How to be Heard – Secrets to Powerful Speaking and Listening, by Julian Treasure
Julian Treasure explores listening and speaking from the point of sound and its effects. It aims to help you understand your own speaking and listening abilities. The provided book is a rather general approach and introduction to speaking and public speaking, with many commonsense points that are worth paying attention to.
Quote of the book for me
"If you want to be powerful in your speaking and fully understood, be straight: say what you mean and mean what you say. Be steady, reliable and unambiguous in your speech and people will learn that when you speak, it's worth paying attention."
The Book has 7 chapters, each diving into a different topic more in depth.
Chapter 1 – Why this matters
Chapter 2 – The dark side
Chapter 3 – Exploring listening and speaking
Chapter 4 – How to listen consciously
Chapter 5 – How to achieve perfect content
Chapter 6 – Your vocal toolbox
Chapter 7 – Stagecraft
Treasure starts with quite a bit of science and knowledge about sound and its effect, and it closes with how to plan for big speaking events.
The vocal toolbox he presents I use myself. These tips are applicable, logical, and by skimming through them, you will already take out several points you remember.
A large focus is on learning to speak more precise by taking care of our language. For instance, Treasure encourages to leave out the unnecessary embellishments that we use in daily speech. He also addresses that we use amplifiers to enhance words, and the term itself loses its power. He uses the word awesome to explain, which means awe-inspiring. Yet, we use it to describe a Burger we eat and top it up even more, so it becomes super awesome. What then would be a sunset over the ocean if a Burger is already super awesome?
He continues on how we can react to assumptions, generalisations, emotions, noise, time and semantics, the most common agents of miscommunication.
I personally liked how he also addressed how to improve what you say and write - thus, how to make the content you produce better.
Treasure tries to cover relatively large grounds though - from basic vocal warm-up exercises to a short 'how to prepare for a larger event', called stagecraft.
It is a little all-around book to become a better speaker and listener, and I found many take aways that we tend to take for granted. For instance, the importance of using adequate pacing when you speak, as it helps to emphasise sentences.
The book is presumably less useful if you have some speaking experience already. Therefore, I would have wished it to have a bit more in-depth and have less advertisement of his TED Talks.
But all in all a good read, especially when starting out and you want to think about sound and speaking more.