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ОглавлениеThis book contains many exercises and suggestions that will help you to become a conscious, attentive listener, and a powerful, effective speaker when you practice them. That’s a lot of potential work, so we start in this chapter with the why… revealing the 4 effects of sound; the power of conscious listening and speaking and what you can gain by improving these skills; and the issue that almost everyone suffers from.
What’s at stake for you?
Working in 4 powerful but largely unnoticed ways, sound (especially how we speak and how we listen) affects almost everything we feel, think and do. Inevitably this process shapes the full panoply of our results in life, both today and in the long-term.
Over the years, I have distilled this process down to 3 core outcomes: happiness, effectiveness and wellbeing. If none of these are important to you, you need read no further! However, I suspect they do matter a lot to you, so let me promise you that the information, exercises and revelations in this book do, when practiced, have the power to transform your outcomes in all 3 of these critical areas.
Let’s look at what you stand to gain from taking this path.
HAPPINESS
We all know what happiness is, but achieving it remains the eternal human challenge. It certainly isn’t about material possessions or financial wealth: once people are above the poverty level and not stressing about where their next meal is coming from, psychologists find that there is no correlation at all between money and happiness. Nor do fame, respect or reputation create happiness: famous or gifted people are just as prone to misery as the rest of us (maybe more so if you believe the gossip pages).
The only factors that do seem to correlate with happiness are connectedness and service. People who have strong family and social connections, or who serve others in meaningful ways, tend to be happier than average.
Both traits require well-developed speaking and listening skills. Service can only be effective if you listen well so that you understand what someone really needs; good functional relationships are built on clear, compassionate two-way communication. You’ll be learning skills throughout this book that will enhance your relationships at work, at home and in your community, and that will generate greater happiness for you as a result.
The sound around you also has an impact on your happiness. Noise creates stress, and often real pain and misery. Pleasing sounds that mean something to you may instantly make you feel good. We’ll be learning how to manage sound for greater happiness throughout the book.
EFFECTIVENESS
Many of the people who have come to my trainings say that they are there because they have the feeling nobody listens to them, or that they can’t seem to get their passion or their views across to others. Without good communication, it really is hard to have an impact in life. We can’t all develop the potent listening of a Mahatma Gandhi or the persuasive eloquence of a Martin Luther King – but we can all make the most of the gifts we’ve been given by learning how to use our voice and our ears to maximum effect.
Speaking and listening are critical skills if you want to make a difference in the world, to lead and inspire people or to be a great parent. These things all rely on the power and effectiveness of your speaking and your listening. Everything in this book is aimed at giving you mastery of these vital skills.
We’ll also be considering the context for communication throughout the book. Ambient sound has a real impact on how well we can connect, so we’ll be exploring how this works and discovering ways to deal with destructive sound throughout this book.
Ambient sound also has a powerful impact on how well we process information, so it can dramatically alter how efficient you are in your work. Simply by listening to your environment and paying attention to its effects on your communication and thinking, you become able to take steps to optimise your working conditions and transform your productivity. This might mean moving away from, or blocking out, unhelpful, distracting or debilitating sound; or, if you have control over your space, it might mean identifying the sound that is most productive for you to work in – something that most people never consider.
Tip: I can’t predict what sound might be best for you to use in working, because we are all different and your personal associations will be very significant in this process. Nevertheless, I suggest that you start experimenting with nature sound that is stochastic, which means composed of many small, random events that combine to create a pleasing wash with no significant individual events to grab your attention. Examples are moderate birdsong, gentle rainfall, gentle running water like babbling streams and small waterfalls or fountains, mild wind in leaves or grass. Probably best to avoid the soporific sound of soothing surf! If you try music, then you may find the most productive genres are those with low density, which means not too many changes in melody, rhythm or dynamics and no significant major events. Those guidelines may lead you towards reflective styles like ambient or gentle chamber music, or repetitive styles like trance, techno, chant or modal music. Styles with strong dynamics and frequent changes are probably more distracting; these might include full-blown orchestral music, jazz, pop, rock, dance or urban. Many people, especially youngsters, think they are more productive with loud, high-density music playing, but in most cases that is true only in that they are doing the work at all or that they continue to do it for longer: in terms of output per minute, high-density sound is generally distracting. I do want to emphasise that we are all different, and I expect that there are some for whom thrash metal is a very productive backdrop, so please do experiment for yourself and be open-minded and creative!
WELLBEING
In 1859, Florence Nightingale wrote: “Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on sick or well.” Recent research has shown how right she was. Sound can powerfully affect our health and wellbeing, for good or for ill – and sadly in most cases it’s the latter. Listening consciously is the key to transforming what in many cases is a negative effect into a positive one in your life.
There are 3 levels to the impact of sound on our wellbeing.
Level 1
Loud sounds can damage your hearing. If we’re not listening consciously, it’s all too easy to be exposed and damaged without becoming aware of it. For many years noise induced hearing loss (NIHL) has been a major issue for people whose jobs expose them to loud sounds, from soldiers in battle to those working in manufacturing and construction. Now it’s a recreational hazard as well as an occupational one as a result of headphone abuse – something that barely existed before the invention of mobile sound with the Walkman in 1979. Delivering music at high-volume deep into the ear for hours a day is a recipe for hearing damage, and possibly severe hearing loss later in life. A 1998 scientific paper found that almost one in 6 American teenagers have permanent hearing damage, while a 2010 survey in London found that two thirds of the people interviewed were exceeding the recommended safe listening level, some of them by massive amounts.
Of course, headphones can be a joyful and productive experience. Noise-cancelling headphones are excellent on flights, and headphones can also mask unpleasant or distracting sounds when we are trying to work. The trick is using them healthily, and not being tempted to keep turning the volume up.
Tip: If you or any of your family use headphones, here are 3 ways of making sure that you don’t damage your hearing. First, invest in the best headphones you can afford. Cheap, low performance headphones tempt people to turn up the volume in search of the detail and bandwidth they miss at moderate listening levels due to the poor quality of the components. Second, make sure the volume is not so loud that you can’t hear someone speaking loudly to you from a metre (roughly 3 feet) away. Third, do not listen for hours every day, especially at a level above the one suggested here. Expert advice on safe listening times depends on volume so it’s hard to give unequivocal guidance, but please be aware that most mobile devices are capable of maximum volumes with recommended daily exposure times of just a few minutes!
Level 2
Sound directly affects your overall health as well as your hearing. Long-term exposure to noise has been shown to increase the risk of heart disease and stroke, largely because it increases blood pressure and creates stress. This is not restricted to industrial-scale noise: with group work in class, teachers are regularly exposed to enough noise to activate this effect. It is probable that many teachers are shortening their lives by working in noisy classrooms day after day.
Noise also results in massive global health issues by causing sleep deprivation. The World Health Organisation estimates that around 8 million people in Western Europe are suffering nightly sleep interruptions due to traffic noise that’s way above its recommended maximum level; many more are affected in the same way by nearby airports or railways. Long-term sleep deprivation has many serious health effects, from stress and depression to impaired immune systems; it also leads to accidents, impatience, irritability and violence. This problem has not been quantified in other territories, but I have no doubt that it exists all over the world, especially in the fast-growing cities where more than half the world’s population live.
On a more positive note, sound can also heal and restore. There is a large and well established tradition of music therapy, now supported in the USA by learned journals, a mass of scientific evidence and a major organisation in the American Music Therapists Association. Carefully-chosen music has been shown to aid recovery from strokes and heart attacks, as well as being powerfully effective for many with severe autism, dementia and many other conditions. Recent UK research has shown that birdsong can also be therapeutic, which backs up my long-held belief that the sounds of gentle wind, water and birds are healthy for us.
Level 3
Our focus in this book is speaking and listening. Wellbeing is enhanced by being able to express oneself clearly and effectively, but it can be compromised by the frustrations that arise when we feel we are not listened to in life. At the same time, conscious listening is the key that unlocks wellbeing from all sound. If we become conscious of the sound we make and the sound we consume, we can start to manage our environment to avoid unhealthy sound and surround ourselves with sound that works for, not against, our wellbeing.
Context is key
In this chapter, we spend some time investigating sound in general before we dive deep into the secrets of powerful speaking and conscious listening. We do this because speaking and listening always happen in a context. This context is often unhelpful: noisy offices, badly designed meeting rooms, poor phone or VoIP connections, low quality or badly adjusted public address systems, street corners with loud traffic noise, an elevator full of people listening… the list goes on. When you remember to consider the context for your communication, you can take measures to improve it, maybe moving an important conversation in time or in space to create a more appropriate and supportive context that will help it to work better.
So… let’s explore sound!
Sound affects!
The first step on our journey to master speaking and listening is to become conscious about the power of sound.
Since before you were born, sound has been affecting you in 4 powerful ways, all explained and explored in this chapter. Every day, sound impacts your wellbeing, effectiveness and happiness – and yet I doubt you often think about it.
Let’s define sound as ‘vibration that humans can hear’. That’s a very small subset of all vibration. Everything in the universe is vibrating, from the tiny strings that comprise subatomic particles right up to huge astronomical objects; as you read this, your entire body is vibrating!
We measure the frequency of vibrations in cycles per second, known as Hertz (Hz). For human beings, the audible range is from around 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz (20 kHz). Animals have different ranges; for example, cats can detect far higher frequencies than we can, right up to about 85 kHz, allowing them to hear the high-pitched squeaks of mice, which are inaudible to us.
We hear a doubling of frequency as an octave, so our 20-20,000 Hz audible range spans just under 10 octaves. By contrast, the entire visible light spectrum is just one octave. Hearing degrades with age and gets damaged by exposure to loud noise, so many people can no longer hear the full audible spectrum. I know this all too well: after years of drumming in bands, I can’t hear anything above 12 kHz and I have tinnitus, a ringing sound in the ears that becomes quite evident if I sit in very quiet places. We’ll look at hearing in more detail in Chapter 3.
Sound always requires a medium to carry it. In most cases the medium is air, though you may be surprised to learn that sound travels almost 5 times as fast, and much further, in water. To understand how sound works in a medium, imagine a densely-packed crowd standing in a room. If you were to barge into someone on one side, the domino effect will end with someone on the other side of the crowd falling over. This is exactly how air carries sound waves; the air molecules bump into one another, and the wave propagates. Without a medium, sound simply can’t travel, so it was perfectly accurate for the promoters of the film Alien to say “In space no-one can hear you scream.”
Most sounds we hear are composites of many frequencies. Usually there is a fundamental, which in music we hear as the pitch, plus overtones, which are what give the sound its particular timbre or colour. Overtones create timbre: they are how we distinguish a flute from a trumpet playing the same note, or how we instantly recognise a familiar voice. Tuneful overtones with frequencies that are perfect multiples of the fundamental are known as harmonics.
Harmonics exist in many of the sounds we encounter, even though we are largely unaware of them. I once had a revelatory experience with harmonics during a week-long workshop with the great American overtone singer and teacher David Hykes. The practice of modulating and filtering the harmonics of my own singing voice (which is how overtone singers are able to sing 2 notes at once) had an effect on my ears, sensitising them to harmonics in general. I got into the car at the end of the third day of the workshop and turned the ignition key – and was astounded to hear all the harmonics of the engine noise. This was the auditory equivalent of seeing a rainbow, where all the constituent colours of light become visible, and it was just as beautiful. Sadly, as the weeks passed, the ability faded and now I no longer hear those harmonics, though I know they are all there. This experience is what gave rise to my listening exercise of savouring, which you will learn in Chapter Four.
Many physical objects have a property called resonance, which means they are particularly responsive at one or more frequencies. You may have experienced something similar in some badly designed rooms, where there’s a booming effect at particular frequencies when people speak. A bell is a perfect example: when struck, its resonance emphasises a certain set of frequencies, which we hear as the note of the bell and its harmonics, while it effectively filters out all the other possible pitches. Most musical instruments make use of this property to create notes, and this natural physical effect may well have been what led ancient humans to create music in the first place. Resonance can be destructive too: soldiers break step when crossing bridges in case the tempo of their marching matches the resonant frequency of the bridge, which can create oscillations powerful enough to destroy the structure completely. When the beautiful Millennium Bridge in London opened in 2000 it had an effect nobody had forecasted: its resonance created little vibrations that entrained the people walking across to fall in step, setting up a feedback loop that ended up with the whole structure wobbling alarmingly. The bridge had to be closed and £5 million of special damping equipment installed before it could be reopened.
Some sounds also have rhythm and tempo. Music is the most obvious example, but it’s also true of many electromechanical sounds, from manufacturing machinery and pile drivers to air conditioning units and photocopiers. Sounds with rhythm and tempo can exert influence through entrainment, which is the tendency of oscillating bodies to fall into synchrony, with the most powerful oscillators establishing the tempo. The Dutch scientist Huygens was the first to notice that pendulum clocks hanging closer to one another always end up in synchrony, with pendulums swinging exactly together. This entrainment effect works on us humans too, as we’ll see shortly.
All the effects of sound tend to increase with its intensity. We measure sound in decibels (dB), which are logarithmic. This means that we perceive an increase of 10 dB as a doubling of the volume level – so 80 dB of noise is not double the intensity of 40 dB; it’s 16 times as loud!
Before we move on, let’s define noise as ‘unwanted sound’. This is inevitably a moving target because it’s personal: my music might be your noise, and vice versa. Nevertheless, we can all agree on some sounds being noise: the sounds of road traffic, aircraft, construction and heavy industry are not going to top anyone’s list of favourites.
I hope you’re starting to see how rich, complex and fascinating sound is. Now let’s investigate the 4 powerful ways in which it affects you every day of your life.
PHYSIOLOGICAL
The human body is 70 per cent water, which makes us rather good conductors of sound. It’s not surprising, then, that sound can powerfully affect us physiologically, changing our heart rate, breathing, hormone secretions and even our brain waves. All our bodily rhythms can be affected by sound.
An age-old example of this is the fight/flight reflex. Many thousands of years of sharing caves with bears or tigers sharpened this instinctual response to any sudden or unexplained sound, and it still operates in you today. You may know intellectually that a dropped plate or backfiring car is not actually a threat – but long before you’ve processed that thought or any visual input, your autonomic nervous system, using much more primitive parts of your brain and working far faster than your conscious cortex ever can, has already acted, releasing hormones that accelerate your heart rate and increase blood pressure and blood sugar levels so that you’re ready for vigorous activity. Any sudden, loud or unexplained sound will have this effect.
Your heart rate and breathing can both be entrained by any loud external rhythm. The typical resting human heart rate is between 50 and 80 beats per minute (bpm), so it’s no surprise that loud dance music at 140 bpm will tend to accelerate your heart, even if you don’t take that sound as a threat! Your breathing will tend to follow suit. The opposite effect pertains in a spa or a meditation session, where slow-paced, gentle sound is often used to slow your heart and your breathing, and create physiological calmness.
TIP: If you ever have problems sleeping, I suggest playing the sound of gentle surf with about 6-10 cycles per minute in your bedroom. This rhythm and tempo is very like the sound of the breathing of a sleeping person and will entrain your breathing and promote rest; also, we tend to associate this sound with being carefree and relaxed and with natural tranquility, so it works on many levels.
From the moment you wake (preferably to something much gentler than the traditional startling alarm clock bell or beep) to the moment you retire, sound plays a significant role in your physiology, affecting your heart, your breathing, your hormone secretions and even your brain waves.
PSYCHOLOGICAL
The second way sound affects us is by changing our feelings, moods and emotions.
The clearest example of this is music. Take a moment to think of your favourite song. I’m joining you by thinking of mine, which is River Man by Nick Drake. As your song plays in your mind and you listen with imaginary ears, you may notice a shift in your mood. Music is a very powerful conveyor of emotion, and most people know how to use it deliberately either to counteract a feeling they would rather not have, or to enhance one they are enjoying. The process may be intuitive, but it’s also complex because music involves many factors: tempo and rhythm; timbre and dynamics; melody and harmony; and for vocal music lyrics and singing style too. Some of these are cultural; for example, the melancholic association of minor keys is strong in the classic European and American tradition, but far weaker in the Middle East, where some very happy music uses the minor mode.
On top of this, like all sound, music works powerfully by association. These associations may be global, like those evinced by the first 2 notes of John Williams’s famous theme from the film Jaws (I bet you just imagined them and thought of a shark!); they may be local, like the social relevance of most folk music; or they may be entirely individual, created by personal emotional experiences that are powerfully tied to a piece of music and rekindled if it is heard again, even years later. Thus, predicting the exact emotional impact of a piece of music on any person or group is very difficult.
What we do know is that human beings have used music for thousands of years to create shared emotional experiences, from tribal rites of passage to religious worship or the modern dance scene. We even use it in war, to give our troops bravery or to intimidate the enemy; that’s what bagpipes were invented for. Never has a human society been discovered, no matter how remote, that did not have music, so it clearly is part of our nature, not spread or learned – though of course styles and songs travel, coalesce and collide constantly, especially in the modern, connected world of YouTube, streaming, downloads and public playlists.
While music is the most obvious type of sound that affects us psychologically, it’s not the only one. My company, The Sound Agency, often installs birdsong-based soundscapes, and for good reason. The birds have been singing for millions of years, and we have learned through the ages that normal birdsong means all is well. We can tell if something alarms the birds, or, even worse, causes them to stop singing altogether – a phenomenon that has often been reported before volcanic eruptions or tsunamis. That’s why normal birdsong makes most people feel safe, even if they are not conscious of this effect. Birdsong is also nature’s alarm clock, telling us that it’s time to be awake and thus promoting alertness, so this combination of security and wakefulness makes birdsong a very useful sound for working, along with many other activities. Just recently, research has shown that it’s also effective in aiding recovery from illness, so it seems that we instinctively like birdsong for some very good reasons.
The latest thinking about the multi-layered process of sound affecting emotions comes from academics in a paper from Lund University in Sweden. It proposes 6 component pathways in the process. In ascending order of complexity and subtlety, here they are.
Brain stem reflex is the physiological effect discussed above, most importantly the fight/flight reflex. Sounds that are sudden, loud, dissonant, or feature fast patterns tend to induce emotional arousal.
Evaluative conditioning is the associative response we considered above. You associate a sound or song with something, maybe a person or event, and that thing creates the emotion.
Emotional contagion is where we receive the emotion the composer poured into a song because we perceive it – in just the same way that seeing someone crying may make us sad. This puts me in mind of the hilarious scene in the film Bridget Jones, where Bridget is wallowing in self-pity and singing along with Jamie O’Neal’s version of Eric Carmen’s classic All By Myself.
Visual imagery involves conjuring up visual images while listening to the sound, so that emotions arise from the combination of the sound and the imagined scene. This is at least partly the process in play if you use gentle surf to relax or lull yourself to sleep.
Episodic memory is where the sound evokes a memory of a particular event in the listener’s life and the event creates the emotion (sometimes referred to as the “Darling, they’re playing our tune” phenomenon). Post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers may react strongly to the sound of thunder or any sudden bang for this reason.
Music expectancy happens where a feature of the musical structure violates, delays, or confirms the listener’s expectations based on previous experiences of the same style of music. Composers have used this for hundreds of years, playfully taking us down a path and then catching us out with an unexpected twist that causes surprise or delight.
Remember, all sound can affect your feelings, not just music.
COGNITIVE
The third effect of sound is on our ability to think, with dramatic effects on our productivity or effectiveness. This mainly because we have quite limited neural bandwidth when it comes to processing sound.
I have never met anyone who can understand 2 people speaking at the same time. Scouring the available scientific evidence, I have calculated that we have auditory bandwidth for around 1.6 human conversations. This feels about right intuitively; most of us know the feelings of overwhelm, frustration and maybe irritation that arise when 2 people are talking at us simultaneously, or when we’re trying to work on a deadline and someone near us is talking loudly.
As you may have noticed, we have no earlids, so unless you don headphones there is no way of shutting out distracting sound. In addition, we are programmed to decode language so a nearby conversation takes up one of our precious 1.6 bandwidth, leaving us only 0.6 to listen to the internal voice we use when we’re trying to work with words, symbols or numbers. That’s why another person’s conversation is the most distracting sound of all.
Research on people working in modern open-plan offices has revealed that variable or unpredictable sounds are the most distracting, especially when we have no control over them. After unwanted conversation, the most commonly cited nuisances are ringing phones and office machinery like printers or other people’s computers. This kind of noise degrades our ability to think, often dramatically: productivity can be reduced by two thirds in noisy open-plan offices! One survey of 1,800 home and office workers in the UK found that they were losing up to 2 hours a day to interruptions from noise, mainly from loud colleagues and ringing phones. The estimated cost to the UK economy was £139 billion a year!
Office expert Professor Jeremy Myerson has written extensively on this issue. He points out that we have different work modes, and that open-plan suits only one of them – collaboration, or team-based working, where the main objective is fast communication so it’s acceptable to interrupt neighbours without warning. When I interviewed him for a BBC Radio documentary on this topic, Myerson noted that this kind of working open-plan is like frontier territory in its lack of social rules. As he said: “The postman doesn’t enter your house unannounced and dump the post on your living room floor, but that’s exactly what happens in open-plan offices.”
Alert sounds in any environment are particularly disturbing – after all, beeps and buzzes were designed to grab our attention. If an alert sounds in communal space, it alarms not only the person it was intended for, but also everyone else in earshot. This is a major problem in hospitals, where the constant racket coming from beeping machinery has created a phenomenon called ‘alarm fatigue’: staff become habituated to the noise and cease to register the alarms. This doesn’t mean the noise has no effect: the unfortunate patients are also subjected to all these warning sounds, with serious consequences for sleep and stress levels, as we’ll see later in this chapter.
So, noise can interrupt collaborative working, as well as being bad for the health. A more profound issue, though, is that 4 critical work modes are simply not catered to at all in many open-plan offices.
The first is concentration, or individual working, which requires a space more like a library. Noise distraction and lack of quiet working space are among the top complaints on the Leesman Index, which has surveyed hundreds of thousands of office workers about what factors affect their productivity.
Tip: If you have an alert sound set for incoming email, your concentration will be broken every time it chimes, which may be many times an hour. Try instead turning off the alert sound and checking your email in batches at defined times, maybe on the hour every hour for 5 or 10 minutes, or first and last thing each day. You may find you become up to 3 times as productive!
The second is contemplation, or not working, which might be decompressing after some intense work or maybe gently sharing ideas in a social setting. The first of these is best done in a calming, Zen-type room, while the second requires informal, social spaces (isolated, of course from quiet working areas!).
The third is communication over distance, which often requires privacy. I have come across offices so quiet that the turning of a piece of paper is a major event. In these places there is no privacy at all, so one person making a call disturbs everyone else in the room – not to mention the uncomfortable, intimidated feeling that arises when you realise everyone is listening to your call!
The fourth is conferencing, or structured meetings in groups. Again, privacy is a major issue here: I have experienced many offices where meeting spaces have no walls, or maybe a token fabric partition, which means the sound of the meeting distracts the people working nearby, who can hear every word - and of course the sound of a lively open-plan office makes the meeting more challenging to hear. Meeting rooms need good acoustics and effective attenuation to stop sound travelling out to and in from adjoining spaces.
You have probably had many of these experiences yourself in offices that were designed purely for the eyes. Now that you know the importance of sound, you can take care to move to the most appropriate environment for the kind of work you want to do.
BEHAVIOURAL
Noise has been shown to make people less sociable, and less helpful to others. Loud, fast-paced music will affect the speed and driving style of a car. Powerful oratory can dramatically affect behaviour, inspiring teams to produce great work, converting people to religious faith, radically changing political and social landscapes or inciting mobs to violence. Roaring crowds can inspire sports teams to stellar performances. In martial arts, special words shouted with a strike increase focus and power. Soothing words, mantras and gentle sounds can induce peacefulness or even trance states.
This fourth effect of sound, changing human behaviour, is the most important one in the work of The Sound Agency, and we’ve proved its efficacy many times. One of the most dramatic examples was in the town of Lancaster, California, where the mayor, R. Rex Parris, wanted to generate positive vibes among downtown pedestrians in the town’s signature BLVD area, in order to enhance the city’s top priority – safety. We installed a soundscape incorporating birdsong, lapping water and carefully-chosen musical elements, all designed to entrain heart rates downwards and produce calming moods. The sound plays from more than 70 weatherproof loudspeakers along the BLVD. Shopkeepers and restaurant owners in the BLVD were delighted with the sound. More significantly, the Lancaster Sheriff noted a 15% drop in crime after installation, which generated global media interest including the front page of the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Daily News, the UK’s Daily Mail, KTLA and KQED radio and NBC Network News.
Research has consistently revealed that the tempo of a soundscape entrains the pace of our behaviour. Multiple studies have shown that fast-paced music causes people to walk faster, which has a significant effect in shops: if we speed up like that we generally spend less time and less money in a shop. The jolly, up-tempo music that most shops play may well be costing them money! We also chew and eat faster in high-tempo sound, so it’s no surprise that fast food restaurants usually play fast music to increase table turnaround.
We tend to move away from unpleasant sound if we can, albeit often unconsciously. If you draw a parallel with fragrance this becomes obvious: you would naturally avoid a bad smell, moving away if possible, and you might gravitate towards a wonderful fragrance. The same happens with sound. Unpleasant noise is the auditory equivalent of a bad odour, and it causes avoidance behaviours or, if we can’t get away, stress reactions. That’s why context is so important for communication, as we’ll see towards the end of this chapter and the next.
The circle
Most people I meet visualise spoken communication as a simple linear relationship between speaking and listening rather like this:
Somebody sends; somebody else receives. But is it really that simple?
Of course, the answer is no. First, we’re missing an important element. In the last few pages we’ve discovered that the sound around us directly affects all our significant outcomes in life, and that it forms a powerful context for all our speaking and listening. Sadly, this context is predominantly negative: all too often it damages our best efforts to communicate by drowning our signal in noise. Only rarely are we in a space that’s thoughtfully designed to help communication or listening, for example a concert hall or theatre.
So, because all our spoken communication exists in a context, we need a third element in our diagram:
That’s better, but it’s not right yet. We need to include one more aspect of communication that not many people appreciate – something that can be transformative if fully internalised.
Speaking and listening are not linear, but circular, they interact.
The way you listen affects the way I speak. And just as powerfully, the way I speak affects the way you listen. This is very far from one way traffic, and some of the most profound lessons you may learn on this journey derive from this one, powerful realisation. Let’s try the illustration again, this time with the circular relationship between speaking and listening.
This is the model that underpins the rest of this book. It shows how dynamic and interactive speaking and listening are, and explains why being heard paradoxically requires working on listening!
Let’s take a look at the power of skilful listening and speaking.
The power of listening
Listening may be a silent skill, but it has enormous power, as we’ll see in the next few pages. The quality of our listening affects our relationships, health, influence, productivity and growth, but in our ocular society we virtually ignore this crucial skill – which is why there’s a need for this book.
So, what is the power of listening?
LISTENING CREATES UNDERSTANDING
In 2014, I gave a TEDx talk in Athens (the cradle of democracy) and also at London’s Houses of Parliament entitled ‘The Sound of Democracy’. I started the talk by walking on stage and saying one word: “Listen!”. Silence fell in those 2 impressive theatres full of hundreds of people. After a while I said: “That is the wonderful sound of several hundred people consciously listening. It’s also The Sound of Democracy, because democracy depends on civilised disagreement – and that is only possible if we understand other people’s points of view, even if we disagree with them. Conscious listening always creates understanding.”
This is a crucial point, and one that is increasingly threatened in the world we are creating. Post-truth politics, fake news, selective web browsing that only confirms our preconceptions, attack journalism that constantly interrupts or mingles opinion with fact, sound bites, personal broadcasting on social media platforms, 140-character diplomacy… these are all undermining the quality of our listening and eroding our ability to coexist in peace even when we disagree. Not listening makes it possible to caricature, depersonalise and demonise people, and that is a long, dark, slippery slope that leads to horrors that we see all too often in totalitarian societies.
I passionately believe that listening is necessary for peace, and for civil society to exist. That alone is a good enough reason to teach listening in our schools, and to defend it as a crucial bastion of the free world. Politicians always meet for talks: I suspect it might be better if they met for listens instead.
After all, what use is free speech is nobody is listening?
LISTENING PROMOTES INTIMACY
Truly listening to someone requires all of your attention. Ask yourself now, when is the last time you truly listened to someone? This is a rare and most generous gift and one that, in our intense, connected, multimedia existence, we are becoming unwilling or even unable to give. What, stop checking my email, Twitter, Facebook and go offline? You may be familiar with FOMO – fear of missing out – which tempts us to live a multi-stream, always-on existence, checking email whilst lying in bed and not talking to our partner, or having conversations with one eye on a screen and the other on a phone. In that twilight world of semi-attention, listening is a tattered vestige of its full self.
Even before technology intervened, true listening was the exception, not the rule. I believe that there are literally billions of people on this planet who have never known what it is to be truly listened to, so scarce is that experience.
Intimacy requires honesty and deep knowledge of another, which can only come through listening. I have heard it said that we seek 3 things in a relationship: to be heard, to be understood, and to be valued. It’s tragic then that one of the most common complaints in relationships is: “He / she never listens to me!”, because not listening eroded all 3 of those needs.
Listening is an act of love, and like all acts of love it requires some work or it can succumb to atrophy.
In this book you’ll be learning some structures and exercises to help revitalise your listening in relationships, rebuilding and renewing intimacy.
LISTENING PERSUADES AND INSPIRES
When I started my first business in magazine publishing, our original advertising salesperson, John, was the polar opposite of the stereotyped loud, brash sales executive. He was so quiet that you could never hear his side of the phone conversation. He never stood on his chair, or did a countdown at the start of the day, or slapped himself in the face before a call. He had a gentle, quiet and polite nature; when he listened, you really felt heard. Despite the lack of fizz and buzz going down the phone line, people just seemed to love buying from him; his sales figures were amazing. He went on to launch a division, buy it out from us, and sell it for a large sum – all, I am sure, at well-modulated volume levels and with very attentive listening.
Ask any top-class salesperson what the most important part of a sales call is and they will almost certainly say: “Listening!”. We all know how irritating it is to have someone sell without listening. We feel disrespected because our needs are not being discovered or met. Listening is how a good seller can identify the problem, and tailor a solution to match it exactly; a call like that can come across as caring, helpful and kind, to the point where we feel grateful after buying whatever it is. That is a recipe for long-term repeat business.
As any parent knows, the need for persuasion is not restricted to selling. Whether the issue is a tantrum-throwing toddler or a recalcitrant teenager experimenting with booze or drugs, listening can be a transformative first step in persuading a child towards more productive behaviours. If we want our children to listen, we need to show them how, by listening to them.
Listening is the oil in the engine of inspiration. We can inspire people only when we know what they want – which means listening.
LISTENING IMPROVES HEALTH
We’ve seen how dramatically sound can affect our health and wellbeing. Developing a practice of consciously listening to the world around us is the only way to discern which sounds are health-giving, and which will make us sick. If we are conscious, we are in a position to take action, whether that’s moving our location or blocking the noise. Some of the exercises later in this book will help you to develop exactly these skills.
LISTENING EDUCATES
It’s said that the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras erected a screen in front of the teacher so that first-year students were not distracted by visual input and could listen properly to what they were being taught. Gradually over the years, the tables have been turned, and the written word has replaced aural teaching at the top of the table, to the point where we now speak of ‘book learning’.
Conscious listening is a wonderful tool for learning and for growth. As you’ll discover, we listen through a set of filters. Once you gain mastery of that process and control of your filters, you too can empty yourself of what you know (or perhaps what you think you know) and make room for plenty of fresh lessons!
The power of speaking
The human voice is the instrument we all play, but very few people have ever had any training in how to use it effectively. This is a complex, versatile and powerful skill and it is extraordinary that we don’t teach or test it in schools.
To paraphrase the old song, it is what you say and the way that you say it. Your voice is your breath projected into the world; it’s the only part of you that you can send forth outside of your own body
SPEAKING AND INSPIRATION
I live in Orkney, a set of islands off the north coast of Scotland that are liberally scattered with antiquities from prehistory. Possibly the most famous is Ring of Brodgar, a stone circle dating back to around 3,000 BC. Each of the 60 huge stones that originally formed the ring (27 are still standing) had to be dragged miles to the site before being erected, which must have taken incredible organisation and determination, not to mention teamwork, for these Neolithic people. Even with modern equipment this would be a major operation. These people had no power other than their own muscles; they worked of their own volition, unlike the slave labourers who built the pyramids. They must have been very highly motivated.
I often wonder who had the idea to create this seminal structure, which some scientists believe inspired all the stone circles in the UK, culminating in Stonehenge. Whoever it was must have been a potent speaker indeed, to inspire thousands to commit so much time and energy over many years to such a huge project.
Throughout human history, powerful speakers have inspired people to change their beliefs, create or destroy social systems, adopt personal lifestyles, follow religious or philosophical paths, take up arms and fight, form movements, work in teams – and build monuments. Innumerable great sporting performances have been triggered by an inspirational talk from a coach or captain.
If you want to make a difference in the world, you will most likely need to inspire others, and you may need to be a leader. Your voice is the most powerful tool you have for these things.
SPEAKING AND PERSUASION
Possibly the most famous and strongest form of vocal persuasion is hypnosis. You may have seen high-speed onstage hypnotism, where the hypnotist instantly induces trance states and the uses spoken suggestions to have people change their behaviour even after the trance ends. Strong suggestions made to the subconscious are not confined to the entertainment industry; hypnosis is now a widely acknowledged and relatively mainstream therapeutic tool, able (subject to an individual’s level of suggestibility) to reduce pain, help stop smoking and clear skin complaints, among other uses.
Persuasion in its widest context is critical in life. Many achievements are beyond the scope of one person acting alone, which means we very often need to persuade others to help us or join our team in order to achieve our goals.
The voice plays a key role in the process of persuasion – not only what we say but also how we say it. Some people struggle to have their voice heard, while others seem to carry natural authority. Stature and body language play a role, but the largest part of this authority derives from speaking, in which both content and delivery play their parts. We will cover both of these aspects of speaking intensively in this book with exercises and tips to help you gain power and authority in your speaking, allowing you to be more persuasive and achieve more of your goals by enrolling people in your passions.
SPEAKING AND HEALTH
If you’ve ever had the experience of not being listened to, not being able to make a dent in an argument, being disrespected, feeling invisible in a group, not being taken seriously, being talked over, being continually interrupted, or secretly crying out to be heard, then you know that the inability to express oneself clearly and powerfully is bad for you. It’s debilitating and frustrating to be ignored. It creates stress and anxiety if it continues or repeats in relationships – and it can eventually cause sickness or even violence. I suspect that at least some of the antisocial behaviour from young people in urban environments arises from this feeling of frustration: “Nobody’s listening to me, nobody cares, so why should I?”
If only we taught our children how to express themselves clearly and powerfully, how much less ill health, stress and violence would we see in the world?
SPEAKING STORIES
One of the most potent styles of speaking is storytelling. We all love a story: as soon as we hear the words, “Once upon a time…” our inner child wakes up; we metaphorically curl up and look forward to the wonders to come. For as long as language has existed, I’m willing to bet that people have told stories to share their day, keep alive the exploits of legendary heroes, pass on cultural traditions, or simply to soothe their children to sleep.
For many millennia, stories have been among the most powerful tools in the essential task of passing knowledge and history on from one generation to the next, or from one group to another. Writing has been available only for around 5 thousand years, so from the development of complex language (estimated at up to 100,000 years ago) all human knowledge was spread simply by speaking and listening. Throughout those many years, countless groups of humans have sat around fires at night listening with wonder and rapt attention to a local sage or storyteller pass on tales that carried wisdom from the past.
In some societies, this powerful oral tradition still exists. Indian classical music has no written form at all: all the complex, lengthy ragas are learned by rote, transmitted from guru to shishya by word of mouth and demonstration. The same applies in many surviving folk music cultures, including that of Orkney, my home, where it seems almost every child plays an instrument, but not many play from sheet music. Traditional folk music often encapsulates old stories in its lyrics, even if we don’t understand the references now; the same is true of many nursery rhymes. The indigenous peoples of Australia can safely navigate the vast expanses of the outback on ‘song lines’, paths that they follow by reciting the words of songs that list landmarks, waterholes and other way finders. Even in the text-obsessed West, there are still many professional storytellers plying their trade, and storytelling festivals exist in the US, UK, India, Dubai and many other countries. Stories still have power!
The problem
Speaking and listening are natural, fast, efficient, powerful, nuanced and rich ways to communicate, and yet we barely give them a thought; we certainly don’t generally teach them with the same devotion we award to reading, writing, mathematics or motor skills. Yes, we joyfully celebrate our child’s first words, but as soon as conversation is flowing we take it for granted – meanwhile, we have many milestones spread over years in reading, writing and mathematics (we call them exams) and in motor skills (from walking to riding a bike to driving a car to athletic or sporting achievements).
Wondering why this was so was the reason I got into the sound business in the first place: it seemed so clear to me that we were missing out on something really important by taking for granted listening and speaking. I have thought a lot about this and over the next few pages I will try to unpack the key forces that are working against the ears.
SPEAKING VERSUS WRITING
Speaking is ancient: expert opinion on the dawn of complex language varies from 60,000 to 100,000 years ago. Writing is much more recent, developing around 4,000 years ago. For most of human history, all knowledge has been handed down orally – but writing has sprinted past speaking in its short existence and it now dominates communication in our ocular world.
I absolutely accept the benefits of writing. It can be propagated, copied and published, and many of the world’s greatest revolutions in thought or belief result from this. It is fixed and can be referred to, as with a contract. It can be asynchronous, so I can email you while you sleep in another time zone and you can read my message the next day when you wake.
However, I do believe the pendulum has swung too far, which is why many organisations are now training people in listening and speaking skills – though mainly the second. It’s interesting to note that my TED talk on speaking has been viewed more than 3 times as many times as my TED talk on listening. We prioritise sending over receiving, just as we prioritise written communication over spoken.
I think there are several reasons for the dominance of the eyes over the ears in the modern world.
NOISE
The world is noisy, and getting noisier. Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve been surrounding ourselves with mechanical, and now electronic, noises, some of them very loud indeed. Transport has always been noisy – the Romans had to introduce ordnances to control the clatter of carts in the streets of their capital 2 thousand years ago – but now we have pervasive jet engines and tyre noise to contend with. My friend Bernie Krause, the world’s most eminent nature sound recordist, relates that it once took 20 hours to get 15 minutes of usable recorded material. “Now it takes 200 hours,” he says.
Once we needed to listen carefully, because sound was meaningful: if you were sharing a cave with some bears or tigers, you’d better be listening carefully! Now most noise is meaningless, so we have developed the habit of suppressing it, and we move around the world simply not listening.
The result of this of course is more noise, to the point where the World Health Organisation (WHO) rates noise pollution as the second-largest global threat to health, just behind air pollution. The WHO estimates that in Europe over one million years of healthy life are lost every to traffic noise pollution. As we’ve seen, 8 million Europeans are having their sleep disrupted night after night by traffic noise, with drastic effects on their health, as well as huge resulting costs – up to 2 percent of GDP according to official estimates, which amounts to over 300 billion euros a year.
Noise pervades many vital spaces because we design them with eyes, not ears.
In classrooms, acoustics are often so bad that speech intelligibility is less than 50 percent for pupils more than a few feet from the teacher, while noise levels during groupwork are exceeding levels dangerous for the health of teachers and children.
In hospitals, noise levels are up to 12 times the WHO recommended maximum, which means patients struggle to sleep – and sleeping is how we get well. It’s no surprise that noise is the number one complaint of patients in US hospitals. Studies have shown that simply sensitising staff to the sounds they are making can cut noise levels by up to 3 quarters, so just listening can make a massive difference.
In offices, noise is again the number one complaint, with millions feeling the frustration of trying to concentrate in open-plan spaces that are designed to support only one kind of work: collaboration. We clearly need much more quiet working space.
The story goes on, in hotels, in shops, in restaurants, in airports and train stations, and even in our homes. Noise is all around us. We need to start listening in order to control it and stop these negative effects on health, effectiveness and happiness.
TECHNOLOGY
The breakthroughs in communication of the last several decades have almost all been text-based: email, SMS, instant messaging and social media all rely on eyes and fingers. The result is that millions of people would rather have a conversation in writing than in sound.
The Sound Agency did some research with our friends at Edinburgh Sterling University into preferred channels and messages and it yielded some fascinating insights. Older people were wedded to email, while the middle generations loved SMS and the youngest preferred IM or social media platforms. This brings a whole new dimension to the generation gap: not only do the generations have different attitudes and vocabularies, but also entirely different channels of communication. All the samples agreed on one thing: they preferred to ask someone out, or break up with someone, in writing – possibly because in a scary conversation like that, it’s safer not to be around to experience the response in person!
MIT professor and TED speaker Sherry Turkle wrote an excellent book called Alone Together on the effects of technology on our relationships. She suggested that, far from bringing us together in a global village, technology is increasing alienation and pushing people apart as we move from a few deep relationships to many shallow ones. I agree with her. In my workshops, I sometimes ask for a show of hands if people do email in bed at night while lying next to their loved one. Increasingly the majority of the people in the room own up to this very destructive behaviour, which I see as another nail in the coffin of spoken communication, driven in by the irresistible hammer of technology. Professor Turkle’s follow-up book, Reclaiming Conversation, is a wonderful, passionate plea, based on 5 years of research, for us all to rediscover the critical humanizing art of conversation. Highly recommended, and absolutely in tune with everything you will read in this book.
EDUCATION
We have 4 communication channels: reading, writing, speaking and listening. Two send; 2 receive. Two are for the eyes; 2 for the ears. Reading and writing are considered core skills in every curriculum in the world, while speaking is barely taught in schools – listening, even less so, maybe because it’s a silent skill. Sadly, millions of children leave school every year having never been taught how to use their voice to its full, to speak powerfully and well, to look after their precious hearing, or to listen consciously.
Tip: Take some time now to ask yourself, what sounds stop you from working? From resting? From relating to your family, friends and colleagues? From exercising? From sleeping? From enjoying yourself?
Once you have that list, try the exercises again but this time ask yourself, what sounds do/could help you in all these things?
Listening is the doorway to understanding, and speaking is the strongest expression of ourselves in the world. We need to re-learn how to speak and how to listen. Helping you to achieve that is the mission of this book.
