The Success Nuggets

The Success Nuggets #51 – Julian Treasure: The Power of Conscious Listening

• David Abel • Season 3 • Episode 10

Share episode

Send us a text

In this episode, Julian Treasure — renowned sound expert and TED speaker with over 100 million views — joins The Success Nuggets Podcast to explore the profound difference between hearing and listening. Drawing from a lifetime shaped by music, business, and deep curiosity, Julian reveals how conscious listening is one of the most underappreciated yet transformative skills we can develop.

We discuss why most people confuse hearing, a passive ability, with listening, an active and trainable skill that shapes relationships, business success, and even societal wellbeing. From the staggering $8.8 trillion cost of poor listening in business, to the personal power of reconnecting with silence, Julian offers both insight and practical guidance for anyone seeking deeper human connection in a noisy world.

He also shares a look inside The Listening Society — a global community dedicated to regenerating listening as a core human skill. It’s a place to share stories, solve real-world challenges, and reimagine how we use sound to influence, empathize, and lead. For a limited time, listeners can join with a free seven-day trial, including direct access to Julian and exclusive bonus material.   https://betterlistening.today/yes

This is more than a conversation. It’s an invitation to step out of your listening bunker and tune into the world — and each other — with fresh ears.

🟡 His Golden Nugget?
"Silence. Re-establish your connection with silence. Sit quietly every day for 3 minutes to help your listening."

This simple practice, shared by Julian Treasure on The Success Nuggets Podcast, is a powerful reminder that the foundation of great listening starts with a few moments of intentional quiet.

With thanks to One Golden Nugget and Maxwell Preece for editing, support and artwork


Speaker 2:

Amazing, amazing wisdom, entrepreneurs, success, success around the world.

Speaker 1:

This is the Success Nuggets podcast. Have you ever wondered what you could learn and how inspired you'd be if you asked incredible people from around the world about the patterns that drive progress? Get ready to dive into a world of insights and inspiration, of insights and inspiration. This is the Success Nuggets Podcast, with the founder of the Digital Lightbulb and your host.

Speaker 2:

David Abel. So listeners, welcome back. Listen in. Today's guest is more than just a sound expert. Better than that, he's a thought leader. He's a famous speaker, author and a marketeer like me, and a musician. So he must be a clever person. Mr Julian Treasure, welcome to the show. I hope I live up to that intro.

Speaker 3:

That's very kind of you.

Speaker 2:

I've got a strange relationship with sound. Is it good sound or is it bad sound For our audience, who don't really know you? Could you maybe introduce us a bit to yourself and sound?

Speaker 3:

Well, sound has been core to my life ever since I can remember. Actually I had a pretty enlightened mother. Aged six she brought me Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra Peter and the Wolf, carnival of the Animals, all those kind of classical greats for children, and I love them. So I used to listen to them a lot and obviously as I got older I developed slightly different musical tastes. But it kind of put me on the road to listening carefully. And when I became a musician that continued.

Speaker 3:

Actually it does for any musician, anybody who plays in a band or an orchestra. You have to listen to all the other instruments at the same time, a multi-track listening, an attentive listening, while you're doing something very complicated yourself as well. So we know now actually that musicians' brains are bigger than non-musicians' brains. They have a more developed corpus callosum, the bit that joins the two hemispheres together. So I guess listening has always been fundamental to me. I've lived through my ears ever since I can remember primarily. You know we all have different primary senses. Most people it's the eyes, but for me it's always been the ears.

Speaker 3:

So, all the way through a career in marketing, originally selling advertising then I became magazine publisher, marketing director, launched by a magazine company ran that for 15 years, producing beautiful magazines for companies like Lexus and Microsoft and so forth. I sold that and eventually I got the opportunity to bring the two halves of me together, because it had struck me all the way through that that why don't these organizations listen to what they're doing? You know they're obsessed with how they look and none of them are thinking about how they sound. So that's when I formed the sound agency, which I ran for 20 years and eventually closed that last year, and that was was audio branding. So it was asking the question how does your brand sound?

Speaker 3:

And in order to do that, I did a great deal of research about how sound affects us. Is it important? Does it matter that all these organizations aren't thinking about sound? Yes, it does. It matters because sound affects us profoundly. Unfortunately, most of us are numb to that because we're surrounded by noise, because we're so distracted with technology and you know things calling for our attention the whole time, and even because most people don't understand the basic, really important distinction between hearing and listening. Listening is a skill, hearing is a capability. We all do that. But most people kind of confuse and conflate those two things and think well, we all listen you know, it's just what we do.

Speaker 3:

No, listening is a skill that you can practice and master, and it's a skill that makes a huge difference in your life. There's a great quote from Hemingway that I use a lot when I do my talks, which is I like to listen. Most people never listen, and listening makes a big difference in everybody's life. You know, if you can become a great listener, it helps you to be a great talker, it helps you to communicate effectively and, of course, it's the absolute foundation of all our relationships in life, at home and at work. Through this journey, I became conscious. It became clear to me the reason these organizations weren't listening is because they were full of people who don't listen. That's what you get. Put a bunch of people who don't listen into an organization. You get one that doesn't think about sound. So that's really what's turned my mission from exploring sound and helping businesses to use it effectively to a passion and a mission to recreate listening in the world, because we are losing it big time and that's serious.

Speaker 2:

Where do we begin to become better listeners? I know a lot of people they'll go. I listen to everyone, but maybe they take on other people's stories and then just give their advice based on what they say. Maybe that's not listening enough well.

Speaker 3:

Unfortunately, almost everybody thinks they listen a lot better than they really do. We do an awful lot of partial listening in the world. You know, tapping away I'm looking down at my hand, tapping away, and then I am listening to you. No, you're sending a text. That's different. That's not actually listening and, unfortunately, because there are some very big organizations spending billions and billions to seize our attention the whole time, we are very fragmented, attention spans are shorter than they've ever been and noise around us is louder than it's ever been. So, actually listening Most people are not great at that, and the first and most important thing is to realize what I just talked about, that listening is actually a skill, it's work, it's a thing you consciously do, as opposed to hearing, which is unconscious, just like your heart beating, you hear or if you haven't got damaged hearing, which unfortunately one in four people in the world have. But nevertheless, when you listen, you select certain things to pay attention to and you interpret them. So my definition of listening is making meaning from sound, which is a conscious process, and it's really important to understand the critical thing about listening, which is that your listening, david, is different from mine. Every human being's listening is unique because we listen to a set of filters which are the language we learn to speak, the culture we're born into, the values, attitudes and beliefs that we gather along the way. You've picked up different ones to me. You've had a different upbringing, a different road to this conversation to me, and then in any given moment, we have intentions, expectations, assumptions, emotions, all sorts of things going on. So your listening and mine change over time and yours is different from mine, and it's a fundamental mistake that most people make when they're speaking to other people. They assume everybody listens like I do. The people they assume everybody listens like I do, they don't. Everybody's listening is different. And once you realize that and you realize that listening is a skill, you've got two very, very important, transformative understandings that move you into a different world altogether with your relationship with listening. It's the thing you're doing, and the person you're speaking into is doing it differently from you. That opens up two incredible possibilities, which is partly what my book is about. Those possibilities are first of all, I can take responsibility for my listening Once I know I've got these filters.

Speaker 3:

For most people, those filters have created the kind of bunker that you live in, with a slit in the front, which is a very partial. You know it's part of perception. We don't perceive everything. It's part of the elective. And with your listening, you've created we've all created this kind of bunker where we have habitually listened from a place that I call a listening position and that may or may not be appropriate in every conversation.

Speaker 3:

At work. You perhaps want to listen more critically At home. You might want to move into more empathic listening, listening with your heart as well as your ears and your eyes. So you can listen from different places. And the great news is there's a door at the back of the bunker. You can leave it and go and explore. Now you know you've got the filters, you can start to and go and explore.

Speaker 3:

Now you know you've got the filters, you can start to challenge them and push against them and say the question here is where's the best place I could listen from in this conversation or with this sound around me? And that's much more purposeful. It makes you at the center of things. You become an actor, not a victim of sound and of listening. And then the other great corollary, of course, once you realize everybody's listening is different, is the other question you can ask is what's the listening I'm speaking into? Because it's different every time and if you can sensitize yourself to that, then that's how you hit the bullseye. Whether you're standing on a stage speaking to 6,000 people, as I was last week in Mexico, or if it's a one-to-one conversation, doesn't matter. You ask the question what's the listing I'm speaking into? You can guess that in advance, but then in the moment when you're actually in the conversation, you can ask yourself that question and adapt, because you can start to sense the listening you're speaking into and it's never the same.

Speaker 2:

Wow so everything's got to be bespoke and I, you know, I got pulled up by an uncle once who said you speak to me like I'm one of your sales team, so it sounds like I made that common mistake there of right conversation, right place, place, right time.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, because it can change your vocabulary which is presumably what he was picking up there your tone, the pace at which you speak and you know, for a professional speaker, I mean, I go around the world speaking on big stages and I can never take for granted the listening. So it's always a good idea if you're a speaker to listen to what's just happened before you, for example, because I can do my research, of course you do. You go, okay, who are these people? What are the demographics, what's their issue, what's their problem, the pain point, what's the gift I can give them, what's the journey I can take them on? All those questions.

Speaker 3:

And then you walk on stage and if you haven't been conscious of what's gone on before you, somebody just before you could have really pissed them off. I've that's happened. I've been on stage when somebody's badly misread the room and upset people, or the person before you could have been riotously funny and you could walk on stage and they're still laughing. You know these are very different listenings, same audience, but they've been affected in different ways. So it's absolutely crucial to be sensitive to this and to speak in the right way, the right language, the right content and the right delivery for this audience at this moment or this person at this moment and pace, you know is very important. This is all part of also, you know, building empathy, building rapport with somebody, which is crucial if you're selling, for example, where you can build rapport by being sensitive, if I'm speaking to somebody who's really quite a slow speaker and I find them really excited, I'm speaking that's just going to overwhelm them immediately. So it's being sensitive, being generous, being kind and, most of all, getting the ball over the net, because that's how the person receives. So this is really important to understand all of this and also, of course, with one's own listening.

Speaker 3:

You know there are lots of tools in the book about receiving effectively because, you know, very often miscommunication happens and it's hugely costly in business. I've been just doing some research on this because I'm doing a talk next week in Copenhagen to a load of CEOs. The cost of miscommunication in business is unbelievable Trillions of dollars, literally trillions. Unbelievable trillions of dollars, literally trillions. The cost of disengagement, which is what happens if you have a leader who doesn't listen to their team, the team get disengaged. The cost of disengagement has been estimated in a huge survey at 8.8 trillion dollars a year. That is unbelievable. So listening, you know, is hugely profitable, hugely important and it makes a huge difference to our relationship, every single one of them.

Speaker 2:

With that 8.8 trillion cost of miscommunication and disengagement. I've seen both of those. I've seen disengagement to the point where the team almost just put their feet on the desk. They're just like we're not interested and like a football team Manchester United at the minute. They're just like we're not interested and like a football team manchester united at the minute. They're going for a very hard time and they're saying it could be years because of the number of contracts you've got. It could be three or four years before this all sorts itself out. If we go down to a business owner's level, have they been able to quantify how many years right off disengagement might be just for each individual business?

Speaker 3:

I haven't seen that number but it does create higher staff turnover, it creates absenteeism, it creates mistakes, it creates much lower productivity and performance in general. So there's just a swathe of costs of disengagement and that all happens. You know, we've all had the experience of kind of a shouty. You know I'm caricaturing them as dragon managers, somebody who doesn't like bad news, who shoots the messenger, who, uh, you know, shouts when things are going wrong. And I've seen that happen in an advertising agency where the boss was so scary people stopped giving them bad news and they started making up good news. So they never lost accounts and they won accounts they hadn't won. And the effect of that was the agency had to restate its financial accounts for three years because they were absolute bullshit, because you know, the person running the company did not know what was going on. So it's really important again, if you're in a business setting, it's's you know.

Speaker 3:

I talk a lot about diversity, not the kind that we are very familiar with in the press, diversity of perspective. If you are not prepared to listen to people who are different, you may not like them, you may fundamentally disagree with them, but it's very important to hear them and listen to them because they might be contributing something of great value. If you have a team of people who all think the same way and believe the same things, that's very fragile. That's where you get Putin and Trump surrounding themselves with acolytes yes-men, people who would never disagree with them in a million years, because the consequences are serious when, in one case, you get fired and in the other case, you get shot or thrown out of a window. So that is so fragile because it does not allow you to entertain alternative perspectives, to see change coming, to deal with things which aren't in your little world view. So very, very important to listen in that way as well.

Speaker 2:

Do you know what centennials are? Centennial brands? No, there's a number of brands that have been around for 100 years, okay, and a guy called Alex Hill has delivered a really great 12-point study on that, and one of them was about welcoming outsiders. So even in organizations like you say, there's only a few that want to talk and not spread to outsiders who may even be inside or bring outsiders in.

Speaker 2:

I lived in Dubai. I could have been in a meeting with one of eight or nine nationalities at any time, including leading a team. I was in Vietnam where I was the only English person there and I had a team of 100, only two who spoke English, only two who spoke English. So I was able to simplify the message get on board with cultures. I probably had to be educated, especially when I went to Dubai, how different everyone is. North Africans can still work in morning, afternoon and evening, where I'm nine o'clock, ten o'clock, so I'd say I need it by nine o'clock and they'd say morning and every time was late because they were working to 12 like the old farmer's way and we'd industrialized it. But having fun is something I've managed to do in vietnam. It was like let's wear blue on a monday, let's wear white on a tuesday or something like that, where we could all get on board and simplify the messaging and that welcoming outsiders has got to be so important.

Speaker 3:

right to play some kind of a positive game you know, we have a an epidemic in the world, which I talk about in the book and on stages as well. It's an epidemic of being right, and the internet has accelerated this enormously and it's anathema to listening because it has this basic worldview that it's a zero-sum game. Always I'm right, you're wrong. Now, two people can have different views and both be right because they have very different perspectives, as you were just saying with. You know the teams you were running. When they're right, they're working till morning, and 12 o'clock is morning, and so your listening needs to change a little bit for that, because that's not wrong, it's just different. You can have difference where you've got these two people with very different views, both being right. It's not a zero-sum game at all, and that means we need to develop or rediscover actually because we've largely lost it the ability to validate people with whom we disagree, and it's fundamental, if you think about it, to democracy. We disagree and it's fundamental, if you think about it, to democracy. If there's 51 of you and 49 of me, it's your way and I have to live with that, even if I fundamentally disagree with it. And the way to do that is to listen to you and understand where you're coming from. I don't have to agree, but validation sounds like this David, I fundamentally disagree with what you're saying, but I totally understand why you believe that that's very different to David. That's crap which is just going to create conflict and unfortunately, that's the way the world is going at the moment.

Speaker 3:

You only have to look at the comments under any YouTube video or any newspaper article to see the level to which people are now descending. It's all vituperative, hateful, bombastic. It's confusing opinions with facts, which I talked about in my famous TED talk. You know the seven deadly sins of speaking, and one of them was dogmatism, which is this conflation of opinions with facts. Being right is absolutely killing us in the world. It's polarizing politics and it's a terrible way to be in business as well, because you know people who have to be right the whole time. You know they'll be. I know people. You know I'll just interrupt you, but I know, I know, I know Dismissive.

Speaker 3:

That is the route to disengagement at $8.8 trillion of cost, because listening is fundamentally humble and that is an issue when you get to be a senior manager, because you're not supposed to be humble. You're supposed to be powerful and telling people what to do and knowing the answers and all that kind of thing, whereas listening to other people, you're actually. If you're doing it properly, it's akin to meditation. You're empty, you're quiet. If you're doing it properly, it's akin to meditation. You're empty, you're quiet. You're listening and receiving, and you know, I talk about trying to see everybody as an opportunity to learn.

Speaker 3:

Whether they're the most junior person in an organization, you can always learn something. You know. I had a good conversation with hyren smith for my book, who was the founder of the franklinovey organization, with Stephen Covey, and he said there was a guy on their binding line who had an idea for a new binder and if they hadn't listened to him they would have missed the $30 million opportunity which it turned out to be. So this is the most junior person in the company, but fortunately had a manager who wasn't oh, just get back to your machine and stop being too big for your boots. No, listened, $30 million later they had an improvement. So it doesn't matter who it is, there's always the possibility of learning. It might be you're learning how not to do something that's quite often the case but it's worth listening to learn, listening to understand, listening, you know, to grow yourself. That little bit of humility is really important, even in a top leader.

Speaker 2:

Yeah absolutely how far back does it go? I remember when the youth joined the workforce and they were wearing headphones and everyone went look at that guy wearing headphones, he's not interested in it. I think you believe that it's kind of sound and listening begins at school as well. So it feels like we've still got a bit of a wall up between the talkers and the listeners.

Speaker 3:

Well, yeah, but we teach reading and writing at school. We don't teach speaking and listening, which is mad, in my opinion. If we taught children first how to listen and they became great listeners, how much more of their education would they receive and how much better would the world be. If everybody really knew how to listen to each other and to generate compassion and understanding and validation and all these kind of things, we'd have far less conflict, perhaps no wars, because wars fundamentally come from somebody being right and not listening to another perspective. So, yes, it begins with the children, definitely, and one of my crusades is to start teaching children listening, and I'm hoping my next book is going to be in that direction. Meanwhile, it's also ignored all the way through life.

Speaker 3:

We do have an increasing problem. It's definitely true that younger people you know the digital native generations are more distracted. You know they prefer to have two or three things going on at the same time, and this kind of level of distraction really fragments the ability to listen. And there's lots of research showing that teenagers in America have less face-to-face contact now than ever before. They much prefer to be on a device, looking at a screen, texting somebody, than having face-to-face meeting, even with their peers, and that means we're not generating the skills of verbal communication and listening. And this is coming out in all sorts of research about how bad they are at interviews, how they don't feel comfortable with interviews at work, how they're uncomfortable in team set, the settings at work they'd rather be, you know, emailing or using some of digital form of communication. So I mean that's the problem, because we've got a whole generation coming into the workforce who are like that, at the same time as ai is about to disintermediate a lot of the fundamental boring bits of many, many jobs.

Speaker 3:

You just think of them all. Take a realtor, a real estate agent, for example. Well, if there's AI that can tell you the best possible house that meets your criteria in the country in four seconds, you don't need that kind of wealth of database experience. What you need is somebody who really understands you. Who's the, who's the real estate, you guy you're going to deal with or woman you're going to deal with. It's somebody who actually gets you at a heart level and says listen, this one isn't strictly what you've asked for. I think you're going to love this.

Speaker 3:

So it's that kind of surprise and delight ability, the human heart connection, which is going to be at the absolute forefront of most jobs in the future, what makes us uniquely human and what I still believe no AI will ever be able to replicate effectively or to do effectively. I mean, they can copy it, you know, they can pretend, but we'll know the difference when you're speaking to a human who really gets you at a heart level, and that is about speaking and listening. You don't get that with email, you don't get that with text messages. You get that with the power of the human voice, prosody paste. You know tone, timbre, everything and vocabulary and you get that with somebody who's truly listening to you, really gets you. That's the critical skill in the future. So we've got this crossover now, where it's declining rapidly and the need for it is accelerating rapidly, and that's a big problem it's so fascinating.

Speaker 2:

I know which side of the fence I'm going to sit on on this. Definitely I've got two small kids, but I had undiagnosed ADHD until I was 42. And regardless of how old I am now 46 for anyone listening who cares is music playing in my head. Has anyone taught you about this from a neurodiversity point of view? I've actually got music playing in my head right now, and I remember being in in english lesson just thinking I can't. I can't concentrate here.

Speaker 3:

It's never left me that well, perhaps I'm undiagnosed as well, because I have that going on a great deal of the time. Music is so important in my life. Um, yes, I mean there's a great deal with neurodiversity as well, but partly about the workspaces that we're designing, which are far too noisy, and certainly there are many people on the spectrum who find that very difficult, and we are seeing some changes there. I do a lot of talking to architects. You know I did a big one to a thousand members of the american institute of architects in december, a plea to them to design with their ears, and they loved it. So I'm seeing a change and we are starting to see activity-based working, where offices are designed to offer different environments to people and to encourage people to go to the right place for them. Now it's not just for the right place of the kind of work they want to do yes, quiet working as opposed to collaborative, all those kind of things but it's also the kind of people they are. So it may be that whatever kind of work you're doing, you need a quieter space to do it in, because that's who you are. It's another way of embracing diversity for the ears really to understand that the sound condition is very, very effective to different people in different ways, and we need to take account of that.

Speaker 3:

So you know, I talk in the book about the four ways. Sound affects us all our bodies, our feelings, our thinking and our behavior. All those four things are affected by the sound around us and if we start listening consciously, we can take responsibility for the sound we consume, if you can. If you can't move, you're probably in the wrong company. So you know, the company needs to take responsibility for the sound it's imposing on people, but we can also take responsibility for the sound we consume.

Speaker 3:

You know, I see two people standing in the street having a yelling conversation next to somebody who's drilling and I think why don't you move? You wouldn't want to propose marriage in a noisy Starbucks. You know we need to take responsibility for the sound around us and start being conscious of its effect on us and, of course, the sound we are creating. So not doing what's jocularly called sodcasting, you know, which is broadcasting our sound and interfering with other people's enjoyment of their lives, whether that's a bunch of hoodies on the top of a bus playing music out of a bus, playing music out of a mobile phone, or a top executive stalking up and down an airport lounge, having a loud conversation and pissing everybody off royally. So you know, there's a lot of ways of sodcasting and again it's just inconsiderate and it's it's unconscious and honestly david. I think to me this whole conversation about sound and listening is really a conversation about consciousness. It's becoming a more conscious human being living a fuller life, opening a door to a whole new dimension that most people simply aren't experiencing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, right on julian, right on jul, julian, right on Julian. The book Sound Affects is out now, I believe, about the declining listening. What can the listeners get from the book?

Speaker 3:

about listening at the beginning, and there's also a wonderful grand tour of the wonders of sound. So the sound of our planet, the sound of other living things on our planet, the sounds we make and the effects they have on other living things and us, and even the sound of space. Most people think space is silent, but certainly is not. There's a huge amount of sound in space. It's just very, very low frequency, too low for us to hear. But space isn't, is not. There's a huge amount of sound in space. It's just very, very low frequency, too low for us to hear. But space isn't a vacuum, it's a very dilute plasma and if a sound has got a long enough wavelength and I'm talking wavelengths of light years it can perfectly well travel through even intergalactic space. So there's a lot of sound in space. It's just too low for us to hear. And if you pitch, shift it up, there are some amazing sounds. You can listen to a lot of the sounds If you get the book. There's a website and there are little numbers in the book. You can then go onto the website and listen to things like the sound of a black hole or the sound of a blue whale Extraordinary, awe-inspiring sounds.

Speaker 3:

So it's kind of a plea to listen for a lot of reasons. First, because of the power of listening for our relationships. It's how we learn, it's how we lead, it's how we persuade people and, incidentally, any salespeople listening to this. The research now shows that most salespeople have the proportion of speaking and listening in a conversation round exactly the wrong way. The vast majority. The sweet spot for closing is listen 60%, speak 40. Most salespeople listen 40, speak 60. And that's not effective. So listening is very powerful in all sorts of ways. It's a plea to listen for all those reasons and because sound is glorious and wonderful. And the last chapter, which is a diminishing sound in our world. You know half of us live in cities now and don't experience silence. So silence is very important and you know we need to reestablish our relationship with it because it's the baseline for all sound and without it everything becomes cacophony. How many TED Talks have you done, julian? I've TED Talks and 11 TEDx Talks.

Speaker 2:

Five TED Talks and I, Julian, I've TED Talks and 11 TEDx Talks, five TED Talks, and I think some of your stats prove that people are the wrong way around, because speaking was about 60 million views, was it? And listening was 10 million.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, it's about right. At least five times as many people have seen the one on speaking, and of course that doesn't work very well, you know, if we're all very keen to be heard and nobody's listening yeah, great, Now you got it.

Speaker 2:

you got it. Who's inspiring you if you're inspiring so many?

Speaker 3:

Who's inspiring me? Well, I mean, just sound is inspiring me. I don't think I can't think of a person. I mean, you know I could name a lot of musicians who I listened to and they were inspiring me because the way they're listing and creating Briony, now, stephen Wilson, you know there's a couple that I really enjoy and who inspire me from that point of view. But I think I'm inspired daily.

Speaker 3:

I live in Orkney, which is an archipelago off the north coast of Scotland, and I'm very delighted to be back here after a very long trip from Puebla, mexico four flights back to back, not fun. Trip from Puebla, mexico four flights back to back, not fun. So here, the sound of wind and the waves it's very easy for me to get out into the sound of nature, which we now know is good for us. And again, of course, with 50% of the population living in cities, we've lost contact with that a lot as well, which is quite serious. This relationship with sound is so fundamental.

Speaker 3:

I love listening to my children. You know I've got two young children now. I've got two older children, but my two young ones are three, four now and ten, and you know, the four-year-old I love sitting around my knee. If you've got children, always go eye to eye with them. Towering over a child and speaking down to them is not a great way for them to learn, and if you listen to them intently and you look at them and listen to them, you're teaching them how to listen, and that is so important, and they will be better people as a result of that. Those are the things that inspire me.

Speaker 2:

Just before we finish the show, Julian, what's your one golden nugget for life?

Speaker 3:

I think it's got to be silence. Actually. I mean listening. I could just say listen, but re-establishing your connection with silence is so important. So I would say to anybody get a couple of sessions, a day of silence, just three minutes. Sit quietly for three minutes and reconnect with silence and it will enormously help your listening.

Speaker 3:

And you know, I would also say come and join me in the listening society, which is the community I've now formed, because this is my life's work now for the rest of the years I've got on this planet. I am about recreating listening in the world, regenerating listening in the world, because we're losing it so badly and it's really important for the survival of societies, all our relationships and our health. So I formed this community, the listening society, which is full of things I've done at the moment largely being generated by all my work, and there's podcasts and papers and training courses and all sorts of things in there. But as it grows I'm hoping there are going to be thousands of people only up in there who are going to be sharing their problems and challenges and solutions between themselves, focused on the importance of sound, to the power of sound and, most of all, the skill of listening.

Speaker 2:

That's a great movement I'm joining. Julian is inviting you to go to the Listening Society, his new venture. This is a movement. This is real change from a real, real thought leader as well. Julian, thank you so much for coming in. It's been a real pleasure.

Speaker 3:

David, thank you again for having me. It's always fun talking to you.

Speaker 2:

Join David and his incredible guests next time on the Success Nuggets podcast and to find out more, visit OneGoldenNuggetcom.

Speaker 3:

Thank you for listening.