Speaking then, and listening, the relationship between them is complex. Most people think it's a straight line, a simple thing like this. I speak you listen, that's the way it is. No, no, no. It's much more complicated than that. Actually speaking, and listening are in a circular relationship.

The way I speak affects the way you listen. And the way you listen affects the way I speak more than that. The way I speak, affects the way you speak. And the way I listen affects the way you listen. Now that last one is really important because it means that if you want to be heard, if you want people to listen to you, if you want to speak in power, it's important to become a good listener. Bad listeners also, not people who encourage people to listen to them.

Now let's have a look at the the two aspects of this. First of all speaking, speaking is hugely important. We've talked about the long heritage of speaking human beings have been doing this for 100,000 years or so. And it's the most effective way of getting your point across. If you are in range of somebody or they can hear you, certainly one to one, even on a platform, admittedly, you can't speak to a million people at once. And writing does give you that capability, particularly these days with social media.

If you happen to be somebody who's got a million followers, of course, but speaking changes your life, the outcomes of your life are fashioned by how well you can speak in politics. Let's just start with the downside here. Speaking is still very important on on unfortunately, as we'll discover, it's really being debated. And the whole skill of oratory seems to have disappeared entirely. But it does allow people to inspire people and not just in politics, in business in life. If you want to enroll somebody in your vision, get a team together, which we always need to do in life.

It's very rare that we can do things, big things just on our own. Most of the great movements in the world have started with somebody who inspired people. And that would happen by speaking, making a difference in the world. If you want to bring up your children. Well, if you want to make a difference at work and be somebody who can make things happen, if you want to change the world do good. Speaking is such a powerful way of doing that very difficult to do it.

If if you were not able to speak at all, of course, your powers would be massively limited. Speaking is also something which shows your confidence In the world, it's your identity, really your voice is you in the world. It's the impact you make in the world. It's your connection with the outside world you breathe in, and you breathe out. breath is very fundamental, as we'll discover a little later on, and your voice is just breath. And your voice is you making a noise.

We can't make light as human beings, but we can make sound. And the sound we make is this wonderful instrument that we all play. Let me play a little montage, and see how many of these voices iconic voices you might recognize. Because the human voice has such an impact through history. Oh, infinity and beyond. Out the back.

You cannot be serious. Frankly, I don't give a damn and we are ready to lead. Once more. May the force be with you. Just a little reminder there some of the things this incredible instrument can do. The singing voice, of course is extraordinary.

From Tibetan chanting to Pavarotti there. But not just that the human voice can inspire, cajole, bully, say, I love you. Be gentle, be loud, it can do all sorts of amazing things. And inspiration is a big one of them. As I said earlier, I live in Orkney, off the north coast of Scotland and we have one of the bests stone circles in the world here. It's called ring Brodgar, here it is one evening.

And when I go to ring of Brodgar on an evening like this, I often reflect on somebody, somewhere who must have had an extraordinarily inspiring voice, who came up with the idea to do this thing. Let's go and get some huge stones and direct them in a massive circle. These stones came from miles away. The current theory is that they used seaweed underneath them to lubricate the ground and drag them across the ground from a couple of miles away where the nearest water was now, that was the work of hundreds of people, and it probably took generations to erect this entire stone circle. Somebody somewhere was really inspiring, weren't they? There were no machines.

It was Let's all get together and do this incredibly hard work. Probably people were hurt in the process. And yet the mission was fulfilled. So the human voice, enormously powerful, enormously effective. And one of the most effective ways you can use your voice, of course, is in storytelling, which we will have a look at later on in the course, in telling stories, whether you make them up or they're from your life or their classic stories, stories are things that everybody loves. And they're very, very effective ways to get a point across.

Now, speaking, and listening are pretty intimately related. As I've said, the way I speak affects the way you speak, the way I listen affects the way you listen. So if you want to be heard, it's important also to become a good listener. And listening itself has enormous power. Listening is the doorway to understanding it's under it's actually the foundation of civil society. I gave a talk at TEDx Athens and also in the Houses of Parliament in the UK, talking about exactly This civil society relies on there being civilized disagreement.

You know, I may disagree with you, but but I can live next door to you. And if there's more of you, than of me in the majority, I have to accept that that's the way things are done. Well, that's not the case in a lot of parts of the world. Sadly, it does take listening, in order to achieve this, listening and respect, just saying, I can see how other people believe that I don't agree with them, but I'm going to accept that they're going to have their way in the country and I'm going to live with that. Listening is also the doorway to intimacy. What's the most common complaint in relationships he or she never listens.

Technology is I think, becoming quite divisive in that sense. You know, people learn by doing email or accessing social media. We have this fear of missing out FOMO which means we're constantly checking in to see if somebody tagged me or somebody tweeted about me or somebody read my tweet or something. thing might have happened out there. That will this was never the case in human history, we've never had this kind of obsessive connection with people we barely know. And it does tend to take away from the connection with people that we do know that intimacy requires careful listening.

And I think we need to be quite careful about our use of technology. Again, persuasion and inspiration, very much are derived from listening. It's hard to speak persuasively to people if you don't understand them, if you don't know what they want, what their motivations are, if you can engage and align your motivations, that is very powerful. It requires listening, that any great salesperson will tell you the most important part of the sales conversation is the listening, not the speaking. You know, we've all had the experience of a high pressure salesperson who simply doesn't listen to us and does not understand that we don't want that thing or we might have wanted another thing but they're not talking about it. talking too much really gets in the way of understanding the person we're talking to.

Listening is also key for your health because you can take responsibility for the sound around you. If you're listening carefully, you can move yourself away from unpleasant sound or unhealthy sound, you become aware of it. And you can actually take action. Not only that, but you can take responsibility for the sound you make and output into the world, which of course may be affecting the health of other people. As we'll see in a little while, just when we start talking about context, sound has a massive effect on the health of millions and millions of people. And unfortunately, it's doing that under the radar because we're not listening carefully enough.

And listening is how we learn. Yes, reading very, very important as well. Nevertheless, in life, if you don't listen to anybody, you're not going to learn very much. It said that the Greek master Pythagoras erected a screen for first year students To stop them from seeing the teacher because he considered looking to be a distraction from the really important input, which was listening. Now, I mentioned in chapter one that we would be looking at the balance between content and delivery, which is most important. And in order to find that out, I asked somebody who knows more about speaking than pretty much anybody else on the planet, Chris Anderson, the curator or head of Ted.

Chris has been running Ted since about 2002. And has seen hundreds, if not thousands, of really effective and not so effective talks. So when I asked Chris, which of these is the most important, this is what he said, Clay both but I would if I was to choose, I go with content. I think the really the only rule that we're absolutely insistent on is that someone has something was saying without that You can have all the performance in the world. And and it's not only worth this is actually deeply annoying. It's definitely tragic to have great content and fail to communicate it powerfully.

But you can address that, you know, someone who's done a lifetime's work and has something really great to share in less than a month, you can probably have them speaking about it in a really powerful way. If someone's an amazing speaker, but they don't have something to share. Well, you have to send them first in the lifetime of work. And that takes a little bit longer possibly than a month. Now, this course is designed to give you the delivery that you require, but we will also be talking about content and how to design accurate content. They are best done in balance.

If you're great at both of them. You can't fail if you've got to be great at one. Well the content is definitely the most important thing. I do agree with Chris that it's actually just irritating to have somebody who's a brilliant speaker and utterly vapid. Nothing to say it's A shallow empty performance. Although I would say it is also pretty frustrating if you've got somebody who is speaking about something incredibly important and fumbling bumbling mumbling, unable to put the points across in any sort of effective order.

Sadly, I've seen a lot of that in academia. Now, in order to get these things in balance and to design great content and deliver it in the right way, I want to give you one fundamental understanding right here, and that is that you always speak into a listening. There is a listening that you speak into, in this case, a compound listening of all these people. And if you ask yourself, what's the listening, you will get good at spotting this. I'm not going to give you any more tools and techniques than that right now. It may be pheromones, it may be body Language, it may be micro expressions, it could be all sorts of things.

Probably all of them put together. Simply ask yourself, what's the listening, whether it's a one to one, or you're on a stage, what's the listening and you will become sensitive to it, and able to adapt your content, your delivery, to the listening. Practice that everywhere you go all the time, every conversation, and you will become better and better at it. This more than anything else, will help you to hit the bullseye, instead of missing the target altogether. Next, we're going to move on and consider context.