The Fine Art of Listening
Transcription of interview with Julian Treasure on September 10, 2012.
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
Julian Treasure, who is based in London, is the author of Sound Business and is the chairman
of the Sound Agency.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Treasure on Arutz Sheva
Radio.
Douglas Goldstein: What is listening really all about?
Julian Treasure: Listening is something that many people donít actually do very much of,
and actually we have four ways of communicating of course, reading, writing, speaking, and
listening.
Although listening, according to the research, takes up possibly 60% of our time, we only
retain roughly one word in four that we hear.
Listening, I define it as making meaning from sound.
Itís distinct from the process of hearing.
We hear an awful lot of sound all through the day.
What we listen to is what we select to pay attention to.
Hearing is pretty universal.
Iíve got some damaged hearing because Iíve been a drummer for years, but hearing is not
selective.
Listening is whatís selective and thereís a great quote by Ernest Hemingway, and he
says, ìMost people never listen,î and I completely agree with that.
Douglas Goldstein: Do you feel that maybe over the years thereís just so much more
noise out there?
Julian Treasure: Thereís so much noise around us.
The world is definitely getting noisier.
There are many reasons why people donít listen so much anymore and there was a time when
you had to listen because if you missed it, you missed it.
We didnít have writing.
We didnít have any way of recording things.
These days, weíre surrounded by noise so our natural habit becomes to suppress sound
and to ignore it so we stopped listening and indeed, many people adopt a very common tactic
to get away from the noise around us all the time.
Itís a bit like when you were a kid you could stick your fingers in your ears and hum, and
now you can do that with an iPod or a mobile music player and a pair of headphones and
thatís how many people take refuge.
Douglas Goldstein: Or you can simply put on white noise, which is what I find I sometimes
do when I want to do writing and I want to block everything else out.
Julian Treasure: Yes, Iím not a great fan of white noise I have to say, and I mean it
is stochastic sound and that means it is composed of a huge number of tiny individual events.
We do find stochastic sound quite easy to set aside, and what youíll notice is after
a while you can hear the white noise.
Nevertheless, I think it does take energy to ignore it and there are other sounds which
perhaps are rather more healthy to use which achieve the same objective, such as birdsong,
gentle surf, or the sound of running water, and these are other stochastic sounds that
weíve evolved with over hundreds of thousands of years which weíve become very used to.
In fact, birdsong is a sound we use a great deal with our clients.
Itís a very useful sound because weíve learned over a long period of time that when the birds
are singing, we are safe.
Itís only if they suddenly stop that you have to be worried, so birdsong creates a
nice mixture of a relaxed body with an alert mind because we also know that when the birds
are singing itís time to be awake.
Douglas Goldstein: Does that also help to block out the outside sounds?
Julian Treasure: Birdsongís a perfectly good masking sound if thatís what you want to
do, so Iíd prefer to see that being used in offices rather than white or pink noise
being broadcast all over the place.
Douglas Goldstein: You work a lot with businesses, and your book is called Sound Business.
How is it that businesses benefit from your wisdom?
Julian Treasure: Itís a fascinating subject because most businesses havenít thought at
all about sound, which is, when you think of it, quite bizarre.
We experience the world in five senses and so we experience a brand in five senses, and
although many brands are starting to understand that brand experience is just as important
as brand promise, they often havenít thought about it.
I often have the conversation where I say, ìDo you have a brand book?î ìYes; we have
a brand book, a great big thing.î ìHow many pages are about sound?î ìOh, none.î Thatís
almost universal - or at least it was.
Weíve now been working for 10 years with some of the worldís biggest brands, showing
them that unfortunately this is true.
A good sound is a good business, especially, for example, for retailers.
Douglas Goldstein: How did that work actually?
Julian Treasure: Well, it works because we can improve retail sound massively and generally,
the process is that if a sound is unpleasant, we just naturally move away from it.
We tend to suppress sound and not be so conscious of it, so we may not even know that we are
leaving that shop or that restaurant or whatever it might be that coffee bar because the sound
in there is bad.
But thatís what we do, and any retailer knows that dwell time is directly associated with
sales.
The longer you stay somewhere, the more you are going to spend in there.
We are in the business of kind of vivid.
If this was smell-related, we are in a business of stink remover a lot of the time.
Itís about removing bad sound and replacing it with something thatís pleasant to be in,
and I am absolutely not talking about mindless music all over the place.
I think every brand should have a different sound, and so you should be able to close
your eyes in any branded space and know where you are, and thatís very much not the case
at the moment.
Douglas Goldstein: How
can people actually become better listeners?
Julian Treasure: What many people donít realize is that we listen through a whole set of filters
the whole time, and those filters for many people are kind of fixed because they are
not even aware of them.
These are things like our culture.
Different cultures listen in different ways.
Language - some languages on the planet donít even have words for time, for example.
Our values, our beliefs, our attitudes, the things we grow up learning and creating from
the experiences that we have and in any situation, also our expectations and our intentions in
that situation will change our listening.
This is all a process of selection.
Thereís a huge amount of sound around us.
The filters are what we use to select the sound we can pay attention to or listen to,
and there are many different listening positions.
Thatís a metaphor.
Iím not talking about physical positions, but I mean imagine thereís a house on a hill.
If you donít like the way that house looks, you could get up and walk around the other
side of the hill and see if it looks better from there.
In the same way, if you are listening to something, you can change your listening position but
many people donít.
In fact, the vast majority of people are in a kind of concrete bunker looking at the one
side or listening to this one perspective and they donít change it, and the male or
female thing you mentioned earlier is a very interesting one.
Men tend to listen in a particular way, and I call it reductive, which is to say men tend
to listen for a point, for a purpose, to solve something.
A typical male conversation would be, I say to you, ìIíve got this problem, Dougî and
you say to me, ìHere is the solution,î and I say, ìThanks,î and thatís all done and
dusted.
Nice and effective, thatís how men tend to talk.
I know this is a slight gender stereotype, but nonetheless thereís a lot of truth in
it.
Women on the other hand to talk and tend to listen in away that I call expansive, which
is to say there isnít a point as such.
Itís a journey that they are on that they enjoy.
Theyíre just being together and wherever the conversation goes, is where it goes.
Now men can find that very frustrating, and women equally can find the male way of listening
very frustrating, so a typical mismatch of these things would be: she comes home and
says, ìIíve had a rotten day,î and he says, ìHave a bath, youíll be fine.î Now thatís
not what she wanted.
For him, thatís a perfectly good conversation.
Heís solved the problem and now he can go back to watching the football.
Our listening is very different compared to other people.
We have to understand we all listen in different ways, and Iím sure thatís very much true
of our relationship with money as well.
Douglas Goldstein: I sit with clients I have a limited amount of time.
I donít go to their house every night.
Theyíll come in, weíll meet for an hour or two, and there are very specific decisions
that have to be made: change your budget, buy those stock, or mutual fund.
We do have to get to the point on the one hand.
On the other hand I do try to be a good listener.
In fact, I think a big part of what I do is more of a marriage counselor than an investment
adviser because Iím just trying to understand what they are really saying, not necessarily
what their words are saying.
But at the end of the meeting, I have to give them something practical.
I guess with men, again just a stereotype, I tell them what I think the solution is,
and they either take it or not, but what would be a way to present it so that Iím going
on a journey with the women?
Julian Treasure: You canít be that general.
I think what you need to be very good at is assessing the listening that you are speaking
into.
In other words, assessing the way that people have got their filter set, and everybody is
different.
For example, one decent way of dividing people up is into people who think, people who feel,
and people who know.
For the thinking people, you need to give them just facts and figures.
They need to understand the reasons and the logic, and so forth.
People who feel, then youíd be using much more emotive words of, ìHow does that feel
to you?
Where do you want to be?
What do you want to be feeling in the future?î So itís the kind of emotional side that you
are appealing to, and people who know: ìDonít bother me with the details, just tell me the
bottom line now.î Different people need to be communicated with different ways and they
have different listenings, and your skill and the skill of anybody who sells for example,
any great salesperson will tell you that listening is much more important that speaking.
You may well find that you have to state the same solution to the husband and the wife
in two different ways in order to get the same message across as clearly to both of
them.
Douglas Goldstein: Are there any other tricks you can give us about how we can keep from
being distracted?
Julian Treasure: I think itís a very good idea to have just a few minutes of silence
in your day.
It recalibrates your ears very well.
Itís also important to understand how sound is affecting you the whole time to be conscious
of it.
To me, this is all part of the conversation about consciousness, and itís a great thing
to become more conscious of everything around you.
Sound changes your breathing, your heart rate, your brainwaves, your hormone secretions.
It changes your feelings, your moods, it changes how you behave all the time, and yet most
of us are unconscious.
I think just if you start listening, you have no earlids after all.
You are always hearing.
If you start listening consciously, then itís like turning up the color on a black and white
TV set.
Suddenly the world is a richer place.
Douglas Goldstein: Could you just tell people how they can follow your work?
Julian Treasure: I have a website, www.juliantreasure.com and for those who are in brands or businesses,
the Sound Agency also has one the www.soundagency.com.
Iím on the usual things: Facebook, Twitter, and so forth, and Iíd be absolutely delighted
to engage in any conversations.
Douglas Goldstein, CFPÆ, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show (Monday nights at 7:00 PM on www.israelnationalradio.com.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S. and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA,
SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE/SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at: www.profile-financial.com (02) 624-2788 or (03) 524-0942.
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