Growing Your Career: How to speak so that people want to listen | Julian Treasure

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0:33Julian Treasure: This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money, and momentum. A good hire, they can help grow your business. But finding great talent isn't easy, especially when you don't have the time or resources to sift through piles of resumes to find the right fit. That's why LinkedIn built HiringPro, your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you, so instead of sorting through applications, you can spend your time talking to candidates who are actually a good fit. With HiringPro, you can hire with confidence knowing you're getting the best talent for your business.

1:16Julian Treasure: In fact, according to LinkedIn, those hiring with LinkedIn are 24 % less likely to need to reopen a role within 12 months compared to the leading competitor. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash tedbiz, spelled B-I-Z. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by Parloa. Look, most businesses want their customers to feel heard, not stuck waiting around for someone who can help. Nothing makes you feel less important than sitting on hold for hours, explaining the same problem to the fifth person who picks up.

2:02Julian Treasure: But here's the thing. The bigger you get, the harder it becomes to show up the way you want to in each customer interaction. Parloa solves that problem. Their voice-first AI agents handle customer conversations in a way that feels natural, personal, and helpful. They work 24-7 across voice, chat, and email in any language with zero wait time. Plus, your team gets access to features like Lens, which flags issues in real time, and Navigator, which figures out why those issues are happening and what to do next. It's secure, scalable, and built to serve the customer. When AI works well, it shouldn't feel like AI.

2:47Julian Treasure: Unhold your customers with Parloa. Learn more at parloa.com. That's P-A-R-L-O-A dot com. Hey, listeners. We're dropping another playlist this month, and this one is for anyone who's on the job market right now. Making a career change is never easy, but I think a lot of us are finding it especially hard at this moment because it can feel so impersonal. There are more AI screenings, more trying to connect over Zoom. it's like the human part of the process is slowly getting filtered out. That's where these talks come in. I've picked out a lineup full of tricks and tips to help you stay calm, stay true to yourself, and advocate for what you want and need.

3:32Julian Treasure: The job hunt can be opaque, overwhelming, and anonymizing. So let's shed some light on it together.

3:48TED Business: The human voice. It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say, I love you. And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them. Why is that? How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world? What I'd like to suggest, there are a number of habits that we need to move away from. I've assembled for your pleasure here seven deadly sins of speaking. I'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list, but these seven, I think, are pretty large. The habits that we can all fall into.

4:23First, gossip.

4:26TED Business: Speaking ill of somebody who's not present. Not a nice habit, and we know perfectly well the person gossiping five minutes later will be gossiping about us. Second, judging. We know people who are like this in conversation, And it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time. Third, negativity. You can fall into this. My mother in the last years of her life became very, very negative, and it's hard to listen. I remember one day I said to her, it's October the 1st today, and she said, I know, isn't it dreadful? It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative.

5:05TED Business: And another form of negativity, complaining. Well, this is the national art of the UK. It's our national sport. We complain about the weather, about sport, about politics, about everything. But actually complaining is viral misery. It's not spreading sunshine and lightness in the world. Excuses. We've all met this guy. Maybe we've all been this guy. Some people have a blame thrower. They just pass it on to everybody else and don't take responsibility for their actions. And again, hard to listen to somebody who's being like that. Penultimate, the six of the seven, embroidery, exaggeration. It demeans our language, actually, sometimes.

5:44TED Business: For example, if I see something that really is awesome, what do I call it? And then, of course, this exaggeration becomes lying, out and out lying, and we don't want to listen to people we know are lying to us. And finally, dogmatism. The confusion of facts with opinions. When those two things get conflated, you're listening into the wind. You know, somebody is bombarding you with their opinions as if they were true. It's difficult to listen to that. So here they are, seven deadly sins of speaking. These are things I think we need to avoid. But is there a positive way to think about this? Yes, there is.

6:24TED Business: I'd like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones, foundations that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world. Fortunately, these things spell a word. The word is hail, and it has a great definition as well. I'm not talking about the stuff that falls from the sky and hits you on the head. I'm talking about this definition, to greet or acclaim enthusiastically, which is, I think, how our words will be received if we stand on these four things. So what do they stand for? See if you can guess. The H, honesty, of course. Being true in what you say, being straight and clear.

7:02TED Business: The A is authenticity, just being yourself. A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth, which I think is a lovely way to put it. The I is integrity, being your word, actually doing what you say, and being somebody people can trust. And the L is love. I don't mean romantic love, but I do mean wishing people well for two reasons. First of all, I think absolute honesty may not be what we want. I mean, my goodness, you look ugly this morning. Perhaps that's not necessary. Tempered with love, of course, honesty is a great thing. But also, if you're really wishing somebody well, it's very hard to judge them at the same time.

7:45TED Business: I'm not even sure you can do those two things simultaneously. So hail. Also, now that's what you say, and it's like the old song. It is what you say. It's also the way that you say it. You have an amazing toolbox. This instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened. I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now, and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with, which will increase the power of your speaking. Register, for example. Now, falsetto register may not be very useful most of the time, but there's a register in between.

8:20TED Business: I'm not going to get very technical about this for any of you who are voice coaches. You can locate your voice, however. So if I talk up here in my nose, you can hear the difference if I go down here in my throat, which is where most of us speak from most of the time. But if you want weight, you need to go down here to the chest. You hear the difference? We vote for politicians with lower voices. It's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority. That's register. And we have timbre. It's the way your voice feels. Again, the research shows that we prefer voices which are rich, smooth, warm, like hot chocolate.

9:00Well, if that's not you, that's not the end of the world because you can train.

9:05TED Business: Go get a voice coach. And there are amazing things you can do with breathing, with posture, with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice. Then prosody. I love prosody. This is the sing-song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. It's root one for meaning in conversation. People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they don't have any prosody at all. That's where the word monotonic comes from, or monotonous, monotone. Also, we have repetitive prosody now coming in, where every sentence ends as if it were a question. When it's actually not a question, it's a statement.

9:45TED Business: And if you repeat that one over and over, it's actually restricting your ability to communicate through prosody, which I think is a shame. So let's try and break that habit. Pace. I can get very, very excited by saying something really, really quickly, or I can slow right down to emphasize. And at the end of that, of course, is our old friend, silence. There's nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk, is there? We don't have to fill it with ums and ahs. It can be very powerful. Of course, pitch often goes along with pace to indicate arousal, but you can do it just with pitch. Where did you leave my keys?

10:24TED Business: Where did you leave my keys? It's a slightly different meaning in those two deliveries. And finally, volume. I can get really excited by using volume. Sorry about that, if I startled anybody. Or I can have you really pay attention by getting very quiet. Some people broadcast the whole time, try not to do that. That's called sodcasting. Imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately. Not nice. Of course, where this all comes into play most of all is when you've got something really important to do. It might be standing on a stage like this and giving a talk to people. It might be proposing marriage, asking for a raise, a wedding speech, whatever it is.

11:10TED Business: If it's really important, you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it's going to work on. And no engine works well without being warmed up. Warm up your voice. Actually, let me show you how to do that. Would you all like to stand up for a moment? I'm going to show you the six vocal warm-up exercises that I do before every talk I ever do. Any time you're going to talk to anybody important, do these. First arms up, deep breath in, and sigh out. Like that. One more time. Very good. Now we're going to warm up our lips, and we're going to go...

11:52TED Business: Very good. and now just like when you were a kid. Now your lips should be coming alive. We're going to do the tongue next with exaggerated la la la la la la la la la la. Beautiful. You're getting really good at this and then roll an R. That's like champagne for the tongue. Finally, and if I can only do one, the pros call this the siren. It's really good. It starts with we and goes to or. the we is high, the or is low. So we go, we are we are. Fantastic. Give yourselves a round of applause. Take a seat. Thank you. Next time you speak, do those in advance. Now, let me just put this in context to close.

12:39TED Business: This is a serious point here. This is where we are now, right? We speak not very well into people who simply aren't listening in an environment that's all about noise and bad acoustics. I have talked about that on this stage in different phases. What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who are listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose? Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound? That would be a world that does sound beautiful and one where understanding would be the norm.

13:20TED Business: And that is an idea worth spreading.

13:28Julian Treasure: Hey, this is Elise Hugh, host of TED Talks Daily. This episode is supported in part by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes, and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com slash podcast or wherever you listen. Pessimism. It's never going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will?

14:09Julian Treasure: At Optum, we're working every day to connect primary, specialty, and pharmacy care, and help lower prescription costs. Will we fix it all overnight? No. But we'll wake up trying, again and again, until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at Optum.com. Optum. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love. From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.