The TED (Technology, Entertainment & Design) Conference is a series of well known meetings where leaders share ideas, concepts and discoveries.
If you haven’t been invited to the California sessions or the offshoots around the globe, the next best thing are the TED videos. Spend a few minutes once or twice a week watching a speaker and you’ll come away with new ideas.
One of the more interesting talks we have watched is titled “5 Ways to Listen Better,” delivered by sound expert Julian Treasure.
Sales people say that if you speak less than 50% of the time, you’ll have better results. But that doesn’t mean a message or pitch is getting through; Treasure argues that we spend 65% of our day listening but retain less than 25% of what we hear. At CommCore, we try to increase retention factors of listeners and have developed modules that focus on the relationship between listening and charisma.
Treasure’s 5 Steps:
- Be silent (or at least quiet) 3 minutes a day
- Develop your ability to divide cacophony into separate channels. For example, at a baseball game, listen to the crowd, the vendors, the conversation just behind you, the noise of the bat hitting the ball.
- Savor an individual sound, whether it’s a car engine starting up, or a bird chirping.
- Adapt different listening positions from active to passive.
- Learn the acronym RASA (it’s also a Sanskrit word meaning juice or essence):
- Receive
- Appreciate
- Summarize
- Ask
What’s your favorite TED talk? Any great listening techniques to share?