Full Transcript: William Ury on The Power of Listening at TEDxSanDiego

William Ury, author of Getting to Yes with Yourself, is one of the world’s leading experts on negotiation and mediation. Here is the full transcript and summary of Mr. Ury’s TEDx Talk: ‘The Power of Listening’ at TEDxSanDiego conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

There is an ancient and well-known philosophical riddle that asks: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?” A scientific view is that, while a tree will make waves in the air, to make a sound, it takes an ear to hear it.

So my question is, if a person speaks – if they offer a TED Talk, for example, and no one listens, is that really communication? Listening, I believe, is the missing half of communication. Absolutely necessary but often overlooked. We live in an age we call the Age of Communication. And certainly with a lot of cell phones, texts, tweets, and emails, there is a lot of talking going on.

But how much listening can there really be with so much interruption and distraction? So my passion for the last 30 years has been helping people get to “yes” in very tough negotiations. From family feuds to boardroom battles, from labor strikes to civil wars. And I hear a lot of talking, but I don’t hear a lot of real listening. We think of negotiation as being about talking. But in fact, it’s really about listening. If you study the behavior of successful negotiators, you find that they listen far more than they talk. After all, we’re given two ears and one mouth for a reason. We should listen twice as much, at least, as we speak.