Starting this week I’m going to one post a week, for the summer.  That way we can all take a deep breath, relax, and spend more time at the beach.  Enjoy!  I’ll go back to two posts a week in September.

Forgetting is important for speakers in several ways.  First of all, there’s the very justifiable concern that your audience remember as much as possible of what you say.  Research over the years has suggested that the track record of speakers and audiences is not particularly good:  we apparently remember something like 10 – 30 percent of what we hear from a speaker.  And the half-life of that memory is equally dismal – the number of speakers, memories, and audiences that intersect in a rich cornucopia of details, lessons, and stories falls close to zero as soon as you get a few months out.

I’ve had a few people come up to me a decade after a speech of mine and tell me (quite proudly) that they remember nothing of that speech – except one story.  And that, they’ll proceed to tell me, as a proof point, in a kind of summary form that usually preserves the conflict and the point of the story, but not much else.

Note to self:  all good speech stories should have conflict and a point.

Speakers need to scan their speeches for minimal numbers, maximum stories, and minimum points if their goal is to be remembered.  And by the way, as I’ve said before in this space, PowerPoint (or other slide software) doesn’t help.  And also by the way, that whole theory we used to embrace about different kinds of learners – visual, aural, kinesthetic, etc – forget that.  The research doesn’t bear that out either.

So we’re on our own, just the speaker and the audience, in a race to forget.  There are a few ways that you can in fact increase the likelihood of your audience remembering what you say.  As I said, telling stories to make your points is probably the most important.  Also, repeating your lessons helps – but not in the way you think.  It doesn’t help to say the same thing over and over again.  It does help to say it in different ways.  And it really helps to get your audience involved.  So, for example, if you’re trying to help audiences remember not to set their hair on fire, then say it first with a terrifying story of the poor kid who did and suffered horribly as a result.  Then, get your audience to stand up, grab their hair, jump up and down, and chant “I won’t set my hair on fire!”  over and over again.  That’ll probably do it.

The second kind of forgetting that’s important for speakers is forgetting the traumatic times when things go wrong.  You can get a complex that way — if you can’t.  For example, if you forget a key section of your speech one of the first times that you give it, you would be pardoned for obsessing about not forgetting that section again.  And yet you find that the more you worry about it, the more likely you are to forget it yet again.

The brain is funny like that.

Instead of obsessing, trying sitting yourself down and thinking about it, and reasoning with yourself that it won’t happen again.  New research shows that the best way to forget a traumatic memory like this – in the sense of not letting it have a hold over you – is to actively work on forgetting.  If that sounds paradoxical, it only seems that way until you try.  Have a talk with yourself.  Go over what happened.  Explain to yourself that it won’t happen again because you’ve had the key phrases from that section tattooed on the back of your hand, and you can just read it to remind yourself.

That should do the trick.  If you run out of tattoo space, I recommend PowerPoint.

The final kind of forgetting is forgetting yourself in the moment of giving the speech.  The best speeches happen when the speaker realizes that ultimately a speech is not about them, but rather about the message and the audience.  Something sublime happens when a phrase comes to you in the moment, because you’ve been preparing for this moment all your life, and you look out at that audience and you say, “I have a dream. . . .”  It’s the preparation that lets you forget yourself.  You have to be so ready that it no longer feels like work, exactly, but more like flow.  The words come because something bigger than you has taken over, and it’s about the message you have to give, and about this exact audience, right here in front of you, hearing it.