Welcome, welcome to this course how to speak so that people want to listen, my powerful course in communication skills and the skills of speaking of listening. Yes, listening as well, because listening actually underpins speaking, as you'll discover, if you want to be a great speaker, then you need also to be a good listener, we'll cover both. The focus, however, will be very much on the skill of speaking. Well, we're going to spend some time together over the hours of this course. So let me introduce myself. I'm Julian treasure.

I'm chairman of a company called the sound agency, which helps organizations all over the world to make good sound in public places and in all their communications. Along the way, I had the fortune to do some TED talks and they started to focus more on that skills of personal sound. So it wasn't just organizations that were making noise as I perceived it in the world. And I wanted to help. It was all of us. As individuals making sound with this amazing instrument, we all use the human voice, and perhaps not listening carefully to the sound that we were making or the sound that was around us.

And it occurred to me that's having a major effect on all of us. I've been traveling the world for years since the TED Talks, which have now been seen by I think, 80 million people amazingly. And I've been traveling the world giving keynotes and the dresses and doing trainings with high level executives on these skills. I've written a book called How to be heard about these skills. The TED talks were between six and 18 minutes long. Here, we've got hours, and I'm going to pack into these hours of this course, everything I can to give you the tools to be a powerful effective communicator, to speak so that people want to listen to you to listen so that you're somebody people want to speak to, as well.

Those are incredibly powerful skills. I've been thrilled that the work I've done over the years has had such great response from so many people, I get enormously inspiring messages from people all over the world saying what a difference these things have made to them. And I'm really excited to be offering you this very powerful course to make such a difference in your life. Let me give you a little bit about my background because people often ask me, how did you get into this? I had years in marketing actually had a contract publishing company in the UK. I started back in 1988.

Yes, I am that old. And that cost custom publishing. It's called in America producing magazines for brands. That's very common. Now it wasn't common when we started. I sold that in 2002.

And all the way through that Being a musician. Now, musicians, I think do listen to the world in a slightly different way to non musicians, you have to if you're playing in a band or an orchestra, you have to listen to everything around you all the other instruments otherwise you don't fit in, you're not doing your job. So it's a kind of multitrack listening. And I had that going on all the time. And it occurred to me so often, the world doesn't sound great. So when I sold the magazine business, I had the opportunity to start again.

And I started the sound agency to help brands to sound better, because they all think about how they look. Very few of them back then were thinking about how they sounded. And yet we experienced the world in five senses, don't we? So that was the genesis of the sound agency. The TED Talks came along the books came along. And here we are.

I live in Orkney, which is a small group of islands off the north coast of Scotland, so you can't get more remote than that. Do I live here? Because it's peaceful and quiet? Yes, I do. It's beautiful, very little electromechanical noise, the noise of wind, water, and birds. We'll come back to that a little later on in the course as well.

It does make travel rather more difficult than it used to be once upon a time. I also have a four year old daughter who's about to start school. And so for many reasons, I'm keen to travel a little less than perhaps I once did not least I had a pulmonary embolism last year, those of you who fly a lot, do Look after yourselves, wear flight socks, drink lots of water, take exercise, and so forth. I was taking my health for granted. And that's a wake up call. So I would like to deliver my courses like this to you one to one rather than traveling the world quite as much as I want to have.

So here we are, at the beginning of this exciting adventure. It's a really significant chunk of work. That's going to be in nine parts. Now before we start, I think it's very important as we Anything to set an intention. So I'm going to tell you what my intentions are for the course first. And then I'd like you to think about yours.

I want to give you mastery of these skills, mastery of this incredible instrument, the human voice, and mastery of listening, which after we don't get taught at school at all, do we. So mastery is the first thing. I'd like to make this course as practical as possible. There will be lots of exercises as you go through things that you can revisit things that you can take on, they won't be difficult, they're not going to be exhausting. They will be some of them challenging, and they will certainly have a major effect on the way that you communicate. Now there are things in this course where you'll go, Wow, I never thought of it like that.

And the moment your perspective shifts that way, life will never be the same again, in a good way, I promise you. And finally, I'd like to make this course something that you can refer to now I'm delighted that you've decided to join me in this course. And I want you to use this throughout your life. So you'll have access to this forever, and you'll be able to come back to it and revisit areas, you may remember there was that skill he talked about. Let's go back and just do that chunk again. You can always do that.

So now I'd like you to take a few minutes. Pause the video you're watching and take a few minutes with a piece of paper or whatever you write it on, to write down your intentions for this course, really important to go in with clear intentions. So take a few and write down your intentions.