The Speaking Expert: How To Speak So Everyone Hears You! Julian Treasure

if you've got a boring voice you can do something about it it's possible Julian treasure the auth of how to be heard your Ted Talk is the sixth most listened to Ted Talk of all time I've assembled seven deadly sins of speaking here they are it's the most common mistake I see in business in relationships you're speaking to teams you're trying to inspire people you're trying to lead people build relationships with people this is part of your life and you've never paid any attention to it we teach reading and writing in schools we don't teach

speaking which is absolutely nuts we're much Keener to be heard than we are to listen to others what's the biggest complaint in relationships he or she never listens to me our happiness and our well-being are fundamentally affected by whether we master the skills of speaking and listening how does one speak with authority in work in life in my relationships what advice can you give me people often say to me I don't feel confident how can I engage with people and the answer is before this conversation starts I've got a favor to ask from you 74

of people that watch this podcast frequently haven't yet hit the Subscribe button and nine percent of people haven't yet hit the Bell to turn notifications on the bigger this platform gets the bigger the guests get so if you could do me one favor if you've ever enjoyed this podcast please hit the Subscribe button and turn notifications on without further Ado I'm Stephen Butler and this is the Diary of a CEO I hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this yourself foreign [Music] you've had a pretty marvelous unique career and it's twisted and

turned and twisted and turned in a really fascinating way one in which I I don't imagine anyone could have really predicted ahead of time what do I need to know about you and your earliest years to inform the person listening to this of any context that ended up steering where you would end up in your life I think I mean I was very fortunate to have a good education which I didn't use to the max perhaps but I appreciated enormously but I think from a young age I grew up with a confidence that all will

be well and that's I suppose you could sum that up in the word faith not talking about religious Faith necessarily although I've been in and out of that in my life but just a conviction that all will be well and I think that's an important thing for I mean for entrepreneurs who tend to be the people who'll take the jump and say oh I think I'll get to the other side whereas a lot of people would be standing there going you know what you do that so when things have come along I've been comfortable to

go with the flow to to say well let's see where this goes I'm sure it'll be interesting I read that your Ted Talk um on speaking and being heard I think that's the one um is the sixth or seventh most listened to Ted Talk of all time which is staggering because there are thousands and thousands of TED Talks I've done one nobody listened um and so I was when I saw that I thought how much did that moment change your life if at all um and can you just tell me about the decision to do

that talk that day and how it came about well it was the fifth actually of five talks I did um in a row five separate teds uh Ted Global was in the UK and Oxford originally and the first one I did was about how sound effects is the four effects of sound it's called uh looking back at that that's a very younger Slimmer me on stage it's quite funny looking at it now um nobody's ever used sound before in a TED talk like that so they were quite excited about it and then I got to

do the next one was about sound and health and then one about listening which is you know as you know kind of a religion for me and then one about sound and the environment the way Architects designed for the eyes not the ears so I had those four TED talks to kind of practice I suppose and become a master I suppose of doing a TED Talk I mean it's it's a discipline you have 12 minutes or maybe even I think my first one was six you can't gabble you can't cut turn cram too much in

you have to be very clear about the big idea the why would people be interested in this the what's the journey I'm taking people on where am I moving them from to and you need to know how to do it how to stand on that stage on that red dot and project it with confidence and clarity and engage people in coming on that Journey with you so I suppose by the time I did that fifth one I was more experts think in giving Ted Talks than most people would ever have a chance to be because

I'd done four before and that's unusual so certainly when I walked on stage I felt quite good on that talk and and yeah I think I nailed it you know I I'd rehearsed a lot and you know we can talk about the principles of public speaking and so forth which you know I've done a lot of work on but I did a good job and the audience really responded there was a great feeling in the room so when I walked off I felt that I'd actually you know done that one Justice they didn't release it

for a year and I thought oh maybe they didn't like it you know but I do remember Bruno jassani who's one of the the guys who kind of runs Ted in Edinburgh Castle bumped into me uh about three hours after I gave that talk and he said hail and I thought ah okay well Bruno wasn't there so obviously word is getting around that there's some good stuff in there and and held the acronym that you delivered in that talk about how to to be a great public speaker um honesty authenticity integrity and love correct um

how did when that Ted Talk came out how did your life change because I'm because I know how the algorithms work it takes some time for things to sort of pick up momentum but once they get going and the algorithm says the watch time on this episode is very very good so we're going to just keep showing it to more and more people so it might have taken some time but how did how did things change for you at that point and also your orientation personally and professionally yeah it took off quite quickly once it

came out um I had long since kind of got past watching the numbers every day you know the first Ted Talk I did you know I was obsessive 10 000 people watch this you know and and I'm sure everybody does a TED Talk start stuff like that um but this one clearly was it was going ballistic quite quickly um it went up you know in a period of months it was in the top 20 I think and yes it has changed my life fundamentally really really powerfully because I have spent many many hours on planes

going all over the world delivering talks getting paid to deliver talks so my career kind of shifted from running the sound agency an audio branding company in the UK which is you know relatively small business and writing you know my first book Sound business I then got the opportunity to write the second book which was off the back of that Ted Talk I got the opportunity to travel the world meet people um give talks and spread the message which is the important thing to me because as I say I'm a listening evangelist I I am

passionate about persuading people to start listening um so yeah it moved my career totally onto a different track a track of public speaking of writing books of being a speaker and an author professionally and in hindsight when you look at this the wild success I mean the TED Talks combined have over 100 million views now right so that one particular talk I think it's about 40 million views on YouTube alone probably right I mean Chris Anderson says because you've got ted.com so it's got however many million on there I haven't looked recently but um then

you add the YouTube views Chris says whatever it is on ted.com you need to double it to get a reasonable estimate of the number of views embedded podcasts and all that kind of thing across the internet so yeah way over 100 million I think which is mind-boggling to me in hindsight as you look at the success of that the very very wild you know completely unprecedented success of that particular video delivered in that way on that topic what has it taught you about why people care so much about that video and the topic I think

that a lot of people don't feel heard in the world so that that talk was about getting your message across how to how to speak so that people want to listen um and I think that's a need and it's interesting isn't it you said the five times number is really interesting the talk on listening has been seen by one-fifth as many people as the talk on speaking so we're much Keener to be heard than we are to listen to others and there's an imbalance there which I think is endemic in modern society why do we

want to be hard um to make a difference to forge relationships to be validated to mean something to somebody to feel right unfortunately which is a big human need that I talk about quite a lot being right is quite a dangerous thing in the world at the moment and a lot of people need to feel justified in that way to be right what is it doing doing for us at our most Primal level to be to be heard or to be right what is it is it helping us to belong in a TR in the

tribe is it yeah tribe family human race and um you know a reason for existing I suppose you know what am I doing here and if people are listening to me it gives me significance that's certainly true so I think it's it is about validating one's self I mean I'm big I'm a big fan of Eckhart Toller uh and his you know theories about ego and I think a lot of it would chime with that you know the ego needs to be massaged the ego needs to have affirmation and being listened to making a difference

to people is part of that but you know on a more altruistic level making a difference in the world you know you your life has affected millions of people um my talks have hopefully you know cast a pebble into a pond and the ripples are going out and lots more people I hope are listening as a result well that's good you know whether it makes me feel good is another thing but it is actually a good thing in the world we were talking before we started um chatting about the uh there's an irony to you

coming here today and speaking because you've got a bit of a chest call yeah well yes a head cold which is in my chest so my voice is pitched down I'd say two tones at the moment and it's a bit croaky you know it's frustrating as well as a speaker because I love this instrument that we have you know the human voice is an incredible instrument and it's an instrument we all play although most of us have never had any training or spent any time learning how to use it really well well I have and

it's frustrating I'm now dealing with a slightly broken instrument it's funny because you know when I'm when my team send me potential guests that you know want to come on the podcast and we've reached out to them to come on this podcast there's a couple of criteria I look for and one of the most important one of the non-negotiables where we've had the most interesting smartest people in the world is their ability to speak and and when I say speak I don't mean you know how well they can you know how funny they are or

things like that I literally mean if they're monotone we can't have the conversation because I I I've no I've got no data to support this but if someone is monotoning their delivery then I find it to be hard to follow the story regardless absolutely you say that you say that the two most important things with speaking are the content and then the delivery and that's what I'm actually getting to is like that delivery point have you got any evidence to back up the importance of that or am I is this just in my head that

I think the well it's another thing I asked Chris Anderson who's got more experience of listening to speakers than probably anybody in the world because they do that all the time at Ted and I said to him which is more important content or delivery and his answer was answer was quite interesting he said well if I had to choose they're both important if I had to choose its content because if somebody's delivering earth-shattering content in a boring way I can really make an effort and listen to them and it's worth it at the end whereas

if somebody's delivering vapid nonsense in a brilliant way it's just irritating actually so I I get that but I do think they're both important I mean it 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 prosody the intonation you know really exaggerating it I'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 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 you 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'm sorry 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've been trying to inspire investors to join us it's con this caught my life is full of the sales pitch whether I'm selling myself or an idea or a vision or whatever um but I've never really reflected on the fact that the foundation of that selling is this instrument of course well actually even more than that below that what's the most important part of the sales conversation listening

it's not the speaker it's the listening listening to understand the other person to go onto their Island to understand what is it what's their pain Point what is it I can solve or help them with here because if you can't it's a waste of time how many times have we all had that irritating sales conversation where somebody's trying to sell something we don't at all need and because they're not listening so patter you know it can be good but really well targeted talking to somebody to whom we have listened respected and understand that's a different

thing that's powerful what 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 message me and they want to come and sit here on this podcast one day what are the types of things um you would advise someone to do with their voice to be a 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 speaking 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 are 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 Jane 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 ought 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 not the chest so 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 cords or it gets you into it well what is it Aristotle said Excellence is uh 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 and 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 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 and 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 um 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 an advertently partly yeah absolutely releases all sorts of good the happy chemicals into your system as well exercise but uh 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 Diary of a CEO podcast what else would I would I have to um do to be heard from by The Listener what are the sort of tips or skills

or 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 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 scandalavia they have much restricted prosody

or intonation compared to say the Latin countries where you know people are like why is it very up and down like this at the whole time I'm croaking here um I remember doing a talk in in Finland in The Amazing concert Center 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 bombed they didn't like it you know they've 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 fins for you they're very taciturned 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 president of the audience you're speaking to what's prostitute president is both intonation so the up and down delivery which is Route One for emotion it's it's absolutely crucial in speaking and it's also the rhythm of your speaking the 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 um voiceover Studios and actors come in to read things TV commercials books and whatnot some 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 um about variety it's about breathing it's about being comfortable with silence for example not filling every tiny little Gap with arms as you knows you know what I means verbal ticks so all of these things it's quite important to record yourself listen back and start to take it as a skill and as Mastery 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 and that's how we become Masters and of course you can get a coach a vocal coach a singing coach a drama coach an acting coach a speaking coach there are lots of them out there so anybody who's for example got restricted Timbre I mean Timbre is the quality of your voice and we tend to like voices that we would describe in the way

we would describe a hot chocolate rich dark warm sweet smooth all of those words if that's not you listening to this when you have a great voice but if it's if it's not if somebody's got a thin squeaky voice or scratchy Voice or whatever it may be get a vocal coach it can be worked on these are things that normally we're in a habit the way we speak is partly derived from our physical being I mean we have a body there are resonant cavities we have vocal cords but it's also how we use it and

that's much more important anybody can learn to maximize their voice and to make the most the most of it so that's about the instrument itself and then how you play it what emotion you put into it whether you're conscious you know the thing I love most about public speaking it's making me more conscious in that moment than anywhere else standing on the stage you know I've I've talked to audiences of 11 000 people there's a big Spotlight there's cameras on you you're standing on a stage 11 000 people are looking at you if you're not

conscious in that moment you've got a problem you know so every gesture every moment of that is maximum consciousness of being me and and communicating with those people so it's kind of like switching the light on to maximum intensity and I really love that that that experience has colored the way I treat life in general now because you know it's my my biggest passion is to become more and more conscious to grow a little every day to become more conscious every day and speaking helps with that I've never really talked about it before but we

um we've deleted a few episodes of this podcast so don't worry this is a perfect episode but what will happen is we've had a guest come and they might be honestly there's some cases where they are the biggest in the world in their industry and I can think of one particular example where if I said the name of the guest that we had the episode we had deleted people would be shocked because I believe they are one of the biggest stars in the world they have like 50 60 million followers online um and then there's

another individual I'll think about who if I said the name now everyone knows this person they're a legend in many respects um but we deleted that episode as well and content is a factor but the other factor that really really does and result in that decision is I I think it'll be really difficult to listen to and I feel like I have this sense of responsibility on a Monday and a Thursday when we publish that even if they don't know the name our audience will listen and we see that in the numbers if we publish

a no-namer or a superstar we get the same amount of Clicks in the opening 24 hours roughly because people are going I don't care I trust this team to put people out there so I just wanted to really state that because there's I know there's a lot of people that want to come on this podcast there's a lot of like big CEOs that contact us and one of the most important things in my decision criteria is literally how engaging they are at speaking and from that I mean the instrument the delivery um so I just

don't think it's funny when you were talking I was thinking about individuals that have said no too big and they don't maybe I should give them feedback but maybe that's not my place it's literally about delivery um so often so let's let's continue then on the thread of of delivery you're talking about standing there speaking in front of 11 000 people on a stage one of the things that I'm sure would stop most of us from even endeavoring to do such a thing is a lack of confidence you've got almost a hundred thousand students online

some something crazy like that that are all coming to do your courses and to learn from you confidence must be one of the first conversations you you you have right to get someone to be a great speaker yeah it's important although it's interesting to note that a lot of the people who've given some of the best TED Talks like me are actually introverts I'm not an extrovert it's not that natural for me to do these things and it's also true of people like Susan Kane introvert you can stand on a stage and you can overcome

the fear which is part of growing as a human being I think um doing things which are challenging and pushing through the barriers and doing it anyway so yes confidence is important I mean we could have a long conversation about confidence because I was educated in a top Public School and I think one of the things that top public schools in the UK do is to give you an overbearing arrogance and um to make you absolutely convinced that you know everything about everything and more than that the ability to sound convincing and to persuade people

that that is in fact the case and it's taken me decades to get over that at actually to discover humility and to discover The Importance of Being you know authentic about what I actually can do so yes I think public speaking like anything else it's like riding a bike if you do it enough you become confident you know the first time you or I drove a car our hands were welded to the wheel you know we were shaking with Terror now you drive a car and you think about everything but driving you know so it's

just falling off a log I've done enough speaking now that's I do not get frightened anymore nervous yes nervous is good nervous gives you the right chemicals to perform at your Peak so I never want to lose contact with that and I think that's true of anybody only a professional footballer before a game nerves will be there adrenaline it's it's taking you up to the next level once you get bored with what you're doing should you be doing it that's a big question but the confidence to do it comes from practice and that's what I

always say to people it's part of my course you know I talk about doing things just just doing the thing speaking in public Toastmasters for example you know they're in every city in the world you can go and join a Toastmasters chapter and and start speaking in front of people that's what they do and as you do it you become more and more familiar with the what goes on and that you know it isn't actually the end of the world nobody is actually going to stand up and and call you out for being a useless

numpty you know you know even if you forget your words you can actually say I'm terribly sorry I've forgotten where I was and everybody I mean I've seen that happen at Ted okay people who rely on memory which is a very very high risk strategy to me you know I always use slides but if you go on stage and you've got a Memory Palace or a chain or one of those routes and you're like relying on that and you lose the chain breaks and your cast adrift in an ocean of Terror I've seen it happen

and what happens when somebody goes red and starts shaking and says I'm so sorry I've completely forgotten what comes next the audience start to applaud because they're on your side it's not the end of the world and actually that can make a deeper relationship than being slick and perfect and and Brilliant at every moment I've seen people who are overconfident over rehearsed where you know every one of those gestures has been rehearsed a hundred times and it was there for the I mean there was a time at Ted when it was almost a Reger to

cry in a TED Talk and I remember saying there was a talk by uh you know an international Banker or something about economics who halfway through talked about his fatherhood deceased and the tears came I thought please this is this is like being put in by a coach who says you've got to connect emotionally and it was just incongruous really so I think it's all about being yourself I mean that's the a of hail being authentic uh being yourself is fine it's so much easier than trying to be somebody else and having the faith that

if you are yourself and you've got a good message that people will be with you on the journey and will be on your side that's certainly the case that Ted people don't go to it's not a stand-up comedy night where people throw things and Heckle it's a place where people expect to learn to be transported to be changed by almost every talk so the talk does that they love you on the on the a point in hell I've come to learn that I think humans are much better at spotting authenticity than we give them credit

for big time I I think so from our own perspective we think we can blag it and we we underestimate how um how much the viewer or the person I'm trying to blag it to understands I'm not being authentic like we think we're better much better actors than we actually are and it's funny the one of the things that's put this friend of mine for me at the moment is about three weeks ago there was a CEO that went viral on LinkedIn because he had fired multiple members of his team and then he had taken

a photo of himself crying and uploaded it with like a really like sorry caption like I'm so sorry today I had a really tough day I had to find members of my team and as you look at that it just feels wrong it's almost hard to explain it but the I think your mind goes well he would have had to cry a very unnatural thing to do mid crying is to pick up your phone and take a selfie and then to go to social media so on that point of authenticity um is your suspicion the

same that we people are much better at spotting someone being inauthentic than we believe than we understand I think so we live in a world where um social media and um viral opinion spreading make it quite hard to be truly inauthentic I mean there's a lot of companies a lot of individuals who do what's now called virtue signaling and people can spot that you know we can we can catch the whiff of manipulative inauthentic stances that are trying to put us across in um the most the best the most acceptable way whatever the current you

know meal is whatever the current um style is to be utterly acceptable and socially right so to me this is again this is part of the human need to be right and to be seen to be right which is huge problem in the world right now I think I mean we're seeing silos all over the world the interventors have made this way way worse where you know you go online and you say there you are I know I was right 10 000 people agree with me yeah but there's a million who don't but you don't

go and ask them you just go and find the people you agree with in order to validate your point of view and that is why we get these extreme you know um conspiracy theory silos of people who have nutty views and are persuading each other that they're right because they only talk to each other they don't go and check you know kick the tires of the thing and check is there an alternative hypothesis here that would be perhaps worth entertaining so I think that's a bit dangerous uh at the moment and it's all about this

need to be right and of course what's the easiest way for me to be right is to make you wrong if you're wrong I am writer and that is a slippery slope that's a slippery slope of depersonalization of dehumanization of um bias and and hatred and you know at the bottom of that slope is the kind of the Isis answer to the world disagree with me I'll kill you so that's a dangerous slope and the media have been contributing to that slope you know this all this outrage addiction that we see in the world that's

outrageous somebody's to blame somebody should be punished and that's all me saying yeah somebody should be punished I'm right they're wrong so it's this kind of ego fire that we have Building inside of us the desire to be the rightest person and to cancel everyone else that's absolutely Council Council and make people wrong left right and Center be judgmental that's one of the seven deadly sins I talked about in that in that Ted Talk is judgmentalism is is pointing the finger at people you know the kind of parent whose son or daughter comes home and

says I got 95 in the test and says what happened to the other five you know this it's difficult to be around people who are that finger pointy the other thing with with those with that a point inhale authenticity that I've come to learn actually from doing this podcast is um there's a real cost mentally to being inauthentic for a long period of time and I see I see it time and time and time again when I sit here with people who were forced to be in the media or who were first forced to not

forced but chose to play a role or a character in the public eye and then their identity became they kind of their true authentic self became imprisoned by this public identity that they felt they had to keep up and then the midlife crisis comes it's usually like 35 45 where they have some kind of burnout blowout they find themselves in the case of one of my guests last week just coming home and crying every day and having no idea why they're crying because they'd spent a decade being inauthentic in every interaction because they felt they

had to sometimes to survive because of some early trauma um and we don't talk about that enough that and I've you know I've learned it from doing this podcast myself as in the most liberating thing for me ever is to sit here in my socks in my house saying whatever I want for three hours and knowing that quite honestly if I tweeted it I'd get dragged it would get quite retweeted people taken out of context and goes into different Echo Chambers and they all try and um find a way to get likes off what I've

said whereas I can sit here and say anything about pretty much anything in my most authentic self it's like a weight I get to lift every day um and it's been so good for my mind but do you know what the biggest challenge is about being authentic what's that was knowing who you actually are yeah good point so what are your values Stephen it's a good question because because you know when people asked I'm so scared of saying what I think people want to hear how do I know what my values are you write them

down you think about it what I would what I would write down I'm worried that what I would write down are things that have been so deeply conditioned to be my values by Society well okay yeah that's worth challenging isn't it so this is a great exercise I mean I strongly recommend everybody does this because not many people do you know we just live our life in this kind of um bumping into things making that up as we go a long way if you have values that's your moral compass if you have values that's that's

you tending to Define who you are then you can be authentic what is a value this sounds like a crazy thing for me to say but I want to be really clear like what is a value it's something that you believe in that is um what they call in business a North star for your life it's something that you will sacrifice to achieve so I carry mine okay I've got four values which I made into an acronym because I have a terrible memory so I like acronyms the acronym is flag so they are Faith and

that is all will be well I'm not talking about a religious faith I'm just talking about the sense that all will be well because to me if I have faith that the future will be okay it gives me the courage to take things on try things and find out you know it may be a disaster but if I get to the disaster I've had a nicer Journey than if I am always oh it's going to be a disaster it's going to be a disaster there you are I told you well I've had a miserable journey

and I've ended up a disaster so I I prefer to go the way of it'll be okay oh it's not yeah but even then it'll be okay to find a way yeah uh so Faith the L is love by which I mean thinking well of people and there's a great practice that um a very wise old friend of mine gave me many many years ago which is amazing um instead of walking around you know we're in London right now well I live in a much more remote place so you walking around London you're always walking

through people and we have this if we're not careful we have this nasty voice in our head get out of my way you fatted yet and oh you're ugly and you're stupid and you know this kind of nasty side of us which is doing a little monologue and being really judgmental and critical about people instead of that it's cultivating habit of saying in the head not out loud bless you not religiously again just bless you I wish you well I'll leave you get into that habit of walking around going bless you person who just got

in my way it is amazing the difference it makes to your likeness of being it's like walking floating three inches above the ground you meet people's gaze and you might even share a smile because you're not guilty about you or just thinking they're horrible you know whereas you've got this nasty voice going on in your head all the time you don't look at people in case you catch their eye and they can see what you were thinking so love in that way wishing people well um and of course love for family and love for well

love for life as well just being positive you know uh the a is acceptance which is a really important thing to me and I tend to try and go with the flow if an opportunity comes along I'll try that there's a reason that's come along so I'm not getting into you know the secret or any of those things but I do tend to believe that things come to me for a reason um you know whether it's God or the universe or whatever one wants to say I'm happy to go with the flow and to accept

also when things don't work you know I don't bang my head against a brick wall forever trying to make them work okay that's not working we'll try something else so acceptance and also of people as they are that's really really important we spend a lot of time disparaging people why are you like this why are you doing this well that's the kind of tree that person is and you know you don't get angry at trees for being that kind of tree so that is the kind of person that is in front of you except someone

once said something to you in the podcast which plays into that they said if if you had been through if you'd walked in their shoes and had their experiences you'd be doing the exact same oh totally well let's come on to validation in a minute the and then the G of um flag can I guess yes is it gratitude yes it totally is um I you know I I don't like that catch phrase and attitude of gratitude but it is really important to me uh you know to do a gratitude list when I'm feeling miserable

when I'm feeling down you know I've got a cold yes but let's now look at all the good things I've got in my life you know I have a loving partner I have two gorgeous little children I live an amazing orkney which is a joy every day you know there are so many things to be grateful for and I've got some Financial Security I've got uh you know so much in life to to be thankful for that way outweighs normally the the bad things now that's not true for everybody you know if I were living

in cursing at the moment for example or somewhere like that there would be a lot more to be ungrateful for to be frightened about and so forth so I'm not saying that in a kind of bland way but even in the worst places it's important to focus our attention on the good things because a lot of this is about where you focus isn't it all the time reality is huge it's all around us we don't perceive reality we have a map in our head and it's up to us to select what it is that we

pay attention to so that's you know it's very much the same as as listening which is selecting certain things to pay attention to and then making them mean something well it's the same with gratitude there's always something or usually there's something you can focus on and say okay there's a thing I can be grateful for so that's it yeah Faith love acceptance gratitude so those are mine and I know that's my moral compass and that's what I try to be in life and I do recommend to anybody listening to this if you've never written your

values down think about it not the ones that you think will be accepted by more people out there the ones that actually ring true in your heart what does your heart tell you and then you've got a map uh you've got a you've got a root you've got a direction in life which I think is incredibly important quick word from my sponsor guys um these days as I'm sure a lot of you know flexibility matters more than ever before because the tectonic plates in which we've built our businesses are changing overnight especially for SME business

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so you get one simple package with one bill saving you time and saving you money so to find out more such Vodafone pulse connect terms and conditions apply for a point about um if you were in their shoes you if you'd live their life you'd be doing the validation yeah yeah what is this validation uh well it's part of active listening so you know if we talk about listening um I talk about listening positions and one of those is active listening so it's a place to listen from and inactive listening to me there are three

stages so stage one is reflection where I repeat exactly what you said without coloring it without making it make sense in the way that I understand but I say something along the lines of okay what I just heard you say is which can be a bit formulaic or you know so you said this or so are you saying this so I'm checking that I actually got what you said I heard you it's amazing how we don't very often do that so stage one is reflection which is used in the therapeutic professions a great deal I

hear you say this stage two stages of being a great listener it's a very important form of listening it's not appropriate all the time to be an active listening um because it's kind of a sledgehammer to crack a nut in Social conversations for example you know if we were sitting in a in a pub or a coffee house and I'm going what I heard you say Stephen is this well and then validation goes um okay I understand it makes sense that you would feel that I totally get why you would think that's true I disagree

with you but I understand why you think that because then I'm thinking about your background and your road to this conversation and we've come different roads to this conversation and you will have different life experiences so validation is really important that's the empathy bit of active listening and once I've reflected and validated then we're into stage three which is I can contribute so as opposed to me invalidating yeah oh don't no that's nonsense to you why would you think that you know we do so much in validating in the world of other people's positions and

you can't sell to somebody or persuade somebody if you invalidate them as a human being it's really important to validate to show that you understand where that person is coming from even if you completely disagree then we can start to put things together and make sense and move forward I'm thinking of every romantic conflict I've ever had but also I you took me back to many client meetings where the client brings forth a concern or a problem um and in that moment you even if you disagree you know you have to show you've accepted their

concern and then use that acceptance that place of empathy to move them to another place of thinking but also you know obviously the most obvious scenario people will think of is with their Partners when they're trying to do conflict resolution you know so what's the biggest complaint in relationships he or she never listens to me and that's not just about hearing the words it's about validating the other person or invalidating the other person and if we do that as a habit it can be very damaging there's a thing actually uh called stress induced audio dysfunction

s-i-a-d which can afflict people when there's a noise that they are exposed to a great deal and they don't like and they psychologically start to wipe it out so for example my father in the later years of his life was deaf at the frequency of my mother's voice and that's not uncommon in relationships where one partner is in the habit of hectoring or nagging at the other partner and they simply cease to be able to hear it because it's a noise they don't enjoy just like it you know it can happen to people with industrial

noise or irritating noises uh so it is really important not to be invalidating somebody as a habit and we can easily fall into that habit and it's so powerful in relationship to be validating people you know one of the seven deadly sins I talk about in in that Ted Talk is negativity and that's a very strong habit that people can fall into so you can audit that how often do I say the word no or not or can't anything negative like that because if that's a habit that you fall into it tends to lead to

invalidating other people a great deal I can't do that I don't see why you'd think that you can't be serious you know and that's not a very nice way to behave with people even if you don't agree even if they are being stupid I can see why you think that now would you like an alternative perspective can I give you a different way of looking at it that might be useful to you so you've said you know what you're doing is not worthless it's not stupid but maybe there's another way and that's respectful I think

everyone has the experience of invalidating someone and them then repeating themselves and then you invalidate them again and then they repeat themselves yeah that's called argumentation yeah well I know it well because I think in my previous relationships I would it was funny because I think I was the problem I was definitely the the one that was unwilling to allow them to feel heard it's the it's the joy of listening actually um listening is at the heart of all good relationships to me and if you listen to somebody I mean what was it Scott Peck

said you cannot truly listen to another human being and do anything else at the same time and I absolutely agree with that because it's so rare in this world now we're so distracted um you know I I'm a big fan of near isle's book um indestructible yeah because we are so prone to being distracted now I am listening to you now you're sending a text that's not listening that's doing something else so it's rare that we will put everything down and do what you and I are doing right now which is look each other in

the eye you know when you look when you're listening I've got an acronym for this um in in the book in the courses and so forth rasa Russia which is r-a-s-a and the r is receive and that means look at the person who's speaking the dance of the eyes in in the west tends to be that the person who's speaking looks around as I am now you know thinking about other things and checks back in from time to time to see if the other person's still listening if you're with somebody who's speaking and they look

at you the whole time it can become a little bit intimidating I mean we're in a slightly unnatural situation here so you know we're across a table from each other which is you know potentially conflicting but we're you know really making an effort to communicate here so you know I'm looking at you quite a lot more than I would if we were just you know in a street or um you know having a chat so that's rasa the r is receive which is pay attention body language facing the person not feet pointing towards the door

which is always a good indication that somebody actually doesn't want to listen to you not doing anything else at the same time the a uh is appreciate which is little noises and head Bobs and gestures you know eyebrow raises Smiles oh really ah those kind of things that oil the conversation the s is summarizing which is the word so and I get very angry about the word so actually it's been totally debased in the modern world for some reason it's become a habit for people to start every sentence with the word so so what's your

name so I'm John what you're John because I just asked you because so means therefore no you were John before and you're going to be John afterwards the word so doesn't I've seen people come onto the Ted stage and say so no I don't know who you are I don't know what you're going to say there is no before um it is debased a lot but it's such a powerful word so we've all agreed this now we can move on to that or in the long Corridor of a conversation so what I understood you just

said is this is that right the old repeating reflecting and so forth closing doors behind you in the corridor so you can move on and keep moving forward so that's the S of rasa and the final a is ask asking questions at the beginning during afterwards you know people often say to me I I don't feel confident people don't listen to me how can I engage with people when they're speaking the answer is asking questions and if you're on a bit of territory that feels unfamiliar or uncomfortable you can ask questions that form linking that's

really interesting Stephen you just said that How would how would that relate to this thing I know about so I can kind of bring the conversation to home turf and start to feel I can contribute something so that's rasa and that really helps in a conversation to direct listening and to and to make the conversation fruitful for both parties so yes therefore one of the things you said that um reminded me of another topic which I think is really important when we're talking about speaking which is how to speak with with authority I think about

all the people that are in boardrooms and that might be a little bit Junior in an organization and that's struggling to be heard because they don't lack the The Authority that a title will give them how does one speak with authority what advice can you give me to be a more authoritative speaker um in in work in life my relationships wherever well let's steal the situation first where you're talking you you want to speak to somebody who is a powerful figure or you consider them to be powerful um I'm a great believer in agreements contracts

in an informal way Stephen do you have five minutes I've got something I really want you to listen to well that puts you in a position you can either say yes or no if you say no that's fine I won't say it now when would be a good time but I'll tell you a great experience I once had on a beach in India and this is one of the best sales people I've ever met it was about a seven-year-old boy and he came up I was sitting on the beach he came and said you want

Coke and I said um you're trying to be British not right now thank you very much okay when you want Coke oh uh well four o'clock at four o'clock he was back here your Coke I love that it was brilliant so it taught me a lot about um being authentic because I wasn't being was I no I don't want to buy a Coke from you um and also about persistence and you know asking the right questions and and so forth so in the same way if I ask you do you have five minutes and you

don't I can park it and come back another time because it wouldn't be the right time if you haven't got five minutes that's fine I can respect your time but from your point of view yes okay I've got five minutes and you have just made a commitment to listen to me so I have a right if I'm talking to you and you're off doing something else you know answering email or something Stephen you said you had five minutes I do understand if you're busy when would be a better time so there's a kind of obligation

there for you to listen to me so that's one thing I think that's a strategy that works very well if you're on a meeting and you don't feel you're the most powerful person then again asking the meeting for permission is a good thing uh guys I have something that I think really will contribute here would it be a good time now to say it to you all it doesn't always work but I think if you're asking and people give you a commitment then you have a contract and you have a Channel of communication that's been

opened explicitly one of the things you talked about there is that kid on the beach with the um Coca-Cola offering you a can of Coke and how that kind of violates your a inhale the authenticity piece um it also violates the honesty so my question is is there a time when one should not be honest well I think that the honesty needs to be tempered with love so the answer is it's a filter which is the L inhale as well absolutely okay I think that uh being dedicated to ruthless permanent uh always on honesty is

a pretty dangerous strategy in life because you'd be going around saying to people you look terrible today I really don't like you what you just said was stupid you know it's not necessary to say those things to people depends on what you want to achieve I don't think it's dishonest to withhold judgment and a lot of the things I just said are opinions and it's very important to distinguish between opinions and facts they're not the same thing and they're very often confused in the modern world so opinions that's what I think what I believe what

I judge fact it's Saturday matter of fact we're not going to disagree about that we can disagree about my opinions and you know I often say I wish that we lived in a society where perhaps people asked before giving opinion would you like my opinion on that no I had such a good opinion all ready to go and you don't want it but we don't do that do we we just proffer opinions and and a lot of the time we we confuse them with facts which leads to a lot of table thumping I grew up

in a family where there was that confusion there was a lot of argumentation and table thumping because people had different opinions and didn't accept that they could possibly be challenged talking about your parents talking about your mother no my father actually he was a my father was a massively confident and very successful man in advertising he was you know he was known as Mr advertising um for some years in the 1960s hugely confident and hugely expressed in that way but didn't Brook disagreement very easily so disagreeing with him was quite difficult and that was certainly

my experience growing up that you had to be ready with chapter and verse and references if you were going to challenge a point of view how did how did that shape you because I think a lot about how my parents you know my mum was sounded a little bit like what you described earlier where shouted so much at my dad that I I couldn't understand how he stopped reacting to the sound of the shouting as a young age I remember wanting them to divorce because I didn't like shouting for six hours my dad would not

really shout back but um that definitely has shaped how I communicate now but how did it shape you that that environment well very similar I mean I think you know my first response to conflict is exit it's the same strategy really and I think probably a lot of uh quieter people who've had the experience of conflict growing up are pretty conflict diverse and I think that's it's quite important to toughen up on that to a degree because conflict exists all over the place I'm not talking about physical conflict which of course we want to avoid

at all at all times but uh um disagreement or somebody being crossed with us or somebody being upset well sometimes those are necessary in life and responding to those in inappropriate ways can actually really damage relationships I mean I talk about four leeches which undermine communication and the fourth of those is fixing fixing is it's not okay for somebody to be upset around me don't be upset don't cry don't express emotion you know uh so it's it's a kind of smothering of everything that goes on around um I'll tell you a story about that my

art told me um when her little sister was due to be born with my grandparents there was great excitement they decorated the nursery uh the the the room was made already came the day off her parents went to the hospital and she was beside herself with excitement aged about six they returned no baby never was a word said about the whole thing because they didn't want to upset her and what she learned from that for the rest of her life was you can't trust people people don't tell you what's going on you never know your

people aren't straight you know there were a lot of bad lessons she learned out of that lack of communication the child had been still born it was a tragedy they were upset but they didn't share it with their daughter because they didn't want to upset her that's fixing and it can be enormously damaging in relationships to behave in that way obviously one wants to be sensitive you know you sit the child down you explain in little ways perhaps starting off with you know the baby's not coming and then moving on to explain what happened as

the child gets older um Jane and I had to survive uh having uh a baby who could not survive and it was deeply traumatic for us um and I'm very glad to say that with Holly we involved her every step of the way Holly was uh what six at the time five I can't remember um but we brought her in you know when um Little Lily was still born we brought her in she met Lily we called Lily a name you know we did everything we possibly could and Holly still talks about Lily she talks

as if she can communicate with her she she accounts her as a member of the family so we didn't fall into that trap of pretending nothing had happened and fixing sometimes people need to be upset you know Holly was upset we were upset and it's authentic to be upset so I think being that averse to upset is quite a dangerous thing in life it's funny because when you told that story I was engrossed I was engrossed for a number of reasons that exact point there when you said that I was engrossed and I've spoken a

lot about the delivery itself of a point and a story but um not a lot about what it takes to design the content in a way where you can engross somebody what advice would you give to someone that is potentially you know presenting has a pitch coming up is going to do a podcast about how to deliver their thoughts in a way which is engrossing as it relates to the content itself because I can I can Hazard a guess as to why I was engrossed but well it's a story yes story we love stories storytelling

is really really powerful I mean what's the number one Ted Talk of all time it's a talk by Sir Ken Robinson sadly missed dead now but see a wonderful man and at the heart of that talk is a little story he tells because the thesis of the talk is that we're educating creativity out of children that's what his talk is saying and he tells this story about a little girl who's drawing at the back of the class and she doesn't normally and the teacher goes to the back and says what are you drawing and the

little girl says I'm drawing a picture of God and the teacher says but nobody knows what God looks like and the little girl says they will in a minute it's a classic story it takes 15 seconds to tell it makes me laugh every time that is his whole Ted talk in a beautiful encapsulating enchanting story storytelling is the best way to get any talk across really if you can think of a a metaphor which matches what you're trying to communicate to people in a captivating story where perhaps there's you know the classic elements of a

story there's a protagonist there's an antagonist there are challenges there's a journey there's a destination there's help on the way from unexpected quarters obstacles to overcome you can do it in a very short space of time you can do it as a personal story as I did in my TED talk about uh my mum's negativity you know that's a true story that you know she was in hospital I took a paper in and I said oh look it's October the 1st and she said I know isn't it Dreadful and I you know well if somebody's

that negative it's very difficult to be around them and that was a true story that I told so it's almost like uh you could have a little storytelling niche in your talk you know I'm gonna can I tell you a story and everybody goes oh yes come on SO storytelling is a massive massively powerful way there are books on this uh if anybody wants to speak in a captivating way become a good Storyteller and it will really really help but the other big part of it I always say is understanding the listening you're speaking into

say that again understanding the listening that you're speaking into okay because we all have unique listening this is something it's the most common mistake I see in business in relationships is people thinking everybody listens like I do they don't our listening is unique your listening is as unique as your your irises your fingerprints your voice print and so is mine and they're different so it's a huge mistake to assume other people are going to receive this message the way I would receive it so it's a massively valuable tool if you're speaking to one person or

ten thousand doesn't matter to say what's the listening I'm speaking into what's the listening I'm speaking into who is this person what's their listening where will it have come from or who are these 10 000 people because in a big room you have a Gestalt listening which changes over time you know that I've done talks immediately after lunch in what they call the graveyard slot he's a Ted talker he can cope with that and everybody's a bit woozy the blood's all gone to their guts they're a bit tired they're not very bright you know or

there's the final slot in the day just before people are leaving when they're all desperate to go and have a drink in the bar or something you know there are different listenings through the day and different listenings from person to person so it's not a fixed thing and it's important to be sensitive and actually do you know what I've discovered is all you have to do is ask the question what's the listening and you become really good at spotting it I don't know how it might be tiny body language cues it might be pheromones it

might be intuition whatever it is you will if you pay attention to it and you ask that question consciously at least you're respecting the other person enough to say this person speaks really slowly so I should probably slow my Pace down a little bit or this is a really really fast person so let's be Buzzy here or you know they might have cultural or uh they might have political views or something like that that you need to be sensitive to if you're trying to achieve something the the point as well about about storytelling I was

I was fascinated by it because it reminded me of um my time at Social chain we bought the social media company um we never had us outbound sales team our strategy was kind of there was maybe fourfolds but the two that are most pertinent what I'm to the point I'm making are personal branding and speaking on stage so we grow our business from nothing to tens and tens and tens of millions in Revenue the agency business the global business 600 700 million in Revenue never with an outbound sales team and the the sole thesis which

I don't think people ever realize who are trying to scale an agency is we just told really great stories and the best way that I can demonstrate this is I remember my first talk when I started social chain at maybe 21 years old and I was in London and I woke up on stage and I say that's exactly why you were kicked out of school you're incapable of listening to anybody and you always think you know a better way don't call me or the family until you go back to University and with that my mum

hung up the phone that's how I started all of my talks for about four years I'm trying to sell you social media advertising here and at the end of this the presentation you would find out what happened with minor mum's relationship so it'd be this heart and it would say and me and my mum have never had a better relationship and I genuinely you know of all the things we did as a business I genuinely believe that I was speaking 50 weeks a year I was going to every corner of the world meeting every brand

our biggest brands like Coca-Cola they all came from hearing that exact talk with about my mum um the conventional and the the normal thing to do is to bring information I'll give you as much information as I can you see it in every slide deck every pitch deck but we all know from a human level the best part of this conversation is going to be the stories yeah of course it's going to be engaging people and causing them to be curious curiosity is absolutely fundamental in listening now I talk about four C's of listening which

are um compassion for the other person for the audience whatever it might be commitment because it takes time and effort to listen listening is work it's not just a capability yes we have ears but we actually have to put things down focus and so forth Consciousness that you're actually doing something now this is an action this is not something that goes on in the background and curiosity and if you can engender those things in people especially the Curiosity which we get with stories especially if you start a story and you don't finish it come on

Stephen we want to know what happens at the end yeah yeah so you then got the bit in the Middle where they're all going I really want to know what happened at the end and then you give them the end at the at the end to satisfy them that is a brilliant way of engaging people could listening to this and actually that's funny because I was actually reflecting on we I told you my company in San Francisco has just raised a lot of money and I broke all the rules that I've just said it's just

it's just there's 10 slides of just information I mean it worked but I think it's funny because I actually thought I don't actually care if it worked I would have liked to do it my way yeah you know well also because you're then kind of conforming to the the Norms out there which is that's where everybody does stuff that's a deck you know I mean I hate that word deck anyway but you know here here let me show have you got a good deck yeah but there's something in in the actual design of the deck

that says way more about you than the information ever will yeah and it's funny because this is genuinely what's going on in my head as he was talking about storytelling is I was thinking about how I should have structured sorry for not listening but you just inspired me to to go from this tangent in my head cool I was thinking about how much I should have started that deck as a story and that would have been so much more gripping yeah um versus just like put your logo on the front and then you know you

waffle into like stats and figures I broke my own rule there and I'm kind of disappointed my own personal philosophy which I consider to be the most important thing for not doing that it's a struggle for me as well I mean I'm writing a book right now about sound and what I'm trying really hard to do is to get human stories into it you know but I have a terrible memory and when I read great books by people I mean I I read you know books by people who've written amazing books about all sorts of

different subjects and what impresses me is they say on March the 5th 1992 I had this conversation with this person who walked you know that way and did this thing and said this thing and I think how how the do you remember with you I mean I have no idea what I was doing in 1992. I don't remember my childhood so it is you know it's quite a big problem if like me you were kind of in a miasma of I mean it's very good because I'm a great believer in be here now and living

in the common in the in the the current moment living in this instant which is all the life we ever have this instant the the future hasn't happened the past has there's nothing we can do about either of them much at this instant so being here now is really important to me but it's kind of become an excuse almost for me for getting everything I do too imagine imagine how many I have the privilege of sitting here with the smartest people in the world who are giving me all these amazing things so you're massively wise

yeah you would think so but I sit here and I go oh my God flag I'm gonna write that down later and then we get an hour and a half in and I'm just my it's like I've got this short-term memory yeah the thing I I fall back on is I go the best stuff will stay with me because it will help me in such a deep emotional way that I won't be able to forget so maybe I'm just absorbing the very best well maybe and also you do have the privilege of having recorded it

all in high quality video and audio so you can watch it back I don't always have the time to watch all of them yeah but in the gym I try and make sure I listen to them What would life be like if we could watch back everything that we've done all the conversations that we've had and learn from them blimey pretty scary yeah I'd be a lot better as a of a human being me too I know I tend to see life it's it's a spiral staircase so the important thing to me is to grow

a little bit every day that's the important thing to learn something you know even if it's how not to do something so you know when I meet people that evidently are making a mistake or doing something wrong it's okay I learned not to do that doesn't work very well why have you struggled to grow um but you have continually intended to uh I would say uh in my nutrition more than anything else probably I am very fortunate to live with Jane who is a four-time world champion martial artist a health and fitness expert I train

with her multiple times a week so you know I'm a 64 year old man who can easily touch his toes and uh is you know my core strength and my flexibility are amazing for somebody of my age but I still eat too much I really enjoy food and unfortunately not always the right food I think that's again you know that's something that comes from our upbringing from our childhood where food was very much a part of our family and it was a reward and it was um you know my mother was a very very good

cook as well so there was always too much of it and it was like a trough with me and my brother sort of having huge helpings so um I'm I I became acclimatized from a very young age to having huge helpings of not necessarily very healthy things it's a tough one isn't it to adjust one's upbringing and relationship with food in that way so kale is good really okay I have to kind of really learn some of those things and get away from Habits which have been with me for 60 years or more it's so

deeply emotional though and that's what we don't really ever appreciate we think it's just a a decision yes or no but it's actually such a deeply emotional thing all of these things are yeah um deeply psychological so I actually I was funny I was talking to my friends about this the other day and I said I think if you will because we're all trying to get in shape and we're working out together Etc um and my one of my friends was like well I'm gonna go on a diet I was like the problem with that

is it's not sustainable what you're doing there is you're you're depriving yourself you're actually sacrificing something you want to do how do you get I said I think that the best way for all of us to get healthier is actually to go see a therapist you know what you just said I absolutely resonate with because Jane's always saying to me that many times with clients they come in and it's more of a therapy session than a physical workout because they're talking as they're doing things and it's the talking that helps them more than perhaps the

exercise or at least as much so you know I do get that and and adjusting one's whole psyche to see things that were perceived as treats in childhood as not really treats and things that were perceived as punishments or um you know really negatively in charge of your Hail yeah exercise go for a run do something you know these things are actually good for us and they're really important to do it's funny because there is a sound Associated to food yeah in the sense of just a from a psychology or an emotional perspective you know

sweets it always sounds like that well the sweet rapper's crinkle for a reason oh yeah and so the crisp crisp packets are crunchy for a reason uh because if you had crisp packets in soggy you know rubbery rubberized containers you wouldn't think the crisps were going to be fresh or as nice so the sound of packaging certainly has a big effect on the way we perceive taste I mean sound and taste are very Associated I've never heard broccoli said with excitement but I've heard McDonald's and sweets yeah and Coke you know yeah but also from

a marketing and branding perspective you know Brands like Coca-Cola spend so much of their time trying to associate even a bottle so sound has been used in advertising for many many years in a very profitable way I think the first sound was Wheaties way back in about 1926 and it was a four-part barber shop quartet who had a little song so have you tried Wheaties and it massively revolutionized the sales of Wheaties and from that point on it's been huge and appetizing it was only a few years ago that I got a ston to the

term audio branding and then I got really obsessed with it because obviously running a podcast people are listening to our podcast every week it's in their ears there's certain sounds they're familiar with there's even certain sayings at the start the podcast where I say I hope nobody's listening for you I'll keep this to yourself they've become accustomed to um what is what is it to have a good audio brand and how does if because there's multiple CEOs and brand owners that are listening to this that have never considered the fact that they have an audio

brand as well how does one go about doing that is it important well the first thing to say is that all businesses all organizations and all brands are making sound already because I've had a conversation lots of times with marketing directors or CMOS where I've said you know this is how powerful it is and they go oh maybe we should start doing some sound you already are it's just not designed it's accidental it might be the sound of your delivery trucks pissing people off at four o'clock in the morning might be the sound of your

uh your on hold music or your automated call handling system press one for this press two for that you know nine levels later you're still going those kind of sounds can really be damaging and can lose unbelievable amounts of money for a business I mean how many times have we slammed the phone down in frustration that one of those systems which is designed by a technical person not a marketing person um which doesn't I mean older people hate them and we have an aging demographic in every Western Country so they're becoming less and less popular

so sounds like those can be enormously damaging the sound of your corporate reception the number of corporate receptions I've walked into where they've got a TV been on the wall with news on and I remember you know when 9 11 happened I walked into the reception of mechanics and in London they had big TV screens with burning skyscrapers on them how are you expecting to have a good meeting when you inflict that kind of thing on people I suppose it's supposed to say we're current and we're up to the minute and we're you know in

tune with the world's events but news generally is bad news I think it's unthinking yeah it is someone just said put something on there if you have a screen in reception they have something playing about your company that's informative that engages people not you know news especially not commercial news which may have ads from your competitors showing in your own reception so those kind of sounds I think are very mindless there's a huge amount of mindlessness about sound we design for the eyes largely and it's not that often that companies think about designing with the

ears so very often you have a company that spends masses of money on visuals whether it's a retailer you know like a supermarket and doesn't think about the appalling sound of checkout beeps and trolleys clashing and some awful tinned music coming across on tiny little loudspeakers that were never designed to play music and so forth you know the cacophony that you and I have to go through a lot of the time in life which is the result of people not designing what brands do that well do sound well yeah generally well I think that Airlines

and airplane manufacturers and car manufacturers are getting very good at it in terms of Designing the Sonic experience of using the airplane I mean there is an unbelievable noise on the fuselage of an airplane traveling at 500 miles an hour and inside you don't hear it so the design in there is very good and the same with cars these days most of them sound very good although there's a thing with electric cars we have electric cars at slow speed they're very silent and it can be dangerous so you need a noise to warn people the

car is coming um and you know a lot of the time they make a nice chord or something like that as they're moving through um brands that have great powerful Sonic logos there are plenty of those you think of Intel for example down down which is something you know if I say to people can you sing intol's logo lots of people can if I said to you can you draw Intel's logo no not really squarish thing isn't it or something that sound which was designed by a guy called Walter was our is worth hundreds of

millions of dollars to Intel and brand value and they have batteries of lawyers who approve any tiny change to it because it's a it's a trademark for them and it's a really important one that's consistency right because we've heard it so much yeah is there anything else other than consistency for people that are thinking about their sonic signature and their content in their podcast in their brand videos whatever is the is there anything else other than just making sure people hear it a lot yeah so well if you're going to hear it a lot it

has to be not irritating as well and there's there have been some pretty irritating Sonic logos but I mean if you think back we talked a moment ago about the history of advertising and sound through advertising I can remember from my childhood so this is addressed to your older listeners uh things like the fairy liquid jingle you know four hands that do dishes those kind of things that was from 1965 or something and I still remember it right now so there there are things that can be enormously iconic and Powerful uh from the the the

Tony the Tiger there great those kind of things which last for years and years and years there's been at least five Tonys saying that it's gone on so long they've kind of all died off and been replaced um is there an emotion to even though it's a jingle we talked about earlier how storytelling implants it into your brain in a way that information can't is there a certain emotion to the sound or the jingle that is important big time because sound effects has four ways and this is a conversation which is really interesting to me

I mean it was my first Ted Talk it's not the most watched of of the TED talks and it's something which is um the reaction I get from people is is often the same it's well that's absolutely obvious but I never thought of it I've never been conscious of it you know we're very very ocular in the Western World particularly and we're very oriented around the eyes there are loads of Design Awards in the world they're all for how things look there's no Design Awards for how things sound it's it's bizarre architects are all about

how things look very often and they design things that sound awful and aren't fit for purpose because they look great and that's all they care about so it is very important to become sensitive sound changes your body physically so for example I could entrain your heartbeat if you go if I drop you in a nightclub with pounding dance music at 140 beats a minute your heart rate will immediately increase or if there's a sudden sound you got me yeah so your heart rate just jumped because you had a shot of cortisol your fight flight hormone

and noradrenaline and that gets you ready to fight or flee so your heart rate your breathing your hormone secretions your brain waves they all get changed by sound that's the first way sound changes your feelings think of music it's the most obvious example but for me you know my favorite sound in the world is the sound of rain on leaves outside the window Summer Rain on leaves outside the window well that's enormously calming to me other people it might be gentle surf or something like that so sound can affect our feelings bird song makes people

feel secure because the birds have been here far longer than we have and we've learned over hundreds of thousands of years so when the birds are happily tweeting things are safe we're okay if they suddenly stop you need to be worried because Birds stop it there's a big Predator like a lion okay then the Third Way sound effects is how well you can think cognitively you know we are all completely used to the the would you be quite I'm trying to think here especially people's conversations the most damaging sound of all it's really difficult to

think which is why we are one-third as productive in open plan offices as we are in quiet working spaces one-third if we're trying to do knowledge working you know manipulate words or numbers in our head and write for example so I have friends at the BBC you know the BBC have gutted that entire building in Portland Place and it's now got a basement where they all sit writing with it four floors of space above them and it drives them nuts if you're a journalist trying to write a story and you're finding on a deadline and

you've got people around you talking it is really difficult to concentrate so that's uh in terms of cognition how well we can think is affected by noise around us or sound around us um and finally sound changes our Behavior it changes what you do and what I do every day there's a brilliant study actually which was done some Years Ago by some academics they had a supermarket with two Gondola ends French wine on one German wine on the other one visually identical and all they did was to alternate the music so day one you had

a bit of French or accordion music day two you had a bit of German kind of umpire music and they kept doing that for an extended period of time on the French music days French wine outsold German wine by five bottles to one which may not be surprising it does sell more in the world so okay we might expect that but on the German music days German wine outsold French wine by three bottles to one now that is a massive shift in behavior and that's not people coming in going ah German music therefore I shall

buy a bottle of German wine they were they weren't even aware of the music most of the people who were surveyed they hadn't noticed so this is unconscious response to a sound situation that's how much sound is changing our behavior all the time and so part of my message part of my my whole thrust and the difference I want to make in the world is to get people listening consciously so that we start to become aware of the ways in which sound is changing our bodies Our emotions our thinking and our Behavior so we can

start to take responsibility for the sound we consume and possibly even more importantly responsibility for the sound we make with our voice and you know also willy-nilly inflicting sound on other people possibly unkindly uh which very often happens also everyone listening to this podcast you know and I even imagine the title that will work best when we do our a b tests will be about how to be a great speaker we've talked about why that is why we all want to be heard more it gives us a sense of significance helps us to feel valued

which makes us part of the tribe and all of these things but you as as we said at this very start of this conversation you really are leading a a crusade to get people to listen more why should that be the title of the podcast why is that potentially even more important um to the world and if we all started to listen a bit more why would the world be such a better place personally and globally because I think with conscious listening the result is always understanding and that's what we need understanding in the world

de phrase conflict it means that people can co-exist side by side with people with whom they disagree and we've seen the way that's not happening in the polarization of politics for example in America where it becomes a hated thing for somebody to disagree with your views uh you know that we're seeing such polarization in so many countries now and that's all about this thing of being right and not listening to other people not not trying to learn anything but becoming more and more entrenched in a set of opinions which you know they may be useful

to you but is that true is that universally true would you Brook any kind of antithesis to that any kind of counter view any competing solutions to the world how can you grow if you are stuck in a bunker and you're listening through a tiny little slit of an entrenched listening position that I'm writing everybody else is wrong certainly on this issue so to me a passion for listening is about coexisting with people I don't agree with I may not like but they have a right to be here and they have a reason there's usually

a good reason for what people think or what people do often and you know I'm not saying pity the mass murderer and so forth necessarily you know there'll be possibly reasons for that as well we certainly need to understand them to stop it ever happening again so listening even to people like that I think there's things to learn I mean how could you ever become like that and why would you ever behave like that so if we just dismiss people that we don't approve of or people we don't like then we don't learn very much

at all so I think listening is you know I said this I did a tedx talk in Athens the Cradle of democracy and I went on stage and said listening is the sound of democracy because without it it's very hard if I'm the minority it's very hard to accept the majority view isn't it you're all wrong and I'm gonna fight well that is just a recipe for recipe for Anarchy conflict War as we've seen whereas if I can say okay I can understand why you all think that I'll try and change your opinion but you

know I'm not de-personalizing you I'm understanding that you're human beings you have a different view from me and I can see why you got to that view then I can grow you can grow we can possibly come to some sort of synthesis thinking a lot about modern listening there and the tools we have to listen to each other one of them being social media yeah one of the things that's so tempting to do for all of us which I've refrained about two years ago I made a very conscious decision to to do this but I

used to just unfollow people that I didn't like what they said so like I I wouldn't follow Trump for example or like Nigel farage or like people that I thought were just idiots who had ulterior motives whatever I would just unfollow them and what I'm the problem with that approach is I was as I saw other Echo Chambers emerging online is that I wasn't progressing in any way I was as you've said it like I was increasing the size of my information my exposure therefore my ability to have empathy or to understand people out that

didn't think like me so I did a I started following people who were who I who made me feel uncomfortable it's the best way to describe it yeah well uncomfortable is a call for reassessment isn't it yeah and that's really important but I do think social media has got a lot to answer for in the way that it's been abused by people um with trolling and particularly with shaming there's a brilliant talk by um John Ronson who's who's become a friend of mine over the years on social media shaming and if anybody hasn't seen that

I do recommend you watch it because it is truly chilling to recount how a mob can beat somebody out of their job for what was originally quite an innocent post so we now see this you know we see slurs being um unacceptable words being labeled on top of people uh who find it difficult to defend themselves whether we're talking about racist or we're talking about homophobe you know at the moment that person is labeled with that thing it's very hard to get the stain off isn't it and then you get a mob who go on

and start castigating the person without ever understanding what caused this in the first place so I think we've got to be very careful about the way these things are used and without listening to the person and what their views really are it's all too easy to get into a kind of knee-jerk mob Lynch Mob kind of mentality where we're being right it comes back to that again doesn't it and that person is wrong and must be punished or shamed or canceled or whatever it may be so I think listening is really important and as you

say to people who make us feel uncomfortable well that's a warning sign that perhaps we need to reassess or analyze or what is going on here why is this making me feel uncomfortable is it actually against my views or my values or is it against my social conditioning and would my friends disapprove of me if I thought that that kind of thing I'd love to live in a world where we um we all including myself we're much better at listening and also accepting ideas that made us feel uncomfortable that's in part what I think we're

trying to do here is to have conversations to see ideas Collide that help to move the the world forward um and I only started thinking about that the other day when we had a guest on called Africa Brook that maybe that's ultimately the the net benefit of this is just Fearless conversations in a medium where no one's going to be edited or or cut down and manipulated that will hopefully push the conversation forward and I'm not right and my guests are sometimes it's just all opinion um we do have a closing tradition on this podcast

where the previous guest asks a question for the next guest they write it in the book Jack gets to see it I don't get to see it um until now so give me a second to read it they don't know who they're writing it for and you will also be asked to do the same I have been dreading this moment really why it's so funny that everyone gets really nervous now yeah and I'll just say you know everyone takes a long time to answer but then they also take an even longer amount of time to

think of a question to write okay okay this person wrote see they've really given themselves away but I have played sport for a living I've presented I've done acting and I've sang songs but I would still love to do one more thing with my life what's your one more thing I think for me um I've resisted doing a lot of um things that I know intellectually are really really good for me so I can probably crystallize that we haven't in Scotland where I live we have a thing called Monroe's these are a set of Peaks

I think they're over 3000 feet or something like that I can't remember how big they are but they're you know it's sizeable and um I saw an amazing story the other day about an 83 year old man I think who has just completed climbing all of the monroes there are a lot of monroes you're talking about more than a hundred and he's just completed that I mean these are serious uh schleps you know and at his age he's just completed it was a wonderful picture of all his friends with walking sticks forming a kind of

um Corridor for him to walk through on his final complete um I would love to take on doing at least one Monroe a year as a walk Jen and I have just got into serious walking where we live in orkney and we did Eight Mile Walk the other day and I was virtually crippled the following day I couldn't move so I'd love to get to the stage where I get my body used to that kind of thing it is so beautiful to be out in the fresh air to be in beautiful scenery to be exercising

my body in that way to be losing weight to be becoming fitter I mean it's just nothing but good from the whole thing and taking it on to do it up on Monroe that would be a serious challenge for me so one a year for the rest of my life would be fantastic amazing and I'm gonna find out if that happens so me and Jane are gonna stay in touch fair enough um and maybe I'll come do a couple of the monroes with you because I've got increasingly um interested in like hiking we'd love it

lately so do invite me if you do end up doing it but um definitely thank you so much for your time today thank you Stephen you've given me so much from through your content and the videos and especially the TED Talks you've made me it's one of those conversations that we've had today but also from watching your videos where I start to reassess all of the as I describe it like the unthinking I've done with sound I just haven't thought about it enough and it through this conversation I even thought about our little jingle at

the start of the Diary of a CEO which we've always had since episode one and to be honest I've never really thought about it it's just been there and it's and that kind of reassessment because I completely agree with everything you've said about the importance of sound but if I agree then why aren't my actions and my why isn't it such a high priority in the way that I'm thinking and designing the things that I create so yeah and also everything you've said about conflict resolution and relationships and the importance of that sound plays there

it's such an important conversation one that I hope we can continue long after this podcast but I just wanted to say thank you for your time today thank you for listening that's a yeah it's a lovely way to end thank you for speaking and thank you for listening it means the world to me thank you thank you Stephen I had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast my girlfriend came upstairs yesterday when I was having a shower and she said to me that she tried the heel protein shake which

lives on my fridge over there and she said it's amazing low calories you get your 20 odd grams of protein you get your 26 vitamins and minerals and it's nutritionally complete in the protein space there's lots of things but it's hard to find something that is nice especially when consumed just with water and that is nutritionally complete and that has about 100 calories in total while also giving you your 20 grams of protein if you haven't tried the heel protein product do give it a try The Salted Caramel one if you put some ice cubes

in it and you put it in a blender and you try it is as good as pretty much any milkshake on the market just mixed with water it's been a game changer for me because I'm trying to drop my calorie intake and I'm trying to be a little bit more healthy with my diet so this is where heel fits in my life thank you heal for making a product that I actually like The Salted Caramel is my favorite I've got the banana one here which is the one my girlfriend likes but for me salted caramel

is the one [Music] thank you [Music]