CHAMPION STRATEGIES – PUBLIC SPEAKING WORKSHOP – AUGUST 22, 2021
HOW TO MEMORIZE A SPEECH IN MINUTES
Looking for a quick and easy way to memorize an entire presentation quickly? Well, the solution to how to memorize a speech in minutes will likely surprise you.
This article covers a few great tips about how great speakers make the presentation memorization process easy and stress-free. First, we will cover the big mistakes that most people make when they design a presentation that makes memorizing the presentation much harder.
Forgetting what you want to say is a common phobia even among good speakers. So, the first step is to eliminate bad habits that make memorizing a presentation more difficult.
Next, we cover a few memory techniques that are common among professional speakers. (These tips are fantastic, and they work really well.) However, in the third part, I will show you how to actually design your entire presentation where you won’t have to memorize ANYTHING!
If you use this memory technique, your audience will see you as being absolutely brilliant. (Your speech will also be fantastically easy to deliver.)
Before you actually attempt to memorize a speech, the first thing that you want to do is to eliminate the following preparation mistakes. If you do these things, it won’t matter what memory aid you use. Your presentation will likely be difficult to deliver and boring for the audience. (That’s bad.)
1) Starting with the Visual Aid.
Many presenters will often start by designing a PowerPoint slideshow or some other visual aid. When we do this, we will likely end up with a long list of bullet points. As the speaker prepares to deliver the speech, he/she will often need to try to memorize exactly what he/she wants to say for each of the bullets.
(This can be hard, and it adds a lot of unneeded pressure.) Instead, start by designing a good presentation. Then, after you have a great speech determine what visual aids will help your audience understand the content.
2) Writing a Presentation Word-for-Word.
Another big mistake is to write out their entire presentation longhand. Many presenters see delivering a presentation like learning lines in a play. We think that we have to create a script first. If you think about the logical “next steps,”, though, you will quickly see the big challenge. Because, after the script is written, you really only have two choices. Choice one is to just read the entire presentation. (Very boring!) Option two is to memorize the entire speech word-for-word (rote memorization.) That adds an extreme level of complexity to the delivery. It also doesn’t fix the initial problem with option number one. (It is still going to be very boring.) To fix this, just create a simple outline of your major points.
3) Data Dumping.
The hardest problem to overcome is called “data dumping.” This is where we give too much information in too short a period of time. When we design presentations, we often think that in order to present well, we have to tell the audience EVERYTHING that we know about the topic all at once. In reality, though, a few points covered really well will be better received than a bunch of points covered in a cursory fashion. We suggest that you limit your main points to five or fewer.
The good news is that once you eliminate these challenges, the next step is pretty easy — choose a memory technique based on the structure of our speech.