TJ Walker shows how to give long speeches without reading from notes. Condense your entire talk to one sheet with five main points, 2-4 word cues each, and brief story prompts. The real problem isn't your notes, it's that you haven't edited your content enough.
How can I improve my public speaking without using a script? We've all seen people up on a stage walking around for an hour and people often turn to the person next to them. Wow. Can you imagine doing that? Speaking without notes for an hour? I could never do that. Here's the thing, you can do that. It all depends on how you use notes. I use notes the vast majority of the time. I give speeches or presentations, but no one ever sees me reading notes. No one ever sees me touching notes. No one ever is aware of me looking at notes. The key is I've boiled it down to just the top five points and a few bullet points for the stories to remind me. So this is an hour long speech because it's on a single sheet of paper. There's no full paragraph, so I don't have to stop and look down and read it. It's not multiple pages, so I'm not flipping pages. And what I can do if I'm walking around, I might stop. Seems like I just put the glass down. But really, I looked at my notes to see what the next point is. So you can be a great speaker and appear not to be using notes if you've created your notes the right way. The hard part is you have to have the discipline to have more. No more than five points for your speech. Two, three, four words to remind you of each point, and then a few words for your story to remind you of the story. And if you need one or two facts or figures, put that down. That should all fit on a single sheet of paper. The problem so many people have is they did such a poor job of creating, creating their speech, deciding what's important, that it's got way too many facts, way too much data. So they therefore feel like, I've got to read, I've got to get through all this. That's not a problem with your eye contact or your notes or your script. That's a problem that you didn't make the tough decisions on. What's really important when creating your presentation?
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