Speaking in public is hard. Memorizing the speech you want to read is even harder.Fortunately there are some tricks that will help you memorize exactly what you want to say. So read on for how to memorize a speech.
Trick 1: Repitition
This is the simplest way of all to memorize a speech, and the core foundation of all other techniques. Simply repeat the speech over and over again until it is ingrained in your mind.
To help the speech stick, try writing out points onto index cards, which you read off of. Keep the points simple and brief; you know the facts already, so there’s no reason to record them. Simply mention that you should say them. As you repeat the speech, slowly start removing index cards. Keep repeating and removing until you have no cards left.
Another trick is to start with verbose index cards and phase down to simpler ones before finally omitting them all together. This lets you get the basics down while still being reminded of the material.
Trick 2: Pegs
Rote repetition is slow and tedious. By the end you’ll know the speech by heart, but you will have wasted much of your time memorizing something that will be used once in your life. Here’s a better way.
Pegging involves linking two thoughts together. Say your speech is about taking risks, with a segue about an Antarctic marathon. Peg those two things together with, say, a sky diver landing and running a marathon on the ice. While that may seem silly, you’ll be amazed at how effective it is. Ever wonder why you can remember a face, or a scene from a movie, but not a name or the name of the movie? Names, concepts, and words in general are abstract. Our mind evolved to be able to handle images through our eyes. The key to quickly memorizing information, then, is to convert abstract information into concepts our minds can grasp, and peg them together. An ice marathon is fairly visual, but you need something for risk.
Another example: say you are trying to remember a speech about dogs. There are 78.2 million dogs owned in the United States, and 21% were adopted from shelters. There are more cats, however, at 86 million. This is tricky, but doable. Maybe envision an old man proclaiming that he is 78, and owns 78 million dogs. Then pin a dog going out for a night on the town. Finally, imagine the binging dog encountering more cats than dogs at a club, and proclaiming “There’s 86 million of them!”
Trick 3: Roman Room
This last one is really just pegging done in a flexible manner. The problem with pegging is that every element needs to be related to the other, and if you forget one element in the chain, you miss everything after it. Not to mention that some things just don’t go together.
The Roman Room is a trick that circumvents that. Rather than relate things on your list to each other, relate them to a spot in your room. Imagine yourself walking through the room. Start at the front door. When you open it, what do you see? Pick the first thing and peg a fact to it. If it’s a table, imagine something sitting on it that reminds you of the fact you want to remember. Keep going like this, pegging facts to a walkthrough of your home. Then repeat the walk again. You should see the memory objects sitting where you left them.
This trick is fairly advanced, and is usually only used by mnemonic masters. But if you can learn it, then you will have a leg up over everyone else who tries to give a speech.
Jill Magso is a member of the Silva Team and contributes to spreading enlightened ideas and sharing teachings about meditation practices. The Silva Method encompasses a variety of powerful exercises that take you deep into Alpha and Theta levels of the mind so that you can work within your subconscious as well as your conscious mind.