Ditch Details To Be A Memorable Speaker

Have mercy on your audiences. No matter how much you know, don’t hit ’em with lashings of detail.

Before I get to why speakers should focus more on big picture ideas and less on nitty-gritty when upstanding, let me ask you a few questions:

Do you ever meet new people at a function and find you forget their names almost immediately?
How about telephone numbers? If someone shares a number with you and you haven’t a pen handy, would you struggle to call that number without asking for the number again (or, in my case, again and again)?
If I asked you to tell me even 3 headlines from the last time you read a newspaper – would that be a challenge for you?

If you said yes to any or all of these – That’s ok, you’re perfectly normal.

And if you can say no on one or more counts, chances are you use a technique or two to remember these details.

Here’s the thing – Whether you’re speaking to audience for 5 minutes or an hour, understand that most people can’t and won’t remember too many details.

And truth be told, every extra detail you share will cause a disproportionate drop in what people remember at all.

Why?

Ah Yes, I Remember It Well (or maybe not)!

Leaving aside that there is still so much to be learned about how memory works, there is general agreement that the following is true:

Although most of us have very sophisticated long term memory capabilities, little will be remembered if it doesn’t get into our short term or working memory first.
Few of us store more than 7 chunks of information (plus or minus a few) in our short term memories. And some argue this has fallen by a few chunks in the last decade as more of us struggle to cope with information overload.

As a consequence…

…Make Things Easier to Recall

Work with the 3 stages adults go through to remember anything:

#1. Encoding

This requires you to earn your audience’s attention for long enough to ‘sense’ the information you share and then make sense of it (attaching meaning). No meaning, no memories!

FYI, you typically have just seconds to get through this stage before audience members are distracted by other things or move on to something new.

#2. Storage of Short Term Memories

Getting people to attach meaning to what you say isn’t enough – they also have to make an instant (conscious or unconscious) decision that they care about it enough that they’ll bump something else and put it into their short term memory.

And if your audience forms the impression that they may have to work too hard to categorise or create associations with what they’ve just encountered – Can you guess what’s likely to happen next?

Yep? Decay. Nothing doing. Forgotten!

Conversely, the simpler and more worthwhile your messages are – the more likely you are to get past this stage.

#3. Retrieving Memories

Of course if memories aren’t retrieved and put to use, they’re useless – right?

Ideally you want your audience to feel that they can put whatever ideas you shared with them to good use fairly quickly – either by themselves or with/via others.

And the fresher the memory, the easier to follow up and the bigger the pay off – the more likely it is that your audience will do something with it.

So, it’s usually a good idea to encourage audience members to get busy asap.

And the moral of today’s story?