Speak from Memory and Establish a Genuine Connection

Do you struggle with fear, doubt, and worry in your public speaking? Do you find it difficult to connect with your audience and deliver presentations that leave a lasting, positive, unforgettable impact? If yes, then let's dive in the world of public speaking and presentation skills with your host, Eric Edmies. Welcome to the Unforgettable podcast.

So we're often taught in school, you're preparing a speech, that you write out the speech. In fact, we even have a category of people called speech writers. The challenge with writing out a speech or using very guided material, there's a number of challenges. One of them is that it changes the dynamic of the communication. Written words and spoken words are inherently different. We don't speak in the same patterns that we write in. So when you write a speech, you're using written word structures, and then you try to say those things, and they don't. They don't really work. In fact, famously, Harrison Ford told George Lucas while filming Star wars, george, you can write this shit, but you can't say it. There's an issue there around that. So that's one problem. Then the next problem is that it engages a different form of memory. So in the way that most people can't say the Alphabet backwards or they can't begin the Alphabet at a middle letter, you know, what comes after M, A, B, C, D, E, M, N. You know, they have to prompt it. Well, if you write out a speech, you engage that same type of linear memory. And so if you forget one phrase or sentence that you were planning to say, then you've lost the bridge to the next one. And then the one other thing is that you're so engaged in your memory of the words that you can't deliver any real emotion unless you're super professional. If you've taken acting and what have you, you can kind of pull it off. But, you know, you can always tell when somebody's worked from a prepared written speech. It's like, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Today I'll be giving you a perfectly constructed talk with punctuation that works. And it's just very clear that there's no authenticity in it. So instead. Instead, what I suggest to people is that they're clear about the stories they want to share, and they're clear about the energy of that and that they share from memory, from remembering, rather than from memorization.

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