285. The Forgotten Leadership Skill: Why Listening Changes Everything with Julian Treasure

What if the most powerful leadership skill isn’t about what you say, but how deeply you listen? Julian Treasure, five-time TED speaker and author of Sound Affects, returns to The Leadership Project with a bold warning: the world’s listening is fading, and the consequences are enormous. Miscommunication costs organizations trillions, yet only 8% of employees believe their leaders are good listeners.

Listening isn’t just hearing — it’s a conscious skill shaped by culture, experience, and belief. Treasure shares practical tools like the PAVE method (Paraphrase, Admit, Validate, Empathize) to help leaders bridge divides and create real understanding. In today’s noisy world of constant alerts and distractions, the ability to listen with presence has never been more vital.

True breakthroughs happen in two places: deep, mutual listening or in silence. For leaders who want to inspire trust, boost engagement, and deliver results, mastering conscious listening may be the highest-leverage skill of all. Are you ready to move beyond hearing to truly understanding?

🌐 Connect with Julian:
• Website: https://www.juliantreasure.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliantreasure/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/juliantreasure/

📚 You can purchase Julian's books on Amazon:
• Sound Affects: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1538741873/
• How to be Heard: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DMJMLZRK/
• Sound Business: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1852526688/

Chapters

• 0:00 Listening: The Forgotten Leadership Skill
• 6:02 The Lost Art of Listening
• 16:03 Hearing vs. Listening: A Critical Distinction
• 27:05 The PAVE Method for Better Understanding
• 39:24 Leadership Listening: A $10 Trillion Problem
• 54:00 The Four C's of Effective Listening
• 1:01:30 Sound Effects: How Noise Impacts Our Lives
• 1:12:16 The Listening Society: Creating Ripples of Change

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

One of the greatest leadership skill isn't the way you speak, but the way you listen. Think about it, when was the last time you walked away from a conversation feeling truly heard, and when was the last time someone left a conversation with you feeling the same? In today's episode, we're re joined by Julian Treasure, five time TED speaker and author of sound effects. Julian is known worldwide for helping people speak so that others want to listen. But today, he turns the spotlight around to show us how listening, not speaking, maybe the ultimate super, powerful leaders. Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Leadership Project. I've got the great pleasure to reintroduce you to Julian Treasure and to welcome him back to the show. He was on the show way back in Episode 119 talking to us about the way sound affects us, and he's very famous for his TED talks around how to speak so people want to listen and around the way sound does affect us. And he's the author of a new book called sound effects. He's also pleased to announce to us today his new project, which is called the listening society, and that's what we're going to focus on today. We've spoken about how to speak so people want to listen. We've spoken about the way sound effects around us. Well, what about the listening element of that and what it means to be a better leader by being a better listener? So tell me. Julian, well, first of all, welcome back to the show. Tell us a little bit about what's happened in your life since you were with us two years ago, and what inspired you to create the listening society?

Julian Treasure: 1:53

Well, first of all, great to be back, Mick, and thank you for having me back again. And it's wonderful to bridge this huge time difference between us, technology is a wonderful thing, isn't it? It's been a very busy period. Actually, when we last spoke, I would have been in the middle of writing the new book, and so that was a kind of long period. You know, anybody who out there has written books will know that you're kind of, you become a monk for a bit, basically, and everything else stops, and you just have to focus, focus, focus. I know there are some people who write an hour a day and then get on with their lives. So that's not me. It was quite intense. For a long time, I put my speaking career kind of on hold and just wrote. I love it. You know, if I could have the rest of my life just writing books, I'd be very happy. Researching the book was fascinating. I learned so many things that I didn't know about sound as well as dredging up things. You know, I would write something and I didn't know, I knew that that's interesting. So it kind of it engaged every part of me, really, and it was a lot of fun. So the book came out in the UK in April, and in the US, it's just come out in June. It's also just come out. I just received this actually, which is quite fun. That is Italian, and it's also just been published in German, where it's got a different title, which involves the word Clang, which is the German word for sound. I think I can't remember the exact title, but it's coming out also in Japanese and Mandarin in the not too distant future. So that's all wonderful, and I hope it becomes a great big pedal pebble cast into the water of listening in the world, making ripples go in all directions, because basically the book is it's a B to listen in a world that's forgotten how and as I was writing the book, it became kind of so clear to me that the world needs listening more than it ever has, that the listening of the world is dying. We can talk about the reasons for that, and that the results of this withering listening in the world are very frightening. We're seeing them all around us in politics, in so many countries where, you know, there's just shouting going on and polarization, it becomes unthinkable to agree with somebody on the other side, you know. So we are kind of creating an enormous zero sum game in the whole world, where it's all about being right. And. Wrong, and there's no understanding of something that's very important, which I talk about now a lot in my workshops and talks, which is that two people can have very different points of view and both be right. Now, that's something which is almost not understood at all in the world. Because if you're different from me, I'm right, you're wrong. And there's no two ways about that. And this is creating just massive conflict right up to war, which we're now seeing, you know, springing up in various parts of the world, unfortunately, and violent conflict, whether it's ethnic or racial or, you know, as in Russia and Ukraine, very similar people fighting each other who'd been, you know, almost won for years and years and years. It's, it's frightening to see the results of this withering of listening, this inability or unwillingness to listen to anybody who's different or doesn't agree with us. So that kind of came up. It was one big thing that came up as I was writing the book. And the other big thing that came up, which we can talk about, is you'll note from the chapters anthropophony, which is about the sound of humanity, our sound, a lot of which is not very nice. And, you know, I go into that quite a lot in the book, the kind of noise pollution that we're in we're foisting on the entire world, including all the other species and animals who live here, who are being to various degrees, damaged some some of them very, very damaged by our noise. Give you one example, one of my favorite animals in the world, the biggest animal in the world, the blue whale, has been able for centuries, for millennia, to communicate across the width of oceans with its low frequency, rumbling, a lot of it way below what we can hear. And I have a recording of the blue whale actually, on the book's website, which is mind blowing if you have good headphones or a very big subwoofer. It's completely amazing. I played it at TED. I did a workshop at TED. We played it through a wonderful l acoustics, eight speaker sound system with some huge subwoofers, and we vibrated a whole floor of the Vancouver Convention Center. I think everybody in the building knew what was going on there. What they didn't. They knew something was going on. So this blue whale, it, it's 130 decibels. You wouldn't want to be next to it when it's calling. That's very loud. That's a air decibels. It's louder than that, you know, water decibels, but 130 equivalent, that's a rock concert. Yeah. So incredibly loud, very low frequency. And because of that, it travels up to 1500 2000 kilometers, or at least it used to before we had 60,000 ships making noise everywhere in the oceans, cavitating propellers, engine noise and so forth, and we're deafening the whales and they they are down to a 10th, potentially, of their range that they used to have. So it's now only 150 kilometers. Well, that's devastating for these very solitary creatures, because they used to be able to find each other and find mates, you know, and community. Now their range is so limited, they'll be very lucky if they can do that. So that's the kind of thing. The effect we're having on the planet was the other big aspect that upset me as I was writing the book, quite apart from the effect we have on ourselves with noise. You know, there's a table in the book of the noisiest cities in the world, and Dhaka in Bangladesh, is not a place I'd want to visit. Number one noisiest city in the world, 120 plus decibels average noise level. Well, that's what loud every day average in the streets of Dhaka. That's terrifying. So bad for people. So our noise is having terrible effects. We're not listening to that, and we're not listening to each other, and we have all this conflict and polarization going on. And the antidote to all of this is this one incredibly simple but forgotten thing, which is listening. So that's why, when I finished the book, I found it the listening Society, an online community which is just starting now, and it's for anybody who's interested in listening or speaking. Of course, because both sides of the corner in there or appreciating the power and wonder of sound, which is all around us all the time, affects us as as you know, we talked about last time, and as I talked about in the book again, in these powerful ways, and most of us are oblivious to it. We've just switched off our ears. We've become almost entirely visual and ocular, and it's a tragedy, because there's so much richness and beauty and wonder to experience if you start paying attention to sound. So that's what it's all about, really. That's a very long answer to your first question.

Mick Spiers: 10:18

That's brilliant. Julian, it sets us up beautifully for a wonderful conversation. I'm going to share with you what I'm taking away, and then I want to unpack one of them in particular. The first thing is, when you first joined us two years ago, I would have said that you're already the one of the world's leading experts on sound, and here you are two years later, I'm thinking of Robert Green's definition of mastery here that you've then gone even deeper in your research and to focus and to remove interference, to rediscover things that you already knew, but also to research things that you thought you knew and then find new bits of evidence. That's just a side observation for me that I loved in your story, the three things that I picked up was were the withering of listening, which is the first one I want to unpack in a moment, the perspective taking. And for those that are watching the video, there's a thing behind Julian said that says where sound means meets meeting meaning. So the perspective taking is really interesting for me. And then this impact of the anthropophony, how our sounds are impacting each other, that Daka experience and impacting the world. Let's go to the weathering of listening. We all think that we listen every day, but you're saying it's almost like a lost, forgotten art. Where did we go wrong?

Julian Treasure: 11:39

It's a very interesting question, because, of course, Homo sapiens has been on the planet for about 300,000 years, and ancestral homonyms going back 3 million years in total. So I mean, that's a tiny fraction of the age of the Earth, which is, you know, 4 billion years. But nevertheless, three, 3 million years is a substantial period of evolution, and throughout that entire period of evolution, we have been listening. It's been our primary warning sense, as it is with almost every animal on the planet, even cells, as I discovered amazingly when I was writing the book, even cells listen and make sound. So when I say listen, I mean they have ears, but they sense vibration. And it's, it's, it's natural, because vibration travels distances, and it's very perceptible. So you can understand the environment around you without the complexity of eyes, which are very complicated things to evolve and to get right. You can even a cell. Can sense vibration, it's pressure differences, and you can sense that coming from quite a distance. So there's not there's no vertebrate on the planet that doesn't have ears. There are plenty that don't have eyes. Ones that live in the dark and so forth, like the gorgeous naked mole rat. I'm sure their mothers love them, but I would have a real struggle having one of those as a pet, I can tell you. But they don't have eyes. They don't well, they barely see, but they hear, and so listening has been our primary warning sense. You can hear what's behind you, and you can hear in the dark. So hearing has been fundamental, and we process auditory input 20 times faster than we process visual input, for that very reason. So the immediate response to any sound, it goes to your your limbic system, the very oldest part of your brain, before your cortex kicks in and says, you know, was that car backfiring a threat? No, well, it's too late, because the car backfiring has set off a fight, flight response in you. You've jumped, you've got fatty acids and stuff entering your bloodstream, you've got noradrenaline and cortisol coursing through you. So these things happen very, very quickly and very powerfully to us, and that's been the case all the way through that 3 million years, and certainly the 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, about half of which has involved also language. So we developed language about 150 maybe 150,000 years ago. Nobody knows quite but that's the estimate. Well, only in the last 5000 years have we had writing, and to be more generally true, only in the last couple of 100 years, has everybody had writing? Because for a long time, writing was the privilege of the elites. You had scribes who could write and read. You had just the very educated top edge alongs of society who could read and write and the masses couldn't. So it's only been very recent. Point that writing has become so dominant, and it has, it came up on the rails, overtook speaking and listening, to the point where, as I always rant and rail about, we teach children how to read and write, we do not teach children how to speak and listen, which is madness. If we taught children how to listen first, how much more of their education would they receive? How much more accurately would they appreciate and understand everything that's said to them or for all those years that they're in school? It's just crazy, but it's got to the point where people don't even realize that listening is a skill. And this is the first big distinction that I make in the book, and that I make in my talks when I'm standing on stage in front of people, this hearing is a capability, listening is a skill, and simply by losing contact with that, forgetting that, and conflating the two things, and think, yeah, everybody listens. I listen. Of course, I do know you're hearing that's different. Listening is is a mental process. It's a skill, it's work, it's something unless you know you're doing it, you're not doing it. It takes focus, concentration, mental effort, and it's a it's a skill you can practice and master and become really good at as well, which most people don't, because most people don't even know it's a skill. So we're in that, you know, the stages of learning. We're in the unconscious incompetence. Almost everybody is at that level with listening. They don't know it's a skill, and they don't therefore know it's a thing to learn. I'm trying desperately to drag everybody into conscious incompetence, and then conscious competence, and hopefully we end up at unconscious competence again when we're listening carefully all the time, so we don't teach it in school. That's the first thing, and then we've made it so many times worse with the rise of technology, which is for a long time, has been almost entirely visual screens, pen and paper originally, but screens, you know, we were spending our whole lives looking down at something in our hand tapping away So our fingers and their eyes are hostage to communication now, to the point where the research shows that many younger people feel uncomfortable with spoken communication, and this is over and over again being reported and researched in, you know, job interviews. They're not very good. They don't they don't like sitting in front of somebody and having a face to face conversation like that, of any intensity, they'd much rather be sending a text or lengthy text or whatever it is. So technology has made things worth it's worse, it's distracting, and as Scott Peck said, You cannot truly listen to another person and do anything else at the same time? Well, that's true listening. I'm not suggesting we have to do that all the time, but sometimes we do, and we're very bad at it. We spend most of our time tapping away. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm listening to you. No, you're not. You're sending a text. It's not the same thing at all. So technology has been another big one. And I think the third big one has been and of course, social media has ramped that up by orders of magnitude to, you know, and the whole zero sum game I was talking about earlier that has been taken into quantum leaps forward by social media, where people are trolling and blaming and criticizing and judging and and so forth. And then the third one, the third big reason, I think, is noise. You know, we're a noisy bunch, and there are eight, more than 8 billion of us on the planet now. It's getting quite crowded in many places. Half of humanity lives in cities now, and the forecast is it'll be two thirds within 20 years. People in cities don't get a lot of silence, and they don't get a lot of nature sound either, wind, water, birds, those three things which have been on this planet far longer than we have, and which we now know from research, are actually good for us. They reduce stress, they reduce fatigue, they make us feel happier. There are many, many beneficial side effects of those sounds. So you know, if you are in a city and you don't have birds and wind and water around you, it's well worth getting some, even if you play them on lads, because in your house, you know, and I recommend, in the book, I recommend the site of that lovely man, Stefan pigeon, my noise.net where you can listen to wonderful nature sound. It's very cheap, and. Or if you're a big company, mood Sonic, which is the company I helped to start a few years ago, who put this kind of biophilic, generative, biophilic sound into big workplaces like open plan offices to to reduce distraction at the same time as including enhancing health. So those are the three big reasons there. Mick, I think we don't teach it. We've kind of forgotten it. Technology is taking over, and noise is what's the point in listening? If the whole world is noisy, you just switch off. Naturally. You become numb to the sound around you. And that's why I think it's so important to start listening, because then we can take responsibility for the sound we consume. And that's a very important aspect of the book. I think that's really one of the big messages of the book, and indeed of the listening society is becoming able to take responsibility again for the sound we consume. So it's not just we're passive puddings and being, you know, besieged by noise all the time, we can start to be responsible here. Move ourselves away from bad sound, change the sound in our houses and offices for the better soon as we become conscious of the way it's affecting us. So that's the withering of listening. And I'm not just making this up. There's lots of research out there now showing that listening is in decline in families, in organizations, and we can talk about leadership listening, because something this is the leadership project, and listening by leaders is abject, and it's having a devastating effect worldwide. And of course, listening in society, in you know, you can see the conflicts out there, this hatred, particularly around immigrants. In my country, at the moment, there's all this kicking off and in politics. So at every level we need listening.

Mick Spiers: 22:07

you more. We're definitely going to come back to that one Julian that the four things I took from there were, first of all, you captivated me with the thought that we have five senses and that listening, hearing and listening, and we're going to come back to that in a moment. Should be the dominant one, right? And use we've become very visual, as you said. Visual requires you to have light. It requires you to have your eyes open, and at best, it's maybe 120 degree angle in front of you, but it's the immersion of sound and listening and hearing that is not just 360 degrees. It's actually three dimensionally, 360 degrees across every plane and access, right? So it's, it's a full immersion around your body, and somehow it's not the dominant sense anymore. And then listening to you about, we don't teach how to listen properly, and we've let it get away on us, that we've become very visual and distracted by our devices on our hand, and the story that instantly jumped in my head when I was thinking to you, and it is the younger generation. I'm not trying to be generational and generationalists here, but if you call a young person now who's like, Oh, why is someone calling me? Why didn't you just text me? That's very real. And then this impact of the noise, and how do we filter substance from all of that noise around us? Because it is a very noisy environment. But I really want to come back to the first stanza there, which is the we don't teach listening, and you spoke about the difference between hearing and listening. So tell us about the difference between hearing and listening.

Julian Treasure: 23:52

Well, hearing is a capability, so you don't have to do anything to hear unless, of course, you've got damaged hearing, which is one in four in the world. Now, unfortunate, quarter of the world's population have damaged hearing, and we have a billion young people joining those ranks very soon who've been damaging their hearing already with noise, with music from ear bud headphones or over ear headphones, but just too loud for too long, and if you put 100 decibels into your deep into your ear canals, for hours a day, you're damaging your hearing. You know, many of us have been to very loud gigs. You know, you come out with your ears ringing. Well, that's that's damage. That's called temporary threshold shift. I write in the book my memory of going to see Leonard Skinner, that Hammersmith Odeon back in about 1974 it would have been give or take, and the PA was stacked up to the ceiling. And I came out, I couldn't hear what anybody was saying as we went home. I had no top end to my hearing at all. All the sibilance had disappeared completely, and it took about two days for them to come back, which is quite. A lot of hearing damage. Now it's not fatal. You know, it didn't mean I was going to be deaf forever, but I have to say, as a drummer, for many years, and many of those years, I didn't know about any of this, as most people don't, I did damage my hearing by smashing cymbals right next to me for hours and so forth. So I have lost everything above 12 kilohertz in my hearing range. So I have got damaged hearing, and I have tinnitus as well. So, you know, I'm one of the one in four, and there are a lot of people with much worse hearing damage than I've got out there and that. And that is a huge problem. Again, it becomes, it's isolating and it's humiliating. People don't like to admit that they can't hear people, so they tend to and they what. They won't wear hearing aids for the same reason for pride. A lot of people know they need them and they won't get them. And then they just isolate. They start they stop going to parties, they stop being in groups. They stop going to the pub because they can't hear anybody. They just sit at home on their own, and it creates enormous amounts of loneliness. So that's a big problem. However, let's go back. Hearing is a capability. You don't have to do anything. It's just like your heart beating, breathing, blinking, you just do it. You don't have to think, blink. You just do it. You don't have to think, hear. You hear. However, listening is a skill. It's a mental process as opposed to the physical process of hearing, and it's where you select certain things to pay attention to. So there's consciousness involved in listening. You direct your consciousness to certain things, and then you make them mean something. You interpret them. So that's what I define listening, as making meaning from sound. Now there are lots of people who've done definitions of listening, especially if you're talking about listening to human beings talking, which is a particular kind of listening, where they have all sorts of phases you go through, where you you in, you listen and then interpret and repeat and act. And you know, there are many stages that you can put together in a process of listening in that way. But I think making meaning from sound summarizes it very well to me, because it's active process. So this isn't passive. This isn't, I mean, you do, you do a degree of it passively, because you've got a massive database of every sound you've ever heard. And when you when you hear something, and you pay attention to it, your your brain will be testing it and saying, is that like anything, either, oh, is that grandma's voice, or is that a trumpet? I recognize those things. So you've got a reference library, huge one in your amazing brain. But I distinguish within this consciousness of making meaning from sound. One of the most important things is to understand that your listening is unique. Now that's critical. Almost nobody understands this. So we've got two doors to go through here, which are very important doors. Door number one, listening is a skill. It's not a capability, and it's a skill you can master and work at door number two, my listening is unique, and so is yours. Mick, so I am currently speaking into a listening and it's not mine. Now, the assumption that almost everybody makes is that everybody listens like I do, but they don't. They may hear like you do, but they don't listen like you do, because we all listen through a set of filters, and those filters are different from person to person, and they change through the day as well. When you're tired or emotional, you have different things on your mind or different purposes going on so and they're about you. You know, the culture you're born into, the language you learn to speak, the values, attitudes and beliefs that you have, your expectations, assumptions, all these sorts of things set you up to listen through. If you imagine it, it's like a bunker that you're in, and there's a little slit in the front, which is what's let in by all of these filters that stop stuff from coming in. And the exciting thing is, once you appreciate that that's what's going on, there's a door in the back of the bunker, you can leave the bunker and move to what I would call a different listening position. Now this is where the consciousness that listening is a skill gets really interesting, because you can start to ask the question, all right, in this conversation with this person, where's the best place I could listen from? And when you start to think about. There are so many places you can listening. Places you can listen from listening positions. I call them. You could call them listing styles or, I mean, let's not get too bogged down in semantics, but that's what I call them, listening positions. So it might be critical listening, where you're judging and assessing and, you know, thinking, was there anything of value in this. Where do you get that? That's interesting? Don't know about that. So that critical, this thing, which is very useful in business. But would you want to take that home if your child has just banged their knee or something? Would you be going, is this really worth all this fuss? No, I don't think that's great parenting. You know, you'd want to be an empathic listening. Oh, come here. Sit down. Tell me what happened. You know, that's empathic listening. So there are different listening positions, many, many of them. And that's a wonderful realization once you get to that and you become active. So people talk about active listening, and they mean just one thing which is paying attention, fundamentally to me, active listening is being conscious of where you're listening, from moving your listening position to the most appropriate one for this conversation. And of course, at the same time you're appreciating that the other person has a different listening to you. So you need to ask yourself the question, what's the listing I'm speaking into as well? So there are two listings, you know, side by side. There's mine for you and there's yours for me, and they're different. I can control mine consciously, which is a very good thing to do, and I can try to be aware of yours by asking myself, what's the listening I'm speaking into, which is also a very good thing to do, because that's how you hit the bullseye, instead of missing the target all together when you're speaking on a stage or to one person, being conscious of how the other person's listening, which can be very simple things, like, You know, if I'm speaking to somebody who's a very, very slow and deliberate speaker, and I start rattling off like this, I'm just going to overwhelm them with my pace, they'll just get become affronted by how fast I'm speaking. So matching and mirroring can be very useful just appreciating the person's listening, which may be very antithetical to mine, of course, because listening comes from your values, attitudes and beliefs and politically. You know, I could be speaking to you, and we could be on opposite ends of the political spectrum and still be friends and have a civilized conversation, because I can allow you to be right in your world, just as I believe I'm right in my world, but it doesn't make you wrong. Very important to understand two people can have different views and both be right in their own perspectives, in their own world. And that means, you know, I have a tool I teach, which actually I developed after the book, but it's, it is something I'm going to be talking about a lot in the Listening society. The tool is pave and it's very good for conflict resolution. P is paraphrase, so it's to repeat back what you have understood to make sure the ball got over the net. Did I receive what you sent? Because often that's not the case we can misunderstand. So that's the P, the A is admit, and that's a really important and very rare thing these days. It's to admit your reality not make you wrong immediately. Not That's rubbish. Obviously, that's rubbish. No, okay, that's what you believe. I let you be right. That's what I mean by admit. And that opens the door to the V which is the single biggest thing missing in the world today, I think, which is validation. Validation sounds like this. Mick, I don't agree with what you just said, but I completely understand why you think that. So you're allowed to have that view. The world doesn't have to be all like me. And I understand that the E then could be, well, okay, given that that's what you believe, I can see why you were upset about what just happened. I wouldn't have been upset about it, but I get why you are. So that allows me to empathize with you, even though we may have different responses going on. So paraphrase, admit, validate, empathize, and there's not a lot of that going on in the world. Unfortunately, you only have to look at the comments under any YouTube video or any even in a quality newspaper, the comments under a newspaper article, and you see the degree of vituperative, aggressive, judgmental, angry, shouty, calm. Comments that go on, even just downright rude comments where people are calling people out and being abusive. There's not a lot of validation going on in the world, unfortunately. And I would love to move us in that direction, because, you know, the bottom of this slope of making everybody wrong is, you know, kind of the ISIS view of the world, which is disagree with me and I'll kill you, and I have young children. I don't want them growing up in that world. So let's start validating each other a little bit. It's not zero sum, and listening, as I said earlier, is the antidote to all of these terrible things we're seeing around us.

Mick Spiers: 35:41

Really good, Julian, I would like to now paraphrase, admit, validate and empathize with the things that I've just heard, just to practice it a little bit here. And I do agree with you that the validation and the empathize certainly missing in the world, and certainly in the political discourse. If you look at the US, I'm going to say that the world is full of conversations where people walked away with a different understanding of what was just said. And Donald Trump is the example that jumped into my head when I was thinking about this. If you sit two different people from different political corners and get them to listen to Donald Trump, they'll take away what they wanted to take away from what he said, not not what was really said, or what was really intended. But the things I wanted to take away was around this, listening is about making meaning from the sound, and it's not even meaning from the language. And I was thinking, as you were talking about this, that we're always interpreting and in some cases, extrapolating. So I was listening to you, Julian, and I was interpreting what I was hearing. I was trying to make sense of it. So sense making, I was extrapolating into examples of what would turn it into meaning for me. So when you spoke about recognizing your grandma's voice, the story that jumped into my head was how mothers can recognize their child's cry from birth. They can, oh, that's my child crying. That's not a that's not language, that's sound, and it's making meaning of sound. Now I extrapolated that, and what you got me thinking is, well, listening is a skill. We're going to talk about that. Listening is unique. That was my unique listening, because you didn't mention mothers and babies crying. But when I walk away from this conversation, that's one of the things I'm going to be remembering. Oh yeah. How do they do that? How do they manage to make meaning from that sound? So that's an example. I'm trying to show you an example of well, listening is unique, and how many conversations do we have in the world where people walk away having heard the same sounds but taken a completely different meaning from what was just said absolutely and the filtering that you're talking about, Everyone has their filter, and you blew my mind when you spoke about the filter is also based on values, beliefs, maybe even experiences, that we could be in a let's go into the business place now and think about our leaders listening to the show that everyone that's in that room that heard the same things heard The same things, is taking away a different meaning of what just happened. And if we do this empathy, this perspective taking, it's not just what did they hear, what meaning did they take away? So if I sat myself in Julian shoes on the other side of this conversation, what meaning is he taking away? Not not what he heard, because we all potentially heard the same words, although we might have filtered different substance from the content, what meaning did you take away? That was my biggest takeaway, the the listening is unique. Julian, so listening is a skill. Listening is unique. And then we need to think about everyone is taking different meanings from what they just heard. How does that sit with you?

Julian Treasure: 39:07

Absolutely right. And I think we it would be good to dive into listening and leadership for a moment, because, after all, it's, you know, it's the focus of your podcast series anyway, and it's also the talk that I've been giving most recently. It's called the listening leader, because I've discovered some very disturbing things, which I will share with you, and they're not in the book, because I discovered these after I finished the book. First of all, leadership listening is very poor, and this is in the book, there was a big survey done, actually in your country, by a guy called Jim McNamara, and it was called the leadership was it called the organizational listening project? Sorry, that's what it was called, the organizational listening project. And without going too much into the data. That they found basically that organizational listening is abject and almost non existent. Many times the resource are spent on outbound communication in organizations as are spent on listening on inbound communication. And that's true for the employees just as much as it's true for customers, prospects, stakeholders, and so forth. So when you talk about corporate communication, you immediately think of PR, advertising, marketing, outbound, outbound, outbound. There's not a lot of listening going on. Now, since I wrote the book, I've moved on and researched a lot on this, and because it occurred to me that, and this is why I got onto listening in the first place, actually, when I was going through the TED Talks after I wrote my book sound business, because I was working with organizations doing audio branding, and thinking, why is it these organizations don't listen? And it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks. At one point, it's because none of the people in them are listening. If you put a lot of people who don't listen into an organization, what you get is an organization that doesn't listen. So that kind of realization kicked off a long train of research, and it's much worse than even I thought 12% is the number of employees in a very, very, very large study that was done, 12% of them rated their leaders as very good listeners. That's only 12% actually, no, it was 8% I'm sorry, one in 12 leader is rated as a very good listener. Now that's quite serious, especially when you look at the consequences of leaders not listening. We can talk about the reasons. At the moment, the consequences of leaders not listening come through in two things. First of all, miscommunication. So people not understanding, people having to repeat things, people asking for things to be repeated, people making mistakes because they mistook the brief or didn't get it right. In a huge piece of research in America, it was discerned that miscommunication is costing on average, a day a week per employee. Now if you add that up across the entire America, the cost of that is$1.2 trillion a year, trillion. The other big effect of leaders not listening, and an even bigger one, I would suggest, is disengagement, because if you are working for somebody, you don't feel hurt, they just won't listen to you. They're not they're not open and give up to your suggestions. Yeah, you give up. So you get all sorts of categories of disengagement right through to employee silence, where you know that's the whole thing, whistleblowers, don't we don't, we don't question this in this organization. That kind of murder that goes on, which is very paralyzing for innovation, of course, but right through to things like high staff turnover rates and just people not trying very hard and not being creative and so forth. Another huge piece of research done globally estimated the cost of employee disengagement to be $8 trillion a year globally this one. So I think it's fair to say, if you take the American just the America, and extrapolate it a little bit globally, we are definitely talking about over$10 trillion a year being wasted as a result of leaders not being good listeners. Now that is a massive cost, and it's completely hidden. Very few leaders will have active training programs teaching them how to be great listeners. I don't know a single organization that rewards good listeners with higher pay or bonuses, and I think almost none have a question in their reviews, their 360 degree reviews, saying, how good is this person at listening? Lots of organizations want to recruit good listeners. It's one of the top skills. A big LinkedIn study of what people are looking for. They're all looking for good listeners. But the problem is, once they recruit these people, it's kind of assumed that they just go on being good listeners, and they don't get trained. There's no program to enhance the skill or keep it sharp, or in, you know, you know, take it to the max. And of course, going on to reasons for this. As you get more senior in an organization, it becomes harder to listen lots of aspects here. There's pride, hubris, you know, there's the ego. I know what I'm talking about. I'm Senior. You try and tell me. How to do this little person, you know that kind of thing can happen at the same time. You are supposed to know stuff. You're supposed to be telling people what to do, not asking them and listening, aren't you? I mean, that's kind of the assumption, although some of the best leaders I've ever worked with have been very quiet people who do sit in the table and say, Okay, let me have all your views, and they synthesize them, and then they quietly say, this is what we're going to do. So, you know, listening is very important for assimilating diverse views. And I think diversity of opinion is critical in any dynamic organization that's going to survive change. And yet, you know, you mentioned the Trump administration. You know, in both of the the big what were called superpowers. Well, in fact, all three superpowers, if you include China, you've got small cliques at the top who are composed of people who all agree with the leader. If you disagree with the leader in Russia, you get thrown out of a window. If you disagree with the leader in America, you get sacked, you get fired, and terrible things happen to you in China if you disagree with the leader. So you get this kind of cloning effect where everybody goes, yeah, oh, absolutely, you're right. You're so right. That's very fragile. To have an organization that operates like that is incredibly fragile. It's not robust because you're not entertaining any alternative perspectives or views. My old friend David Earth, I just interviewed him, actually, for the listening society. He wrote a lovely book called The Corporate fool, which was, it was about the old tradition in the courts in England where the king would have a jester fool. It was the only person who was allowed to take the mick out of the king. And it it wasn't that the jester was just doing it for no reason. The Jester had a commitment. And I think it's a wonderful phrase this that David summarized it as he said, was not committed to the king. He was committed to the king better. Now, if we're committed to our leaders better, that means we're giving them feedback, and if the leader is willing to take it, that's how the leader can become a great leader. But of course, if the leader is not willing to listen to comments, criticism, feedback, anything that disagrees with their worldview, that's rigid, it's fragile, and it's very dangerous, and it's demotivating, and then you get all of that disengagement and miscommunication going on in an organization. And I've worked in organizations where they've got what I call dragon leaders, you know, people who bite the heads off anybody who gives them bad news or says anything that they don't like. Well, if you're shooting the messengers, you will know you won't get the messages. And if you don't know what's going on at every level in an organization, you can't manage it. So you need to be listening, and you need people working for you who are listening, so that it all filters up and you get a realistic view of what's going on, of the culture, of people's opinions, of their motivation, of the morale, of the direction and and it goes the other way, of course, because you've got a strategy that you want them to understand and work to and if they're not listening to you, that doesn't work very well either. So listening in organizations is critical, and it is terrible, and it's something we need to have training programs for in every organization. You know, it needs to be a major thrust of the training because it reduces conflict. It reduces, you know, Team unpleasant, team dynamics. It improves every aspect, productivity, profits, you know, staff morale. Reduces disengagement, reduces accidents, all sorts of numbers we can see flow from improving listening, communication, engagement.

Mick Spiers: 49:14

That's wonderful, Julian, let me summarize some of the meaning I'm taking away from the things that you're saying first thing, and I want to specifically focus in on leaders here, that that if you're not getting feedback, that doesn't mean that the feedback doesn't exist. It means that you might not have created the environment where people are willing to give that feedback, or you're just not listening to the feedback. It is there. You're just not listening to it. The things that I'm taking away there. In terms of some tests, I'm going to say, Julian, this is what I want to put to you, and some of them might be a bit provocative. So bear with me, like I'm going to challenge some listeners, the leaders listening to the show right now, that if you're. You're finding yourself in a situation where your ego is getting in the road, where you think you have to be the smartest person in the room, then you're not listening. If you're in a situation where you're walking away from every conversation with the same information or the same knowledge that you had before the conversation, you're not listening if you're just waiting for your turn to talk, you're not listening. If you're the distracted listener you spoke about someone on their phone before Julian and go, oh yeah, I'm listening to you, Julian, I really am. You're not listening. So I'm kind of asking people out there to almost do an audit, like you can go into work today or for this week, and reflect at the end of the day, did I really listen? And now to give come back to listening as a skill from that audit, you can then start practicing some of the things that Julian is is asking about here, and I'm going to add one here. Julian, I'm testing something with you. So pave is the one I want you to think about. At least start practicing this. Start practicing being very present with the person, so you're not distracted and you're giving them the gift of your full attention, paraphrasing back, admitting, validating, empathizing so that the person does truly feel seen, heard and valued is going to be the step. And then you can check those questions. I said, Did you walk away with more information than when you started the conversation? And if not, you weren't really listening? The bit I want to add Julian and bear with me here. If you, of course, please disagree, if you just, if you don't agree with what I'm gonna say to then curate or to draw out the meaning of what the person is sharing. I'd like to add the word curiosity on, on it. Julian, so not just paraphrase, admit, validate and empathize, but then turn it into a question and say, Oh, Julian, I'm I'm hearing from you that you're worried about the people of Dakar and the 120 decibel noise that they have in their city. What makes that important to you? Or it could be on a scale of one to 10. How important is this to you, because you might be walking away going, Yeah, that was interesting, but it's a two. The other person is in catastrophization mode. What they just heard? They're walking away with a nine, though we're going to go out of business tomorrow if we don't, if we don't act so. So I'm looking to interpret meaning from what does this mean to you? What makes this important to you, and also what scale on a scale of one to 10? Is this catastrophic for you, or is it a minor issue? How does that sit with you?

Julian Treasure: 52:49

Curiosity, totally right? And actually, I train people on four Cs of listening, of effective listening. The first is conscious, so knowing you're doing something the second is committed, because listening takes time and effort. You know, you do have to put things down quite a lot of the time if you're going to really seriously listen to somebody, it's, it's not something you can do while you're doing other things. I mean, of course, there's distracted listening is fine. We do it a lot of the time. You know, if I'm cooking and you know, my film set comes in and tells a joke, I don't have to stop cooking to listen to that. I can get on. It's fine. But if she came in and was really upset about something that had really just happened, then I would say, Okay, give me a minute. Let me just put this down and come and listen to you. So it's about the listening position again. So commitment to the right listening position, if you like. The third C is curiosity. So being curious, seeing everybody as an opportunity to learn. And indeed, you know, there are wonderful questions. You've given some of them there. I mean, you just a simple question like, is there more? Is there more that you would say about that? Is there anything I'm missing? Do I need to know more about this? You know, these kind of teasing questions where you're just open and letting somebody expand, they can be very powerful. And then the final C is compassion, listening with the aim of understanding the other person, even if you disagree with them, even if you don't like them, you can still have compassion. You know, there was a great guru who used to talk about people seeing people as trees in a forest. You know, you don't go around in a forest going being angry, because that's an ash and that's an elm and that's an oak, that's just the kind of trees they are, yeah, and if you have that attitude towards people, okay, that's just the kind of tree that person is. It's a lot more calming to see that than to be wildly angry with people the whole time. So. So that's compassion. So it's, it's, it's consciousness, commitment, curiosity and compassion. And you hit the nail on the head there.

Mick Spiers: 55:09

Really like it, Julian, so that's, that's our next takeaway, these four Cs, are you listening consciously? Are you committed to the listening? Are you listening with curiosity? Are you listening with compassion. And you've said this a few times, by the way, Julian, listening with compassion and listening with empathy doesn't mean that you have to agree with them, just that you're the perspective taking, that you understand, that you're validating where they where they're coming from, not not that you have to agree. Every time the other one that you made me think with the is there more this. I see this one a lot, Julian, and I'm sure in your study, you probably would have well, but please let me know the interrupting listener.

Julian Treasure: 55:51

Oh yeah.

Mick Spiers: 55:52

And I think this is a is definitely prevalent in a lot of businesses. Sometimes it takes a while for the person to warm up and get the true meaning of what they're trying to share with you out. And they might even be building up the courage I might want to be sharing something with you, Julian, that's been on my, you know, on my heart, for a very long time. And I'm building up the courage to tell you some bad news. And every time I have the conversation with you. You interrupt me after the first sentence because you think you already know what I'm trying to tell you. So what about the interrupting listener?

Julian Treasure: 56:28

Yeah, so true. Do you know the average time that an American gets to describe their symptoms to their doctor before they get interrupted is 18 seconds? Average. Wow, somewhat bigger than that. So, you know, I know doctors are under time pressure. I know they're trying to move people through as quickly to see as many people, blah, blah, blah, but nevertheless, it becomes a habit, and instantly male doctors much worse than female doctors on that measure. So yes, absolutely interrupting tends to be a symptom of being right and maybe also looking good. Is the other thing that's in play there, where you're, you're, it's what Stephen can be talked about, listening to respond, as opposed to listening to understand. So if you're, I call it speech writing. If you're while this noise is going on in front of you, that's you speaking, if I'm just ignoring that and composing my next brilliant bit of monolog. That's where the interrupting tends to come from, because I'm not really listening to you at all anyway. And it's demeaning, it's dismissive. It upsets people to be dismissed and belittled in that way. So if you're an interrupter, I'll give you a little not you, I mean gentle listener. If you're an interrupter, I'll give you a little exercise that's very simple to do, which is, get into the habit before you say anything. Of take a deep breath. Well, first of all, breath is the fuel for your voice, as I talked about in my TED talk about speaking. And you know, it's very important to have a good breathing practice anyway, but if you get into the habit of taking a deep breath before you speak, that just gives you a second when you might notice that the other person is still speaking, and you might just be able to save yourself from diving in and upsetting them. Now, of course, sometimes we have to interrupt, if it's time pressure or whatever, we can apologize for it. We can say, I'm terribly sorry. I'm going to have to stop you there, because we do need to get this finished, and we've got to do this, this and this, but if it becomes a habit, it's very damaging for communication, especially if it's a leader habit, because you're just stepping on people and squashing them.

Mick Spiers: 58:53

I like this little pause or this little breath that you're talking about, because you could be using that to process what you just heard at the same time to let the person finish that they might they may not have been finished. Or you could use the curiosity say, is there anything more before I respond to that? Yeah, okay. There's going to be times where you can't do that, but I should. I'm going to say that it should be the default mode, Julian and the opposite, the opposite, the the haste should be the only for special circumstances.

Julian Treasure: 59:24

Yeah, definitely true.

Mick Spiers: 59:28

All right, very good. So there's so many things to take away from today. Julian and I want to go on one more topic in a moment, and then close out with some things about the listening society. However, I want to take some time now to to summarize some of the things for leaders out there. First of all, the impact of of not listening is catastrophic. Listening to what Julian is saying, and I'm going to tell you, as a leader, I'm going to even flip that on its head. You can turn a catastrophic consequence into a positive. You've changed in your leadership. If you want to become a better leader, you become a better listener, and you can differentiate yourself from from other leaders. That listening is not the same as hearing. It's it's about taking meaning from the sound, whether it's language or other sounds. It's about interpreting meaning. That listening is a skill, and you can build that skill, that listening is unique. This is very powerful. Please take this one away. What you're taking away from the conversation is not the same as what everyone else is taking away. And if you can take these listening positions that Julian is taking this perspective taking, you will become richer in your knowledge and your understanding of what's happening around you, if you can understand that listening is unique, that with pave if you want to become a more attentive and more present listener, to be able to paraphrase, to admit, to validate, to empathize with The person that you're talking, and add in the curiosity so that you can better understand the meaning that they're taking. What does this mean to you? What makes this important to you on a scale of one to 10, how? How important is this to you? And with those four C's, are you consciously listening? Are you committed to the listening? Are you listening with with curiosity? Are you listening with compassion? If you can take those away from today, Julian, and I, I'm talking on your behalf here for a moment. For Julian, we will be very happy that you've taken something valuable from today's conversation. Now the bit I wanted to come back to was how sound affects us, and this is in the book sound effects. But what you captured me with this DACA, people walking around a city with 120 decibels is what I think you said at the time. And you talk in the book about the physiological, the psychological, the cognitive, the behavioral impact of the sound around us. You've got me deeply worried. Are the people of DACA not only having long term hearing loss from cacophony of sound around them all the time, but how are they cognitively? How are they psychologically? Is this? Is this creating an element of mental illness where, if you're in these kind of sounds like this, sorry, my curiosity is getting away with me. I'd like to know more.

Julian Treasure: 1:02:31

Well. I would love to know those things. And I don't think anybody's done a study on this at all, because, of course, noise is not a political issue. You don't get any politicians saying, vote for me, I'll make it quieter. Doesn't happen. It's invisible. And we're so ocular, you know, we tend to focus on things that are visible. It's only just behind air pollution, which you can see in places like Los Angeles and Bogota when you know the smog is pouring over the hills and the you can see that the air is yellow. And indeed, in China, you know when you see those pictures of people in smog in Beijing. So you know that's acceptable to us. But noise not. We don't pay attention to it. There's very little policing of it. There's very little measuring of it. There is there has been noise mapping in Europe for years, but there's none in America, well, very little. And in some of the noisiest places in the world, India, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, there's nothing that can be done, really. I mean, I write in the book, there are some in Mumbai, there are some traffic police have now been given noise meters, and they have, they're trying to have horn free days, which would be good, because in, you know, in India, you drive around with your hand on the horn pretty much the whole time. But, you know, as we get more densely thrust together. As I said at the beginning, we're a noisy bunch. And if you put a million or 20 million or 40 million, I mean, we've got mega cities now. Tokyo is what 40 million, something like that asked, if you put that many people into that smaller space, it's noisy. It just has to be. And even when we replace all the petrol engines and diesel engines with electric engines, we've still got tire noise. We'll still have construction we'll still have all sorts of noise going on, just from people being there. You know, neighbor noise, boom boxes, you know, all sorts of shouting, whatever it is, trains, subways, so airplanes, so it is probably doing immense damage. We know a great deal about the damage. I mean, the cost of billions and billions of dollars a year in Western countries. We know absolutely it. Lost sleep, apart from anything else, just the damage to people's sleep, which is catastrophic over a long period of time, because it causes emotional upset, depression, anxiety, mistakes, obviously, accidents and so forth. And then on top of that, you know the cardiac arrest numbers are really disturbing. You don't have to be in very, very loud levels of noise to be affected in this way. So definitely, I would say that the noise in a place like Dakar is shortening everybody's lives quite substantially. It's increasing the risk of heart attack, stroke and all sorts of you know, long term illness scenarios like that, dramatically this noise all the time, because it's putting you in fight flight. I mean, it's not good to be dosed with cortisol the whole time, or noradrenaline. It's not good to be stressed, and it's not good to be shouting the whole time, and it probably creates an enormous amount of conflict as well between people. Because, you know, whenever there's a lot of noise going on, you're shouting at somebody. Anyway, the energy is up, and it tends to foster a question. There's not many wars that are fought in silence. You know, shouting is very much part of conflict. So, yes, I haven't seen any any numbers. Mick, but I would imagine I wouldn't like to live there, and I would imagine it's having a devastating effect on the health of the people there. To end on a positive note, that we are seeing some some good things happening in the world. I mean, Shinra, the last chapter of my book, is all about silence and the value of silence. And there's a there's a really good setup, which was created by Gordon Hampton, who wrote one square inch book about defending a square inch of silence in the Washington forests, up in the northwest of the US, which is gone now because the US Navy Air Force discovered that the population density was very low there, so they decided it was a great place to do all their low flying sorties with their fighters. So it's not silent at all anymore, but Gordon created a an organization where you can seek out quieter places. It's called Quiet parks International, and you can go to a website and find quiet places around you, where perhaps you can go and experience Shinrin Yoku, which is forest bathing, going for walks in nature, getting out of the city. And it doesn't have to be a forest. I mean, for you, it might be the Outback, I don't know, but it's pretty quiet out there, I should imagine. So just having a quiet walk in nature, whether it's a beach, a forest, you know, a desert, wherever it might be, that can be very good for you, and reconnect you with the baseline. So there are some good things happening. And I just, I strongly advise everybody listening to this to start taking responsibility, listening consciously, and taking responsibility for the sound you consume. That's what the listening society is all about, of course.

Mick Spiers: 1:08:16

Very good, and we're going to come to that now. I'll just put a pin on what you're just saying. And when I was listening to you, I was thinking about the physiological, the psychological impact of getting back to nature. I think you're definitely onto something there. But I was also at the other end of the scale, the behavioral stuff that you talk about. I was, I've been thinking about those child playground situations, the indoor playgrounds, which are very noisy, and watch the kids go crazy, the behavioral impact, and then the other one was the cognitive and I'll tell you what I was thinking of when I was listening to you. There all of my best ideas that I've ever had in my life have come through either two modes, and I think it goes nicely with our conversation today, either where I was deeply listening to someone else and they were deeply listening to me, and we co created something that we couldn't have created individually because we were truly listening to each other, or the second one was when I went for a walk in the quiet, My mind was still, and all of a sudden I came up with a solution to a problem that I've I've been struggling with for weeks. It was the silence so either deeply listening to someone and CO creating, or silence.

Julian Treasure: 1:09:34

Beautiful. Yeah, I'm sure many people resonate with that. yeah.

Mick Spiers: 1:09:40

All right, great. And Julian, this has been absolutely wonderful. At this point in the show, we normally ask our guests the same four questions, but you've answered them before, back in episode 119 so I'm going to ask you one, which is, if people want to know more, how do they find your book and how do they find the listening society so they can come on this journey? With you?

Julian Treasure: 1:10:02

Well, the book is available in all the usual places. It's sound effects with an A affects, not sound effects. So it's about how sound affects you and why it's important. And I hope you enjoy it. There's also an audio book, which I narrated myself in a little studio up here in Orkney off the north coast of Scotland, which is normally full of barons and fiddles and things. And we had a lot of fun doing that, and we were able to drop in quite a lot of the sounds into the audio book. So if you get the audio book, you can hear the sounds. But even if you don't get the audio book, there's a website for the book as well where you can go and listen to the sounds as you're reading through the book. So anything from, you know, the blue Well, I mentioned earlier, the sound of a black hole, all sorts of amazing sounds are available to listen to. So that's the book sound effects. The listening society is designed to take this on to the next level. It's just starting out, really. And what I've done so far it's an online community on a platform called circle, which is the world's leading platform for such communities. And what I've done so far is to put pretty much everything I could in there of my own work. So all my training courses are in there. All the podcasts I've ever made. There's about 32 I think, hour long podcasts in there. There's loads of training, including my big training course, which is seven and a half hours long and originally retailed for nearly 1000 pounds. That's in there. All of these things, interviews with people you know, fireside chat type interviews with with some amazing people, documents research, audio files, soundscapes that you can listen to, hours of beautiful sound that you can work to, and so forth. It's all in there. Now I'm very happy to give all your listeners a month's free trial to test it out, you won't be able to see the courses with a free trial, but as soon as you become a paying member, it's only a pound a day. It's not exactly breaking the bank. But what I want is to build this into a community that actually makes a difference in the world, where people are not just coming along, passively enjoying the content, but also creating, putting their own content in, whether it's sound ideas, asking questions, having suggestions, helping people who've got problems. I want it to be very much an interactive community, not just me putting loads of stuff in, although I will put in I'm only halfway through. I mean, I've got tons of stuff left to do. I'm going to put in everything I've got in there. So everything Julian treasurer has ever spoken about, researched, thought about, will be in there and accessible to everybody, but I hope it'll be many times bigger than that and more important than that in time. So come and join us, and I'll give you a link Mick, which you can put out with the show notes of this so that everybody can come and test it out for themselves. Come and listen.

Mick Spiers: 1:13:09

Brilliant Julian, absolutely. We'll put the link in the show notes, and I can tell the audience right now that I'll be one of the ones joining. I want to go on this journey with you. Julian, thank you so much for that, gift, but also thank you for the gift of your time and your wisdom. Today, I certainly walk away from this conversation richer than when we started. You've given me things that I can immediately apply, and I know the audience can do so as well. Thank you so much.

Julian Treasure: 1:13:36

Well, it's such a pleasure, and to me, Mick, this is ripples in the pond that it's so important, you know, for the world that my children are going to grow up in, it's so important that we reverse this trend and we start to increase the listening in the world. So that's what it's all about to me.

Mick Spiers: 1:13:55

What a powerful conversation with Julian Treasure, he reminded us that leadership starts with the simple yet profound act of listening. Here are the big takeaways. Listening is not the same as hearing. It's a skill we can develop. We all listen through unique filters. Great Leaders Ask, what listening Am I speaking into conflict transforms when we pave the way, paraphrase, admit, validate, empathize, and the soundscape around us, whether it's noise or nature, shapes our well being and performance far more than we realize. So I'll leave you with a few questions to reflect on. How consciously Are you listening to the people in your life? What would change if your team felt truly hurt, and what small adjustments could you make today to improve the soundscape you live and lead in? If this conversation resonated with you, please follow. Of the podcast. Share it with someone who needs to hear it and leave a review. It helps us spread this important message. You'll find links to Julian's book sound effects and his new initiative, the listening society in the show notes. I encourage you to explore them further. In the next episode, we'll be joined by Rand Selleck, who's going to teach us how to go from autopilot to the driver's seat with intentional leadership until next time, keep leading with curiosity, compassion and above all, the power of listening. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project, mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo and my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project, YouTube channel, where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.