Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Conscious listening
Welcome to this course on Conscious Listening. Listening is an amazing skill, but

Introduction

Throughout these workbook pages youll find space for notes in

this right hand column, along with tips, questions, exercises and
links to additional resources.

its not a natural skill. This course aims to make you a master of Conscious
Listening; to become somebody who people love talking to.

Contents
In this course we will cover:
Listening filters
We each have a set of unique listening filters that change our reality. Well
explore these and the ways that you can consciously change and play with
them.
The three types of listening
I distinguish three types of listening - inner, outer and created listening - and
I teach you how to become a master of each of those spheres.
Five practices for conscious listening
Well go through the five daily practices that will transform your
consciousness of and relationship to the world around you.
The greatest threats to listening, and how to avoid them
We are losing our listening. Ill explain why and how to restore it.
Advanced listening
These are ways in which you can move your listening to a whole new level in
both business and personal situations.
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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Listening filters
Most people think that we listen to all of the sound around us, but we dont. We
listen through a set of filters. We develop these listening filters from a very early
age and use them to unconsciously select which sounds we pay attention to and
how we react to that sound.
Our listenings are all unique. Your listening is not the same as my listening. Our
listenings are as different as our fingerprints. This means that ten people, in the
same place at the same time, can have a slightly different experience and reality.

Introduction

Q Describe how each of these filters is affecting the way that you
listen to the world around you.
culture
language
values
beliefs
attitudes

culture
language

expectations
intentions

values
beliefs
attitudes

Q Which of these filters would be most challenging for you to alter?

expectations
intentions

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Listening
Julian

About
Introduction
Julian

perceived
reality

The McGurk Illusion is a simple

Your listening
creates your
reality.

Watch again: The McGurk illusion

demonstration of this. It proves that

what you hear and what you pay
attention to is not necessarily reality
itself; its a powerful cross-modal
effect. We must learn to be conscious
of how our senses and our filters alter
what we perceive. Later, well discover
how powerful this realisation can be.

bit.ly/mcgurk-illusion

Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Inner Listening

Inner listening
Inner listening is how we listen to the
voice that we hear inside of us all the
time. (If youre not sure what I mean,

inner

outer

its that voice that just asked What

little voice?)
Inner Listening creates your
experience of life because this internal

created

in situations, our expectations and

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For many people, our inner voice

is not particularly helpful or
positive.
Inner listening is a very important
skill because that voice is not
you. And if youre not the voice,
who are you?

Your listening
for yourself creates
your experience of

Q Are those three things helpful?

you and there are different ways

in which you can listen to it.

dialogue contributes to our behaviour

our outcomes.

Your inner voice is not necessarily

Q What are the three most common things that your inner voice
says to you?

life and all of your

outcomes.

Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

You are not the voice.

You are the one listening.

Inner Listening

The voice is a part of you but its very easy to get confused and think that the
voice is you.
Were not going to go deep into psychology on this, but psychologists identify
that we have parts. The voice may be a learned reaction, a habit or your ego, but
the important thing to remember is that you are not the one speaking, you are
the one listening.
When you move into that mindset, you have great power. You can start to relate
to the voice as you would an unruly child; tousle its head, say Thanks for
sharing and ignore it. Here are some suggestions of how to deal with your inner
voice:
1. Listen with compassion
2. Dont believe everything you hear!
3. Ask Is it helpful?
I hope that these realisations and suggestions change your relationship with your
inner voice for the better.

Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Outer Listening (i) How do we listen?

Outer listening

Outer listening is the type of listening that we are most familiar with; listening to

the sound around us as opposed to imagined sound inside of us. But are we any
good at it? I agree with Hemingway:

I like to listen. I have learned a

great deal from listening carefully.
Most people never listen.
Ernest Hemingway

Q What are the advantages of being a good listener?

Most of us are not very good at listening. We miss so much by not paying
attention. People who listen well have a huge advantage in life.

How do we listen?
Q Which three parts of our body do we listen with?
1
2
3
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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Exercise
You will need a partner in order to do this exercise.

Outer Listening (i) How do we listen?

Q What was it like for the speaker to speak into those three
listening variations?

Sit with somebody and have the first person describe their favourite holiday
destination. The listener will do so first with ears only, making no eye contact and
with no emotional involvement. At some point the listener will make eye contact
and listen with their eyes and ears. Finally, the listener will connect with their
heart and start to listen with real empathy and understanding.

Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Outer Listening (ii) Making meaning from sound

Listening
We are surrounded by sound. My favourite definition of outer listening is this:

Listening is making meaning

from sound.

Hearing is at first a physical process where sound touches our ear drums and
turns into vibration in fluid inside our inner ear. It then becomes an electrical
process where that vibration is chemically transmitted into neurons which fire off
in our brains.
Listening is none of those things. Listening is part of our mapping of reality. It is
how we make sense of the world around us.
We have four primary methods if communication. Research shows that we
spend more of our time listening than any of these other methods combined. But
were not very good at it; we retain just one word in four.

Q What are our four methods of communication?

1
2
3

60%
listening

25%

retained

Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Outer Listening (ii) Making meaning

Once upon a time, all of our knowledge was received and passed on aurally. As
weve invented more ways of recording this knowledge, weve become worse at
retaining that aural information.
So how do we listen? There are two techniques in particular that help us extract
meaning from noise.

Pattern recognition
The most obvious example of pattern recognition is your name. If youre at a

Q What other words or sounds do you think you might recognise

very quickly?

busy cocktail party and somebody says your name, you immediately recognise it
because its a pattern that youre very familiar with.

Differencing
Our brains have evolved to ignore any constant noise - such as the hum of an air
conditioning unit. These constant noises are not perceived as threats. Its only
when theres a change in these sounds that they are brought back into our
consciousness.

Listening is a dying skill

DANGER
we are losing our listening
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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Outer Listening (iii) We are losing our listening

We are losing our listening

Millions of people are losing their listening. There are consequences to this which
well come onto later, but first lets look at why this is happening.

Recording
Weve invented ways of recording things;
writing, audio recording and video
recording.
Nowadays its very easy to revisit content. It
used to be that if you didnt listen, you
missed it.
There are still traditions where the latter is
true. In Indian classical music nothing is
written down, its all passed on aurally.
Legend goes that when Pythagorus was
teaching his first year students, he erected a screen so that you couldnt see him
at all. He believed that seeing somebody distracted from the meaning of their
spoken word.

By inventing ways of recording,

we have reduced the premium
on careful listening.
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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Outer Listening (iii) We are losing our listening

Impatience
Weve become impatient. We dont want oratory, we
want soundbites; Give it to me in three words, Just
give me the top line.
This hinders our ability to the listen to the subtle or to
a well-developed argument. We simply dont have the
time or patience for it.

Desensitisation
Across the world - and in the UK particularly - the
popular tabloids regularly use words like these:

Q What words does your countrys press regularly use?

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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Outer Listening (iii) We are losing our listening

Because of this, weve become desensitised. In the press, nobody can be mildly
upset; youre either okay or furious. When we start to polarise emotional
states in this way, we lose the subtle, the understated and the quiet.
This is part of a move towards a much
more directive, aggressive style of living

tell

and being. The Chinese depict the

balance of nature as Yin and Yang. Yin is
dark, yielding and feminine. Yang is
aggressive, hot and masculine. The idea
is that in order to have a complete world

listen

these two must be in balance.

In the Western world, we are moving a
great deal towards the Yang. And if we
turn those words into sound-related

words, tell and listen, we are much more fond of telling than listening.

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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Outer Listening (iii) We are losing our listening

Headphones
Because of the cacophony that
surrounds us, many people take
refuge in headphones. One of the
major downsides of this is Noise
Induced Hearing Loss (NIHL).
One in eight American teenagers
has damaged hearing.
NIHL is not noticeable until its too
late, and the damage is irreversible. We may be raising an entire generation of
deaf people.
Headphones also turn big open spaces into millions of little sound bubbles. In
this situation, nobodys listening to anybody.

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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Another effect of headphones is schizophonia - a word coined by the Canadian

composer and writer Murray Schafer. Schizophonia describes the experience of

Outer Listening (iii) We are losing our listening

Read The Tuning of the World by Murray Schafer

hearing something that youre not seeing.

Headphones are now a major cause of road traffic accidents, and they also
cause of a loss of contact with reality, nature and other people.

Text vs. voice

Text is replacing spoken communication. These textual
exchanges are not conversations; you cant hear the tone
of voice and theres no real-time reply. Whilst I do accept
that there are benefits of text-based communication, I
think there are many dangers that we need to be aware of
in terms of degrading our listening.

Social media
Were moving from a world where you knew a few

Read Alone Together by Sherry Turkle

people very well to one where we have a large number

of superficial relationships. Its a hard territory to
navigate. Words have changed their meanings;
friends doesnt mean the same as it once meant.
This type of communication is a phenomenon I call
personal broadcasting; were putting a lot of
information out there and not listening to whats
coming back.
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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Conscious listening
creates understanding.

Outer Listening (iii) We are losing our listening

It is crucial to remember this because only without understanding can terrible

human acts - from bullying to genocide - happen. These acts require
desensitisation, depersonalisation and a lack of understanding in order to
happen, and that is why I am concerned about a world that is losing its listening.

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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Exercise 1: Silence

Silence
I recommend three minutes of silence a day; it recalibrates your ears - like having a
sorbet in a meal. It helps you listen anew, as if for the first time.
The Walk of Silence

In the silence you accept and understand

Silence is the language of love
Silence is the peace of oneself
Silence is music and harmony
Silence is truth and prayer
In the silence you meet the master
In the silence you breathe God
Walls are in the mind
The moment is present, here and now
Leave yourself and what is yours
In the silence you receive all
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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Exercise 2: The mixer

The mixer
This is an exercise that you can do in a variety of different places, and it involves
noticing and listening to the individual sound sources around you. Its a good way
of becoming more acute and attuned in your listening.

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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Exercise 3: Savouring

Savouring
Savouring is about discovering the hidden choir in the seemingly mundane sounds
around us. Many of the everyday sounds that we encounter have a real richness
and complexity that we can unlock just by paying attention to them. This awareness
can enhance your experience and enjoyment of the world.

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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Exercise 4: Listening positions

Listening positions
Earlier I talked about using our listening filters as control surfaces. Once you start
to consciously play with them, you can change your reality. You can also become
a different sort of listener depending on the situation that youre in.
Most people listen from one place all of the time. Thats a terrible restriction on our
ability to communicate with other people and enjoy the world.
Examples:

active

passive

critical

empathetic

reductive

expansive

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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Exercise 5: Rasa

Rasa
Rasa is the Sanskrit word for juice but in this context it stands for four practices
in your listening skills which can transform the way you listen to people,
regardless of who you are - whether youre a leader, a teacher, a spouse, a friend
or a parent.

Receive
Appreciate
Summarise
Ask
Rasa is a great way to encourage somebody who is speaking to you and
improve your communication. Ive had many people tell me that theyve
practised Rasa with great results.

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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Advanced listening

Visual Listening
Lets see if you can imagine how these people look from their voices alone. Write
down your descriptions after each clip and well discover how well you do.
Your descriptions:
Person 1

I dont know if were going to be talking to our fridge...

Person 2

Sure, certainly. So, the project that weve started...

Person 3

Yeah well, if we could all hear red, for example...

Person 4

Speaking as someone who has seriously misread...

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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Advanced listening

Advanced listening techniques

In certain situations, you can use the things weve dealt with in this course and put
them together into a package which is appropriate for the situation.
Here are some examples:

Loving listening
consciously coming from nothing
complete generosity
learning the language

Selling listening
rapport
empathy
think - feel - know
VAK (visual - audio - kinesthetic)

Business relationships
inner: affirmations, detached compassion
outer: appropriate position, RASA
content: HAIL
delivery: train, register, prosody, silence

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Summary

Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Sonority is time and meaning.

Jean-Luc Nancy

Summary

Watch Daniel Kishs echo location clicking

Listening gives us our sense of place and time.

If I stand in a room with my eyes closed I can tell the size of that room and
whether its occupied from the sound around me. Our ears give us a vast amount
of knowledge, 24 hours a day.
Listening also places us spiritually. Meditation and quiet prayer are important parts
of every religion.

bit.ly/daniel-kish

Finally, listening places us in time. All sound has time embedded into it. There is no
such thing as a snapshot of sound. You only understand what Im saying now by
remembering what I just said.

Listening is the primary way

in which we experience
the passage of time.

Listening is also crucial for our connection with other human beings. It is
fundamental to our experience as a human being.
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Julian Treasure Master Sound Training | Conscious Listening

Sound is my job and my passion - my mission is to make the world sound beautiful.
I live to listen and Im not suggesting you do the same, but I will suggest that we
all need to listen to live. In other words, we must all become conscious in our
listening in order to experience life in all its richness.

Key takeaways
1 How your listening creates your reality
2 How you create your listening
3 The three kinds of listening

Contact
Id love to hear from you about your experiences with this Master of Sound
training. You can also engage with our Masters of Sound community online.

Website juliantreasure.com
Email julian@juliantreasure.com
Linkedin linkedin.com/in/juliantreasure
Twitter twitter.com/juliantreasure

Happy listening!

Facebook facebook.com/juliantreasuremastersofsound
Newsletter juliantreasure.com/connect
Live workshops bit.ly/mos-workshops
SoundCloud soundcloud.com/juliantreasure
YouTube youtube.com/user/juliantreasure
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