One of my favorite business experts is Seth Godin (https://www.sethgodin.com/)
I subscribe to his daily blog posts and this one really hit the mark on the topic of memorization. It follows my philosophy that I share with my coaching clients when they tell me they want to memorize their presentation.
Here are his thoughts…
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Awkward Memorization
The spread of TED talks means that more and more people are being put on stage and told to memorize their talk.
This almost always leads to failure.
It’s not because people memorize too much, it’s because they don’t memorize enough.
Watch a great performance and you’ll see no artifacts of memorization. Instead, you will see someone speaking from the heart.
This is what it means to know something by heart.
Memorizing the words is half of it.
And woefully insufficient.
My suggestion: Don’t memorize your talk. Memorize your stories. Ten stories make a talk. Write yourself a simple cue card to remember each story’s name. Then tell us ten stories.
Be you.
We didn’t come to hear your words. If that’s all we wanted, we could have read the memo and saved a ton of time.
Bring your heart.
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And I would add…in the word rehearse is the word ‘rehear’. Practice and rehearse until it becomes apart of you…Yes, I agree, be you and bring your heart.
Public speaking and communication skills are the primary skills SmarTalkers can provide through our coaching and training opportunities. Visit our website www.smartalkers.com or contact Wendy Warman: wendy@smartalkers.com for more information.
