completely understand why you think that. You’re different from me.” We live in a world where there’s this kind of fiction that it’s a zero-sum game: you’re wrong, I’m right. It’s not like that. We can both be right and be different, because we have different perspectives, different backgrounds, different knowledge, different understanding, different everything. Therefore two people can be entirely different and both be right.

And if you can appreciate that, then you get into a situation the ancient Greeks described as thesis, antithesis, synthesis. When you put the two together, that’s where you can get some of the best ideas. When you start taking challenge on and synthesizing it, “That is a really good point, actually. Let’s have a look at that,” then you’ve got something on the table which is not me versus you. It’s both of our ideas on the table. Let’s look at how these can actually live together and mingle and create something that’s even better. So that’s another very important point. Thank you for bringing that one up.

Book Recommendation

Henry Lopez [36:41]: Oh, brilliant. Thank you. Is there a book that you’ve read, in the past or recently, that you would recommend?

Julian Treasure [36:47]: Well, I had the honor of guest curating a session at the TED conference in Vancouver in April, and it was great, because I could bring some of my big heroes onto the stage. One of the speakers I was able to bring on is an author called David George Haskell, and he wrote a book called Sounds Wild and Broken, which is absolutely beautiful. It’s a paean to the wonder and the majesty of sound, particularly nature sound, and it’s a marvelous read.

Henry Lopez [37:14]: So what is it about?

Julian Treasure [37:15]: It’s about sound, and it’s about appreciating sound and understanding the impact of sound on us, and the impact of us on the sound of the world.

The Problem With Open-Plan Offices

Henry Lopez [37:24]: And you’ve studied this a lot, and you’ve written about it as well. So, interesting book. Thank you for the recommendation. That triggers something. I want to go back to a point you made earlier that you also talked about in our last conversation, which is our work environments and how critical sound is in those environments. What comes to mind is the big shift that occurred many years ago in the corporate world to cubicles, or the open concept. Is that noise really as bad as I think it is? And is it true, from what I’m reading, that it can inhibit communication?

Julian Treasure [37:59]: Probably worse than you think it is, Henry.

Henry Lopez [38:02]: Yeah.

Julian Treasure [38:02]: The research shows that open-plan noise can reduce people’s productivity by up to two-thirds. That’s shocking, and it’s the number one complaint in all of the big surveys of people in offices: noise and lack of quiet working space. We have adopted this strategy of open plan universally, with no evidence at all that it’s good for people, for their health and well-being. It certainly isn’t. It creates stress and fatigue, and there are lots and lots of studies now proving that. So you’re burning people out. You’re going to get absenteeism. You’re going to get people leaving, just because of the noise. And it’s also dysfunctional. People can’t hear each other, so you get miscommunication happening.

Now, it was thought for a long time that it was good for collaboration. It was marvelous for collaboration, because we can all just shout across the desk and get on, and we’re all a big team. Well, actually, we’re now finding out from research that even that’s not true, because people don’t like being overheard, and they are much more likely to email somebody across the desk than they are to lean across and talk to them. So even for collaboration, it’s dubious. But certainly for concentrated work like writing, calculating, and thinking, it’s a disaster. It’s very important, if you’re running an organization, to create quiet working space where people can go.

There’s a philosophy called activity-based working, where you create different spaces in an organization and then encourage people to move to the right space for the kind of work they’re doing. And now that we understand neurodiversity, for the kind of person they are, too, because you need to take account of different types of people as well as different types of work. So create different environments where all of that can be done most effectively.

Henry Lopez [39:58]: Well said. I think the truth is it comes down to economics, right? “I don’t want to spend the money to put up the walls or to give everybody an office.” That’s really what it’s about, under the guise of collaboration. There’s no doubt about that.

The One Thing to Keep

Okay, excellent. Let’s summarize this. As you said, with a lot of the stuff we talk about, somebody’s listening to this, and then it evaporates. What’s one thing you would like us to keep from this conversation?

Julian Treasure [40:25]: The idea that listening is conscious, that it’s work. If you’re not conscious that you’re listening, you’re probably just hearing. Moving through this door into a world of conscious listening opens all of the possibilities up for you and makes you a more conscious human being as well. So that’s the one thing I would love people to take away: becoming conscious that you’re doing something when you’re listening.

Henry Lopez [40:52]: Excellent. Where should we go online to learn more about you?

Julian Treasure [40:55]: Well, JulianTreasure.com is my website, and I’m quite proud that I’ve just redone the entire website. It’s now, I think, a 30-page website, which took me approximately a week with Claude’s help.

Henry Lopez [41:08]: Oh, amazing.

Julian Treasure [41:09]: It’s unbelievable what is possible now. I’m deep in AI; we can have a conversation about that another time. But it was amazing how fast that was able to be done. It would have taken months and thousands before. So yes, come and see the website, the results of my teamwork with Claude. I hope you like it.

Wrap-Up

Henry Lopez [41:29]: Yeah, absolutely. I just released an episode this week about how I’m using Claude Code to do a lot of similar things, so thank you for sharing that. All right: that consciousness of listening. Are you consciously listening? And remember to come to the show notes page to get the link to his new app, Master Conscious Communicator. It’s a great tool and a great offer to help you develop this critical skill. Julian, a pleasure once again, sir. I’m so glad you accepted my offer to come back on the show. Glad to have you again. Thanks for spending time with me and for sharing.

Julian Treasure [42:06]: Well, thank you, Henry. It’s been an absolute joy, and may everybody listen well.

Henry Lopez [42:11]: Thank you. This is Henry Lopez. Thanks for joining us on this episode of The How of Business. My guest again today was Julian Treasure. I release episodes every Monday morning. You can find the show anywhere you listen to podcasts, including The How of Business YouTube channel and my website, thehowofbusiness.com. Thanks for listening.