How many of you have to stand in front of people and give presentations? Well, if you ever have to do this, then the last part of this session will be really useful for you, I think. I’ve had the honor of doing five TED Talks, and the TED stage is a pretty intimidating place to stand. Also, I travel the world doing this, speaking at conferences and large events, and I’m really delighted to pass on to you some of the things I’ve learned over those years.

So, without further ado, let’s just revisit the principal thesis of my book and all of my work, which is that speaking and listening are not related in a straight line like this. [visual] It’s a common misconception. Actually, speaking and listening exist in a circular relationship. The way I speak affects the way you listen, the way you listen affects the way I speak, and, more than that, the way I speak will affect the way you speak, and the way I listen will affect the way you listen. Which is why, if the key for you is building relationships, being understood by somebody is as equally good and important as being a good listener, as well as having the skills of great speaking.

We are going to cover both of those things, and, as I said the other day, they happen in a context that is not always ideal. Now, I don’t have time today to go into context. I’ve got a whole TED Talk about oral architecture and the effect it has on our communication and the spaces around us, the noise around us. However, we don’t want to go into that today. I would just urge you to be conscious of the context and maybe plan it. If you have an important conversation to have, think about where and think about whether acoustics or noise are going to support you or really get in the way.

Now, there are three outcomes for good speaking and good listening, and they are very important things. The skills of speaking and listening, if you’re good at them, will harness your happiness and your effectiveness as a human being — in your work it will make a difference in the world, whatever you’re committed to — and also your well-being, how healthy you are. Those three things are the outcomes, so it’s worth doing them right. Also, I would just like to suggest to you that you can do this mentally or, if you want to write something down, that you set a target of having three things you take away with you, three actions. I’d love this to be not one of those talks where you go, “Oh yeah, that was really interesting. I can’t remember what he said, but it was good.”

So, how about three things, which start with “I will” or “I will not.” How about listening to me through that lens and trying to pick out three things that will make a difference in your life that you will change as a result of some of the things that we are going to discuss? That’s an invitation for you.

Also, along the way, I’m going to present you with some exercises, something I suggest you do. They will look like this big blue screen; you can’t miss them. [visual] By all means, photograph the screen, but you’re going to get all of this afterward, so you can relax and just be interested to know, “Oh, that’s what I might do when I get home.”

Now, why do we not do these things so well? The world really is focused on these, isn’t it? [visual] Rooms, spaces are designed for the eye; we’re very focused on visual communication. When you think about communication — email, text, instant messaging — it’s all for the eyes and for the fingers. Speaking has been around a lot longer than writing, for about 100,000 years. Actually, we’ve been using complex language, writing, just 4,000 years. Now, they have different strengths and weaknesses. I’m not saying that writing is anything other than wonderful. I am saying that we have forgotten some of the benefits of speaking. How often do we send an email to somebody instead of phoning them up, which is so much more powerful if you have an important message to put across?

Now, written communication becomes a blizzard. I don’t know about you, but it’s a constant struggle for me to keep my inboxes under control. I know people who’ve got 2,000 messages in their inbox, and that’s like dragging a huge statue around with you, isn’t it? So this inbound is always compromising the way that we are listening. We have gone pretty unconscious in our relationship with sound actually. I mean, when was the last time you thought about sound? And, yet, sound affects you in four powerful ways. With speaking being sound, I think it’s very important to give you a basic understanding of this, so I’m going to share those four ways with you.

Everyday sound is affecting you in these four ways; here’s the first one. [audio] Noise like this around us is why we’ve gone unconscious. I will move on to the first way sound affects you. [audio] That’s quite gentle. That’s a little, tiny shot of cortisol to your fight-or-flight hormone. [audio] If your alarm clock at home sounds like that, please change it; it’s not good for you to wake up to a sudden jolt like that. Hearing is your primary warning sense. You will interpret any sudden or unexplained sound as a threat; it’s the safe way to be. So sound affects your heart rate, your breathing, your hormone secretions and even your brain waves. I can calm you down again with a little bit of this gentle surf, some of it outside as well. [audio] It’s a very good sound. If you ever have problems sleeping, please do deploy this. This is a wonderful way to allow yourself to sleep. I won’t leave it on very long right now if that’s all right.

The second way sound affects you is psychological. This piece of music is not going to make you feel happy; it wasn’t designed to make you feel happy. [audio] Music carries enormous emotional impact all the time and is not the only sound that changes our emotions. In my company, The Sound Agency, we deploy birdsong in many spaces because people feel secure when they hear birdsongs. We learned for hundreds of thousands of years that when the birds are singing like this, things are normally safe. Also, it’s nature’s alarm clock — time to be awake and alert — so it’s a very good sound for waking to.

The third way sound affects you is cognitively. You can’t understand two people talking at the same time or, in this case, one person talking twice. [audio] You can’t do it, can you? We have band width for 1.6 human conversations, so if you work in an office that sounds like this, it’s extremely difficult to concentrate if you can hear one conversation. [audio] Now, you may know this by your own experience. An open plan is great for collaboration, but it’s rubbish for concentration. And, unfortunately, we are really falling into the trap of thinking one size fits all for all offices and open planning the entire world. We need quiet working places, and that’s a whole different talk. We’ll move on.

The last way sound affects you is behaviorally, so ask yourself, Is this person going to drive at a steady 28 miles per hour? Perhaps not; this kind of sound changes our behavior in pretty fundamental ways. [audio] Very simply, we will move away from unpleasant sound if we can, so if I were to put this sound on and leave it for the next 45 minutes or so and go to the beach, of course you would. [audio] So we tend to move away from unpleasant sounds even if we’re not conscious of it. Sound powerfully changes your behavior; I’ll give you a wonderful example of how that happens.

This is a study done by some academics. In a store there were two displays in a supermarket, one with French wine, one with German wine. The visual displays were absolutely identical. There was nothing between them at all; all they did was to alternate the music, so on day one you had a little bit of this, and on day two a little bit of that. So what happened? On the French music days, French wine outsold German wine by five bottles to one, which may not be surprising as it does sell more on the world stage. But on the German music days, German wine outsold French wine by two bottles to one. Now, this is not you and me going in and saying, “Ah! German music. Therefore, I should buy German wine.” It doesn’t work like that. This is unconscious, and this is how much sound is affecting you and your behavior every day. It’s worth becoming conscious of the sounds around you so that you can become conscious of whether these effects are helping you or hindering you.

Now, let’s have a look at the dark side of communication. The dark side, of course, in “Star Wars” comes from fear, and so does the dark side of communication; it’s all about fear. These two things that I mentioned are absolutely crucial. Looking good — it is a human instinct to look good and I think gives rise to competitive speaking — having to be bigger and better than the other person. It gives rise to speech writing, which is thinking toward my next piece of brilliant dialogue instead of listening to the person in front of me. If looking good is driving your communication, if you just want to look good in front of people, it’s not effective. People can generally sense that. And the other thing, of course, which we love even more than looking good, is being right, and the easiest way to be right is to make someone else wrong. There’s a wonderful quote that says, “You can either be right or be in a relationship,” and I think there is a lot of truth in that.

If being right is driving the communication, it tends to make others wrong. It denigrates them and is an issue in the communication process; it’s not seeking to understand the other person. Now, those two things are very much behind what I call the seven deadly sins, and I’m going to go through those very quickly with you now — the seven deadly sins of communication. I am not saying never do these seven things; I am saying that if you do them a lot, if they become very habitual for you, they will tend to make you hard to listen to, and they will be in the way of your being understood and able to communicate powerfully with other people. So what are the seven deadly sins? Here is the first one: gossip. By this I mean speaking ill of somebody who is not present. It’s not nice, is very often fabricated or embroidered and not true. And you know that, although it is very seductive to listen to gossip, when you walk away, who are they going to be gossiping about? It’s you. It’s a form of communication that, if you are getting into the habit of doing, really undermines the respect people will have for you. Try not to gossip too much.

The second deadly sin is condemning, judging and finding wanting. This is very common. Unfortunately, there are people who always want to find fault with other people. Do you know somebody like that? You may have worked with people like that — nothing’s ever good enough; everything has to be blamed and judged. It’s not easy to be around people like that.

The third deadly sin is negativity. My mother, toward the end of her life, sadly became very negative. I remember taking a newspaper to her one day, and I said, “Oh look, it’s October the 1st,” and she said, “I know, isn’t that dreadful?” Well, if October the 1st is dreadful, what hope is there really? Her worldview at that point had become “everything is dreadful,” the opposite of “The Lego Movie,” really. Everything is dreadful — that was her worldview — and it is draining to be around people like that, isn’t it? “Oh, look the sun’s out.” “It’ll be raining later.” You have to go away and replenish your batteries if somebody’s being very negative. Try to watch out for the word “not.” Just monitor how often that word comes up in your communication; it’s a good barometer. Next, another form of negativity, complaining, the British national pastime, of course. We do it a lot. I’m not saying don’t complain in a restaurant; if it’s wrong, complain. But if it’s the weather or a sport or something you can’t influence, complaining is just viral misery, spreading misery around a place and not worth doing, and it’s hard to be around people like that all the time.

Next is excuses. We’ve all done this: “It’s not my fault.” “What can I do?” We’d rather put the blame on somebody else. I know people you could describe as blame throwers. They’re just always “It’s somebody else’s fault”; “It’s something else’s fault”; “It’s never my fault.” Do you know that if it’s never your fault, you learn nothing? We learn by being out-thought, by saying “sorry” and by amending the behavior and saying, “This is what I’m going to put in place to make sure that it doesn’t happened again; I’ve learned a lesson there.” If it’s never your fault, you don’t learn.

And then we have exaggeration, leading to outright lying. This can be very habitual; it starts with a little embroidery. I am very against the devaluation of language. For example, a few years ago it was fine to be excited, but now you have to be super excited, don’t you? And probably in a few years you will have to be super, super excited because super excited won’t be enough. So language tends to be devalued. We lose words in that way, and we get into the habit of exaggeration and hyperbole. It’s a very good exercise to say exactly what you mean, and that’s a tough one.

The final deadly sin is dogmatism, or “my way or the highway.” My opinion is a fact. Opinions and facts are two different things, and we need to distinguish between them carefully in order to be well-heard by other people.

We have the circle of speaking and listening, so let’s consider listening in a little bit more detail. I actually distinguish between three types of listening, and I’m very briefly going to touch on these. You may not have thought there were different types of listening.

First of all, let’s consider inner listening, or listening to the little voice inside you, the one that just said, “What little voice is he talking about?” You have a little voice in your head. It is not necessarily you; a lot of people struggle with negative self-talk: “Don’t you dare go on that dance floor,” “Don’t do that, you’ll make a fool of yourself,” “Don’t put your hand up.” You know that little voice that’s restraining you from doing things sometimes? Well, there is an important and a potentially transformational realization here. You are not the inner voice. If you’re not that voice, if that’s not you, who are you? You are the one who’s listening to the voice. Now, that distances you. The voice may be part of you, it may have learned from a nasty experience from the past, it may be trying to help you, but if you are the one listening, you have the power to tap on its head and say, “Thanks for sharing. I’m going to do it anyway.” That voice is not you, so that may help anybody who has the negative self-talk we do from time to time.

Let’s consider the second slightly different form of listening, which is “created listening.” What do I mean by that? You always speak into a listening; I’m speaking into a listening right now, the compound listening of the hundreds of people in this room. It’s a very powerful question to ask: “What’s the listening I’m speaking into?” All you have to do is ask that question. I promise you if you ask that question over and over again, whether it’s one-to-one, one-to-many, one-to-thousands, you will get good at intuitively spotting the listening you’re speaking into because it varies all the time. This is an early morning listening; this is an “I could’ve been at the beach listening” I’m speaking into; this is an “I could’ve stayed in bed listening,” hopefully; this is an “I’m glad I didn’t” now. You see, listening changes over time and everybody’s listening is unique, as I said, so that’s your first exercise: Ask, “What’s the listening?” It’s very easy to do, and it’s a great habit to get into.

Now let’s move on to the classic listening that you probably think of if I said the word “listening,” which is outer listening, listening to the sound around you, making meaning from the sound. That is my definition of “listening.” What you do is select certain things to pay attention to, and then you make them mean something in your brain. It’s a mental process, not physical, a process of selection and interpretation, and you do it differently from anybody else. So your listening is unique to you, like your fingerprints or your voice or your irises — as unique as that. Now, that means every time you have a conversation with somebody else, you’re speaking to somebody with a different unique listening, and it is a grave and common mistake to assume everybody listens like I do — they don’t. And once you’ve opened that door, and you start to become sensitive to that, that will put turbos in your communication effectiveness, I promise you.

You listen uniquely because you listen through filters, and they are the culture you were born into, the language you speak, your values, attitudes, beliefs that you accrete along the way from your parents, teachers, role models, friends and anybody whose values you like. You tend to gather them to you. In this room, you may have had expectations or intentions coming in, you might have emotions going on, and they all color and affect your listening at this moment. So what these do, effectively, is to create your reality because you are selecting different things to pay attention to, and, of course, reality is just perception, isn’t it? It’s the map, not the territory. We don’t perceive everything; we choose certain things to perceive, and then we make them mean things. You’re doing that differently, and if you play with your filters, you can change your reality. Now, that’s a pretty powerful statement. But it’s true, and the secret, as with so much of this, is to become conscious.

Let me show you a little audio illusion to back up the fact that you can change your reality. This is one of a very few audio illusions. I’d like you to look at the screen and listen to what this guy is saying. [visual/audio]

Speaker: Baba. Baba. Baba.

Treasure: You’re probably hearing “Dada.”

Speaker: Baba. Baba. Baba.

Treasure: Now close your eyes and listen to him.

Speaker: Baba. Baba. Baba.

Treasure: No, he’s actually saying, “Baba.”

Speaker: Baba.

Treasure: On the video, actually he’s saying, “Gaga.” So your eyes see “Gaga,” your ears hear “Baba,” and your brain says that’s “Dada.” If you look back at the screen, you will hear “Dada” again. [visual]

Now, that’s quite interesting, isn’t it? I showed you that what you perceive is not necessarily reality. It’s all colored. The senses affect one another all the time.

I’d like to give you a couple of exercises to improve your listening skills. I would like to give you a couple of different ones and focus again on one at a time. This is the first one: silence. Just a few minutes a day, it’s a wonderful thing to give you a reset to, to recalibrate, your ears. Please do try to give yourself a few minutes of silence a few times a day if you can. It’s a wonderful way to listen, a way to refresh what’s going on around you. This is my suggestion for your silence exercise. [visual]

Here’s another one; I call it savoring. And that is tasting the sound around you. You’re very alert to what you put in your mouth, and obviously you don’t want to eat food that doesn’t taste good. We can get the same thing with sound; you can savor it. Sometimes that unlocks the hidden choir in very mundane sounds, which are actually really interesting. I’ll give you one example.

Now, these three sounds have been around a lot longer than we have, and they’re very, very healthy sounds. [audio2] Research is starting to come out now that shows that each of these three sounds — and I’m not talking about roaring hurricanes or massive surf or the cawing of crows; I’m talking about pleasant versions of these sounds — are good for you.

They’ve been shown to aid recovery from stroke. There’s a lot of evidence now showing that they aid productivity and well-being in general. So get some of these things, and savor them. And ask yourself, Are the sounds around me, in my home, in my work, beneficial, or are they deleterious? Are they hurting me?

Go home after this, close your eyes in every room in your house, taste the soundscape, and ask those questions and think about what you might want to change. That buzzing thing that’s been there for years and you never noticed it or noticed it and just discounted it every time? And what are your most happy and healthy sounds personally? We’re all different. How can you get more of those? It’s a good exercise.

This is so powerful, listening in a different position. You have been listening all your life probably in one position without consciously thinking where it is. One set of filters, one place to listen from. At the moment, you’re listening to me in critical listening, which is very good. Critical listening is excellent. Evaluating, judging: Is this useful to me? Do I agree or not? Can I use that?

It’s a very powerful form of listening in this kind of situation and, generally, in business, but perhaps not one we want to take home with us to listen to our family in that way. Or if somebody comes to you with an upset or a bereavement or something like that, do you want to be marking them 1 out of 10 in how well they’re doing this? Not really. You actually probably want to be moving into empathic listening, which is at the other end of that scale, where you are seeking to feel the other person’s feelings and leave them feeling understood as well as heard. Are you starting to see how you can listen from different places? This is so powerful. The question to ask yourself, of course, is Where should I best listen from in this conversation? It makes such a difference.

I’ll give you a gender stereotype here. This is a gender stereotype. [visual] However, people have come up after this and said, “That makes a huge difference in my relationships.” Men, not all men, not all the time, tend to listen from a place I call “reductive” or in a way I call “reductive,” which is listening for a point, for a solution, for an endpoint. The conversation’s going somewhere. There’s a place to get to. So, he might be saying to him, “Here’s my problem.” He says, “Oh, here’s the solution.” “Oh, thanks.” It’s a typical male conversation. It’s fairly simple and straightforward.

Women, on the other hand, not all women, not all the time, tend to listen in a way I call “expansive.” Now, in expansive listening, there is no point. It’s not aimed at a destination; it is enjoying the journey. It is simply being with the other person, enjoying her company, and the conversation goes where the conversation goes.

Now, these are two different listening positions, and they give rise to a lot of the complaints in relationships. “He or she never listens to me.” She comes home and says, “I’ve had a dreadful day. This happened, this happened, this happened.” He looks up from the football and says, “Have a bath, darling. You always feel better after a bath.” Now, in the male world, that problem is solved — back to the football! In the female world, that was not what she was looking for. What she would have enjoyed would have been: “Darling, you poor thing. Sit down; let me pour you a glass of wine. Tell me all about it,” a phrase that strikes terror into the hearts of most men. “Tell me all about it.”

So do you see how listening positions can enormously affect the quality of our communication? Think about where you’re listening from in every conversation, including when you go home, and you may find a difference. Review your filters. Where do you normally listen from? Is it the best place to listen from? Where could you listen from to your advantage?

Here is one more exercise for listening before I move on to speaking. This is listening “for.” What are you listening for in a conversation, a business conversation with a client, for example? Are you listening for opportunities to serve? Are you listening for opportunities to make money? What is it that you’re listening for? Be clear about that, and it clarifies the communication. Ask the question also, what are they listening for? What are they listening for in this conversation? So, there are two listenings going on, and it’s very powerful to ask yourself the question, What is that person listening for? You’re guessing, but even a guess is better than ignoring it completely.

Final exercise, RASA: Receive, Appreciate, Summarize, Ask. RASA. It’s a great way to work conversations and to improve the quality of what’s said.

“Receive” means “pay attention to the person.” Do you know, I think there are millions of people on this planet who’ve never had the experience of being listened to properly. Some of you may have read the books of M. Scott Peck. He’s an excellent author, a commentator on behavior, and he said, “You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time.” That is so true. And yet how often do we give somebody 100 percent of our attention? We’re so often “Yeah, no, I’m listening to you again.” “No, you’re not. You’re texting.” That’s not listening.

We’re often giving people partial listening. It’s a very common state in the modern world with all the inputs and distractions we have. We look at somebody when we’re listening to them. Our body is facing them, not attempting to get out of the door. “Yeah, no, I’m listening to you. No, go on. Go on” — that’s not very powerful. We’re giving them the gift of our attention.

Appreciate those little noises that oil conversation. “Oh, ah, really?” And nods and eyebrow raises and smiles and so forth. Those really help to make the thing flow.

“Summarize” is the word “so,” a very, very powerful little word that closes doors in the corridor of your conversation or meeting. If you don’t have a “so” person in the meeting, it can be a very long meeting, can’t it? The “so” person will be going, “So we’ve all agreed this, now we can move on to that.” If we don’t have that, you go round and round and round in circles. What do they say? Meetings are places where you take minutes and waste hours. I think we all identify with that one. “So.” It’s a very powerful little word.

And “ask.” Ask open questions, ideally questions that start with “why,” “what,” “when,” “how,” “who,” and don’t permit the answer “yes” or “no.” Open questions give you far more feedback and show far more interest, and they will open lines in the conversation.

That is RASA. Try it for a week. I’ve had people contact me after trying this who said that it’s transformed their communication and have noticed the difference in the people they’re speaking with.

Here are the four C’s of conscious communication, of conscious listening primarily, but conscious communication as well. First of all, be conscious. That’s a word I’m using all the time, and I will continue to use it all the time because it’s the key to empowering your communication. Be conscious of this amazing instrument that you’re using and that you’re doing something when you’re listening. It’s a skill. It’s not a natural capability. It’s work, it’s effort, and if you’re conscious you’re doing it, you will get better and better at it.

Be committed, as I just said. Give somebody your attention. Be committed to getting the ball over the net with them. “What’s the listening I’m speaking to? How do I have to change for this person? I’m going to have to speak more slowly, more clearly and faster, using particular words in order to be received effectively.”

Compassionate, seeking to understand. Conscious listening always creates understanding. Politicians go off for talks, don’t they? I wish they’d go off and have listens instead. I think the world would be a far nicer place if it were that way around. We’re very obsessed with sending and being understood, not so much with understanding the other person.

And curiosity — what a great way to be in life, to be ferociously curious about people, about what you can learn. I hope you have been this week, and I hope you’ve had a tremendous experience meeting people and being curious about what they might be able to give you.

So that’s enough about listening. I hope you can see how these two things are related all the time. [visual] I’m now going to move on to the skill of speaking and give you some tips in powerful speaking.

First are the foundations that you can stand on in order to speak powerfully. HAIL, hail. It means to greet or acclaim enthusiastically. It also stands for four very important cornerstones. It’s a great place to start in your powerful speaking. What do you think they stand for?

“H” is honesty. I simply mean being straight and clear in what you say. Be straight and clear. Try not to use big words to confuse people, or jargon and so forth. I’m a great fan of simple, clear language. Say exactly what you mean without the embroidery, without the exaggerations. Simple, straight and clear.

“A” is authenticity, which is being yourself. It’s a big effort to pretend to be somebody else all the time. We need to have trust in ourselves and stand in our own truth in communication. That is a much more powerful, long-term strategy than being a chameleon. I can try to present somebody that I’m not, somebody who’s more lively or different or whatever. I’m quite a quiet person, actually, and being myself is like this onstage. I’m not a sort of, “Rah, rah, stand up and give me whoops and high fives.” That’s not me, so I don’t do that. Do you see that it’s much easier to be natural and authentic at all times?

“I” is integrity, being your word. If you say it, it happens. If you’re somebody who says it and then forgets, your words will tend to evaporate like puddles in the sun. People won’t listen to you very much. But if you say it, and it always happens, your words have weight.

And, finally, “L,” surprisingly perhaps, love. Now, I don’t mean romantic love here; I’m talking about compassion, well wishing. There’s a tremendous exercise you can do, which is simply to wish people well, in your head I’m talking about. You might have some strange encounters if you went around saying “I wish you well” to everybody you met. It’s a nice thing to do but unusual. But, in your head, it gives you a tremendous lightness of being, and it also means that you are thinking of other people and communicating in ways that are going to help them. So those are the cornerstones.

Let’s talk for a moment about content — it is what you say. It’s also the way that you say it, to paraphrase the old song. So we need to be clear. Probably the most common question I’m asked about powerful speaking is “I can’t organize my thoughts. My ideas aren’t clean and clear. How do you do that? How do you get great content?”

Well, the first magic trick to great content is to ask yourself about intentions, to set your intention for yourself: What am I aiming to achieve in this conversational presentation? What would success look like to me? And then your intentions for the audience. My intention here is to give you as much as possible in this short space of time. It’ll be recorded; you can check back. I hope this becomes a reference point for you because I’m cramming a lot in here, but I would love to give you at least three things that you’ll take home with you, which will transform your communication and make you more powerful communicators.

There’s a third intention. That’s my intention for me, my intention for you. There’s also your intention for you. What is the intention of the people I’m speaking to or the person I’m speaking to? You have to guess that one. So, if you can set two intentions, and guess the third, you will then be much more accurate in designing content that’s going to achieve those intentions instead of going in blindly and not really knowing where the whole thing is leading.

When you’re designing content for an audience, this is one of the most important questions that you can ask. It’s a question that newspaper editors and media editors have been shouting at trainees for decades and decades: “So what? Why would that matter to you? Why is this important to you?” When you’re writing a newspaper story, you have to have, in the first paragraph the “So what? Why does this matter?” It’s not just that this happened, and that’s the implication. Otherwise, it’s a poor newspaper story if you have to read down and down and down to understand the “so what.” Ask yourself, So what?

There’s a bullseye you can hit, and there are three things to include. The “why” is the center. Why does this matter? If you can get to the “why,” then you will really deliver powerfully. Why does this matter to you? Hopefully because you care about your happiness, your effectiveness and your well-being. So I have your attention. You’re engaged because I’m talking about things that will give you more of those three things.

What do we need to do? What’s the substance of the program, and how exactly do we do it? Now, different people have different relationships with these. Some people prefer the “how.” Some people just want the big picture, the “what,” and some people need to be inspired with the “why.” Make sure you include all three of those in your content, and you will communicate with all three of those different types of people.

So that’s a few words on content. It’s very summarized, but nevertheless probably the most powerful and important parts of it. You have a vocal toolbox. You may not have thought of this, ever. You may not have realized it, but this is an incredible instrument, possibly the most powerful sound in the world, and it’s a combination of lots of tools that you can actually deploy. [visual] So let’s have a rummage in your vocal toolbox before I end by talking about public speaking.

This may surprise you, but posture is incredibly important for your voice. If you sit at a desk all day, and you end up leaning forward, can you hear how my voice has changed because I’m stretching my vocal cords here? [audio] Equally, if I go right back here, I am compressing my vocal cords. Neither of those are particularly good places to speak from.

When you are standing, I do suggest two visualizations that will help you achieve naturally great posture. Have a string attached to your head going up and dangle from it. That’s a wonderful visualization. Your shoulders go back and down, everything is vertical, and you’re nice and relaxed. That’s a great place to stand, a great way to stand in front of people, not to hunch over like this but dangling. [visual] Also, if you want to visualize roots going from your feet into the ground, that is an excellent way of deferring some of the most common issues that I see with people, particularly presenting, which are little unnecessary movements going on all the time, which just gets a bit distracting. Why is he doing that? I don’t know what he’s doing, this very strange walking around in small circles. [visual] It’s not necessary to move. If you’re going to move, we’re coming to this move consciously. So, posture, vocal cords — very important.

Next, of course, is breath. Your voice is just breath. That’s all it is. The breath is the fuel for the voice. If you ever have nerves, if you’re presenting in front of a lot of people, and your voice goes a little bit quivery, a deep breath will sort that out immediately. Take one now with me. That may be the first deep breath you’ve taken today. It’s a wonderful thing to do. Get into breathing practice — the better your breathing, the better your voice.

Register. There are four registers, technically. We’ll only be using one of them, but I will mention the other three. The whistle register sounds like this. [audio] That’s Mariah Carey. I don’t think it’s very useful to you or to me. I can’t do it. I’m sure you can’t do it either, but it does exist. The whistle register — it’s very, very high.

One down from that is the falsetto register, which is vaguely comical for men. If I were giving this whole presentation like this, I don’t think it would be quite as powerful as the way I’d been doing it. [audio] So that is falsetto. You may remember Monty Python: “He’s a very naughty boy.” It is a vaguely comical register, although used often by older ladies. “Hello, dear, how are you?” You know, the grandmotherly voice that just keeps you out of the dangerous heavy traffic lanes of conversation.

It’s very useful in singing, of course, and it’s been used for decades by many singers up to and including Chris Martin of Coldplay. Think of the Bee Gees; think of Frankie Valli. Falsetto is an amazing singing voice, but don’t use it for powerful conversations.

Modal register is the most common one. This is somebody from Colombia who is speaking very much from the nose. [audio] And then I’ll give you an example of resonating in the chest. This is the actor James Earl Jones, and you can hear the chest. [audio] You resonate your voice, and, of course, your voice comes from the vocal cords, but you resonate in cavities. If you resonate very much in the nose, you can hear the difference, or I can go into the throat, which is here, or I can go right down and resonate in my chest. [audio] Do you hear the difference? We prefer people with deeper voices if we’re looking for authority, so it’s very worth practicing resonating in your chest. It’s easy to do: Put your hand on your chest, and speak until you can feel the vibration in your hand. Practice that, and you will move your voice down to the chest, which is where I suggest you speak from if you want to be authoritative.

There is one other register. I used to say it wasn’t used very much, but, sadly, it is now. It sounds like this: “Yeeeeah.” [audio] And, as I said, I did think it wasn’t used very much a long time ago, but now we’re really stoked about this; it’s so exciting. Have you heard people speaking like that? It’s vocal fry, and please don’t do that. It’s not good for your voice, and it certainly is not good for the power of your communication. So that’s a few words on register.

Let’s talk about pitch for a moment, a slightly different thing. “Where did you leave my keys? Where did you leave my keys!?” Same pace, slightly different impact, yes? [audio] Pitch can indicate arousal or upset or agitation very easily. It’s also a very good thing to vary if you want to make sure your communication is powerfully received because if you end up at one pitch, it’s very monotonous, and there’s a reason for the word “monotonous.” Next, alter pitch, and the best way of using it is prosody: the singsong of speech. Up and down, it’s how you enormously deliver emotion in what you’re saying, the passion of what you’re saying. Prosody — it’s a combination of the up and down and also the little paces that you put in between words and so forth; it’s very important. If you have restricted prosody, I suggest you practice extending your range. Go completely crazy with enormous prosody, and then next time you’re speaking in public — I don’t suggest you go that far in public — you will have greater range. This is all about pushing the barriers of your range because if you have extremely limited prosody, and you speak like this for an hour, you’re not going to have many people awake at the end of the hour because it’s not very interesting. [audio] That’s the word — “monotonous,” isn’t it? Monotone: one tone. So, prosody — very important.

Timbre: the feel of your voice. It’s very similar to the way we would describe a hot chocolate and is what people tend to like in voices: rich, dark, warm, smooth, sweet. Now, if that’s not you, don’t worry. Get a vocal coach, who can change the way you sound to other people. Just Google, “Speaking coach, drama coach, singing coach, voice coach,” and you’ll find some in your local area. Call a couple, find a couple, try them out, and work with somebody you like. They will be able to transform your timbre if you are squeaky or scratchy or thin, or whatever it might be that you are challenged with. We all have huge capability.

These vocal cords are there to be used and extended, so why not really have fun extending them? You wouldn’t dream, probably, of performing on a piano in public without having some lessons from somebody who knew and could help you to do it well. Well, this instrument is equally powerful and important, and it’s amazing to me that we don’t get trained on it. Out of interest, how many people in the room have had formal vocal training? Look at that! And how many of you present in public? Hands up? Get with the program, guys! Get some vocal training. You’re using this thing, so use it as well as you can.

Pace. You can go really, really fast and get excited about things, or you can slow right down. Again, what’s important is variation, otherwise the whole thing becomes tedious and monotonous. Volume, again, I can emphasize upon like this. Or like that. [audio] You can go to enormous extremes with this, please, but the key thing here is to be conscious of what you’re doing. Conscious. If you’re with a very quiet person, it’s probably kind to reduce your volume level, so be conscious of your natural level and change if you need to. Space: I’m not talking about the final frontier, I’m talking about silence.

See, nobody’s run away; you’re all still here. Actually, it’s quite nice, isn’t it? When the speaker stops for a bit, you can just say, “Oh, ah, that was pleasant.” I’ve seen people stop for the longest time. You can stop far longer than you think you can stop in a presentation. You do not need to gabble, and you don’t need to fill the whole thing with “um’s” and “ah’s” and “you know’s” and so forth. Silence is fine. It’s actually a really good way of emphasizing an important point, so become friends with it. And I gave you an exercise for that earlier on.

If you’re going to move on a stage, or in front of people or in a conversation, please make sure that it’s authentic and that it’s conscious as far as possible. As I said, little involuntary movements like this get a little bit distracting: “Is he going to do that like … Oh, there he goes again. Oh, he’s done it again.” These things just become distractions. If you’re a walker, like some great speakers — Tony Robbins, for example, is like a tiger onstage; he prowls about — that’s fine, but please don’t do it unconsciously, just moving from spot A to spot B and back and forth and so forth. And, again, if you’re going to use gestures, which are wonderful things, practice them so that you know the gestures you’re using and they’re authentically you. You don’t have to; different cultures are different in all of this, so it’s worth asking yourself the questions about how you use these things.

Now, I guess rapport is so important to all of you. The fear is technology, and price comparison sites can never replace relationship; they can’t have rapport. This is a secret weapon against technology. Building rapport with people is crucial. And that comes from listening well, from speaking well, asking, soliciting, and being in the empathic listening position as often as possible to get their concerns, their fears, their feelings. Using questions that demand “yes” is a very good way to start. “What a lovely sunny day, isn’t it?” Well, you can’t say no to that, can you, if it still is out there? And as people get into the habit of “yes,” the whole conversation becomes lit up with positivity. You may need to match and mirror; I’m sure you’ve all read books on this. You do that naturally, anyway. It’s pretty important to be conscious of that. And, as I said, if you’re talking to somebody who’s slow, you might need to slow down. So, let’s be sensitive to the listener we’re speaking to.

I’m going to finish with a few tips for doing this. Some people find this quite a scary thing. It’s not true that it’s the biggest fear. There’s an urban myth that fear of public speaking is greater than fear of dying. That’s nonsense. That was actually spread about by somebody about 30 years ago, but it’s not true. However, I do get that a lot of people get nervous when they have to do this, so let’s talk about how to do this really well. There are three things that you need to remember: PPD, practice, prepare, deliver. This is just like Olympic athletes: They practice, they prepare for the race, and then they “execute,” or deliver. So, if you go through these three stages, you will be all right, I promise you. PPD.

Let’s have a look at the first of those: “practice.” What do I mean by that? I mean practicing the skill of public speaking. You can do this at home; you can record yourself on your phone. You may be surprised by how good or how different you sound from what you thought. Your voice, of course, sounds different when you hear it on a recording, doesn’t it? That’s because when you’re listening to yourself, you’re listening mainly through bone conduction. It’s not coming out here and going in here. [visual] It’s going directly through the skull, and that tends to make you sound deeper than you really sound out there in the world. So, record yourself, and get familiar with that; work on your real voice. If you can video yourself, that’s the best thing to do. Set up a video camera and present to it, and you will see so many things that you weren’t aware of that you were doing, things you could improve or things that you’re doing really well that you can build on. So record yourself. It’s very important to practice.

If you can, get a coach. It’s worth having a coach because you cannot see your own game. That’s why people become world champions, and they never stop. World champions are always working on something. The coach says, “Now, next we’re going to work on this.” It’s seeking the extra 1 percent. A coach can do that for you if you can get one. If you can’t get a coach, then I suggest you work with people out there. There’s an organization called Toastmasters; some of you may be in it. If you haven’t encountered it, it’s worth trying out. It’s where you can go and practice public speaking. Everybody goes along, everybody presents to the group, and you get feedback and a coach, and it’s all automatically delivered for you. If that’s not your style, why not work with a group of friends? You could simply put a buddy group together and ask people around, maybe have it on a Wednesday night. We all go around to somebody’s house, and we do two-minute presentations with feedback to improve, and the rule is “I’ll accept your feedback as long as you’re not too vicious.” And, in that way, you can improve and practice the skill. So those are my suggestions for practice.

Moving on to “prepare.” So you’ve got a gig; you’ve got a talk; you’ve got an important conversation. It’s coming up; you know what it is. We’re now preparing for a specific thing, not practicing in general. I’ve told you some of the ways I would set about preparing content. I hope they’re useful to you. Getting the content right is critical first and foremost. If we’ve got good content, then we can be much more confident about the outcome. When you know where it’s going to be, check it. Whether it’s standing up in a schoolroom, in a big room like this, in a massive theater like that, check it as best you can. Get there early, and talk to the AV crew, who helped me enormously this morning with some issues that we had to overcome — there often are these things. And if you get on with the professionals, they can help you, and they can make or break your presentation. Understand: “Does this venue have everything that I want? I’m using slides, so does it have screens? Does it have projectors? I want a lectern. Does it have a lectern?” And so forth. Check, check, check. Understand what you’re walking into.

What if you’re going to use aids in your presentation? I am using slides. I like using slides, but not everybody does. You might prefer different things. If you’re going to use aids, practice with them, and make sure that you can use them in the way that you want to use them. If you’re using slides, I suggest that you don’t do this. [visual] Because you’re already down at the bottom of this slide, which means I’m completely redundant, doesn’t it? This is not a way of using slides that’s productive anymore, so I suggest avoiding these. [visual] It’s called a slideument. I used to have people say to me, “Can you send us your slides so we can give them out to people afterward?” Well, no, because my slides are just generally a picture and a word, and they don’t make much sense except possibly as an aide-mémoire, and I have put stuff in these slides for you specifically to use afterward. If you get this kind of presentation, there’s a strong temptation to turn around and start reading the whole thing from the screen, which I’ve seen many people do. Please don’t do that; it’s rude and it’s boring. You just become a member of the audience.

There’s a great book I can recommend to you by Garr Reynolds about modern presentation techniques, if you’re going to use slides, called “Presentation Zen.” I think it’s very good, and I strongly recommend it. If you like, you could use cue cards. If you don’t want to use slides, cue cards can be quite useful. Write everything out on them, like a TV presenter does. You could even put your company logo on the back so that it looks nice and professional; they can be very effective too, as long as they’ve got bullet points. I like speaking naturally with bullets in my head, not reading a script. Whatever you’re going to do, rehearse until you bleed. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse so that you know how long it’s going to take and what you’re going to say. That’s the most important thing of all. So, prep.

And, finally, “deliver.” Eat well; energy is very important. Hydrate well on the day with room temperature water by sipping; it’s very good for you. Try not to drink heavily the night before you have an important talk; it’s not good. If you’re hydrating a lot, remember to go before it’s time and before you can’t because it’s not comfortable to be up here and be desperate. It’s a pretty stressful experience. I can recommend some pills, little lozenges, called Vocalzone. Lots of professional speakers use them. They’re very good for soothing your vocal cords and giving you the best chance. If you’re doing a huge thing, don’t be frightened if you see makeup. I’m talking to you, guys, as well. If you have a shine, like some of us do, it’s sometimes worth dulling that down. Depending on where you are and how you feel, makeup is absolutely fine to use. Some big talks will have a makeup department just before you go on as well.

Do warm up. Warm up your body: Feel loose, feel fit, feel alive and energized. I’m going to give you a couple of tips on warm-ups. The first is to do what Amy Cuddy calls “power poses.” Basically, anything that makes you bigger is a power pose; it releases testosterone and makes you feel more comfortable and confident. Please, stand up for a moment. We’re just going to do the vocal warm-up exercises I do before every talk. It won’t take more than a minute. The first is, as you raise your arms in the air, if you can with the person next to you, breathe in and then moan out. So do that; it opens your lungs up. Second, we have to energize our lips, and doing that, we’re going to do two exercises.

The first is “Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba.” Very good. And the second is simply “Brrrrrrrrrr.” You may now find your lips have just come alive, which is quite a nice feeling. The tongue is also extremely important, so we’re going to do a very pronounced “La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la.” Very good. And the other one for the tongue is to roll an “R.” It took me months to learn how to do this: “Rrrrrrrrrrr.” So that’s like champagne for the tongue. You’re now fully in gear with the mouth, and everything is operational. Let’s now look at the voice. This is the one I will do. If I don’t have time for the others, this is the most important one. It’s called a siren, and we’re going to go, “We, aw.” “We” as high as we can go, and “aw” as low as we can go. So, say with me: “Weeeaawww, weeeaawww.” Fantastic. Now, my voice will have gone down around a pitch, one tone, and that is a tremendous exercise for discovering discontinuities and preparing your voice.

As you approach the stage, there are four things to do: Breathe as you come on, take a big breath, expand your awareness, and try to see the whole room. You’re not just speaking to one person but the whole room. An expanded awareness is a wonderful way to see the room. Get your stance right, and smile! Pleased to be here, lovely! BESS: Breathe, Expand, Stance, Smile as you come onto the stage.

There are a couple of things to avoid. Please don’t speak to the screen; I did say earlier that that’s not good. I’m not a great fan of reading writing, either. I love talking. If you’re reading from a script, it’s pretty stilted, and you also lose contact with the audience because you’re looking down here. [visual] Try not to do that. Lack of variation and repetitive cadences — make sure the thing moves and has dynamism and life. Physical ticks, as I said, can get pretty distracting if you’re doing the same thing over and over again for no reason.

And, finally, running overtime, which I just have by four minutes, even though I have to run out the door to catch a flight, but I really did want to get all of this in for you. Try not to run over. And, at the end, which I’m going to have to do, try not to rush off. If people are going to applaud, take the applause. It’s very often the case that people say, “And that’s my thought, thank you very much,” and they’re off before anybody has a chance to affirm.

The key is consciousness all the way through in everything you say and everything you listen to. This is a way of becoming more conscious as a human being. So here is a way to deliver well. And, as I said the other day, if we speak powerfully and we listen consciously, then the result is always understanding. I’m very grateful for your time today. I hope you got three things out of this talk that you’re going to take home with you, and that they will enhance those three very important things.

Julian Treasure is a sound and communication expert. He travels the world training people to listen better and create healthier sound. The author of “How to Be Heard” and “Sound Business,” Treasure’s five TED talks have been watched more than 40 million times. He is regularly featured in the world’s media, including Time magazine, the Economist and the BBC. Treasure is also founder of the Sound Agency, which work with some of the world’s biggest brands to improve their sound.