7 Deadly Sins of Speaking

The Ted Talks I decided to watch for the third week was titled “How to Speak So That People want to Listen”. I chose this video because as teachers we will always be speaking, we will spend our days talking in front of students. As teachers I think we all want our students to listen to what we are saying. I figured that by watching this video it would teach us a thing or two about speaking to others and making our kids are listening.

In the video with Julian Treasure, he brought up valid points on what we do in our daily lives. He called them the seven deadly sins of speaking. He said that we need to learn to step away from those seven deadly sins. The deadly sins include, gossiping, judging, negativity, complaining, making excuses, blaming others, exaggeration, and confusion of facts with opinions.

The first “sin” was gossiping, he said that it is hard to want to listen to someone who is always gossiping of people who are not present. It is also hard to listen or talk to, to someone who is always judging others. A person who is negative about everything makes listening hard. In my opinion, there is already enough negativity in this world, we don’t need more. Complaining is the other “sin’ that he mentioned. I think that complaining and negativity go hand in hand. I had a coworker always complain about everything and you eventually get tired of hearing that person speak, especially if you don’t have anything to complain about. A person who is always making excuses and can’t take responsibility for their own actions is hard to listen to as well. I think that if they can’t take responsibility then it is kind of hard to listen and make them a credible person if they are always blaming others. Exaggeration is the sixth sin mentioned, and the last one is confusing facts with opinions. I think that all of these are things we should keep in mind if we want people to listen to when we speak.

Not only did Julian Treasure bring up good tips and what to stay away from when we are speaking but he also mentioned four foundations that can be used as a platform to make a speech powerful. He said to keep in mind the word HAIL. The acronym HAIL stands for, Honesty, Authenticity, Integrity, and Love.  People are more than likely to listen to someone who is honest, and can be trusted because their actions reflect their words, and they aren’t trying to be someone you’re not. Love is the last term and I think this one speaks out to kids more than the others. We want to make sure that those kids feel loved because some of those kids don’t have that at home.

The TED Talk was probably not the best one out there but I think it mentioned very important key points to keep in mind when speaking in public and actually wanting people to listen to us. At the end of the TED talks he mentioned that we want understanding to be the norm, and as teachers we want that to be the norm as well, but it’s hard when we don’t always say things to get those kids to listen and actually understand what they are learning.