Speak so that people want to listen

Every now and then a TED talk lands like a diamond, and Julian Treasure's "How to speak so that people want to listen" is one of them. To hear a speaker with not a single "um" or "er" is like pure poetry, so wonderfully easy on the ear. Add something genuinely worth saying on top of that, and you have a winner. Julian opens with the seven deadly sins of our speech, moves on to the most important cornerstones of your voice, and closes with a handful of warm-up techniques. Here is the whole thing, gathered in one place.

The seven deadly sins

These are the habits that quietly cost you your listeners:

• Gossip.
• Judging others.
• Negativity.
• Complaining.
• Excuses.
• Exaggeration and lying.
• Dogmatism, that is, treating opinions as though they were facts.

Your voice: the toolbox

Then come the cornerstones, the parts of your voice you can actually train and play with:

• Register. Ideally deep, drawn from the chest and belly rather than from the throat, where most of us tend to speak from.
• Timbre. The quality that makes a voice smooth, warm and soft.
• Prosody. Rhythm and intonation, which create flow in your language. Without rhythm, speech turns monotone. But beware a repetitive rhythm, which can, among other things, turn your statements into questions.
• Pace. Variation in speed gives your voice life, and signals the important from the less important.
• Pitch. This one means talking like the smurfs. Not exactly a common phenomenon, so I am honestly not quite sure why he includes it.
• Silence. Sweet music. Daring to be deliberately silent is strong, weighty and full of trust.
• Volume. The strength of your voice. Both low and high volume grab attention, and in this setting, low volume is the most powerful of all.

Warming up your voice

And finally, six quick ways to warm up before you speak:

• Arms up, breathe in, and sigh out deeply.
• Warm up your lips by saying "ba, ba, ba, ba, ba".
• Play at car noises with a long "Brrrrrr" through your lips.
• Warm up your tongue with big, exaggerated "La, la, la, la".
• Roll an R with your tongue.
• Sound a siren, sliding from the highest frequency down to the lowest.

Simple, a little silly, and genuinely effective. Give them a try before your next talk, and your voice will thank you for it.