About
I teach leaders, teams and organisations the two skills that decide almost everything and are almost never taught: how to listen consciously, and how to speak so that people want to listen.
I've spent three decades studying sound, voice and communication. The conclusion I keep arriving at is that most of what we call a speaking problem is a listening problem wearing a different costume.
Listening is the foundational communication skill, and it's almost never formally taught: not in schools, not in universities, not in most leadership development. The deeper problem isn't the absence of training but a wall of denial. Most people are confident that they listen well, and you can't develop a skill you've already concluded you possess.
The data says otherwise. Only one employee in 12 rates their leader a very good listener, which means that in most organisations the great majority of leaders believe they listen well while the people around them experience something entirely different.
The cost of that gap is over $10 trillion a year in disengagement and miscommunication, which makes listening one of the largest and least examined sources of value destruction in organisational life. The societal cost runs alongside it, because listening is the only way we can embrace disagreement, challenge or difference as opportunities to grow, rather than threats.
And as artificial intelligence absorbs more of the analytical work, the human capacities it can't replicate, empathy, connection and the experience of being deeply heard, become more valuable rather than less.
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My five TED talks and 10 TEDx talks have been seen an estimated 170 million times, which makes me one of the five most-viewed TED speakers of all time. How To Speak So That People Want To Listen is the sixth most-viewed TED talk of all time.
Sound Business, my first book, argues that good sound is good business. How To Be Heard is a practical guide to improving personal communication, and won both the SOVAS and Audie global awards for best business audiobook of the year. Sound Affects, the most recent, explores the power and wonder of sound and the value of conscious listening in a noisy, distracted world.
My online courses have taught over 160,000 students, and the work has been featured by Time, The Economist, the BBC, CBS and NBC's Today Show, and on over 100 podcasts including Diary of a CEO.
“Julian has made a lasting contribution to how we think about communication. Long before listening became a leadership talking point, he was helping people understand that sound is not background. It shapes attention, emotion, productivity, and the quality of our relationships.”
“Clever, witty and innovative, Julian is just errr... sound.”
If you're looking for a speaker, the speaking page has the talks and the evidence. If you want the ideas as a daily practice, the app Master Conscious Communication turns them into something you do rather than something you read. If you'd rather start with the argument itself, the Conscious Communication Framework™ is the organising idea behind all of it.