Posts Tagged ‘memorize’

Life Lessons: How NOT To Open A Speech

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011
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A Poor Speech Opening Is Like Breaking A Promise To Your Audience

A Poor Speech Opening Is Like Breaking A Promise To Your Audience

Let’s say that you owned a lot of real estate. One of your properties was located on the edge of an ocean. Front this lot you could see the most beautiful sunsets every single night. Now you are getting ready to build some houses on the properties that you own. What kind of house are you going to build on your ocean front property? I suspect that it’s going to be the nicest house that you build – you are going to want the house to match the fantastic piece of property that it sits on. Turns out that you need to use the same thinking when you are creating an opening for your next speech…

How You Should NOT Open Your Next Speech

Sometimes the best way to learn how to do something is to find out how NOT to do it. I’m hoping that if we spend a moment talking about how you should not open your next speech this will help you to do a better job of coming up with a way that will work.

The first rule of what not to do is to try to tell a joke. The one exception to this is if you tell jokes for a living, then you can consider it. For the rest of us, this one is a no-no.

Likewise, opening with a barrage of words or terms that your audience won’t understand is a great way to lose them from the beginning. The flip side of this tactic is to take the time to laboriously define all of the terms that you are using. Don’t do this because it will slow down your opening and once again you will lose everyone from the beginning.

A very common mistake that I see over and over again is for the first words that come out of the speaker’s mouth to be a long series of thank-you’s. The audience really doesn’t care to hear you thanking everyone that you’ve ever met (that’s why those Hollywood awards shows are always so boring). Use your first words better.

If you need some help in what to open with, for goodness sake don’t think small. Talking about some minor point or some trivial matter will turn your audience off. They’ll be thinking that if you’re going to start out small, then you’re speech is just going to get even smaller so why should they pay attention?

Finally, no matter what is going on around you, never open your speech by apologizing for anything. Flames could be leaping from the curtains and the flood waters could be rushing in through the back doors, but don’t you mention it to your audience. You need to focus on your speech and let everything else take care of itself.

How You Should Open Your Next Speech

Now that you know what not to do, it does bring up the interesting question of what you should be doing. It turns out that the answer is that there are two things that you need to accomplish during your speech’s opening.

The first of these is to grab your audience’s attention. The first minute or so of your speech is your special time – everyone will stop what they’ve been doing and they’ll listen to you while they try to figure out if you’ll be worth spending time on.

This is your one chance to convince them that you’re going to be saying interesting things that they will want to hear. Make your opening grab their imagination by using provocative questions, startling statistics, or even by referring to recent events.

Once you’ve grabbed their attention, your job is not done. Now what you have to do is answer the one question that every audience asks themselves at the start of any speech: “what’s in it for me?” You need to tell them why spending the next 30, 60, or even 90 minutes listening to you is going to produce real tangible benefits for them. If you can do this during your opening, then you will have spent your first few words wisely.

What All Of This Means For You

Next to the way that you close your speech, the way that you open it is the most important thing that you’ll do during the speech. It sure makes sense that you don’t screw this up!

What this means is that you’re not going to want to start out with a joke unless you tell jokes for a living. You’re also not going to want to waste those precious first few words on things that have nothing to do with your speech.

You are going to want to use your opening to capture the audience’s attention. Once you’ve done that, you will want to follow up and make sure that you answer the question “what’s in it for me”.

If you can avoid doing the wrong things while at the same time doing the correct things, then the opening for your next speech should be spectacular. Just like that house that you built on your waterfront property, your speech opening will be someplace that you’ll be proud to go over and over again.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: How long do you think a speech opening should last?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Ever get the feeling that your audience just isn’t listening to what you are telling them? I mean sure, they seem to be with you at the start of your speech and then they seem to show up once again at the end, but how’s that middle part going for you? Researchers have studied what’s going on with your audience during the middle of your speech and let’s just say that it’s not good – they are checking out. Looks like we’re going to have to have a talk here – let’s find a way to keep them on board…

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Posted in opening | 2 Comments »

The Presenter Super Memory System – The Details

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009
The Super Memory System For Presenters

The Super Memory System For Presenters

I recently had an opportunity to deliver a 45-minute keynote as part of a training session kick-off for a group of IT Mangers. I decided that in order to boost my creditability with this hard-nosed group, I needed to stay in eye contact with them and not be looking at my notes. This meant memorization.

Here’s how I did it:

  • I broke the speech up into sections – my speech resulted in 9 sections.
  • I then broke each section up into “ideas” – basically sentences.
  • I then picked a place that I had lived in the past (a school or any place that you know well would have done fine also). The only requirement was that it had to have multiple, distinct “locations” – in this case rooms.
  • Then I pictured myself in a room such as the kitchen. I could see myself sitting a the table in a particular chair.
  • Next I came up with a picture AND an action for the first idea / sentence that I wanted to memorize.

Here’s how I had written my speech to start out:

“I’d like to start out our time together today by asking you a simple question: where do you want you want to be at in your career 5 years from now? That will be 2014 – it’s just 1,825 days from right now. I have no idea what you will be doing in 5 years, but there is one thing that I know with 100% certainty – the job that you are doing right now will no longer exist.”

  • I basically had three image / actions to create. Remember, these are highly personal – what you come up with just has to work for you.
  • My first image was of 5 calendars: one each being stuck to each of  the fingers on my right hand. I was shaking that hand very hard and they all flew off.
  • My second image was of a stack of those one-a-day calendar tear-off sheets in a really, really tall pile sitting before me. Just to make it more vivid I pictured it as being sheets from the Dilbert: 2009 Day-to-Day Calendar. I then pictured a card in front of this stack that said “1,825 days” and the stack falling over and making a real mess on the floor.
  • Finally, on the table in front  of me behind the stack of calendar sheets was a very small model of a worker in a cubicle typing away on a computer. All of a sudden a trap door built into the table swung open and the little cubicle vanished.

There you have it. When I went to give my speech, I didn’t even try to recall the words that I had written down. Instead, I had three pictures flash in my head – calendars stuck to my fingers, a stack of calendar pages, and a disappearing cubicle. Without looking at any notes, I was able to quickly and easily recall what I wanted to say without having to look at any notes!

Have you ever had to give a speech without using notes. How long was the speech? How did you memorize what you had to say? How did it go? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in memory | 3 Comments »

The Presenter Super Memory System – An Overview

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Presenters Need A Way To Memorize Their Speeches

Presenters Need A Way To Memorize Their Speeches

Congratulations – you’ve been invited to speak for 30 minutes. Remember – don’t use any notes! If you got this offer could you do it?

As though standing in front of a group of people was not scary enough,  now you have to find a way to shove 30 minutes (that’s 1,800 seconds) worth of information into your head – and recall it under pressure. Given that we all talk at about 150 words/min, you’re looking at memorizing 4,500 words. Good luck!

I recently had an opportunity to deliver a 45-minute keynote as part of a training session kick-off for a group of IT Mangers. I decided that in order to boost my creditability with this hard-nosed group, I needed to stay in eye contact with them and not be looking at my notes. This meant memorization.

Now let me make a confession – I hate it when people memorize their speeches. When they do this, they have a tendency to deliver them in an automatic robot-like manner that has virtually no emotion because they are trying so hard to remember what they want to say next. I was determined to avoid this!

Here’s what I did to get ready for this speech:

  • I wrote the speech out word-for-word. This allowed me to create a 6,750 word speech (45 minutes) so that I would exactly fill my time slot.
  • I then “tuned” the words trying to drop in as many memorable phrases as possible. This is the real advantage of writing your speech out completely.
  • I then memorized the speech.

… and that’s what you really want to about. But, I’m out of space for now so I’ll share all of the secrets about how I memorized this speech with you next time.

Have you ever had to give a speech without using notes. How long was the speech? How did you memorize what you had to say? How did it go? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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How To Use Your Mental TV To Memorize A Speech (or Anything)

Monday, September 15th, 2008
To Memorize A Speech Requires Strong Visual Images

To Memorize A Speech Requires Strong Visual Images

Back when I was in school, I was taking mainly technical courses and I got to be pretty good at them. The routine was pretty much the same for each class: learn the formula, work some problems to practice using the formula, take a test and show that you know how to use the formula. The same thing went for my Computer Science classes except that instead of formulas, we were dealing with computer languages. You can well imagine how surprised and unprepared I was when I had to take some business courses: there were no formulas! Instead, there was a great deal of “facts” that needed to be memorized and then dumped back out of your head while you were taking a test. My friends who were in Business School had become very good at this type of memorize / dump routine; however, I was basically clueless.

Eventually I found a way to get all of that information to stick in my brain. What was even better was that, unlike my friends, it would remain there long after the test / final exam had come and gone. I had truly found a way to memorize my material. This is exactly the skill that you need when you have an opportunity to give a speech. You need to memorize your speech in such a way that it comes back to you quickly and easily each and every time that you need to give the speech without the need for any notes. In fact, if you could find a way to get your speech to play out on that big TV in your head, then all you would have to do is watch it and tell your audience what you were seeing. Sounds like an impossible dream? It’s not and I’m going to show you how to do it.

First, let’s start with just a little bit of medical knowledge so that you understand why this technique works. Based on years of research, Doctors believe that the part of the human brain that is responsible for our memories is the part that is called the hippocampus. Here’s the important part: if this part of the brain is stimulated sufficiently, then we will remember what stimulated it. We are all very visually based beings. This means that our memories are made up of images – sorta like a big stack of photographs. If you can visualize something, then it suddenly becomes much easier to remember it. That’s why long phone numbers can be hard to memorize (no good picture) and why what a fancy new car looks like (it’s all about looks) can be easy to recall even if you’ve only see it once.

In order to memorize your speech, you need to do three things:

  1. Break the speech up into a sequence of steps. These steps need to be as small as you can make them and they need to be placed in a sequential order: start, middle, and ending.
  2. You need to associate an image AND and action with each step of your speech. The wilder and more outrageous the image/action are the easier that step is going to be to remember.
  3. Finally, you need to “place” all of your steps someplace where you will be able to find them. If your speech was short and only had 10 steps, then I’d suggest that you visualize yourself “placing” them on your body: toes, ankles, knees, shins, hips, butt, back, shoulders, neck, head. If you have more steps, then I’d use some place that you know very well: your home is a great place to start. Think of your bedroom and “place” each step on things that are currently in your bedroom.

Now comes the fun part. In order to memorize your speech, what you are really going to be doing is running thorough your list and recalling the images/actions that you have stored in each location. The key to success is that you’ll need to recall each step in proper sequential order and you’ll be need to be able to do it with little or no effort. How about an example to make this all seem just a little bit more real?

Let’s say that you were asked to give a presentation on your company’s new 401k program (how boring would that be?) Here are the key points that you need to cover in your speech: everyone is automatically enrolled upon joining the company, you can un-enroll, the company will match the first 5% that you contribute, if you leave the company you can take your 401k with you, and you can borrow against your 401k in special circumstances. Yawn! Now let’s do some work to memorize this speech:

  1. Break it into steps:
    • everyone is automatically enrolled upon joining the company,
    • you can un-enroll,
    • the company will match the first 5% that you contribute,
    • if you leave the company you can take your 401k with you,
    • you can borrow against your 401k in special circumstances.
  2. Now create pictures / actions for each step (sorry, these pictures/actions work for me – results may vary for you):
    • I see an assembly line of new employees moving along past a machine that stamps “401k” on everyone’s forehead. The stamp hits them with a big “smack” sound and leaves a big red mark.
    • I see some new employees on the assembly line, after they have been stamped, reaching up and peeling off a piece of clear tape that covered their forehead and, because it got stamped and not their actual forehead, they can just throw it away and they are not labeled as “401k” like everyone else
    • I see the employees on the assembly line one-by-one stopping at a table where an accountant wearing a green visor and sitting at a plain wooden table sits. Each employee starts to lay down $1 bills on the table and as he does so, the accountant lays another $1 bill down on the table right by the employee’s bill. However, once the employee lays down his 6th $1 bill, the accountant stops laying his money down. The employee scoops up all of the money and gets back on the assembly line.
    • I see some employees jumping off of the assembly line holding big piles of cash and vanishing through a hole in the floor that has a big flashing “EXIT” sign beside it.
    • I see an employee jumping off of the assembly line and running towards a house that is fully on fire. The employee goes over to a big water tank that is located right by the house, turns a faucet on and drags a hose over to the burning house turns it on. Money starts to stream out of the end of the hose and smothers the house and puts the fire out.
  3. Finally, I see myself sitting in my office and the assembly line of new employees is running by the office just out in the hall.

There you have it. Admittidly this is a fairly boring topic for most of us to talk about; however, using the memorization techniques that we’ve talked about you can see how you could “lock” this speech into your brain. When it came time to deliver the speech, all that you would have to do is sit back and play the stored images back on that big TV in your mind. What could be easier?

So tell me: have you ever used a memorization technique like this? How did it work out for you? Do you use some different way to keep your facts straight? How long can you recall things – for a day? a week? or longer? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in memory | 13 Comments »