The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett XX
[0] Did you know that the DariVosio now has its own channel exclusively on Samsung TV Plus?
[1] And I'm excited to say that we've partnered with Samsung TV to bring this to life, and the channel is available in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.
[2] Samsung TV Plus is a free streaming service available to all owners of Samsung Smart TVs and Galaxy mobiles and tablets.
[3] And along with the Dyeravisio channel, you'll find hundreds of more channels with entertainment for everyone all for free on Samsung TV Plus.
[4] So if you own a Samsung TV, tune in now and watch the Dyer of a Cio channel.
[5] right now.
[6] It is a shame if somebody's saying something incredibly important and they're not using what I call the vocal toolbox.
[7] You know, there's all this stuff that we can deploy if we start paying attention to our voice.
[8] You know, if you've got a boring voice, you can do something about it.
[9] It's possible.
[10] Get a vocal coach, work on it, you know, take up a breathing practice, improve your posture.
[11] Just practice prosody, prosody, the intonation, you know, really.
[12] really exaggerating it.
[13] I'm a, I'm a great fan of doing this.
[14] It's the kind of thing that actors do, singers do.
[15] And many times, for example, I've given talks where I've been looking at an audience of CEOs, hundreds or thousands of them.
[16] And I say, how many of you have to talk in public?
[17] Forest of Hands goes up.
[18] How many of you have had formal vocal training, three or four people?
[19] And I go, what?
[20] This is part of your life.
[21] It's an important part of your, you're speaking to teams, you're trying to inspire people, you're trying to lead people, you're trying to communicate, build relationships with people, you're trying to move, you know, mountains with your voice and you've never paid any attention to it.
[22] It's tragic, you know, we teach reading and writing in schools.
[23] We don't teach speaking or listening, which is absolutely nuts.
[24] It's funny, because when people ask me, I always say that the most important skill you can learn is to sell because you're selling all the time.
[25] I'm selling right now.
[26] I meet a girl in a bar.
[27] I'm just going to sell to her to try and get her number.
[28] I have a girlfriend.
[29] I wouldn't do that.
[30] I'm selling in business.
[31] I'm selling to my teams.
[32] I'm trying to inspire investors to join us.
[33] This caught my life is full of the sales pitch, whether I'm selling myself or an idea or a vision or whatever.
[34] But I've never really reflected on the fact that the foundation of that selling is this instrument.
[35] Of course.
[36] What would I have to do?
[37] Because there's lots of people that are out listening to this podcast that start the room podcast and want to be a podcaster.
[38] And many of them message me and they want to come and sit here on this podcast one day.
[39] What are the types of things you would advise someone to do with their voice to be heard?
[40] Well, treating your voice as a skill is the first thing.
[41] So becoming conscious that this is a skill.
[42] It's not a natural capability.
[43] Just like listening is a skill, hearing is a capability, listening is a skill.
[44] So I very much talk about these two things as skills.
[45] Speaking and listening are skills that we do not teach in school or university, which is mad.
[46] So we have to take it upon ourselves because they matter, you know?
[47] They affect our outcomes in life.
[48] They affect, I always say, our happiness, our effectiveness, and our well -being are fundamentally affected by whether we master the skills of speaking and listening.
[49] So in terms of speaking, understanding there's a vocal toolbox is the first thing.
[50] So things like breathing.
[51] Your voice is just breath.
[52] That's all it is.
[53] breath moving across your vocal chords and in order to speak well it's very good to develop a breathing practice maybe you do yoga maybe something else Jane my wonderful fiance taught me a breathing practice which is very very simple anybody can do it and it's called resonant breathing which is breathing in through your nose and then out through your mouth like as if you're blowing so you can hear it and you practice that and lengthen, you count, and lengthen the in -breath and lengthen the out -breath.
[54] And also, we want to be breathing from our diaphragm, from our stomach, because, you know, if you watch a baby breathing, it's their stomach that goes up and down, not the chest.
[55] So just developing that, I mean, I wonder people listening to this podcast, when's the last time you took a really deep breath?
[56] We tend to breathe, you know, just to a fraction of our lungs, like a little bird.
[57] But with your voice, it's very important to breathe deeply and to get into that practice.
[58] Also a great cure for nerves.
[59] You know, if you come on stage and you're a little bit like this, hello everybody, then a big, deep breath will settle the voice right down.
[60] So it's a really powerful thing to do.
[61] That breathing practice, what is it doing then in terms of improving my performance?
[62] I've got the nerves part, but in terms of my vocal chords.
[63] It gets you into it.
[64] Well, what is it?
[65] Aristotle said excellence is uh no we are what we do repeatedly so excellence is not an act it's habit so it gets you into the habit of breathing better and deeper and you know when you're speaking in public there's nothing wrong with taking a deep breath and filling your lungs actors do it all the time i mean a singer can sing for the most enormously long note uh you know what's the world record for static apnea 20 eight minutes, something like that, lying at the bottom of a swimming pool on one breath.
[66] You know, and that's static apnea.
[67] Then you've got the free divers.
[68] There are things we can do with our lungs which are beyond imagining virtually.
[69] And yet most of us just breathe a little tiny, tiny breaths.
[70] So it's good for you as well to exercise your lungs to inflate them.
[71] I had, unfortunately, a few years ago, a pulmonary embolism, which is quite scary.
[72] I mean, it can kill you, and that's blood clots going to the lung.
[73] They have to go through the heart to get to the lung so that, you know, that's where you can die.
[74] And so my lungs are not as efficient as they were before that.
[75] And it's made me even more conscious of the importance of deep breathing, of expanding the lung capacity.
[76] It's part of being healthy, apart from anything else, to have great lung capacity.
[77] Is that what exercise does, kind of inadvertently?
[78] Partly.
[79] Yeah.
[80] Absolutely.
[81] Releases all sorts of good, the happy chemicals into your system as well, exercise.
[82] But breathing is very, very good for you, generally.
[83] And we don't do enough of it.
[84] So I've done my breathing exercises.
[85] I'm heading on to the driver's CEO podcast.
[86] What else would I, would I have to do to be heard by the listener?
[87] What are the sort of tips or skills?
[88] Well, I think variety, just in general, is a very important aspect of speaking.
[89] So you talked about people who are monotonic, and that literally means one tone.
[90] So if I speak like this through the whole podcast, it would be extremely boring for people.
[91] There's not a lot of intonation going on there.
[92] I don't get any emotional resonance speaking like that.
[93] So it's just boring.
[94] So intonation, the up and down of speaking, is really important.
[95] It's also crucial to be sensitive to cultural differences in that.
[96] For example, in Scandinavia, they have much restricted pros of the art intonation compared to, say, the Latin countries where, you know, people are like, well, is it very up and down like this at the whole time?
[97] I'm croaking here.
[98] I remember doing a talk in Finland in the amazing concert centre in Helsinki, which was designed by a brilliant architect called Toyota, and is acoustically unbelievable.
[99] And at the end of my talk, there was a little tiny ripple of applause.
[100] And I thought, ah, I bombed.
[101] They didn't like it.
[102] You know, if they'd been in America, it'd be whooping and hollering and whatever going on.
[103] And I went down for a coffee and people came up to me and said, thank you.
[104] That was the best talk we have had for some years.
[105] That's Finns for you.
[106] They're very taciturn, quiet people.
[107] They don't get very excited much.
[108] So, unless they've had a vodka, perhaps.
[109] But you have to be adjusting to the prosody or prosody of the audience you're speaking to.
[110] What's prosody?
[111] Prozody is both intonation, so the up and down delivery, which is root one for emotion.
[112] It's absolutely crucial in speaking.
[113] And it's also the rhythm of your speaking, the gaps you leave, and the emphasis you put on words.
[114] So it's understanding how to, it's not just reading a script flat, it's putting your personality into what you're saying.
[115] And that makes all the difference in the world.
[116] so anybody who it's interesting i mean i have friends who run um voice service studios and actors come in to read things tv commercials books and whatnot some actors can read some can't it's not a skill that everybody possesses to be able to read something or speak in an interesting way that's not a script you learn and then you really really work on it and so forth just reading something it's quite technical actually you have to get yourself out of the way so yes working on your voice is um about variety it's about breathing it's about being comfortable with silence for example not filling every tiny little gap with ums urs you nose you know what i means verbal ticks so all of these things it's quite important to record yourself, listen back, and start to take it as a skill and as mastery, become your own coach effectively.
[117] I mean, I'm sure you watch back your podcasts and there's always something to learn.
[118] There's always something to look at and to say, oh, okay, I could have not done that or I could have said that better or whatever it might be.
[119] That's how we become masters.
[120] Did you know that the Dariovacio now has its own channel exclusively on Samsung TV Plus?
[121] And I'm excited to say that we've partnered with Samsung TV to bring this to life and the channel is available in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.
[122] Samsung TV Plus is a free streaming service available to all owners of Samsung Smart TVs and Galaxy mobiles and tablets.
[123] And along with the Dyeravisio channel, you'll find hundreds of more channels with entertainment for everyone all for free on Samsung TV Plus.
[124] So if you own a Samsung TV, tune in now and watch the Dyer of a CEO channel right now.