Make Your Audiences Laugh And They'll Remember What You Say

Stop. How funny was the last speech that you gave? What – you were talking about how best to diversify a 401k basket of investments in order to incorporate more foreign exchange funds & there’s nothing funny about that? Wrong. You’re not trying hard enough. Stop being not funny.

Learn To Be Funny From A Politician

Every speech counts. Especially if you are trying to get elected. If there was any group of speakers who needed to find a way to get people to remember them & their message, it would be politicians. They have three goals every time they give a speech:

• Promote their policies
• Boost their accomplishments while minimizing their opponents
• Impress people with their moral upstanding character & leadership skills

Politicians know that humor is a powerful speaking tool. They use it to both make a point as well as to illustrate that point for their (or your) audience.

In the end, it’s all about getting votes. You’re probably not running for anything right now, but why waste a speech?

Why Humor Is So Powerful When You Are Speaking

Every speech that you give is your next chance to change the world. Adding humor to your speaking style isn’t something that you can put off until “sometime”, you’ve got to do it right now.

The reason that humor works so well comes down to five basic “levers” that every audience has. Gene Perret who won several Emmys for his work in television has spent a lot of time researching what these levers do to an audience:

• Humor Makes You More Likable: I don’t care how much of a jerk you are in real life, if you start to work more humor into your speeches your audiences will start to like you better than your family does. Perret points out that it’s really hard to laugh with a person if you don’t like them – make your audience laugh and they’ll love you forever.

• Build Credibility Using Humor: Who are you to talk to anyone about anything? Somewhat amazingly, audiences associate the ability to be funny with wisdom. When you can joke with your audience about 401k plans, they’ll settle back and say to themselves “gosh, if he can joke about this stuff then he must know it really well”. Whether or not you really do know it really doesn’t matter any more after this.

• Get Respect Using Humor: Some of the worst speeches that I’ve ever had to sit through were ones where the speaker was too full of himself / herself. I quickly tuned them out – I don’t have time for blowhards. When you kid around with your audience you’re telling them “I’m one of you”. When they understand that you “get” them, you will have hooked them and they’ll pay attention to you for the rest of your speech.

• Make People Want To Listen Using Humor: When you say something funny, people laugh. If they’re not listening, then they miss out. Nobody likes to miss out on something that’s funny. When you work humor into your speeches and people start to laugh, then all of those other people who are busy reading email and sending text messages will start to look around and wonder what they are missing out on. Very quickly those iPhones and Blackberry’s will go away and you’ll have their attention.

• Make People Remember What You Say Using Humor: Stay home if you are going to give a speech that nobody is going to remember. Why bother? What humor does is it creates the possibility that people will remember the joke, and if they do then there’s just a chance that they might remember what your point was that you made the joke about.

Final Thoughts

Stop wasting my time. If you want to get up there and give a dry, lifeless speech that has no humor in it then you may as well stay at home and just send me an email with your main points.

If, however, you want me to walk away thinking that you know what you are talking about and remembering what you said, then that’s another story. The only way that that’s going to happen is if you start to work some humor into your speech. No, you don’t have to turn into a stand-up comedian; however, you do need to make me crack a smile or at least chuckle. Get me to do that and you’ve spent your time well.

Do you think that there is any type of speech that can’t have humor added to it? (Hint: eulogies are great candidates for humor so don’t even bring that up)

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When I come to hear you speak, no matter if it’s at a departmental project status report or at a local restaurant or even if it was at a convention, the worst thing that you can do is to waste my time. What are you going to do about this?

No related posts.

Reaching An Audience Of The Opposite Sex Can Be Difficult (c) - 2008 by Steve Hopson

Man, as though giving a speech wasn’t hard enough already, then you go ahead and throw that gender thing in there and all of a sudden it gets that much tougher! It can be a challenge when you are asked to talk to an audience made up of members of the opposite gender. How can you not screw-up this speech?

Boys Talking To Girls

Male presenters need to adapt their speeches when they are presenting to a primarily female audience. Neil Chethik has a great deal of experience presenting to female audience and he points out that even in the enlightened age in which we are living, there are still differences between the sexes and a skillful presenter has to know about these differences and find ways to steer around them.

• R-e-s-p-e-c-t: A male presenter needs to treat his female audience with respect if he wants to have any chance of the speech going well. Women are generally willing to learn from a male presenter; however, they have to feel as though they are being respected.

• Down To Earth: A man who starts off his presentation by telling his audience how wonderful he is will instantly lose the connection with his female audience. There’s no problem with you being an expert in your area, you just don’t want to come off as being a know-it-all. You can connect with your audience by telling a story that points out a personal failing or error and a female audience will connect with you.

• Evidence Counts: One of the biggest errors that male presenters make when they are speaking to an all female audience is that they give an emotional presentation and leave out all of the facts. Yes, women do like stories; however, they won’t believe what you are saying unless you can back it up with hard evidence – facts & stats.

• Humor: talk about a minefield! Many a good speech to a female audience has gone wrong when the male speaker tried to interject some humor. Your best best is to let the humor naturally flow from the stories that you are telling. Trying to work in one-liners can only lead to disaster.

Girls Talking To Boys

Yes, men have it rough when they try to address an all female audience. However, women have it at least as rough and perhaps even rougher when they are called on to present to an all male audience. Once again, there are several ways to make sure that this type of speech goes well:

• Stand Up: One of the simplest issues for a woman to solve when she’s addressing a male audience is to make sure that they can see her. All too often,  a lectern can overwhelm a speaker and hid her from her audience. Stand on something if needed and adjust the mic so that it works correctly for your height.

• No Expression Is Good: Often women speakers will become flustered because no matter what they say, the expressions on their male audience won’t change. It turns out that this is very normal – men don’t tend to display their emotions.

• Be A Straight Shooter: Whereas women tend to enjoy hearing lots of stories, men tend to be more “to the point”. Clearly communicating your main points and making sure that any stories that you do tell quickly come to the point will help to hold their attention.

• Be A Professional: Men do a good job of dealing with other men. They will struggle with any presenter who comes off as being too “girlish”. This impression can be caused by clothing, gesture, or even a vocal tone that takes away from what you have to say. Ask a male friend that you trust for help in order to make sure that this is not a problem.

Final Thoughts

Giving any presentation can be a challenge. When it is complicated by the additional challenge of having one gender present to the other gender, it can get even more tricky.

The key to making this type of speech a success is for the presenter to acknowledge the situation and adjust the presentation to match it. Men have to make sure that they show respect to their female audience and women need to not get flustered by their male audience’s lack of outward emotions.

Speakers who take the time to adjust what they are going to say and how they are going to say it when addressing the opposite gender will be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Stop. How funny was the last speech that you gave? What – you were talking about how best to diversify a 401k basket of investments in order to incorporate more foreign exchange funds & there’s nothing funny about that? Wrong. You’re not trying hard enough. Stop being not funny.

No related posts.

Audiences Seek Speakers Who Are Experts To Teach Them

If you forget all of the advice that you’ve ever been given about speaking, then please at least remember this: audiences come to hear experts speak. No matter how badly you stutter, lose your place, don’t make eye contact, etc. an audience will always forgive a presenter whom they believe is an expert in what he/she is talking about.

What Is An Expert?

Great I hear you saying, but just what is an expert? It turns out that this is a pretty simple question to answer: an expert is someone who knows more about a topic than the audience does. It really is that simple.

It’s not easy to become an expert; however, it is possible. The key to success is to transform yourself into a non-stop learning machine that is never satisfied with what you already know.

How Can You Become An Expert?

Shawn Doyle is a speaker who has looked into the whole “become an expert” thing and he’s found the secret. He says that the key is to get motivated and stay motivated.

Perhaps you thought that learning stopped when you got out of school? Sadly some people do; however, with any luck they are out there sitting in your audience. It’s really not that hard to acquire additional knowledge if you know the secret of how to do it. At the heart of knowledge is books and it turns out that, just like your mom told you all those years ago, the more you read, the smarter you’ll be.

Are you groaning yet? Complaining that you read magazines (while you are standing in line waiting to check out at the supermarket) but you haven’t read a book in years? It turns out that the time that you spent in school was just a brief part of your overall life (hopefully) and continuing to learn is something that you need to keep doing for your entire life if you want people to show up and listen to you.

Steps To Becoming An Expert

Another name for an expert is “learner“. If you want to find a way to work learning into your already busy schedule, then you are going to have find out how to find the knowledge that you need in order to wow your audiences. The good news is that I’m going to tell you how to do this.

Learners read books. They might also watch TV, they might surf the web, they might do a lot of things, but most importantly they read books. Not only do they read books, they have a plan for what books they are going to read. They create a monthly list of the books that they are going to read. They add books to their list by asking other people that they know and respect what books they are reading.

If you are going to become a learner in order to become an expert, then you are going to have to start doing more reading than you are doing today. Here are some suggestions for how you can make this happen:

• Create A Reading Budget - you create a budget for everything else in your life, why not reading? By doing this you’ll know how much you have to spend (and when you have it to spend) when you are surfing the Amazon.com and BN.com book web sites.

• Get A Library Card - remember the library from your childhood? Good news – it’s still there. No matter where you live, no matter how big or how small your local library is, almost all libraries have some sort of inter-library loan program that can provide you with access to just about any book that you might want. Check it out!

• Become A Sale Shopper – you don’t have to buy the newest books immediately when they come out. Look for the slow seasons and stock up then. Right after Christmas most books stores have great sales so that they can get rid of the extra stock that they bought for the holiday season.

• Befriend Local Used Books Stores – when I lived in Dallas there was a bookstore called Books-A-Million that was huge and always seemed to have a book in the area that I was looking for. If you don’t have a local used books store then you can always make use of half.com which is Ebay’s used book store.

Other Ways To Become An Expert

With all that being said, reading books isn’t the ONLY way to become an expert in your selected area (although it is the best way). You can always supplement your reading by doing additional things like:

• Searching The Internet – however, you need to remember that you can’t always trust what you find on the Internet. Verify, verify, verify.

• Ask Questions Of Smart People – seek out people who know more about something than you do and take them out to lunch. Ask them questions and then pay attention to what they have to say.

• Read The Newspaper – yeah, just like your parents used to do. You just might be amazed at what you find out is going on around you.

• Watch DVDs – no, not Hollywood films, but rather instructional ones that will teach you something.

• Attend Seminars – since you are trying to become an expert, take the time to go see other experts and learn from them – how did they get their knowledge and how do they use it.

Final Thoughts

One characteristic of an expert that many speakers never realize is that they are always growing, always changing. One self-help book that I read awhile back had a great way of putting it. The author suggested that we should plan on reinventing ourselves every year – sorta a you 1.0, followed by a you 2.0.

By doing this you will always have fresh and interesting things to tell your audiences about and they will always be interested in hearing what you have to say.

Make the effort to become an expert and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The purpose of giving any speech is to be able to reach out and connect with your audience. No matter whether you are trying to inform them, entertain them, or convince them to take some action, none of this can be done unless you are able to make a connection with them. What you say is an important part of doing this, but did you know that what you wear also plays a role?

No related posts.

Experienced Speakers Can Have Phobias Too

Even the most accomplished public speakers can develop a sudden phobia about speaking in public. In order to get over this phobia, you need to recognize what kind it is and how to deal with it.

These phobias can show up out of the blue and you’ll never see them coming. Judith Pearson is an experienced counselor who has seen this happen time after time and she’s got some suggestions on what to do if / when this happens to you.

What is a Public Speaking Phobia?

One of the big problems that public speakers have with phobias is simply recognizing them for what they are. It turns out that a sudden fear of public speaking can hit an accomplished speaker at any time. If you find yourself with an irrational fear of speaking to a group, then you’ve got a phobia.

Pearson says that public speaking phobias can be broken down into one of three main categories:

• It’s all about me
• Past disasters
• Fear of making mistakes in front of an audience

The “It’s All About Me” Phobia

In my opinion, this is the most common phobia that can hit an experienced speaker. If you develop this phobia, then all of a sudden you’ll find yourself feeling highly self-conscious when you think about speaking in public. The more you think about giving a speech, the more you’ll feel as though the audience that you’ll be talking to will be sitting there disapproving of every word that is coming out of your mouth.

The solution to dealing with this phobia is to sit down and have a talk with yourself. You’ll need to realize that ultimately it’s really NOT all about you. In reality, it’s the audience that matters – not you. They have come to hear you speak in order to learn – in all honesty it really doesn’t matter that you will be the one talking to them.

The “Past Disaster” Phobia

I think that we’ve all been here before: this phobia is created by some sort of traumatic event that has occurred in your past that had an accompanying highly-charged negative emotion. A great example of this would be if something went wrong with a speech and then the event organizer yelled at you about it afterwards.

Once again, the right way to deal with this phobia is to sit down and have a talk with yourself. You need to find a way to make yourself understand that what has happened has happened in the past. You need to realize that it can never happen again and you need to move forward. Acknowledge what happened and convince yourself that you’ll do better in the future.

The “Fear Of Making Mistakes” Phobia

If you have to have a phobia, then this is probably the one that you’ll want to have. The reason is that the fear of making mistakes is really the other side of the desire to do a great job at something. The phobia stops you in your tracks or makes it hard to get started because you just don’t think that you can do a good enough job at some speaking task.

This is the one phobia that you can actually muscle your way though. Ultimately the solution is to practice, practice, and practice. You need to get yourself to a point where you can realize that you are always going to make mistakes (we’re all human after all). However, you need to be able to observe your mistakes when you make them, make corrections, and then continue on.

Final Thoughts

Phobias are not just for beginning speakers – they can hit any of us at anytime. The key to dealing with a public speaking phobia is to realize what it is – a irrational fear.

Dealing with the three most common forms of public speaking phobias requires you to sit down and think through your fears in order to put them in context. This is the best way for dealing with them. Learn to do this well and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you forget all of the advice that you’ve ever been given about speaking, then please at least remember this: audiences come to hear experts speak. No matter how badly you stutter, lose your place, don’t make eye contact, etc. an audience will always forgive a presenter whom they believe is an expert in what he/she is talking about.

No related posts.

A Speaker's Voice Contains Many Tools Than Can Be Used During A Speech

When you find yourself giving a speech, you quickly realize that what you are missing is any sort of tools with which to give the speech. If you were a painter, you’d have a canvas, brushes, paints, thinners, etc. with which to make your creation. However, when you are giving a speech it’s just you and your audience. Make you feel sorta naked, doesn’t it?

It turns out that you actually do have a toolbox with which to create your speech – the words that you’ll be using. It turns out that not only the words that you choose to use, but the way in which you speak these words can cause a powerful reaction in your audience. Debra Johanyak is a professor of English at the University of Akron and she has come up with a list of different ways that we can use our voice to make our point during a speech.

Let’s take a look at the different verbal delivery “tools” that Dr. Johanyak has come up with:

• Words That You Accent: It turns out that not all words are created equal – you have the ability to emphasize certain words. As an example, consider the sentence “After cutting the green wire, a sudden silence descended over the entire bomb squad.” Simply by pronouncing the word “green” differently, you can draw your audience’s attention to it.
• Slow Pitch Speaking: The pitch of your voice controls how high and how low your voice goes. This is a powerful way to communicate emotion during your speech: “Once I saw that the cage was empty, I knew that the 6′ snake could be anywhere in the house.” The word “anywhere” can be said in a higher pitch than the other words in order to draw attention to it.
• Just Be Quiet: The most powerful speaking tool is also the simplest – just be quiet. When we add periods of silence to our speeches, it adds emphasis to the words that came before and sets the stage for the words that are to come next.

There you have it – now your speaking toolbox is actually looking rather full!

When you give a speech do you use your voice to its fullest? Have you ever ever accented words or varied your pitch to make a point? Are you able to remember to use quiet pauses to make a point? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

Politicians Use Stories To Win Their Audiences Over

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, politicians are by and large fantastic communicators. If you take a look at their technique they may be lacking; however, they sure seem to be very good at getting their point across and wining audiences over. Wouldn’t it be great if we could figure out how they do that?

There are a number of speaking techniques that politicians use, but the one that packs the biggest punch is our old friend the story. Caren Neile has done some research into just how politicians use stories and she’s discovered some things that we can use to make our presentations even better.

Ronald Reagan was known as the great communicator due in a large part to the numerous stories that he would tell. He wasn’t just telling stories to fill space in his speeches, rather he was trying to make points and emphasis parts of his speech.

For politicians, there are four main story-lines that they use over and over:

1. We take care of our own.
2. We must protect ourselves from our enemies.
3. We can’t trust the people who are running government and business.
4. Anyone can succeed.

The reason that these four story-lines are used is because they are time tested – politicians know that they work, audiences respond to them every time.

For us speakers, we can take advantage of the years of research that politicians have done for us and start to use more stories. We can use the four story-lines that have served our leaders so well for so long and create our own stories that flow in these well-worn ruts. By doing this we almost assure ourselves of being successful with our audiences.

Do you use stories when you give a speech? Have you ever told a story that fit one of these story-lines? How was it received? Do you have stories that you could make fit these story-lines? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

A Podcast Is A Great Way To Record And Distribute Your Speech

So speaking in front of a real, live audience is a great way to communicate. However, we don’t always get to control the world that we live in and so sometimes it’s just not possible to have you (the speaker) in the same place as all of the people who need to hear your message (your audience). What’s a speaker to do? Back in the olden days, this would be the time that you’d whip out the cassette recorder, make a master tape, and then through the magic of high-speed dubbing you’d crank out as many copies as you needed and off they’d go in the mail. Thank goodness those days are behind us now.

Here in the 21st Century we’ve now gone all digital. When we want to record our voices to share with others, we no longer reach for the cassette, now we reach for our laptops and iPods to create podcasts. As easy as it is these days to capture and publish our spoken words, lately I’ve been running into a lot of really poorly done podcasts and it’s got me scratching my head. I mean, aren’t these people listening to what they are creating and, just like me, doesn’t it make them shudder?

To make sure that you don’t get off the beaten path, here are some tips that will help you create a great communication tool your first time at bat:

• How Do I Record My Voice In The First Place? You’re going to need two things in order to capture your voice on your laptop: a microphone and some software. You can get wacky about microphones if you  are a real audiophile; however, just about any one will do. It turns out that the sound card built into your laptop actually does most of the work, so the physical microphone just has to be good enough – if you already have one, then use it. If you need a recommendation, the Labtec Verse 524 is a good one to go with and you can’t beat the price: ~$10.
• What Software Should I Use?: Once you have your speech recorded, you are going to want to do at least a bit of editing on it – chop off the false starts at the beginning or trim off the run on bit at the end. Once again, I’m a big advocate for doing this on the cheap and so I’d recommend downloading and using the very popular free (as in beer), open source software that everyone else seems to be using called Audiocity.
• How Long Should My Recording Be?: Ok, so this is where you can get yourself into some serious trouble. The longer you speak, the more damage you can do. You have no way of actually “seeing” the audience who will be listening to your podcast, so you need to be as brief as possible and keep to your main points. You want to speak long enough so that your listeners get value from what you are saying; however, you don’t want to speak so long that they start to look at their watches wondering if you are ever going to wrap this thing up. Remember, they are not sitting in an audience so if you lose them, they’ll just click you off. As a general rule of thumb, I’d say that you don’t want to talk for longer than 15 minutes on a single podcast.
• What Should I Not Do?: This is an easy question to answer – get rid of any “umms” and “ahs” that show up when you are speaking. Since there is no live audience, there is a good chance that if you aren’t careful you’ll start to fill in the blank spots in your speech with these filler sounds and especially on a podcast, they are quite distracting and really take away from your message.
• How Should I Change My Speaking Voice?: Stop – don’t! Sometimes your microphone, your laptop, or even Audiocity software will let you change how your recorded voice sounds. I’ve had women friends who have fooled with these settings so much that their recordings made them sound like James Earl Jones was speaking their parts. You are better off speaking using your normal voice. It can be quite a shock when you hear your recorded voice the first time; however, spend some time with it and become comfortable with it – everyone else is!

Have you had a chance to create a podcast yet? Why did you have to do it? Did you have any technical challenges making the actual digital recording? Were you happy with the final outcome? What did you think about how your recorded voice sounded? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

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.

No related posts.