How To Speak So That People Want To Listen by Pete Mockaitis
The LinkedIn Learning course I took was a 30-minute podcast about how to speak in a way that will make people want to listen to you. The speaker\’s name is Julian Treasure. I started this course on December 8th and finished on the same day. One main takeaway from this lesson is that you start off by speaking in a way that will make people want to listen to you is by listening to them first. Another is that you might want to train your voice in a way that makes you want to be listened to such as training to make your voice deeper, or using your chest voice instead of your nasal voice, avoiding focal fry, and using range to make yourself sound more interesting. And another way is to have a deeper look into your own vocabulary. Treasure suggests cutting the word \”just\” out of your vocabulary. Sending an email with \”I\’m just following up with you regarding…\” is much less dominating than \”I\’m following up with you regarding…\” The word \”just\”, according to Treasure, sounds like an apology when you shouldn\’t have to be apologizing. He says that it makes you sound like the more timid one in the conversation like you\’re being an inconvenience. I never consciously thought about my daily word bank in that way, but now I am going to be much more conscious of it so that I can speak in a way that will grasp people\’s attention. Another small piece of advice Treasure gives is that you don\’t always have to be constantly talking when it\’s your turn to talk, such as when you\’re giving a presentation or when you\’re running a meeting. He said that when he was talking in his TEDTalk, he stayed silent for about 30-45 seconds, which is a long time to be quiet onstage. He said that people just sat there, watched him, and kept listening to him like there wasn\’t anything wrong. From this, I learned that you don\’t always have to be talking when you need to talk, and in fact, it\’s more beneficial to stay quiet for a little bit in the middle of talking so that people can come back into focus on what you\’re saying.
A lot of this is relevant to my personal life because I will be working with a lot of people in my life and throughout my career, and I want to be able to communicate with people in a way that will allow them to actually listen to me, and I want to be a good listener to my colleagues too. It\’s relevant to my life right now because I\’m already working with a lot of people in my classes, my internship, my job in the city, and also in my sorority.