At some point in your life, you are going to be called upon to give a speech.
Now, this might be at work, this might be a best man's speech at a wedding; it doesn't
matter where, because if you can't do this without constantly looking down or looking
to the PowerPoint to reference your notes, you are at a huge disadvantage.
Not only does it come across as inauthentic when you're not communicating to the people
eye to eye, but if the PowerPoint breaks, which I've had happen, you're going to find
yourself standing in front of a room full of people who are waiting for you to speak
and you have nothing to say.
So we want to avoid that and today I'm going to teach you how.
The first thing you need to do is to create an outline of your speech that is memory friendly.
Now, what does this mean?
The first thing is that it's chunked in a way that you can remember in your short-term memory.
Chunks, think of it like this.
If I were to tell you a phone number, that's 10 digits.
You'll probably find that whenever you hear a phone number, you've got to write it down
or you got to remember the first half and ask your friend to remember the second half,
and then, you type it into the phone.
That's because there's 10 chunks.
That's too many for most people.
Most people can handle anywhere from 5 to 9 chunks.
I play it safe, most of my videos, I had anywhere from 3 to 5 chunks that I have, so your first
piece is get an outline 3 to 5 bullet points, but these points need to, in your head, feel
like they flow clearly from one to another.
This piece is very important.
This is how you avoid memorization.
It just kind of flows out of you.
So if I'm doing a piece on conversations, I'm going to do it in chronological order.
That makes sense to me, right?
So the first thing is you approach someone, the second thing is what do you say to start
the conversation, the third thing is what do you do when you run out of things to say,
and, finally, how do you say goodbye, right?
That makes sense to me.
If you're giving a pitch and you're at a meeting, right?
And you're trying to figure out how to structure things, maybe you think about it from the
customer's perspective.
First, they're gonna hit the marketing team, then they're gonna finally meet the sales team.
And once they get sold, they're gonna go to the deliverables team.
Whatever it is, the pieces should flow naturally in your head.
That will save you so much memorization work down the line, that's why I avoid memorizing.
The second piece is that once you have these bullets, you flush them out.
I will actually go in and I type everything that I can think of underneath each bullet.
That includes stories, things that I want to get, details that I might not have thought of.
That's gonna help me communicate my main point.
But, more importantly, this gives me a chance to edit the ones that I don't spend time on.
You've seen this before.
This is when I rambled.
This is when you ramble.
So the really key point is to find your details, and then, to cut the ones that don't support
your purpose.
It's not to memorize all these, by the way, we just want to get it out on paper.
That's the second piece.
The third piece is now you've got a speech written for you, right?
It's got these chunks.
It's got the details.
The third thing is to go through it and subvocalize the entire thing, referencing your high-level
bullet points, but without visual cues.
I realized that last since, I had a lot of weird words in it, let's break it down.
So, first off, you want it, you've got your main bullet points, but you're not memorizing this.
You're going through this speech and it's gonna change a little bit every time--critically important.
People who try to memorize word for word, they blow it because they get off one word
and they can't get back on the next sentence.
We all want to have like these main points that we're memorizing.
When I say subvocalize, though, that means that you go through it and just kind of, you
know, whisper to yourself.
You go through the whole speech like that.
Again, not going through it word for word for what you have on there, but just hitting
those main points, but most importantly, you do this without visual cues.
I can't tell you how many people I have seen think that they're preparing for their speech
by reading through it 20 times and then, they get up there and there's nothing they can
do but read the speech.
Or more common in the corporate world, people don't even realize they're doing it as they
click through a PowerPoint, and they don't realize that they're taking cues from this
PowerPoint as they go; they haven't memorized anything.
So, if the PowerPoint goes down, they've never had the exercise of actually connecting those
pieces in their brain.
You need to go through it, shut your laptop, whatever and just kind of talk through it to
yourself in your own words the only things you need to worry about are those main points
that should be memorized and should already connect.
If they don't connect, rewrite the speech so that it makes sense and put them in an
order that sequences well and just clicks for you.
You don't want to be memorizing here.
But there are things that you have to memorize, and that brings me to the fourth point.
The two things that I will memorize in just about any video that I do are the first sentence
and the last sentence.
You got to nail the first sentence.
Its got to have a hook.
You want it to be interesting.
Don't rift it, so get your first sentence down word for word.
And, sometimes, I'll even get the first two or three sentences down because my intros
tend to be something that I stick on to these videos after I come up with the concept.
And, of course, the last sentence; we've all been part of a speech where the person did
a good job, but at the end, they just kind of stood there and like, "...and that's the end
of my speech.
Thank you," right?
That will blow it.
You don't have to say "Thank you, that's the end of my speech," to cue the applause.
You want to have something that has a tone, a finality.
If you've watched this channel, you know that I do this all the time.
This is not a special one, it's just I'm used to it.
I say, "Okay, so I hope that you guys have enjoyed this video and I'm looking forward
to seeing you in the next one."
That is how I know that I'm done.
It's how you know that I'm done.
And then, of course, YouTube tells you that I'm done when the video stops.
But, memorize word for word first sentence, last sentence, that's going to give you the
sort of bumpers on either end.
And that's how you can speak for 10-20 minutes at a time without actually having to memorize
that much.
I do it all the time.
I've just done it right here and I hope that you've seen the examples in it as I've gone
through it.
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A question for you guys, and for a request, is that you write in the comments things that
you'd like to see me do.
And this video was one that I got a lot of questions about how do I do these videos without cutting.
This is how.
But it also was related to another group of questions I got, which I'm not sure that I
want to cover, but I'm going to throw it back to you guys.
People are asking about-- there are questions about YouTube like, you know, how do you set
up the channel?
What makes a good video and what goes into it?
And I've learned a little bit about not only, you know, the psychology behind it, which
is my bag, but also, how to do it at a technical level.
So, if you're interested in either of those, the psychological pieces that might go into
making a video that's shared virally, or if you're just into the technical aspect of it,
let me know.
I don't want to change the main thrust of this channel, but maybe we can have some sort
of, you know, Wednesday video that is related to YouTube.
I'm not forcing it down your throats though.
I only want this channel to be something that helps the most number of people.
So you let me know in the Comments, with up votes and comments what you want to see.
If it's something else, go ahead and write that too.
So, thank you guys for that.
It's gonna help me direct the channel and, of course, I hope that you've enjoyed this
video and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next one