People Stop Listening When You Gossip, Judge, and Complain

Julian Treasure, a speaker on the power of the human voice, stood before an audience with a blunt question. Many people speak and are not heard, he said, and the reason often lies not in the audience but in the speaker.

His answer was a list Julian Treasure called the "seven deadly sins of speaking." These are habits he argued drive listeners away, and most people can fall into them.

The first two are personal. Gossip, he said, is speaking ill of somebody who is not present, and listeners quickly do the math that in five minutes the gossip will be talking about them. On judging, Treasure said "it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time."

The next two are about mood. He said he found it hard to listen to his own mother in her final years, when her outlook had turned gloomy. When he told her, "It's October 1 today," she replied, "I know, isn't it dreadful?" He said "It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative." Complaining, which he called the national art and national sport of Britain, is a close cousin. "Complaining is viral misery," he said. "It's not spreading sunshine and lightness in the world."

Then come dodges of responsibility and truth. Some people have a "blamethrower," he said, passing blame to everyone else rather than taking responsibility for their own actions. Exaggeration, which he called embroidery, demeans language. If everything merely good is called awesome, he asked, what do you call something that really is awesome? Exaggeration becomes lying, and Treasure said "we don't want to listen to people we know are lying to us."

The last is dogmatism, mixing proven facts with personal views. When someone bombards you with personal views presented as established truth, he said, "you're listening into the wind."

He presented them as habits to move away from for anyone who wants to speak powerfully and make change in the world.