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Sound has always been my primary connection with the world. In my childhood in South West London we lived by parks and later a river, and I remember listening with wonder at night to the sound of gentle summer rain outside my window, or looking up in woodland walks and being transported by the sound of wind rustling lush Spring leaves together in rich, fascinating waves. It was inevitable that music became a passion from the start; I spent many hours in darkened rooms listening studiously through cherished headphones to a fast-growing collection of precious vinyl. Becoming a musician was the natural next step, and my parents were tolerant enough to buy my first drum kit and bear the pounding from my bedroom as I tried to emulate heroes like John Bonham and Bill Bruford.

Many paradiddles and many bands later, I sold my magazine publishing business and at last had the chance to unify my work with my passion for sound. I had spent more than 15 years helping brands to create written content that would engage, enlighten and entertain their customers – all the while continuing to play and make music in my spare time. Now I wanted to help those same organisations to make sound that was appropriate, effective and beautiful, both in their marketing and in the spaces they managed, from offices to banks, shops, malls and airports. And so The Sound Agency was born in 2003, its mission to prove that good sound was good business.

The Sound Agency was always about sound, not just music; in fact, we have spent a lot of time removing mindless music from places where it was playing inappropriately and upsetting people. To develop a robust modus operandi that applied not only art and aesthetics but also science and technology, I read papers, journals and books, initially about the psychology of music, and then about the greater subject of sound and how it affects human beings. We started to ask the question “How does your brand sound?” with increasing understanding and experience, and then I created a set of models and tools that allowed us to map the effects of all sorts of sound on employees, customers and prospects.

In 2007 I pulled all this thinking together into a book, inevitably entitled Sound Business, which became a respected textbook for audio branding agencies and their clients alike, helping them to explore this exciting new territory of intentional, designed sound. Two years later, I got the chance to speak at the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, England, albeit with the challenge of condensing everything I’d learned about sound into 6 minutes! That talk led to 4 more in successive years, all of them subsequently published as videos on the TED website. As I created them, my focus shifted from sound in business to sound in human interaction – in other words, to listening and speaking.

For many years, I had known that very few people listened well. This was clear from the blank faces we usually met when trying to sell The Sound Agency’s services: every major brand has a book defining it, many of them as thick as a Bible and even referred to as ‘brand bibles’ – and none of them contain any pages at all about sound. Our society is crashingly ocular. The business managers we met didn’t think at all about the sound their organisations made, so each time before we could start selling our wares, we had to have a short, transformative conversation, explaining how sound affects people and why the management need to be listening. This conversation is what eventually formed the core of my first TED talk, and it usually resulted in an astonished expression and the phrase: “Now you say it, this is so obvious, but we’ve never thought about it before!” You may well encounter that little paradox yourself at points in this book, and you will be in good company. Most of the top managers I’ve met at major companies have had exactly this experience. I remember presenting to the CEO of British Airports Authority when London Heathrow’s beautiful Terminal 5 was in the early stages of construction. Like many successful senior managers, he was open to challenge and grasped big ideas fast. About 5 minutes into my passionate description of how sound affects people, he stopped me and said: “I cannot believe we’re about to spend 4 billion pounds on a new building, and we have never asked: ‘How will it sound?’”

I gradually realised that what’s true for people running brands is just as true of all of us in every aspect of our lives. Most people do not listen much at all. And when I started thinking about human communication I saw the full extent of the tyranny of the eyes: not only do we not listen well, we don’t speak well either. Somewhere along the way, our oldest, most natural, powerful and effective mode of communication got taken for granted, devalued and then left behind as the world became ever-noisier and technology beguiled our eyes and appropriated our fingers too.

People have always been scared of public speaking, but now it seems we have a generation scared of private speaking too. Research shows that youngsters would rather text or instant message than talk to ask someone out, or to break up with someone. The next oldest generation loves the big social media platforms, and the one above that is lost in email overload. When we want to communicate, our first instinct is to reach for a piece of technology and type.

This is about to change, even for the most tech-savvy. Billions have been invested in speech recognition and voice synthesis, and more importantly in artificial intelligence (AI). Scary as this development may be (check TED to understand why), it does mean that within the next 5 years we will be having meaningful, natural conversations with machines. When each of us has our own AI assistant, we will have no need to deal with dozens of apps and our umbilical connection with screens will be broken. Unless we want to look at something, we will simply ask. Voice communication will be back, as we query the Internet, make travel reservations, carry out financial transactions, manage our houses and cars, send messages and even (whisper it) communicate with other human beings by speaking and listening.

In parallel, we saw in the year 2016 what happens in politics if people can’t or won’t listen. Democracy depends on civilised disagreement, which requires listening to people with whom we disagree and understanding and respecting their perspective. It also requires the skill of oratory, the elegant and skilful exposition of an argument in a debate in order to persuade others or explain complex issues. Increasingly, political discourse is being carried out in soundbites to journalists or even in 140 bombastic characters. People seek out proof’ that they are right on the Internet, collecting views that support theirs and ignoring antithetical ones. This is a recipe for polarisation. The only antidote is skilled conversation: conscious listening and powerful speaking working together.

These 2 crucial abilities affect one another in a circular relationship: it’s hard to be a great, powerful speaker if you don’t listen, or to be a great listener if you can’t articulate your own thoughts. This is the central subject matter of this book.

Technology is unstoppable, so time is short. We urgently need to reclaim the art of conversation. However, if we look to traditional education, there is little or no infrastructure to help us. Very few schools teach speaking or listening in any serious way, and no countries that I know of have national curricula with exams in these vital life skills. This is the gap that this book is designed to fill: we urgently need to educate ourselves if we are to master sound communication, pun intended. My TED talk on powerful speaking is the seventh most-viewed TED talk of all time, with around 50 million views on the Internet at the time of this writing. It’s wonderful that so many people have taken this in – but the talk is only a few minutes long, and necessarily passes over much of the depth and breadth of the topic. It’s also worth noting that my TED talk on conscious listening has only one quarter as many views, which says something about our communication. We prioritise sending over receiving, which is itself a dangerous mistake.

For all these reasons, I was delighted when Mango offered me the opportunity to write a whole book about the skills of speaking and listening. At last, I can make publicly available the content and the lessons I’ve learned from seminars and workshops on conscious communication that I’ve given to thousands of people over the last few years. I hope the result will be interesting, engaging, transformative, – and most of all a practical resource you can pick up and refer to again and again.

If you want to make a difference in the world, or to be a great parent, or to have a brilliant relationship, or to lead and inspire people, or to be someone that people stop to listen to, or to be a real friend, or to be a star salesperson, or even to stand on the TED stage and change the way people think forever… this book is for you.