digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Improve your conscious listening through five practical exercises: silence, the mixer, savoring, listening positions, and RASA. Speaker Julian Treasure argues that we are losing our listening skills due to recording technology, noise, and distraction, and that listening, which he defines as making meaning from sound, is our main access to understanding.
Key Points
- The five promised exercises, in order: 1) Silence, 2) The mixer, 3) Savoring, 4) Listening positions, 5) RASA (an acronym for Receive, Appreciate, Summarize, Ask).
- Treasure says we spend roughly 60% of our communication time listening but retain only about 25% of what we hear.
- Listening is a mental process of extraction, supported by pattern recognition, differencing (ignoring unchanging sounds), and filters that determine what we pay attention to.
- Reasons we are losing our listening include the invention of recording, a noisy world that is tiring to listen in, headphones creating "personal sound bubbles," and media that scream for attention.
- Sound places us in space and time, and Treasure suggests listening is the main way we experience time flowing from past to future.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Silence: Spend 3 minutes a day in silence to reset your ears. If absolute silence is impossible, aim for quiet.
- The mixer: In a noisy place like a coffee bar, or a natural setting like a lake, count how many individual channels of sound you can hear, and where each one is coming from (e.g., how many birds, where they are, where the ripples are).
- Savoring: Deliberately enjoy mundane sounds, such as a tumble dryer's rhythm, which Treasure hears as a waltz (1 2 3, 1 2 3).
- Listening positions: Consciously move your listening position to suit what you are listening to, using your filters as levers. Treasure says there are many such positions and encourages experimenting.
- RASA: When communicating, Receive (pay attention to the person), Appreciate (make small acknowledging sounds like "oh, okay"), Summarize (use "so" to reflect back what you heard), and Ask (ask questions afterwards).
- Treasure's personal intention: He promised his wife he would listen to her every day as if for the first time, which he admits he falls short of daily.
- He describes that in some UK conversations listening is sadly rare, and that conscious listening always creates understanding.
- He proposes teaching listening as a skill in schools, and invites viewers to connect with him and with each other to pursue this.
Bottom Line
Listening is a learnable skill that requires conscious practice, and Treasure believes it should be taught in schools to counter the decline of attentive listening in modern life.
