The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 85 - How To Speak So EVERYONE Listens To You: Julian Treasure

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this moment Julian Treasure opens up his vocal toolbox and talks about the importance of paying attention to your voice. While people focus on the content of their speeches and talks, their voice is just as important for every aspect of their life, considering that it is used to inspired, lead, communicate and build relationships. Julian believes that the voice should be treated as a skill rather than a natural capability, something that can be trained, improved and in turn have positive knock on effects for your happiness, health and wealth. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/pEn5wA7Xdvb Julian: https://www.juliantreasure.com https://twitter.com/juliantreasure?lang=en Get Your Diary Here: https://g2ul0.app.link/WJconj0g2ub Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Quick one, just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio.

And thirdly to Amazon Music who, when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. 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, 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 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. And I go, what? This is part of your life. It's an important part of your, you're speaking to teams. You're trying to inspire people, you're trying to lead people, you're trying to communicate, build 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 teach reading and writing

in schools, we don't teach speaking or listening which is absolutely nuts it's funny because i when people ask me i always say that the most important skill you can learn is to sell because you're selling all the time i'm selling right now i meet a girl in a bar i'm just going to sell to her to try and get her number i have a girlfriend i wouldn't do that i'm selling in business i'm selling to my teams i'm trying to inspire investors to join us it's caught this caught my life is full of the sales pitch whether i'm selling myself or an idea or a vision or whatever. But I've never really reflected on the fact that the foundation of that selling is this instrument. Of course. What would I have to do? Because there's lots of people that are out listening to this podcast that

start their own podcast and want to be a podcaster. And many of them message me and they want to come and sit here on this podcast one day. What are the types of things you would advise someone to do with their voice to be heard? Well, treating your voice as a skill is the first thing. So becoming conscious that this is a skill. It's not a natural capability, just like listening is a skill. Hearing is a capability. Listening is a skill. So I very much talk about these two things as skills. 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 affect our outcomes in life. They affect, I always say, our happiness, our effectiveness, and our well-being are

fundamentally affected by whether we master the skills of speaking and listening. So in terms of speaking, understanding there's a vocal toolbox is the first thing. So things like breathing, your voice is just breath. That's all it is. Breath moving across your vocal cords. And in order to speak well, it's very good to develop a breathing practice. Maybe you do yoga, maybe something else. 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 want to be breathing from our diaphragm, from our stomach, because, you know, if you watch a baby breathing, it's their stomach that goes up and down, not the chest. 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? It gets you into it. Well, what is it Aristotle said? Excellence is, no, we are what we do repeatedly. So excellence is not an act, it's habit.

So it gets you into the habit of breathing better and deeper. 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. You know, what's the world record for static apnea? 28 minutes, something like that, lying at the bottom of a swimming pool on one breath. You know, and that's static apnea. Then you've got the free divers.

There are things we can do with our lungs, which are beyond imagining virtually. And yet most of us just breathe little tiny, tiny breaths. So it's good for you as well to exercise your lungs, to inflate them. I had, unfortunately, a few years ago, pulmonary embolism, which is quite scary. I mean, it can kill you. And that's blood clots going to the lung. They have to go through the heart to get to the lung so that, you know, that's where you can die. And so my lungs are not as efficient as they were before that. And it's made me even more conscious of the importance of deep breathing, of expanding the lung capacity. It's part of being healthy, apart from anything else, to have great lung capacity.

Is that what exercise does? Yeah. Kind of inadvertently. Partly. Yeah. Absolutely. Releases all sorts of good, the happy chemicals into your system as well, exercise. But breathing is very, very good for you, generally.

And we don't do enough of it. So I've done my breathing exercises. I'm heading on to the Driver CEO podcast. What else would I have to do to be heard by the listener? What are the sort of tips or skills? Well, I think variety just in general is a very important aspect of speaking. So you talked about people who are monotonic,

and that literally means one tone. So if I speak like this through the whole podcast, it would be extremely boring for people. There's not a lot of intonation going on there. I don't get any emotional resonance speaking like that. So it's just boring. So intonation, the up and down of speaking is really important. It's also crucial to be sensitive to cultural differences in that. For example, in Scandinavia, they have much restricted prosody or intonation compared to, say, the Latin countries where, you know, people are like, is it very up and down like this the whole time? I'm croaking here.

I remember doing a talk 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, if they'd been America, it'd be whooping and hollering and whatever going on. And I went down for a coffee and people came up to me and said, thank you, that was the best talk we have had for some years. That's Finns for you. They're very taciturn,

quiet people. They don't get very excited much. So unless they've had a vodka, perhaps, but you have to be adjusting to the prosody or prosody of the audience you're speaking to. What's prosody? Prosody is both intonation. So the up and down delivery, which is route one for emotion. It's, it's absolutely crucial in speaking. And it's also the rhythm of your speaking, the gaps you leave and the emphasis you put on words. So it's understanding how to, it's not just reading a script flat, it's putting your personality into what you're saying. And that makes all the difference in the world. So anybody who, it's interesting. I mean, I have friends who run voiceover studios and actors come in to read things,

TV commercials, books and whatnot. 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 about variety.

It's about breathing. It's about being comfortable with silence, for example, not filling every tiny little gap with ums, errs, you knows, you know what I means, verbal tics. 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. That's how we become masters.