Episode transcript with Julian Treasure
Here's a transcript of my First Time Facilitator conversation with Julian Treasure.
Leanne: I would like to welcome to the First-Time Facilitator Podcast, a guest who was spoken on the TED stage five times. But look! This is his first appearance on this show. So thank you for joining us today, Julian Treasure.
Julian: Well, thank you Leanne. It's my pleasure to be here.
Leanne: It's great to hear your voice. I feel like I know you because I've watched all your videos. Your voice definitely resonates with me and I think it's what makes your speech is so powerful. I always like finding out from our guest what kind of career pivots led them to the role that they're in. So you're now a world expert in communication, in listening and speaking. How did you get to this stage in your career?
Julian: I think probably I'd say there were two pivots. I started out in advertising sales. Well, actually media buying originally in the early ‘80s and advertising sales in computer magazines. And I launched my own company in ‘88 and that went for 15 years it became very successful. It was a contract publishing company in the UK producing customer magazines for brands such as Microsoft, Orange, Apple, Lexus, Toyota and so forth. So global magazines for their customers which is a huge industry now. It wasn't when we started but it is now the biggest part of magazine publishing actually. So it's “branded content”, that's the word for this kind of thing now. High-value content produced by brands or produced on behalf of brands to engage their customers without they're just going over and over again on their basic sales message. I sold that business in 2002- 2003 and that was the first pivot.
All the way through that I've been a musician all my life and all the way through that I was playing gigs in the evenings and listening to the world. Musicians listen to the world in a slightly different way. To know musicians I think that's not to say they're better. But if you're a musician, you have to listen in a multitrack way. If you're playing in a band or an orchestra, you can't be a good musician if you're not listening to everybody else at the same time. You need to respond to everybody. So you develop this kind of multitrack very sensitive listening and I was going around listening to the world like I was thinking the world doesn't sound very good and then they occurred to me that most of the noise around us is made by organizations and by brands indeed.
So with my experience of dealing with brands and helping them to serve customers better, to engage customers. It wasn't a huge step to think, “Hmmm. I wonder if there's a business here helping brands to ask and answer the question, ‘How does my brand sounds?’” So I started researching that and found that there was basically very little of that going on and I formed the company called the Sound Agency with precisely that message. The idea was good sound is good business and that was a theory then and it's now a well-proven thing. There are now hundreds of audio branding companies around the world operating in pretty much every market you can think of and it's become almost the rigor to think about your brand in all five senses not just one.
When we started, it was almost all a marketing money was spent on the eyes, very little on the ears. So the sound agency has helped, brands all over the world to become conscious about the sound they're making and that has been a good thing. We've improved the sound and lots of shopping malls and airports and so forth. Lots of it by removing mindless music actually. People always think, “Oh, you do background music?” No. Actually we do a lot of removing that because very often that's inappropriately chosen or badly played in bad quality or just an irritating noise and I speak there is a musician.
Now, the second pivot I think was along mat journey of helping brands to become conscious that the sound they make affects people. It occurred to me that, “Well, hang on. This isn't just about brands, it's about people.” and so my TED Talks which started with the one about how sound affects us moved into how sound is being created by individuals and consumed by individuals. So we have responsibility for the sound we make as people and the sound we consume as people and that is about speaking and listening primarily.
So I did a TED talk about the health effects of sound and then one about conscious listening which probably to me is still the most important one and then followed through with one on how sound in different spaces is badly designed, how architects designed for the eyes not for the ears and that affects us in places like schools and hospitals and offices and hotels and all sorts of different environments.
And then, finally the TED talk that went completely ballistic is the one about how to speak powerfully. So it's called How to speak so that people want to listen and that one's now in the top ten of all time and I can't believe it. But the interesting thing is that TED talk has got something like six times as many views as the one on listening.
Leanne: Yes. I actually had written down a stat and I was going to say is that the problem with our society right now. For the batch that start right there is that more people are interested in the one about speaking.
Julian: Yes. I mean, this is the old adage. You have two ears and one mouth.
Leanne: Yes. [laughs]
Julian: You should be listening twice as much as you speak but most of us have that round the wrong way. We're very focused and I should say not just individuals but also organizations. We're massively focused on outbound communication. So speaking overrides listening almost every time. We like sending. That's true of what I call a personal broadcasting using the tools that we've now got on social media to be tweeting. You know tweeting- “I'm on a train.” Who cares, really?
Leanne: Yes. [laughs]
Julian: But we have this fantasy that there are thousands of people out there hanging on our every thought and movement which is of course not true but we like the idea of broadcasting. It makes us feel more important. And speaking I think, I mean speaking is incredibly important and it forms the core of my book How to be heard and that indeed the whole book's title is for people who struggle to be heard in life which is an awful lot of people.
Nevertheless, you can't be a good speaker if you don't learn first to be a good listener. So that is also in the book and really at the core of my work is this theory that speaking and listening are in a circular relationship. That's true for organizations which are terrible at listening generally and put all their effort into broadcasting their message and it's true for each of us as an individual as well.
Leanne: Actually, I really-- that whole thing about how to be a good speaker is it's important to be a good listener where I really sort of seen this play out actually it was on the weekend. I was at a conference and I was watching the emcee the master of ceremony and after every speech he just come on and to say thanks for the speech and then move on and he didn't really acknowledge what the previous person had spoken about and I feel like that was a really lost opportunity because I just don't have a sense that he was listening to their content. It was more about, “Thanks for that. Now we're going to move on.” and I think the real value that great emcees have- Have you done some emcee work as well?
Julian: Yes. I have over the years done some of that.
Leanne: Yeah.
Julian: And you always want to reflect off what somebody said to give it continuity and sew the whole thing together otherwise it becomes just lumps of content and unfortunately, I mean that's a kind of listening or a kind of communication which you would call faux listening or I call it “speech writing” where you're not really listening to that person at all. You're preparing your next brilliant piece of dialogue and it's all about what you're going to say, not what somebody else is going to say. So that might be the kind of person who would in conversation be doing a lot of “Anyway!” and overriding the whole thing you were just saying and moving on to what they want to talk about which is a disconnect. It is also, it's demeaning to the other person. It leaves them feeling not appreciated.
Leanne: A hundred percent. I also want to go back to “Look there! I've done it.” But I'm going back to one of your earlier points about being a drummer in a band and how it really, you really tuned into all the different sounds. And I was listening to your Ted speech about listening and how you said listening in mixer mode is so you're actually paying attention to everything that's going around you. So I woke up this morning and I was tuning into the birds, my dog was outside I was hearing him breathing, I was breathing and you're like, it's really interesting because you can go through life without acknowledging any of those sounds just the ones that drew your attention at the time, the beep of a phone or whatever. Today that you felt very present. Well, I did. I did this morning. It's a really cool, cool tool.
Julian: Yeah. Well, listening is a skill, that's the whole thing. So you can improve any skill and we take it for granted. We teach reading and writing frantically in schools. It's a scandal of a child leaves school unable to read or write. We do not teach speaking and listening or if we speak teach-speaking tool, it's minimal. We certainly don't teach listening skills which is tragic because it's our primal form of communication. It's so much more powerful than reading and writing to be direct, to be there with your voice in the world.
You can convey so much more emotion. It's a much more influential form of communication if you're going to lead people or in the case of this conversation train people. It really behoves you to take on that you're playing an instrument here. We're all playing this amazing instrument- the voice and you need to train that and just at the same time, we're doing a thing which is called listening. It's not a passive activity, it's not like hearing. You don't have to do anything to hear stuff, you hear everything. Listening by contrast is a skill. It's a two-stage skill. You select stuff to pay attention to and then you make it mean something.
So my definition of listening is making meaning from sound and that colours your whole perception of existence. I mean as you said, you paid attention to some things this morning that you had never really paid attention to before or generally didn't and we can do that anytime. We can change the searchlight of our listening, focus on different things. So that would give us a different reality because we're then associated with different things going on around us and they affect us in different ways and of course we are able to direct the meaning making.
We can challenge the meanings that we associate with various sounds. So it is a conscious process, it's a skill that can be improved by practice and that exercise I gave in that TED talk is a good way of starting that process of improving listening. And the better we make our listening, the more we understand other people and the more powerfully we can speak to them.
Leanne: Yeah and actually that's the reason why side of this podcast is there's a lot of podcasts out there that really focus on public speaking and giving great keynotes and being a great presenter. But I believe that facilitation, it's really harnessing what's going on in the room which is then listening, linking that back to stuff that's been spoken about to the content. You've got to be really flexible but it's actually really exhausting too because you have to pay attention and doing that extra listening. At the end of a day it's quite tiring.
Julian: I think it is, you're right and it's worth it because what you get is a much better result at the end of the day. For everybody, it's more satisfying. It does get better with practice I would say. I mean, in the book and I didn't have time to do this in the TED talk, actually. But in the book I distinguish three different kinds of listening and the one we're talking about is really important. I call it “created listening” and that is around the concept that you always speak into a listening.
So if you've got a room full of people, all of those people have got unique listenings. Every one of us has a unique listening. Your listening is different from mine because we listen through a set of filters and those filters are different for each individual. That's the culture you're brought into, the language you speak, the values, attitudes, beliefs that you create along the way from parents and teachers and role models and friends and so forth. The emotions and intentions and expectations with which we go into any conversation or situation, all of these things affect the way that we listen at this moment in this situation.
So you have a room full of people with that going on. The important question to ask yourself is, “What's the listening I'm speaking into?” and just by asking that question, you will become more and more practiced at spotting it and it becomes an automatic process eventually. So whether I walk on stage and I'm speaking to a thousand people or I'm in a one-to-one or talking to a small group, the question is always “What's the listening?” That's the first question- “What's the listening?” and as soon as you spot it or you get a feeling for it, you can start to speak in a way that's more appropriate. The listening might be if it's after lunch and you've had a good lunch and everybody's had a good morning. The listening will be a bit sleepy because everybody's blood will be in their gat and they'll be feeling that little after lunch feeling. So you have to perhaps up your game a little bit there and be more dynamic. I often get to speak in that spot they think, “Oh, he's a good speaker. He'll wake them up off the loads.”
Leanne: Yeah, what the top crowds want.
Julian: Yeah. So I always get that. Or it might be early in the morning and they don't know what to expect and they've come here and they're not they're a little bit confused and trepidatious and you might want to be very reassuring at that point in calm and helpful and interactive. So speaking into the right listening is really important and makes your speaking much more appropriate. So the question to ask always: “What's the listening I was speaking into?”
Leanne: Excellent question. When you said, “What do you spot? or how do you feel?” I think that's- So you’re looking at sort of body language or if you said a joke that everyone sort of laughed at and there's a connection point which now you then can everyone's feeling more relaxed. Is it that sort of stuff? It's just the dynamics of what’s going on.
Julian: It maybe.
Leanne: Yes. A responses.
Julian: I think- you know I've always said- I said in the book again, I'm not quite sure how this works, I mean. Because there are so many factors involved and it may be little body language signals that you pick up sort of unconsciously. You know consciously you can spot certain things if everybody's leaving back and supporting their heads and eyelids are drooping you that's pretty clear. If by contrast people are leaning forward and looking bright and alert and you've got some smiles then that's all good. So you can certainly see some obvious things but I'm sure there's a lot more going on at a micro level and with the whole science and micro facial expressions and things like that.
We spot an awful lot maybe pheromones I don't know. A whole panoply of sensory input which is going in and probably at subconscious level giving us a feeling for the listening we're speaking into. The important thing it's not to get hooked up in what's the process it's to ask question because just by asking the question, you're training your consciousness in that way, you become sensitized to it. Doesn’t matter how it works you will be good at it I promise and it makes life an awful lot easier.
You can, as you suggested, you can test the water with a joke or with something and see how it goes down you may be there's a little litmus test or a listening ohmmeter phrase that you can use the same way every day and see how it goes down and give you some sort of calibration. I don't do that I just ask the question. So whatever works really for anybody as long as you get in there and ask the question at beginning of every important conversation, it will really help to speak more powerfully into that listening.
Leanne: That's wonderful. What you've talked about in terms of paying attention and you're not too sure whether it is the body language or the pheromones or something going on but I really like that. Earlier this year, I was asked to travel to Indonesia for my day job. I'd helped write a program for our leaders over there but it was being delivered in Bahasa Indonesian which I don't speak and so I was just questioning I said, “Well, what's the value of me going over there?” I'm going to observe this facilitator running a Leadership Program in another language surely I can't critique the course that way. And the guy that runs the operation over there said, “Oh, you'll figure it out.” and so I sat there for a couple of days in the course and he was absolutely right. So I knew when we need to switch the content, put an activity in. I didn't know a word of Indonesian but it was just really interesting how I could pick up on all the energy in the room and what we needed to fix without even understanding the words.
Julian: Yeah. I think much of this is universal. Of course some of it is cultural and we have to be culturally sensitive anytime we're speaking. I've given business presentations in cultures where it's perfectly okay to be doing your email around the table while somebody's talking.
Leanne: Oh, I had that.
Julian: Yeah. Well I don't like it and in the UK that would be considered extremely rude. But there are places I've been in the world where it's the norm and if that's their norm, there's no point you know thumping the table and saying, “Excuse me! Are you listening to me?” and getting all self-righteous because it would just offend and you wouldn't end up with the outcome that you want. So obviously one can try to be as engaging as possible but there are cultural differences which require some sensitivity. Nevertheless, a lot of it is universal. I think a lot of human body language is universal and I think we can pretty much spot when somebody's engaged or not engaged in any culture in the world.
Leanne: Yeah, I agree. Now, we're talking about listening but I'd like to transition and talk about using your voice and speaking as well and particularly talk about the case of credibility. So a lot of first time facilitators struggle with a bit of confidence because I may not believe that they're the right person to be stepping up in training or facilitating a topic. They may be a subject-matter expert but credibility can be shown in many other ways. And in your speech you mentioned that we vote for politicians that have lower voices because it gives us a sense of authority. What then can we do as facilitators to own our voice more? If we don't have a strong voice, can we change that? Or are we doomed to just sort of have a voice that doesn't convey that kind of authority that we’re really after?
Julian: Yes. Again, I think consciousness is vitally important. So in the talk about talking, I speak about having a vocal toolbox. We all have this vocal toolbox and it's really important to become conscious that that's there and there are things you can rummage around in and deploy consciously which will change the way that you received and changed the power of your speaking. First of all is what you say and there's a huge amount in my book about designing great content. I mean, that is really important.
I talked to Chris Anderson, the curator of TED for the book and I asked Chris, I've known him for a long time and he's seen thousands of TED talks now. So the question I asked him was, “Which do you think is more important, great content or great delivery?” and he said, “Well, they're both equally important, really. But if I had to choose one it would be the content. I'd rather see somebody delivering earth-shattering content in an amateurish way than see somebody delivering banal nonsense in a highly slick and professional way because the latter one that's just actually annoying.”
Leanne: Yup.
Julian: I think that's really important. So get your content right is the first secret to engaging people making sure your content is for the right listening and it's going to engage them. There's a big idea. You know the flow of it, you know there's a story, there's an arc you're taking them through in the day and it's just not just an endless repetition or an endless procession of fact after fact or thing after thing. Content is vital. Then, you've got how you say it and the voices I said earlier is this amazing instrument. Mine is slightly compromised at the moment you probably hear I have a slight cold right now here in Oakley which is a long way North from where you're speaking.
Leanne: Yup.
Julian: So it's winter here and I have a slight cold. While I work around that, I have to become conscious of my voice all the time. I do vocal warm up exercises before important conversations to give my voice the best chants and I'm conscious of the vocal toolbox. And that includes all sorts of things starts with things that you might not guess perhaps which are things like stance. You know standing in the right way is really important. Getting your vocal cords relaxed and vertical is a key. Many people will stress their vocal cords.
If I leave my head forward you can hear my voice change or if I push my head back you can hear my voice change. That's because I'm compressing or expanding my vocal cords and they can't work so well in that situation. It's amazing how many of us will do a phone call leaning forward and that changes your voice like that, so stance is important. There's a kind of neutral position I would say which is a very good base. I'm not saying stay there all the time but feet roughly shoulder width apart, slightly narrower for females and everything vertically stacked above.
I always imagine there's a string in the top of my head that I'm suspended from and that gets your shoulders back and down and you feel nice and relaxed and I imagine roots from my feet going into the ground. So I feel rooted and yet supported and relaxed and it's all vertical and it all looks good. Hands loose by the sides that is a fantastic position to speak from. No jiggling, no physical tics of walking around and around on the spot or leading to one side than the other. These things are distracting. If you do them all day, they'll drive people nuts like a dripping tap. So that's- you can video yourself and spot any of those little things.
Stance very important; breath crucial. If you're going to be a good talker, learn to breathe. There are lots of breathing exercises. You can do them in yoga or you can simply Google breathing exercises and take on breathing because your voice is just breath. Breath is the fuel for the voice and without being able to breathe it's very difficult. Most of us breathe like a bird, little tiny breaths to the top of our lungs. We don't take many big deep breaths in the day and it's really important to do that.
Then we've got some of the more fine and really important aspects of voice like for example register. There are four registers of the human voice and the one we would want to use in speaking as modal which can move from the head to the neck or throat down into the chest. I strongly advise anybody who speaks for a living to practice chest voice. You can do that with visualizations, again, you'll find lots of stuff online or go work with a vocal coach.
You can just google voice coach or speaking coach or drama coach or singing coach. Find somebody near you and work. Go and check out some- find somebody you have good chemistry with and then do a set of sessions to learn how to use your diaphragm, how to breathe, how to speak from the chest. This is a much bigger resonator.
So if I take my voice up to my throat which is where most people speak from all the time it's a much lighter feeling and as soon as I move down into my chest the voice has added depth. It's where I habitually speak from these days, not everybody does many people don't actually. There’s a lot of people strangled.
Leanne: Yeah, I’m very jealous.
Julian: Just practice. It's practice- practice-practice. You simply need to be breathing and using the diaphragm. It's a physical thing like learning how to swim or how to ride a bike. So this can all be learned and as you learn it, you give your voice extra authority because you're right. Yes we do prefer in terms of tambour and pitch, we prefer deeper voices, we prefer voices which are described in the way you would describe a hot chocolate, smooth, dark, rich, warm, sweet, all of those words are good for voices.
So you can work at these things, again, with a vocal coach or simply on your own. Recording yourself is a very good idea. We don't like doing that very much because we all listen to our own voice largely through bone conduction. So it comes through the bones of the skull not much of it comes out of your mouth and round the corner into your ears. So when you hear your voice recorded you go, “That's not me. I'm much deeper than that.”
Leanne: Yes, yes. [laughs]
Julian: But you're not. Actually, what's going out into the world is what you hear on the recording. So it's very important to record yourself and practice speaking in ways that you feel give you extra extra authority that usually means a bit of depth and that's where practicing the chest voice is really really important. And then then we've got two other incredibly important things about the voice. There is pace and there is prosody or prosody as I like to say it. Pace is something that a lot of people aren't conscious of when they're speaking.
If you're doing a whole day facilitating something with a group of people, if you maintain the same even pace throughout the entire day they will start to glaze over because we get habituated to sounds and that the habitual cadences of somebody's voice speaking the same way over and over again, saying the same thing over and over again becomes a little bit boring. It's a slightly tedious and we start to glaze over and so really becoming conscious of habitual cadences and of pace is crucial.
You can go really really fast and get people suddenly, “Oh, hello. There's something really exciting.” or you can slow right down to make a point and to the point where you also need to get to be friends with silence. There's nothing wrong with bit of silence. People don't like it in radio and equally on podcast.
If I’m silent for 10 seconds then people would start thinking, “Oh, I lost it. What happened? Did it stop?” So dead air on radio is kind of anathema. But if you're in front of people they can see that you haven't disappeared and I've played with this. You can be silent for the longest time really up to ten seconds right comfortably.
Leanne: Wow.
Julian: And people would just sit there smiling at you and going, “Well, something's going to happen in a minute.” It gives you- if you do this it positions you as a master. You know you are in control. You're comfortable with just being with the other people. You don't have to fill every second with babble and arms and ears. The moment you become comfortable with silence, it gets rid of all that stuff and it's a very very powerful friend to have. So that's pace. Varying the pace is crucial and the other varying that we do in speaking generally is prosody which is the up and down, the sing song of speech. It's how we communicate emotion, how we emphasize certain words and it's also how we break our talking up into discrete chunks. Typically we go down at the end of a sentence, like that. Now, your country has been partly responsible for creating an intonation.
Leanne: I was going to say with you the other way. Yeah.
Julian: Yeah. Which is called high rising terminal, where everything said is a question, even if it isn't a question. Now, that is something to avoid I would say in training particularly, in facilitating, in public speaking because there's a hidden question in that uplift at the end which is kind of, “Is that okay with you?” So it's a kind of questioning intonation and in fact it was originally called Australian questioning intonation or it's otherwise known as high rising terminal. It's in America as well very much on the West Coast and it's really flowed from the American content machine in Hollywood to affect many people particularly younger people around the world who speak like this a lot?
Leanne: Yes, yes.
Julian: So I would tend to avoid that one if you're going to be a professional speaker and remember that it's clear. When you finish a sentence, you go down and that's confident and it shows everybody it's the end. There's no question there, there's no it goes down, “Is that okay with you now. Can I go onto this?”
Leanne: Yeah. You sort of seeking permission, aren’t you?
Julian: Yeah, it's a little bit querulous and it is a little bit less powerful. It's also repetitive and I would avoid repetitive things. And the other, I'm assuming we're talking globally here but I mean, I will say another Australian habit I come across a great deal is “look” at the beginning of every sentence. So, “What's your name?” “Look, I'm John.” Well, that is, it's a verbal tic and if you put a verbal tic- The other big one that is much more common around the world is the word “so” which should mean this then that is a logical sequence this-so-that. Nevertheless, “You get a lot of what you do for a living.” “So I work for-” No, that didn't follow from my question, actually.
And I say in training people on my conversational little acronym the tool RASA Receive, Appreciate, Summarize, Ask which is a wonderful way to flow conversation. The summarizing is “so”. And I want to reclaim the power of the word “so” from this abuse it's getting all around the world. Because if you have a “so” person in the meeting, “So what we've all agreed is this, now we can move on to that.” or it's a great way of closing doors along the corridor of your facilitation or conversation, “So we've got that. Now we can move on to the next thing.”
If you summarize each time, it's good for people's memory and it gets everybody to a nice state where they say, “Yup, that’s finished. Now, it's fresh approach, move on to that. So it's a very powerful little word. And then were going back briefly to prosody, using it, again, culturally-sensitively is important but using it is the most important thing of all. If you have again a voice that's rather monotonous and doesn't go up and down very much and I speak like this for the whole day. It's going to get extremely tedious for people and they really will switch off because they'll get- Monotonous comes from mono tone- one note.
So it's really important with any kind of conversation and particularly if you're standing in front of a group of people, it's very important to use prosody in order to get your points across. So you've got these wonderful tools. You can go loud, you can go soft and whisper, you can go fast and gobble or you can slow right down to the point where you just go silent.
Leanne: Very effective. So it's really about contrast isn't it?
Julian: It is.
Leanne: To get that attention.
Julian: Yeah.
Leanne: I'm on the concept of pace. This is one that's really sort of hits home for me because I talk very quickly. I’m very mindful of it though when I do facilitate especially in other countries because the Australian accents difficult for one thing and then my pace is another thing. What kind of tools or strategies can you use or is it just being mindful and aware that it's okay to talk fast when I want to emphasize a point but to just to change the pace, to change the pitch, to think of everything to make the communication more effective or are there particular tools to kind of slow down your brain so that it doesn't come out of your mouth as quickly?
Julian: Sometimes pace is about nerves and the more you speak the less nervous you will be. It's like any activity. Also, breathing is very important. I would say to interrupters which is a particular habit that can be very destructive in conversation. A great tool for interruptus is simply to take a deep breath every time they're about to speak because that takes a second or two and you might just realize the other person is still speaking while you're taking that deep breath and that is incredibly important on stage as well taking deep breaths. That gives you a chance to slow down again and reset and recalibrate.
Consciousness is the key to everything. Becoming conscious of what you're doing, how you're standing, the gestures you're using, the pace at which you're speaking, asking the question all the time, “How's my listening? What's the listening?” Because if you're really going fast and people are sort of starting to lean back and, “Whoa! What's going on here?” You can feel that in the room. It's a lovely exercise to deliberately slow yourself down really to what you feel is a grinding low gear and just get the feeling that actually works.
A lot of this is about practice I mean, like when I'm training people in speaking, we do a lot of range extension with volume, with prosody, with pitch and with pace as well to get people to realize they can go way further than they think. You know our natural range tends to be a tiny little band in the spectrum and going from really really really slow to incredibly fast and really really babbling. There's a huge spectrum there and the natural pace that you tend to move in will be a very small part of that.
So it's great to expand it to practice, expanding your spectrum so you can start to use more variety in the speaking. Record yourself, video yourself, have people video you when you're actually performing or in front of people, record those sessions. You can get a little zoom digital recorder or something like that for next to nothing and just set it up next to you. Nobody will see it and press record before you start and then you can listen back afterwards. That kind of feedback is absolutely crucial in helping you improve what you're doing and becoming more and more conscious of the tools that you're using and how you're using them.
Leanne: And that was probably the biggest lesson for me when I started the podcast was having to listen back to the first few interviews and thinking, “What the hell?” So I think I'm still guilty of talking from my throat and I know that not only because of the sound of my voice but at the end of a big day of meetings, my voice will just be in a world of pain especially if I've not been as listening as much as I should have.
Just to finish off, I want to- your speech the one with 31 million views, you do that vocal warm-up exercise in front of all those people in the TED Conference and that's something that video I show it in a lot of the workshops that I run with presentation skills. I even use some of those vocal tools to warm-up myself in the morning and also the people who are good in the room.
Julian: Very good.
Leanne: And it's just super fun especially the first one where you sort of just sigh. That's actually very relaxing that first move. That video was published a few years ago. Have you got any other kind of are vocal warm-ups in your toolkit now? Was it just remain the same?
Julian: No, I've stayed the same actually. I use exactly those ones before I go onstage and speak anywhere. So I use them before this conversation, I use them every conversation. I find that those do it for me. That's not to say that they are the pinnacle of vocal warm-ups. There are lots of famous voice coaches who've worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and people like Cicely Berry and so forth. You have books full of vocal warm-ups. It depends what you want to do really.
If you're an actor and you're going to be reading Shakespeare, you need different things. There are specific tools for doing stuff with your lips and your tongue and your mouth and your embouchure and so forth which she has which that’s a different world altogether. You know actors have to be able to whisper onstage, you can hear them right at the back of the theatre. What we don't need to get quite to that level. So I find- I kind of culled those out of looking at what everybody used and I find those fast, easy to remember, fun to do and very effective in readying all the bits of the equipment that I need. So now I haven't changed it over the years. I've stayed with those ones for those very reasons really.
Leanne: Awesome. Well, isn't that cool that we both use the same warm-up routine for this podcast.
Julian: Absolutely. Yes, indeed. There you go and that's how it works. And in relation to speaking from the throat I mean, I would say the same to you, Leanne as I would say to anybody which is find a vocal coach and just work on that because if your throat gets stressed, I mean, I can't shout very loudly. I'm not allowed shouter. There some people can shout enormously loudly from their chest. If I go to a rugby match and I probably can't speak very much the next day. So I have the same thing-
Leanne: Especially if you’re an England supporter. Haha.
Julian: Yeah. Haha. Yes. Well, we won't talk about rugby right now. But if I'm speaking, I can speak all day quite comfortably because I've found a way of keeping my vocal chords quite relaxed when I'm on stage. So I can certainly do that without feeling stressed and if that is happening to you, to anybody listening to this then a vocal coach can really help with that because it's really about that diaphragm and that breathing and getting it into the chest and letting your vocal cords kind of float on top of it.
Obviously all the sound really comes from there but they can be much more relaxed than they perhaps are at the moment so I do recommend that. There are some wonderful people out there working and they know that science of this extremely well.
Leanne: Will look into that for the next year. I actually used to play the tuba when I was younger so my breathing was excellent but it sounds much more shallower now. So I would definitely work on that in the new year. Julian, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Your TED speech, it's in the top 10 of TED as you mentioned but for me, it's my favourite TED speech. It's one-
Julian: Thank you.
Leanne: I think I joke to your friend, your assistant that out of the 31 million views, I think I've read it about 29 million times of those.
Julian: Hahaha. Fantastic.
Leanne: It's been so helpful and practical. So thank you so much for all the work that you do.
Julian: My pleasure.
Leanne: If people want to connect with you or find out more about your book in your online courses and watch all your videos, where should we send them?
Julian: Juliantreasure.com would be a good place and that has links to all of that and the book is called How to be heard and it contains everything we've just talked about and awful lot more I tried to pour everything I've learned for years and years about speaking and listening into it. So it's full of exercises and pretty practical. I'm very proud of it actually, so I do recommend it to anybody.
Leanne: Congratulations and thanks again. It's been great having you on the show.
Julian: Thanks, Leanne. My pleasure.