This week’s post is a response to Jessica Cooper’s excellent post from last week on the subject of memorization. 

I began my real public speaking coaching career crouching at the base of a stage in Richmond, VA, huddling with a teleprompter operator.  We were making last-minute changes to a “State of the Commonwealth” speech I had written three weeks earlier for the governor.  When I say ‘last-minute’ I mean that the governor was a few minutes late to begin the speech, the audience was restless, and they were looking at us, inconspicuous as we were trying to be, because we were the only thing happening at the moment.  The governor had finally paid close attention to the speech about an hour earlier, and we were madly focused on bringing the text up to date to reflect his desired changes.  I hoped the audience assumed we were dealing with some technical issue, because the idea of a teleprompter was still not widely known in that era, and the unspoken rule was that you made the speaker look good by keeping the teleprompter a hidden-in-plain-sight secret.

I actually had one audience member come up to me afterwards and ask me, pointing to the two panes of teleprompter glass (each about the size of a hardcover book) if they were bulletproof glass to protect the governor. I deflected the question, and excused myself, smiling.  Job done.

Well, we were rushing to input the new text, and the teleprompter software in those days was crude, and the result was that we had extra multiple returns in the places where the new text was placed.  That meant that, during the speech the governor delivered a few minutes later, the teleprompter operator had to fast-forward through the gaps, because only a few lines of text could appear on the teleprompter screens at a time.  As he raced to zip through the blank spaces in the speech, he overshot, stopped, and backed up.  The governor could only wait for the text to stop jumping around, hoping that it would come to (temporary) rest at the right place in his rhetoric.

It mostly did, but there were some pauses in the governor’s delivery that seemed to me, still crouched on the floor, helping the teleprompter operator to ensure the integrity of the text, to last forever.

I learned several lessons from this hair-loss-inducing experience.

Teleprompters make average speakers look good.  They do not make good speakers great.  At the end of the day, you are still reading, and very few people can do that in a way that truly brings the text to life.  Neuroscience tells us why.  When you are reading, you’re using your prefrontal cortex – the seat of judgment and decision-making.  When you speak from memory, you use the older, deeper parts of your brain – the parts that connect to emotion.  That’s where you need to be to sound human.

The goal for a high-stakes speech should be memorization.  It’s not always possible.  I worked with the potentate of a middle-eastern country on a speech to open an international conference his country was hosting.  The speech was written by his aides, with a bit of input from me, in English.  Then it was translated into Arabic.  Then the potentate tinkered with it, right up to the day before the taping.  There was no way I or anyone else was going to tell His Excellency that he should stop editing the speech and memorize it.  He would most probably have said no anyway.  We were content with teleprompters.

Getting a speech into your muscle memory, where it belongs, is a multi-week process.  Allow the time, rehearse the speech, record it to play over and over in your air pods, internalize it.  The result will show up in an embodied, emotionally present speech.  That’s the goal.

If you are unable to do that, then use a comfort monitor or teleprompter – but in the right way.  The right way is to have cue words or minimal phrases to help you keep on track, to jog your memory to say the next bit, conversationally. A speech like this sounds and plays best if it is spoken like a conversation, not struggling to recall specific words or phrasing.  Don’t read!

You can also use images on the comfort monitor.  If you can put a few pictures as memory jogs on the comfort monitor, then you’ll have the best of both worlds – you’ll stay in embodied speech, emotionally present, and you’ll have the images to make sure that you don’t forget anything important.

The final implication is that you should be telling stories that you know, personal ones, ones already deep in your muscle memory, because storytelling is what brings a speech to life, and if you know the story as your lived experience, you won’t forget it.  That’s how you bring your unique voice to a speech and make it unforgettable for your audience.