6 Speaker Strategies for Speech Memorization
In previous posts, I’ve written about content creation. Now we are switching gears to the next part of the speaking preparation process. After you have developed the content of what you want to deliver to your audience, the rehearsal protocol begins. In my experience, it is the most challenging part of the speech preparation process for the speaker, and it is often what makes or breaks your presentation. Rehearsing is what separates the best speakers from the mediocre. Rehearsing minimizes anxiety and elevates your performance. Rehearsing prevents those moments when your mind goes blank and you forget what you were going to say!
As humans, we typically look for shortcuts to make processes easier. However, with rehearsals, there really isn’t a shortcut. We need to work with how our brains work. Curious if there were secrets to hacking the rehearsal process, I interviewed Dr. Theo Tsaousides, a neuropsychologist and assistant professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai’s Brain Injury Research Center, for answers on how to better remember content when you are delivering a speech.
In interviewing Dr.Tsaousides, he emphasized, “You can’t remember content unless you have learned it. Speaking to an audience is an unnatural way of communicating – it’s not like the spontaneity of a conversation. The best way to memorize your speech is to know your content.”
Here are 6 strategies from Dr. Tsaousides on how to remember your speech:
1. Repetition is the most important part of learning. Just as we learn lyrics to our favorite song on the radio by hearing it and singing along over and over, the more we repeat our content out loud the better chance we have to learn it. Learning is a multisensory process.
2. It’s easier to learn your content when you “chunk” it. Organizing your speech material by sections helps you memorize and remember it. Your sections could include your introduction, first point, first story, second point, etc…Memorize the chunks in your speech, then work out the transitions from section to section.
3. It’s more important and far easier to remember concepts than words. Deeply processing your content means that you can explain the concepts in words your audience will understand and perhaps, enjoy. As Albert Einstein once famously said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
4. When you repeat your content out loud, you are also training your facial muscles and your tongue to deliver your words. This is a form of procedural memory, also known as muscle memory. With repetition, your body (face, mouth, and tongue) remembers what comes next. This is why it is important to rehearse out loud multiple times!
5. Just as organizing your material helps you to remember it, physicality/movement enables you to embody and internalize it. Physicality and movement can also help to cue/remind you what comes next.
6. Just as important as knowing how to remember your content, is to know and minimize the barriers to memory: anxiety, fatigue, distractions, impatience, and perfectionism.
The most striking part of my interview with Dr. Tsaoudsides was his emphasis on repetition. Certainly, repetition and knowing your content enables you to make a stronger connection with your audience – as you won’t have to look at your notes or your slides as you deliver. And isn’t making a connection with your audience the key to a stellar speaking performance?