Moment 85 - How To Speak So EVERYONE Listens To You: Julian Treasure

00:02It is a shame if somebody's saying something incredibly important and they're not using what I call the vocal toolbox. You know, there's all this stuff that we can deploy if we start paying attention to our voice. You know, if you've got a boring voice, you can do something about it. It's possible. Get a vocal coach, work on it, you know, take up a breathing practice, improve your posture, just practice prosody, the intonation, you know, really exaggerating it.

00:32I'm a great fan of doing this. It's the kind of thing that actors do, singers do. And many times, for example, I've given talks where I've been looking at an audience of CEOs, hundreds or thousands of them. And I say, how many of you have to talk in public? Forest of hands goes up. how many of you have had formal vocal training three or four people i go what this is part of your life it's an important part of your you're speaking to teams you're trying to inspire people you're trying to lead people you're trying to communicate build response relationships with people you're trying to move you know mountains with your voice and you've never paid any attention to it it's tragic you know we we teach reading and writing in schools we don't teach speaking or listening which is absolutely nuts it's funny because i when people ask me i always say that the most important skill you can learn is to sell because you're selling all the time i'm selling right now i meet a girl in a bar i'm just going to sell to her to try and get her number i have a girlfriend i wouldn't do that um i'm selling in business i'm selling to my teams i'm trying to inspire investors to join us it's caught this caught my life is full of the sales pitch whether

01:44I'm selling myself or an idea or a vision or whatever. But I've never really reflected on the fact that the foundation of that selling is this instrument. Of course. What would I have to do? Because there's lots of people that are out listening to this podcast that start their own podcast and want to be a podcaster. And many of them messaged me and they want to come and sit here on this podcast one day. What are the types of things you would advise someone to do with their voice to be heard? Well, treating your voice as a skill is the first thing. So becoming conscious that this is a skill. It's not a natural capability. Just like listening is a skill, hearing is a capability, listening is a skill. So I very much talk about these two things as skills.

02:25Speaking and listening are skills that we do not teach in school or university, which is mad. So we have to take it upon ourselves because they matter you know they they affect our outcomes in life they affect i always say our happiness our effectiveness and our well-being are fundamentally affected by whether we master the skills of speaking and listening so in terms of speaking understanding there's a vocal toolbox is the first thing so things like breathing your voice is just breath. That's all it is. Breath moving across your vocal cords. And in order to speak well, it's very good to develop a breathing practice. Maybe you do yoga, maybe something else.

03:08Jane, my wonderful fiance has taught me a breathing practice, which is very, very simple. Anybody can do it. And it's called resonant breathing, which is breathing in through your nose and then out through your mouth, like as if you're blowing. so you can hear it. And you practice that and lengthen, you count and lengthen the in-breath and lengthen the out-breath. And also we want to be breathing from our diaphragm, from our stomach, because, you know, if you watch a baby breathing, it's their stomach that goes up and down, not the chest.

03:45So just developing that, I mean, I wonder, people listening to this podcast, when's the last time you took a really deep breath? We tend to breathe, you know, just to a fraction of our lungs, like a little bird but with your voice it's very important to breathe deeply and to get into that practice also a great cure for nerves you know if you come on stage and you're a little bit like this hello everybody then a big deep breath will settle the voice right down so it's a really powerful thing to do that breathing practice what is it doing then in terms of improving my performance i've got the nerves part but in terms of my vocal chords or it gets you into it well what is it? Aristotle said excellence is, no, we are what we do repeatedly. So excellence is not an act, it's habit. So it gets you into the habit of breathing better and deeper.

04:40And, you know, when you're speaking in public, there's nothing wrong with taking a deep breath and filling your lungs. Actors do it all the time. I mean, a singer can sing for the most enormously long note uh you know what's the world record for static apnea 28 minutes something like that lying at the bottom of a swimming pool on one breath you know and that's static apnea then you've got the the free divers there are things we can do with our lungs which are beyond the imagining virtually and yet most of us just breathe a little tiny tiny breaths so it's good for you as well to exercise your lungs to inflate them i i had unfortunately a few years ago pulmonary embolism which is quite scary i mean it can kill you and that's blood clots going to the lung they have to go through the heart to get to the lung so that you know that's where you can die and so my lungs are not as efficient as they were before that and it's made me even more conscious of the importance of deep breathing of expanding the lung capacity it's part of being healthy apart from anything else to have great lung capacity is that what exercise does yeah kind of inadvertently partly yeah absolutely releases all sorts of good the happy chemicals

05:57into your system as well exercise but breathing is very very good for you generally and we don't do enough of it so i've done my breathing exercises i'm i'm heading on to the driver of a CEO podcast, what else would I have to do to be heard by the listener? What are the sort of tips or skills? Well, I think variety, just in general, is a very important aspect of speaking. So you talked about people who are monotonic, and that literally means one tone. So if I speak like this through the whole podcast, it would be extremely boring for people. There's not a lot of intonation going on there. I don't get any emotional resonance speaking like that. So it's just boring. So intonation, the up and down of speaking is really important. It's also crucial to be sensitive to cultural differences in that. For example, in Scandinavia, they have much restricted prosody or intonation compared to say, the Latin countries, where you know, people are It's very up and down like this the whole time.

07:06I'm croaking here. I remember doing a talk in Finland in the amazing concert centre in Helsinki, which was designed by a brilliant architect called Toyota and is acoustically unbelievable. And at the end of my talk, there was a little tiny ripple of applause. And I thought, ah, I bombed. They didn't like it. You know, if they'd been America, it'd be whooping and hollering and whatever going on. and I went down for a coffee and people came up to me and said thank you that was the best talk we have had for some years that's Finns for you they're very taciturn quiet people they don't get very excited much so unless they've had a vodka perhaps but you have to be adjusting to the prosody or prosody of the audience you're speaking to what's prosody prosody is both intonation So the up and down delivery, which is root one for emotion.

07:59It's absolutely crucial in speaking. And it's also the rhythm of your speaking, the gaps you leave and the emphasis you put on words. So it's understanding how to, it's not just reading a script flat. It's putting your personality into what you're saying. And that makes all the difference in the world. So anybody who, it's interesting. I mean, I have friends who run voiceover studios and actors come in to read things, TV commercials, books and whatnot.

08:31Some actors can read, some can't. It's not a skill that everybody possesses to be able to read something or speak in an interesting way that's not a script you learn and then you really, really work on it and so forth. Just reading something. It's quite technical, actually. You have to get yourself out of the way. So, yes, working on your voice is about variety. It's about breathing. It's about being comfortable with silence, for example. Not filling every tiny little gap with ums, errs, you knows, you know what I mean, verbal tics.

09:14So all of these things, it's quite important to record yourself. listen back and start to take it as a skill and as mastery be become your own coach effectively i mean i'm sure you watch back your podcasts and there's always something to learn there's always something to look at and to say oh okay i could have not done that or i could have said that better or whatever it might be that's how we become masters