How to speak so that people want to listen

by Julian Treasure

The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. 

It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably.  

It's the only one that can start a war or say "I love you".

And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people dont listen to them. And why is that? How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world? 

What I'd like to suggest, there are a number of habits that we need to move away from. I've assembled for your pleasure here seven deadly sins of speaking. I'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list, but these seven, I think, are pretty large habits that we all can fall into.

exhaustive: if you describe a study, search, or list as exhaustive, you mean that it is very thorough and complete.

fall into something: to start doing something by chance. She fell into modelling quite by accident. 

• First, gossip. Speaking ill of somebody who's not present. Not a nice habit, and we know perfectly well the person gossiping, five minutes later, will be gossiping about us. 
• Second, judging. We know people who are like this in conversation and it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time. 
• Third, negativity. You can fall into this. My mother in the last years of her life became very negative and it's hard to listen. I remember one day, I said to her, "It's October 1 today," and she said "I know, isn't it dreadful?" 
• And another form of negativity, complaining. Well, the is the national art of the UK. It's our national sport. We complain about the weather, sport, about politics, about everything, but actually complaining is viral misery. It's not spreading sunshine and lightness in the world. 
• Fifth, Excuses. Some people have a blamethrower. They just pass it on to everybody else and dont take responsibility for their actions. Passing the buck is the antithesis to accountability and responsibility. 
• Penultimate (second last), the sixth of the seven, embroidery, exaggeration. It demeans our language, actually sometimes. And then, of course, this exaggeration becomes lying, and we dont want to listen to people we know are lying to us.
• And finally, dogmatism. The confusion of the facts with opinions. When does two things get conflated, you're listening into the wind. You know, somebody is bombarding you with their opinions as if they were true. It's difficult to listen to that.

Think/speak ill of somebody: to think or say unpleasant things about someone. The Newleys's acquaintances spoke well of the dead in order to think ill of the living. 

dreadful: causing or involving great suffering, fear, or unhappiness; extremely bad or serious. There's been a dreadful accident. 

misery: a state or feeling of great distress or discomfort of mind or body. she want upstairs and cried in misery.

blamethrower: someone who refuses to accept personal responsibility for anything. 

pass the buck: to shift blame from oneself, to leave a difficult problem for someone else to deal with. dont try to pass the buck, this is your responsibility, not mine.

antithesis: a person or thing that is the direct opposite of someone or something else. love is the antithesis of selfishness.

embroidery: embellishment or exaggeration in the description or reporting of an event. fanciful embroidery of the facts.

demeans: cause a severe loss in the dignity of and respect for (someone or something). 

dogmatism: the tendency to lay down principles as incontrovertibly true, without consideration of evidence or the opinion of others. a culture of dogmatism and fanaticism.

These are things that we need to avoid. But is there a positive way to think about this?

Yes, There is.

I'd like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones (foundations) that we can stand on, if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world. Fortunately, these things spell a word. 

The word is "hail", and it has a great definition as well. I'm talking about this definition to greet or acclaim (praise publicly) enthusiastically, which is how I think our words will be received if we stand on these four things.

• Honesty - being true in what you say, being straight and clear.
• Authenticity - just being your self. A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth, which I think is a lovely way to put it.
• Integrity, being your word, actually doing what you say and being somebody people can trust.
• Love, not a romantic love. But I do mean wishing people well, for two reasons.  

First of all, I think absolutely honesty may not be what we want. Perhaps, that's not necessary. Tempered with love, of course, honesty is a great thing. But also, if you're really wishing somebody well, it's very hard to judge them at the same time. So hail.  

You have an amazing toolbox. This instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened. I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with. 

rummage: an unsystematic and untidy search through a mass or receptacle

Register: You can locate your voice. If you want weight, you need to go down to the chest. We vote for politicians with lower voices, because we associate depth with power and authority.

Timbre: It's the way your voice feels. Research shows that we prefer voices which are rich, smooth, warm, like hot chocolate. 

The Prosody: The sing-song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. It's root one for meaning in conversation. People wo speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they dont have any prosody at all. That's where the word "monotonic" comes from or monotonous, monotone. Also we have repetitive prosody now coming in, where every sentence end as if it were a question when it's actually not a question, it's a statement?

impart: make (information) known; communicate. Teachers had a duty to impart strong morals to their students.

Pace: I can get very excited by saying something really quickly, or I can slow right down to emphasize, and at the end of that of course, is our old friend silence. There's nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk, is there? We dont have to fill it with ups and ahs. It can be very powerful.

Pitch: to indicate arousal, you can do it just with pitch.

arousal: a state in which you feel excited or very alert.

pitch: the pitch of a sound is how high or low it is; to try to persuade someone to do something (She pitched her idea to me over a business lunch. They are pitching for business at the moment) 

Volume: I can get really excited by using volume. Sorry about that, if I startled (surprise) anybody. Or, I can have you really pay attention by getting very quiet. Some people broadcast the whole time. Try not to do that. That's called sodcasting. Imposing (force) your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately. Not nice. 

Of course, where this all comes into play most of all is when you've got something really important to do. It might be standing on a stage like this and giving a talk to people. It might be proposing marriage, asking for a raise, a wedding speech. Whatever it is, if it's really important, you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it's going to work on, and no engine works well without being warmed up. Warm up your voice.