Step Six: Learning to Listen with Julian Treasure

This episode is step six in the 10-Step Toolkit to Having Critical Conversations and features Julian Treasure, a top-rated international speaker and award-winning author on the power of sound and the skills of speaking and listening for both individuals and organizations. Julian’s five TED talks have been viewed more than 150 million times; one of them is the sixth most-viewed of all time. He is also an audio branding consultant who uses innovative biophilic soundscapes in retail and hospitality spaces.

 In this episode, we discuss:

• the difference between listening and hearing
• the impact of noise on our relationships and conversations
• the power of music and sound in shaping behaviors
• the perfect setting for critical conversations
• tools to harness the art of listening

If you have any questions or comments you would like addressed in the  Q&A with Julian Treasure, please email whatsjustpod@gmail.com. Don't forget to follow Whatsjust on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn and subscribe to the weekly newsletter to get details on where and when the Live Q&A is happening! 

And, as always, please review, subscribe, and share with everyone you know :)

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Timestamps:

01:20 Julian Treasure: The Sound Expert

06:01 Understanding Listening vs. Hearing

09:27 The Personal Nature of Listening

18:21 The Impact of Listening on Critical Conversations

29:22 The Power of Context in Communication

31:16 The Unseen Impact of Noise Pollution

32:21 How Sound Affects Us: A Deep Dive

35:14 The Power of Music and Sound in Shaping Behavior

36:47 Crafting the Perfect Setting for Critical Conversations

38:48 The Art of Listening: Enhancing Interpersonal Communication

48:04 Exploring Silence and Its Varieties

56:46 Three Captivating Things

Chapters

• 1:03 Mastering the Art of Listening
• 6:01 Understanding Listening vs. Hearing
• 9:27 The Personal Nature of Listening
• 18:21 The Impact of Listening on Critical Conversations
• 29:22 The Power of Context in Communication
• 31:16 The Unseen Impact of Noise Pollution
• 32:21 How Sound Affects Us: A Deep Dive
• 35:14 The Power of Music and Sound in Shaping Behavior
• 36:47 Crafting the Perfect Setting for Critical Conversations
• 38:48 The Art of Listening: Enhancing Interpersonal Communication
• 48:04 Exploring Silence and Its Varieties
• 56:46 Three Captivating Things

Transcript

  

The Epidemic of Being Right Over Relationships

If there's one thing we like more than looking good, though, it's being right.  It's, it's become an epidemic, all this kind of  tearing people to pieces. It's all about feeling better about ourselves.  Harville Hendricks, he said, you can either be right or be in a relationship.  Please listen carefully. 

Introducing Critical Conversations Podcast

Welcome to Critical Conversations, a podcast for lifelong learners who like to get deep. I'm Abbie Henson. Qualitative criminologist searching for ideas on how to become a more cohesive, healthy, and compassionate society. If you found yourself wanting to have thought provoking deep and sometimes difficult conversations, but just didn't feel well equipped this podcast is for you.

This season provides a 10 step toolkit for having critical conversations guided by my interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, and more. Let's learn together.  

Diving Into the Art of Listening

Welcome to step six of the 10 step toolkit to having a critical conversation. So far, we've learned to become self aware, address our biases, become curious, create safety and conflict, ask questions.

And now we get to learn how to listen. Today's expert is Julian Treasure, a top rated international speaker and award winning author on the power of self awareness. Sound Julian's five Ted talks have been viewed more than 150 million times. One of them is the six most viewed Ted talk of all time. He is the founder of international audio branding consultancy.

The sound agency pioneering the use of innovative soundscapes  in retail and hospitality spaces. This was one of the most fascinating conversations I think I had all season where I had my mind exploded. Expanded to information I had not had before. So hopefully you all feel the same, and I hope you enjoy this critical conversation.

Now, let's get into it.  

Julian Treasure: The Sound Expert

Well, my name is Julian Treasure, and, uh, I guess I got into sound from a very, very early age because hearing is my primary. Sense in different people have different primary senses many people. It's the eyes for me. It's always been the ears  So I remember from a relatively young age sitting in a darkened room with headphones on listening to records it was kind of a religious experience for me in those days and then I became a musician, of course, so I've been a drummer since my early teens and played in bands and made records and things like that.

And I do think musicians listen to the world in a slightly different way to non musicians. There's been quite a lot of research about this recently, about musicians brains, and the fact that playing an instrument helps with spatial consciousness. Coordination with problem solving with, you know, acuity of all kinds mentally, which doesn't surprise me because if you're in a band or an orchestra, you have to listen to all the other instruments simultaneously and quite attentively, otherwise you're not going to play very well.

So it's a multitrack listening and attentive multitrack listening, which I took into my relationship with the world in general, really. And  then I had a long career in marketing. In the. Eighties and nineties in the UK, I launched a company in that period, producing beautiful customer magazines for some big brands like Lexus, Apple, Orange, and so forth.

All the way through that, I was still playing music and still considering the world to sound pretty bad a lot of the time. So when I sold my business, I started a company called the Sound Agency, which was about asking the question, how does your brand sound?  And it was designed to help organizations to start designing the sound they were making instead of just it being an accidental  output. 

So that was really bringing the two sides of me together,  the marketing experience, the brand experience, and also the listening and through part of that, you know, through, through that journey, it, it, it became clear to me as I, Got the chance to do a TED talk. I'd written a book about sound called sound business.

And then I got the chance to do a TED talk about how sound affects us, which is very powerfully. We can talk about that if you like in a minute, it occurred to me that the reason organizations aren't very good at sound is because nobody's listening.  And that was my third TED talk, which was about the importance of listening.

As a human being,  and that's become my passion. So I went on to, there was a fourth TED talk, begging architects to start designing with their ears, as well as their eyes. And the fifth one was about the equally important skill, almost equally important skill of speaking. And that was the TED talk that went completely ballistic, the six months, beautiful time.

And it's seen by, I mean, it's like a football stadium of people every day watch that, which is really mind boggling to me, but wonderful as well, because I think this is all part of a conversation about consciousness, about being present, about being attentive and speaking and listening are.  Incredibly important skills, which have dramatic, dramatic effects on our outcomes in life.

And yet most people consider them to be  capabilities. Don't even realize their skills. You know, we just speak, we just listen. It's what we do. Well, no, they're, they're skills that you can master practice.  And the people who get really good at these skills have huge advantages. in life. One of the things,  I love that.

Understanding Listening vs. Hearing

One of the things that I would love for you to do for our listeners is to define listening, particularly within this realm of skill, because I think one of the things that you do really well is distinguish between hearing,  hearing and listening. And so if you could first define what listening is and how it differs from just hearing.

Sure. Yes. Well, hearing is a capability and it's a physical and then electrical process about which we have little choice. I mean, unless one has damaged hearing, you hear everything around you all the time.  Listening starts with the process of selection. So your brain or you consciously select certain things to pay attention to.

So you don't listen to everything. You listen to certain things. And then the second stage of listening is you then. decode them. You ascribe meaning to them. So my definition of listening is making meaning from sound. That's a process of selecting things to pay attention to and then making them mean something.

And your brain does that very quickly. Obviously hearing is the primary warning sense. So part of this happens at a very low level in the oldest parts of the brain. Is that a dangerous sound that you can hear behind you? which is why hearing is the primary warning sensor. You can hear a sphere all around you.

And I don't know about you, I'm not very good at seeing what's behind me. So there is always this relationship where your brain is testing sound for danger. And that Assists today, even though we're much more sophisticated. So if a car backfires, you're, you're, you will immediately go into fight, flight reflex, and then a little later, your cortex will tell you, Oh, it's a car backfire and we can calm down now, but it's already happened by then.

In fact, we respond.  Far faster to sound than we do to visual input, much, much faster, partly for that reason, which stands to reason, you know, if you were living in a cave a couple of hundred thousand years ago, and there was a noise in the dark, you better be listening because that probably is a bear or a tiger or something that's going to be very threatening.

That's still there right now. Then at a higher level, your brain will be assessing. Have I heard that before? Do I recognize this sound or have I had something like it? Do I know what that implies? What that means? Is it going to require action or any response of any kind? So there's this process of assessing the whole time and preparing responses as need be.

It may be that you Recognize the sound that brings back  a flood of memories. I mean, it's, it's a very deep mind of something in your grandmother's house or something like that. People have that kind of thing happening a lot. We have associations with sounds, which can be very varied. And quite powerful.

And there's a famous European or English former footballer, Wayne Rooney, who apparently can't go to sleep without the sound of a vacuum cleaner running.  You know, we all have our associations and they have effects on the way we behave in our lives. So that's the big difference between.  

The Personal Nature of Listening

And listening, listening is a skill hearing is a capability and listening is we need to develop. 

Yeah. So in thinking about what you were saying about how  our brains are assessing, have I heard this before? Do I know how to respond? Is that. Both with  sound, just like noise, or is it also with the messaging that you're hearing as well? Like, so I've heard this kind of messaging before this kind of word association, or I've heard these kinds of, yeah, these terms or this string of words put together in a way that then signals to me, oh, we're in conflict, or, oh, this is,  You know, and then we get triggered because we've listened to this before, heard this before.

Is that the same kind of. Yes, that's all associations. And, uh, they're very personal, which is why people sometimes say to me, what's the best sound to work to? Well, that's completely up to you. It's whatever works for you. I'm sure there are people in the world who work their very best while listening to loud death metal.

That's not me. But, you know, I have no doubt it is somebody, so you can't generalize for that reason. We all have our own associations, and as you rightly say, a lot of these sounds will be triggers to us. It's something that somebody's said to us in the past that's upset us, and if somebody else says that same phrase or word, we have a reaction, even though it's not meant in that way, perhaps.

What's important is to be conscious. Of listening, listening is work  and it's an action and it's a skill. So if we're conscious that we're doing something, that's really the first, the, the, the, the opening that allows us to become better. Most people are not conscious that they're listening.  And we spend a huge amount of our time doing partial listening, you know, we're doing something else.

It's a multitasking, always on world. There are a huge number of distractions. There's nothing wrong with partial listening per se, as long as we're conscious that that's what we're doing. Because it may be that the person who's talking to us is trying to share something very deep and meaningful. And at that point, we need to be able to go, Oh, hold on, hold on, partial listening is not right here.

Hold on, let me put everything down. Now say that again, what were you saying? So we switch from partial listening to full listening. And Scott Peck said you cannot truly listen to another person and do anything else at the same time. So that true listening, and I wonder when,  dear listener listening to this podcast, when's the last time You gave somebody your full undivided attention, put everything else down, weren't thinking about what you're going to say next, simply listened to the other person.

It's a great gift, you know, and it's one that we very rarely bestow these days.  Yeah, I, I had an experience I remember a couple of years ago where  I was hanging out with a friend and it was in a platonic way. And I remember we were splitting a bottle of wine and watching the sunset and I was having all these anxious thoughts.

What happened if he would make a move and all these things. And I was totally not present. And I remember at one point I was like, You know what? I will know how to handle that situation. If it arises, let me just be here and listen and be part of this. And I felt this wave of anxiety lift, this like blanket of anxiety lift.

And I was able to enter what felt like a real flow state with this person. And it was so  comforting to be able to just give my full attention to someone without distractions around me, but also without the distractions in my head. And I think that's one of the keys to listening. And some of the other episodes that I do in this particular season about having a critical conversation kind of identifies ways in order to release that.

Those more internal noises that can distract from listening, but I, I agree, like giving full attention and being totally present in a moment is so, at least to me in a way, because it's so deeply connecting. And if you can feel safe in that it's, it's so comforting. Yes, the inner voice is often a distraction.

Actually, I distinguish three kinds of listening. In my work, so there's listening, external listening, listening to sound is the one we've been talking about. And we need to understand actually, when we're doing that, that our listening is unique.  And this is something that not many people appreciate.  Your listening is as unique as your fingerprints, because you listen through a whole set of filters.

Some of which are what you were just talking about, assumptions about what's going on in somebody else's head. Okay.  Colors the way we're listening to them. And we can change that as you did in that scenario, which changes are listening entirely. You might have expectations or intentions in any interaction. 

You might have emotions going on and deeper than that. There's the culture you're born into, the language you learn to speak, the values, attitudes, and beliefs. that you pick up along the way. We've all come a different road to this moment here and now, and that means we all listen through slightly different filters, or quite often radically different filters.

So it's a hugely incorrect and very damaging assumption, which I see many, many people making,  to assume everybody listens like I do. They don't.  They don't. And therefore, it's a very valuable exercise if you want to speak powerfully or have deeper connections with people to ask the question, what's the listening I'm speaking into? 

Because that or that group, they're different listening from you. And what is it right here, right now? It changes over time. It changes from person to personal group to group. So it's a real skill to develop.  to ask that question. We'll develop the skill naturally, just keep asking the question, and you become more and more sensitive to the listening you're speaking into.

So that's, that's external listening.  There's also created listening, which is to say you, by your actions and the way you are in life, you create a listening for you. In other people,  so if you're late for every single meeting, people will start inviting you 10 minutes earlier because they know you're a late person.

That's just the listening for you. And sometimes there is none of that because they don't know you at all. Other times they know you very well and we can get into a very tired listening in a relationship where, you know, perhaps where we start to go. I know what you're going to say now. Oh, there's that thing you said again.

And it can become a little bit jaded. So it's a great exercise to try listening to your partner or long term friend or whoever it might be, family member. Try listening to them as if for the first time. Let them surprise you again. That's a great exercise. That kind of listening  is inner listening. And that's where that little voice that you were talking about, the one that came up with  That's where that's in play.

A lot of people have a problem with negative self talk, the kind of critical inner voice, you know, don't you dare go on that dance floor, don't put your hand up in class, don't do this, don't do that. It's, it can be very limiting. The important thing to realize there is that that inner voice is not you.

Part of you, it may be responding to some damage or hurt in the past that it's trying to avoid happening in the future, but it's not you.  If the voice isn't you,  who are you? You're the one listening to the voice and that puts you in a completely different position. It's like being the king or queen on the throne and the jester coming up and lobbing insults or whatever it might be at.

You can tussle its head and say, thanks for sharing. I'm, I'm going to do that anyway.  So. That's a different way to listen to that in a voice. So different aspects of listening, different concepts of listening here from, you know, away from the more traditional one of listening to sound. I love those. 

The Impact of Listening on Critical Conversations

I was just going to ask because this whole season is about critical conversations, how to have a critical conversation and.

I was going to ask why you think listening is important to having a critical conversation, and I feel like  what you just laid out is kind of some groundwork to that answer, but I'll just ask anyway, why do you think listening is such a critical component to having a critical conversation? Well, there are a couple of human tendencies which get in the way of having Critical or any other kind of conversation, really one is looking good, you know, we all like to look good, but if that becomes a driving force in a conversation, it tends to give rise to some not very nice habits, like having to be having to override people and be bigger, better than them all the time, you know, and that can be a matter of exaggeration, even lying to appear bigger than we are. 

Affirmation. So if that's a driving force that you can see it, if somebody comes on stage to give a talk and it's all about them, that doesn't create a very deep or productive relationship with the audience. Whereas if you come on stage and you realize it's not about you, it's about the gift that you can give to people in the audience,  then that's a much more profound relationship.

So looking good is a little bit shallow and it tends to create. You know, shallow relationships, shallow communications. If there's one thing we like more than looking good though, it's being right.  And that is a huge problem. I see in the world today, it's, it's become an epidemic and an addiction. Really?

We're, we're addicted to making people wrong, to outrage, to blame, to pointing the finger. You see this in social media. You see it even in mainstream media and now, and in, you know, things like internet shaming. Pylons, all this kind of  tearing people to pieces, it's all about feeling better about ourselves.

I'm right because that person's wrong,  elevates me. So that tendency of being right is enormously destructive in having critical or empathic conversations. Harville Hendricks, who developed the imago method, is a great teacher and author. He said, you can either be right or be in a relationship.  And, uh, I think there's a lot of truth in that. 

This is a thing that we need to resist. And it's a thing that, you know, this is what makes me so sad that we don't teach children listening skills in school because they come out of school, not very good at listening to other people. And certainly with  the algorithms in the internet, you know, we get more and more into communing with people we agree with already.

Never being challenged.  And we're getting into a way of being where even in corporate life, in relationships, it's difficult for B, it becomes more and more difficult for people to entertain challenge, which is crucial, of course, you know, the, the Greeks used to have. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which is a stronger union of those two opposing forces.

Something good comes out at the end.  But if we're not willing to Brooke challenge in any way, shape, or form, we're not even willing to tolerate it.  That's a very dangerous world. It's a world of caricaturing other people, demonizing them and forming mobs and hating people. And, you know, the end of that slippery slope is you disagree with me, I'll kill you, which is.

You know, a solution we are seeing in the world at the moment, and it's very concerning to me. It's not a world I want my children growing up in. The solution to all of this is listening.  Conscious listening always creates. understanding.  And I gave a TEDx talk some years ago in Athens, the cradle of democracy, where I called the talk, the sound of democracy.

And I said, the sound of democracy is listening  because without that, without that understanding of other people, how can we live next door to people with whom we fundamentally  disagree? And there's a, there's a, uh, a process that I teach in, in my work, which I think is really powerful for conflict conversations or difficult conversations. 

I call it 

. It's RVSEC. The R is to reflect what you've just heard. So that's Kate, that's taken from therapy, therapeutic professions and education, where you repeat what you just heard exactly without coloring it or interpreting it at all. So what I heard you say is dot, dot, dot. And that leaves the other person feeling heard. 

The V is the most important step of the whole thing, which is to validate.  Even if you disagree with somebody, you can validate them.  You can say, I absolutely disagree with you, but I can see why you would think that.  Just that effort to reach out in your heart and understand why somebody would believe that they're different from you.

They have different life experience. They have a whole different perspective.  As soon as you validate. You're creating possibilities which don't exist if you invalidate. The moment you say that's just ridiculous, that's stupid. How could you possibly think that? You, you're into  absolute head butting conflict.

The S of RVSEC is to summarize  using the words so, so, so. And parceling stuff up. So what you, what we've agreed is this, or so, so let me, let me get that straight. This is what you've just been expressing and that's why, and so forth. It's like closing the doors in a long corridor of a conversation. You can actually lock things down and move on to the next thing. 

The E is empathize.  where it's relevant to do so, that must have been really tough for you. Wow. I can't imagine how that must have felt. That kind of empathy builds rapport and it, it moves you through to the C, which is create. So if you've validated, even if you disagree with somebody, then we're now Kind of pointing in the same direction, we're not opposing each other and we can start to consider how we can create something together out of our different views.

And it may be something that's better than either of our initial positions. So that I think is a way of seeing a route through a difficult conversation, perhaps with somebody we don't like, we don't understand, we don't agree with. We can do all of those things. And at the end, we can still create something with them.

I've been in couples counseling in the past, and the R is very much the thing that is taught in terms of the relaying back of this is what I heard. And I think  one of the things that is so important there is the uniqueness of the listening that you spoke to where  you have to relay it back. Because of the filters that you were talking about, because of the fact that so much of our listening is colored by our own assumptions and our own emotions.

And so what we hear or what, how we are listening, as you said, what is the listening I'm speaking into? So the unique listening that I'm doing in this conversation may misconstrue your words. And I may hear them differently. And so the importance of that relay is to say I'm hoping that we're listening or we're communicating on that same wavelength.

And  it's funny that you brought that up because that was something that I was just speaking with my partner about this past weekend was asking him, can you relay what I just said back just to check in? And I, I think that that's,  such an important component, especially in the context of the unique listening.

I hadn't thought about it within that context.  Definitely. And, uh, it brings into place semantics, of course, this is all even more powerful. If you're talking to people in different cultures or who speak a different language and there's translation going on, but semantics, you know, you have any word has got a denotation, which is what it actually means like dog, we know what a dog is, but then around that there's connotation, which is to our associations or interpretations of what that means. 

There was an advertising campaign a few years back in the UK for a phone brand. And the strapline was be more dog  by which they meant, you know, be more happy, loyal, you know, uncomplicated, enthusiastic, and all that kind of stuff that goes with, you know, Dogness, as opposed to cats, of course, so, I mean, I have dogs, you can tell, say, dogs have, dogs have masters, cats have servants, or cats have staff.

So, you know, that, that connotation can be very different from person to person. And somebody who's been bitten or attacked by a dog has a completely different connotation for the word dog to the one I do, for example. Right. So, as you absolutely rightly say, it's quite possible for two people to listen to the same words and understand the meaning.

Completely different things and their assumptions, you know, I talked briefly about assumptions before they're very, very important.  So you could have somebody who's had a very tough life and being, you know, hurt a lot by people who has developed the assumption that people think I'm useless and they walk into a hotel and the bell person at the door says, can I take your bag, sir?

And he says. No, thank you. I'm perfectly capable of carrying my own bag and storks off and the next person comes in who's had a very happy and uncomplicated life. Can I take your bags? Oh, yeah. Thank you very much.  So, you know, the assumption about what's going on in somebody else's head or about how people perceive us generally, that varies wildly from person to person.

And it can color  our understanding of exactly the same words. Enormously. So it can be a bit of a minefield, of course, all of this, which is where I think we, we can benefit from a simple system like the RVSEC. Yeah. 

Exploring the Subconscious Influence of Sound

So with the,  so outside of just the direct line of communication, I'm wondering how important  the setting noise is. 

for having a critical conversation. So one of the things that I was hearing you speak about before  was about how a lot of your companies that you work with, especially retail companies, you create nature soundscapes for those companies because it keeps people shopping longer and it keeps people in the store longer.

And you spoke about this, Experiment that occurred, which I would love for you to talk about with the selling of the wine and the music for the German wine and the French wine. But so much of our what you were kind of saying, there's this conscious listening, but then there's the hearing that's happening subconsciously of what's around us. 

But the subconscious hearing is very much impacting the ways that we're engaging with the world and how we're communicating and relating. And so I'm wondering, even if you're doing the RV sec with the person or group that you are engaged with, how important is the surrounding noise to influence the conversation at hand?

Yeah, it's crucial. The fundamental of, at the heart of my work is that speaking and listening are in a circular relationship,  not linear, circular, because the way I speak affects the way you listen and vice versa. Um, and that all happens within a context and the context is very often noise. Noise is an incredibly, major problem in the world.

Although little regarded, you don't get many politicians saying vote for me, I'll make it quieter. 

The Unseen Impact of Noise Pollution

Get any,  but noise is just behind air pollution. There's a killer and it's blighting the lives of  tens, even hundreds of millions of people across the world. Like in Europe, there are at least 8 million people who are having their sleep wrecked night after night by traffic noise.

That's way above the recommended maximum.  So You know, you think about how that plays out in their lives when they have had terrible sleep. It's going to create accidents, arguments, ill health,  sleep deprivation over a long period of time. And we now know that exposure to even moderate levels of noise, 65 decibels is the average noise level in a German classroom now. 

Teachers who are exposed to that day after day are probably increasing their risk of heart attack. quite substantially. So they may well be shortening their lives by working in that environment. So there are many issues with noise. And as you rightly say, it's something we need to start paying attention to because sound affects us.

How Sound Affects Us: A Deep Dive

And I distinguish four ways in which sound affects us. And they're very powerful. First of all, physiologically. Sound changes what happens in our bodies, we get entrained, you know, if I drop you in a nightclub with dance music at 140 beats per minute at 100 decibels, your heart rate will go up immediately,  just in the same way, if there's a sudden noise behind you, as you know, we talked about earlier,  you have your fight flight response immediately, so heart rate, breathing, hormone secretions, even brainwaves, they're all affected by the sound around us.

The second thing that sound does to us is it changes our feelings.  Music is the most  obvious example of that. So I'm sure you can immediately think of a song that would make you happy or a song that would make you sad. And that's again, possibly quite due to associations of those songs with events. But music isn't the only sound that changes our feelings.

And as you said, the sound agency we've often used. For example, birdsong in indoor spaces, because birdsong is a sound that most people like. It's also a sound that's associated with safety.  When the birds are happily singing, things are normally okay. So it leaves people feeling secure. And of course, mentally alert, because when the birds are singing, it's time to be awake.

It's a great sound to work to, if you're looking for a sound to work to, birdsong is very good.  The third way a sound affects us is cognitively. Coming on to work, it changes how well we can think. And we all know that the most distracting sound of all is other people's conversation.  Again, as you said earlier, we're programmed to decode language.

It's the most significant sound around us.  We've been using complex language for well over a hundred thousand years.  So we are very used to it being the most important sound. And that's why if somebody's talking about their big night out last night behind you, when you're trying to write or do numbers, it's really frustrating because we can't understand two people talking at the same time.

We have limited audio bandwidth.  And that's one person talking behind you is taking out one of your roughly 1. 6 that you can understand at the same time, which doesn't leave you much space to listen to the voice in your head that you need to listen to when you're writing. Or calculating or doing solo work like that, which is why in open plan offices, many people are just a third as productive as they would be in quiet working spaces. 

And that is a big problem around the world because many organizations don't provide enough quiet working space for people to move to if they want to do Uh, that kind of concentrated solo working. So open plan offices are having a dramatically awful effect on people's productivity. 

The Power of Music and Sound in Our Lives

And the final way sound affects us is it changes what we do. 

And that comes back to your request to talk about the wine. This is a wonderful study that really shows how powerfully sound can change what we do. They had two displays of wine in a supermarket, absolutely identical visual displays. One, a French wine. One of German wine and the academics who devised this study simply alternated a music condition day after day.

So on day one, they had a bit of French music on day two, a bit of German music and keep that alternating for months. So what happened on the French music days, French wine outsold German wine by three bottles to one, which may be not surprising because it does sell more. In the world stage, but  on the German music days, German wine outsold French wine by two bottles to one.

And that is a massive shift in people's purchasing.  And this was not conscious.  The people who were asked coming out of the supermarket hadn't even noticed the music. So it wasn't German music. Therefore I should buy German wine. It's unconscious. So there's part of your brain always. Processing the sound around, and this was your subconscious  just being put in the mood for a bit of German wine by the, the sound condition.

So if that's how powerfully unnoticed sound is affecting us, I think we all need to start paying more attention to it.  Yeah, yeah. 

Crafting the Perfect Setting for Critical Conversations

So in a critical conversation, if you know that you're going to have  a critical conversation with someone or you know that you're stepping into a debate, or you know that you need to sit down with a friend or partner and kind of air something or speak intensely or intimately about something,  what would be the best setting?

What would be the best sound to curate the space?  Well, again, that's a very general question and everybody's different. So I would suggest discussing, you know, what would work best, you know, something really important to talk about with you. First of all, I'm a great believer in agreements here. So I've got something really important to say, say, can you give me 10 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever it is, five minutes of your undivided attention? 

No. Okay. When, when would you be able to, so you make an appointment and you make an agreement. And I think once you've got that agreement, even very often people say to me, what about somebody who just won't listen to me? This agreement is a great answer to that because if they then start picking up their phone and doing their email or whatever, you have a right, I think at that point to say, you did say you'd give me your attention here.

So that's the first thing is to set a context of them listening to you.  You're the sender.  And the second thing then given that is, you know, you could say, would you like peace and quiet, or would you like some this sound or that sound or whatever sound it might be, you might want a little string quartet or, you know, you might want death metal.

I don't know  what works. For you and the person you're talking to best, very often peace and quiet is good, but some people find silence threatening and they would rather have some background sound on, maybe nature sound or maybe music of some kind, so it'll be different for everybody, but being conscious.

What you're putting in the background is the key. 

The Art of Listening: Enhancing Interpersonal Communication

You know, I talk about four C's of listening and the first C is always consciousness, being conscious of what you're doing, how you're listening, how the other person is listening. The second C is commitment because it takes time and effort to listen properly to somebody.

You have to put things down and we're not used to doing that. The third C is compassion. And that is seeking to understand the other person. You know, everybody does everything for a perfectly good reason in their world. Might not be the same in your world. It might appear very weird, but they've done it for a reason.

So seeking to understand the other person is, is hugely important. And the fourth C is curiosity. Treating everybody as an opportunity to learn. You know, it might be that you learn how not to do something,  it often is, but everybody's an opportunity to learn something. And you know, it's, the arrogance of dismissing people immediately is I think very sad.

There's a humility in it. curiosity,  which I think is very, very important in being a growing and evolving human being. Yeah. One of the things I was just thinking, you're saying  that listening allows you to, or a type of listening allows you to feel understood. And I was thinking that In the senses, the tying of the senses,  there's this perception of feeling seen as you're heard, right?

So, oh, I feel like you see me when you hear me.  And I think that's really interesting. Absolutely. I'm not synesthetic. I do know people who are, and it's a very interesting condition to have synesthesia  where the senses are sort of crossed over and people  hear colors or smell sounds, but yes, I'm sure there is.

Because many people are visual, I'm sure that that metaphor of finally being seen by somebody is very powerful for a lot of people. It was in Avatar, wasn't it? That phrase was very powerful. So, yes, people tend to use language which is kind of aligned with their primary sense. So I would much more be saying, I hear you, or that sounds good to me, as opposed to people who might say, you know, look at this, or how do you feel, or whatever it might be.

So it's quite interesting. I mean, that's kind of NLP stuff, isn't it? But it's quite interesting to try and detect what people's primary sense is. And, you know, once you know that you can start to talk to them in a way they're going to understand far better. Right.  Yeah. I, so in thinking about the physio physiological impact of sound, I was just thinking about the curation of.

the space and  the perception, how perceptions change due to sound. And so thinking about how if you're to have a critical conversation with someone or no, you set the appointment, you're sitting down and thinking about the beats per minute, right? Like if you are in, if you're already nervous or know that this There's a lot of weight to this conversation.

Then you set a beats per minute that heightens your physiological response. You might be sending someone into a fight or flight unconsciously prior to even engaging in what could be seen as an intimidating conversation. And so being conscious, not only of the conversation, but the setting of the conversation and the sound of the conversation within that setting. 

I'm realizing just. through our conversation how important that is and I'd never really given it much thought. You only have to think about the effect of sound and music in movies to realize that it completely changes the framing for any given situation. Very often they'll introduce a sound. In advance of the picture changing to prepare you or, or, you know, you'll, you'll get a sound, you think, Oh, something bad's going to happen.

You won't, you won't think that, but you'll feel it immediately, intuitively. And of course, music, I don't know if you've ever seen a film without the sound effects and the music, it's a pale shadow, it's a tiny, tiny amount of the emotional impact that the film has with all the sounds. So yes, if you're going to have a critical conversation, Certainly it would be worth thinking about the kind of backdrop of sound that you want to have.

And it might be, if it's going to be fractious, difficult, possibly conflicted, you might want to have some very gentle, calming, soothing,  kind of ambient music or very beautiful, slow, classical music of some kind in order to keep the mood chilled and calm. Whereas if you're trying to,  you know,  inspire somebody and get them up before a big event or something, then you want probably something that's much faster BPM and more inspiring and exciting.

So sound, music, sound, it, they all have huge impacts on us.  And the context is always critical. Right. So to give our, one of the things that you said right off the bat, is that listening is a skill. skill and it can be honed. And so what are some of the tangible steps that our listeners can do to become better listeners?

Practical Steps to Becoming a Better Listener

Well, I think the first, and it's a fairly simple thing. The first exercise I'd recommend is silence. Giving yourself a few minutes of silence a few times a day is a really wonderful exercise. We are surrounded by noise a great deal of the time, especially those of us who live in cities. I mean, I don't. I live in a remote island off the north coast of Scotland, so you can tell what I think about city living now.

But if you are in a city, there's constant backdrop of noise, and it's really important to give your ears a rest. You recalibrate. So get yourself to the quietest space you can. And if you can't get absolute silence, then tranquility is fine. Um, you can go to some beautiful nature spot, for example, that's very good for you too.

And commune with silence. Just be with yourself in the silence, let your ears rest and recalibrate. And you will listen afresh when you go back into the fray. Silence is a great first exercise. Uh, I think there's another one. Uh, which I enjoy a great deal, which I call savoring. So  stares with  food, for example, you know, what you put in your mouth, you know, if it doesn't taste good, you'll spit it out or never have it again.

We are always savoring food for pleasure and also for safety.  Well, you can do the same thing with sound. So it's kind of like tasting the sound that's around you, becoming more conscious of its impact on you. Is it nutritious or healthy? Is it enhancing your well being? Is it making you happy? Is it good for your productivity?

So people often say, what should I, what sound should I work to? As I said, there's no one answer to that, but experiment. And there's a great thing you can do in your house or flat or wherever you live is to go into each room and close your eyes. and listen to the sound in that room and ask yourself the question, is this the best sound I could have in here to support whatever it is I want to do in this room?

It might be wood, it might be rest, it might be cook, whatever it is, you know, we tend to accept the sound around us as a given. No, it's not. It's very easy now with small loudspeakers. Many people have got smart speakers at home. You can have pretty much any sound you want in a room. Just talk to it and say, Hey, whatever name it is, I'm not going to say it right now or somebody's going to interrupt us.

Uh, give me the sound of seagulls on a beach. And hey, presto, that's what you will have. So never has it been easier really to design sound around us to think, what would I like now? What would work for me now? That's savoring sound. And, you know, there are many sounds around us that you can enjoy. I remember I had a, I had a tumble dryer years ago, which, Had the ca, the cadence of that tumble dry was a waltz.

It went ong ka  ong all the time, and it was a happy little waltz. It used to make me quite happy listening to it. I might be a sad individual, but you can tease out pleasure in almost any sound. And if you can't, then maybe it's not doing you any good. Maybe it's a sound that you need to perhaps remove. It might be buzzes.

Hums, a banging door.  Little irritations that we just get used to, well, don't. Listen to them, savour them, and ask yourself all the time, Is this the best that I could have around me? The most nourishing sound I could have around me? So there's a couple of exercises which will help people to become more and more conscious and acute in their listening. 

Yeah, those are great. 

Exploring Silence and Its Varieties

One of the things that I have been curious about is defining silence, given  that most of us can't enter a vacuum sealed room.  And so, how do we define, is, is, Is silence a subjective experience? And because what I've heard is that silence is the absence of noise and noise is a subjective definition.

Your noise might be different than my noise. I might really appreciate, you might love that noise of the dryer and that noise drives me insane, right? And so silence, what I've heard is that silence is the absence of noise, which Then if noise is subjective, then silence is subjective. So would your silence in the three minute exercise be different than my silence?

Well, first you have to ask the question, does it matter? I think silence, if you define it slightly more broadly, silence is the absence of sound, not noise. Noise, as you say, is a subjective categorization of  sounds that are unpleasant, and, or whilst we can agree on quite a wide range of things that we, pretty much anybody would say are noise, and like, The sound of somebody else's baby crying, for example, is noise to almost everybody, possibly not to that baby's mother, where it's an important signal.

But, you know, there are sounds which are uncomfortable for us because we're, I mean, in that case, we're programmed to do something about a crying baby and we can't. Right. If you're sitting in a plane and it's somebody else's baby, there's nothing you can do apart from suffer genetically inspired guilt or anxiety that it creates.

So yes, absence of sound.  And there is, you know, virtually no such thing really as silence. I mean, I've been in anechoic chambers, and they are pretty spooky places, you know. If I turn to the wall in an anechoic chamber and speak, you wouldn't hear anything at all. Because my voice would be absorbed by the wall, it wouldn't bounce back, which is what we're used to in any room.

It's quite spooky. But, and I think the quietest one in the world now is at Microsoft in Redmond. www. microsoft. com in Washington, which minus 43 decibels or something ridiculous like that. So yeah, they're uncomfortable places. There isn't even silence in space and my new book, which will be out in spring next year, which is called sound effects.

I did a lot of research about cosmic sound and sounded, I mean, there's a huge amount of sand in space. It's just incredibly long wavelength.  So far too low for. human ears to hear you. If you had ears the size of a galaxy, you might hear some of it, but wavelengths, you know, light years in length, but these sounds come out of extraordinary objects like black holes or pulsars.

And of course, sound was very involved in the formation of the galaxy. It pretty much created the changes in density, which eventually created stars and galaxies and so forth. So there isn't really.  An absolute definition of silence, I don't think, and I'm not sure it matters a lot to, to you or to me,  if we go somewhere that's ultimately peaceful and we're not being disturbed or distracted by unwanted sound,  that's fine.

You know, it's as good for you to be in tranquility, which might be a forest glade with some gentle birdsong and maybe a bubbling brook. Well, how can you get more pleasant than that?  I would say, I mean, silence is very important as a concept. Evelyn Glennie, Dame Evelyn Glennie, who's a wonderful percussionist, who incidentally is profoundly deaf and learned to hear with her entire body by perceiving vibrations.

She says silence is a sound, and I tend to agree with her. So, you know, you can't even say silence is absence of all sound. It is kind of a sound, and there are varieties of it. The silence of, I've been on up in high mountains above the tree line. When there's no wind and there are no birds up there, that's a massive, expansive, extraordinary, infinite silence, which is very different to the silence if you go inside a cave, deep in a cave, and it's pitch black, and you sit quietly, that's a kind of,  cloying, enveloping, threatening silence.

So I think there are different qualities of silence as well as whatever your definition is being potentially very different,  but it's the gaps between the words that make sense of languages, the gaps between the notes that make sense of music. So silence is essential. Otherwise everything is just, we lose all context.

I love that. What would you say for someone, because I know my father as well as my partner both suffer from tinnitus.  And so for someone who's seeking tranquility or seeking silence and has tinnitus, is there anything in your work that has soothed that experience? Well, that's very difficult. I have it as well, because I've been a drummer for years and hitting cymbals, you know, three feet away from your ears is not the most ideal practice for a long time. 

There's no cure for tinnitus or tinnitus. It's, it's, uh, not that anybody knows in the world at the moment. A kind of ringing in the ears, mine is eight kilohertz roughly, and it's always present. The, the cure for that, it really is to train your attention away from it. It helps, In that case, it helps to have some sound around you, so I would say that probably people with tinnitus would prefer the Bubbling Brook and the Gentle Bird Song to complete silence, because in complete silence, the only sound you're going to hear is the ringing in the ears and it's going to be more obvious to you.

So yes, it's a difficult condition and it, you know, largely due to hearing damage at some point through loud noise. And yeah, it, it takes, I think the mental side of it is the most important, but you know, I'm sure it was possible to find sounds that are as calming as sound as silence for people with tinnitus, which would mask that tinnitus and leave you still very tranquil.

Right. So doing the summary,  so to summarize, we are informing our listeners to engage in RVSEC when engaging in interpersonal conversation and to practice listening and hone the skill of listening to do the three minute in silence daily. And. To find the savoring, so to listen to noise and to evaluate its impact on us.

Is that correct?  Yeah, very good summary. Good. I, I, I  was listening to some of your, some of your other works and I just, I love this topic because I do think it is so impactful and so deeply part of our daily lives and yet is so.  unthought of, right? It just is completely absent from our vocabulary and our consciousness and sort of bring awareness in such a heightened way to something that is so critical and yet so subtle is so important.

So I'm so glad that we're getting into this because I do think it is absolutely a vital component to having a critical conversation.  Well, thank you for the opportunity to spread the message. It's my passion in life and I've got workshops now on this which I've developed and I'm very excited about giving and my new book is coming out next year, which will contain quite a lot about listening.

It's more about sound than listening. This one, the last one, how to be heard was more about the skill of listening. Actually, I called it how to be heard because people are so much keener to be heard than they are to listen. Mm. Perhaps. whisper it. Most of that book's about listening. Kind of a Trojan horse in there.

So yeah, thank you for the opportunity. I hope everybody's going to go out and be conscious in their listening now, which changes everything. 

Personal Reflections and Recommendations

Yeah, and I like to just end every podcast episode just switching gears a little the three things outside of listening that are keeping your attention right now, whether it's a podcast, a book, a show, anything that your mind is just held on recently. 

three things. We have just been revisiting Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings.  We're a bit obsessed by it in my family. And it's been absolutely wonderful watching it in ultra high definition. Now that you can get these, you know, amazing definition DVDs, there's stuff that every frame I'm seeing stuff I've never noticed before.

So that's definitely holding my attention. I think Chris Anderson's book, Infectious Generosity.  has been a major revelation to me. It's a wonderful concept. Chris Anderson is the head of TED and you know, he actually did that with TED, putting it online for free for people to see and everybody tells him you're mad.

Why would anybody come and pay to  attend a conference when they can see everything online for free? But all it did was make TED a huge brand in the world. And spread the ideas worth spreading far, far wider. So he's passionate about this idea. And I think the book is absolutely beautiful. And then the other thing which I am obsessed by at the moment is Steven Wilson's new album, which is called the Harmony Codex.

Steven Wilson is an. English musician and producer. He's often described as the, the most successful British musician  or artist that nobody's heard of. Anybody who's into prog  would probably have heard of him and his bands, the porcupine tree and no man and so forth, but.  His new album is a solo album, and it's the most extraordinary piece of production I've ever come across.

I'm a very into production,  of course, because sound is my thing. It is the most magnificent and unbelievable piece of work. So yes, I've got that on kind of repeat play at the moment. And every time I hear it, it's in another goose bump moment, really. Yeah. So those three things. It's very much I'm enjoying, savoring it.

I love that. Well, thank you again so much for joining me and speaking about this. Pleasure. Thanks for having me. 

Thank you so much for joining me in my critical conversation with Julian Treasure. This was step six in this season's 10 episode toolkit for having a critical conversation. And I hope you found this episode as exciting as it was. I led a book club event following this interview, and one of the attendees was actually the Department of Transit's Director of Noise, which I found fascinating and also had so much to talk to him about after this, so that was very cool.

I'm also someone who tends to work in complete silence at home, no distractions. But that can also make me stir crazy. So since doing this interview, I've been going to cafes and turning on a 12 hour sound machine episode of bird sounds, listening with my noise canceling headphones. And I think that's now the only way I can do work out in public.

It's really enjoyable and not disturbing. I also love the idea of thinking about silence as a sound and how silence gives words and phrases meaning, how our pauses provide context and understanding. And honestly, I'm just really loving how all these episodes are building off of each other. So I'll be doing a Q& A with Julian following the release of this episode, so be sure to follow What's Just on all social platforms so that you can submit your questions and comments.

Links to all socials can be found in the show notes. Please leave a review, subscribe, share, leave a review, leave a review,  and we'll be back next week with step seven, learning to be vulnerable. So stay critical, stay connected, and I'll see you next time.