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Matt Abrahams ©
As a communication professor and coach, I hear a lot from
presenters about anxiety. Their two greatest fears:
1. They will forget what they intend to say, and
2. Their audience won’t remember what they said.
These dual fears are certainly understandable and create much
angst among nervous and novice presenters. However, by
employing specific techniques and practices, all presenters can
deliver more memorable in-person and online presentations
that both the presenter and the audience will remember.
SECRETS FOR REMEMBERING
YOUR PRESENTATION
Whether you are going to be presenting live online or in-person,
prior to any effective presentation you must both remember
and practice it. You can dramatically increase the likelihood of
remembering all of your points by: (1) employing good
presentation hygiene, (2) structuring your presentation, and (3)
practicing properly.
TIPS FOR MAKING
PRESENTATIONS
MEMORABLE
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The best preparation advice sounds like it comes straight from a
parenting book. Make sure you eat right, exercise often, and sleep
well. Research in wellness and memory clearly point to the
importance of taking care of our bodies. In terms of consumption,
when drafting a presentation as well as preparing to deliver one,
you need to mind your diet. To begin, you should avoid sugar and
caffeine. While these items can momentarily boost your energy,
they always result in a sluggish fog after time passes. Rather, eat
protein and complex carbohydrates. These foods help in memory
formation and assist in the retention of ideas; additionally, they
provide for a more constant energy level.
Like food, exercise can help memory by enhancing your energy
level, reducing your stress, and increasing your memory formation
and retention. A regular exercise regimen that supports your
presentation preparation and memory should include both strength
training and aerobic activity, such as walking or jogging,
conducted at regular
SWEET DREAMS…SWEETER SPEECHES
Finally, sleep is critical to memory. Sleep researchers have now
concluded that one of the most important aspects of sleep is to
consolidate memories. You are much more likely to recall
information if you are well rested from a good night’s sleep than if
you stay up all night trying to memorize your points. Further, getting
a good night sleep allows you to better cope with any speaking
anxiety symptoms that may arise.
A powerful way to help you remember your presentation is to provide
a meaningful structure to your content. Research shows that people
retain structured information up to 40% more reliably and accurately
than information that is presented in a more freeform manner. There are
many presentation structures on which you can rely, including:
• Past-Present-Future — good for providing a history or stepping
people through a process
1.
SLEEP IN,
REMEMBER
MORE
2. MAKE A
ROADMAP
BEFORE YOU
BUILD YOUR
PRESENTATION
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Matt Abrahams ©
• Comparison-Contrast — good for showing the relative advantages
of your position
• Cause-Effect — good for helping people understand the underlying
logic of your position
Having a structure helps you remember what you plan to say, because
even if you forget the specifics, you can use the general framework to
stay on track. For example, when using the Problem-Solution-Benefit
structure — good for persuading and motivating people — you first lay
out a specific problem (or opportunity), then you detail a solution to
address the problem, and finally you define the benefits to your
solution. If you are in the middle of the Solution portion of your talk and
you blank out, then by simply thinking back to your structure, you know
that the Benefits portion comes next.
My favorite structure is What?-So What?-Now What? This useful structure
can help you not only in planned presentations but also in
spontaneous speaking situations, such as job interviews. When using this
structure, you start with your central claim (“I am qualified for this
position because of my experience”) and then explain its importance
or value (“This experience will allow me to start contributing to your firm
immediately”) before concluding with a call to action or next steps
(“So when can I start?”).
Practice is clearly important for remembering your presentation.
However, many presenters don’t practice properly. They simply
mentally rehearse or flip through a slide deck, passive approaches
that don’t really simulate the conditions of a presentation. To
practice effectively, you also need to stand and deliver — even if
you are presenting virtually, you need to physically stand up to
project effectively. Rather than only thinking through a
presentation, standing up and practicing your speech helps you
remember it. Specifically, hearing your own voice and using
relevant, appropriate gestures improve later recall. You remember
more because your mental imagery and physical practice use
overlapping neural networks in your brain, improving what’s known
as memory consolidation, or the process by which a thought
becomes cemented into your long-term memory.
3.
PRACTICE
OUT LOUD&
STANDING UP
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Matt Abrahams ©
One very useful technique, called focused practice, involves taking
one aspect of your presentation — say, the introduction — and
delivering it repeatedly until you become highly familiar and
comfortable with it. (Note: You should not memorize your
presentation, because memorizing invites blanking out.) Next, you
move on to another aspect of your presentation, such as
transitioning between two specific visual aids. Focused practice
allows you to feel less anxious because you do not have to spend
valuable mental effort thinking about all the particular aspects of
your presentation at once.
The location where you practice your presentation should be in the
place where you’ll be presenting, or at least in a similar place. For
example, if you are going to give a speech in a large room with big
windows where people are quiet and attentive, you should
practice giving the speech in a large room with windows. The
context in which you learn helps you remember and will boost your
confidence, since the surroundings will feel comfortable. This
advice also works for presenting via the Web or teleconference.
Practice in the room with the technology that you will be using. In
fact, you should always practice with the technology in advance of
presenting.
Through proper preparation, structure, and practice, you will be
able to more easily remember your presentation. And the added
confidence you will have in your memory will allow you to present
in a more compelling manner.
Now, we must explore what you can do to make your presentation
more memorable for those who listen to it.
SECRETS FOR BEING MEMORABLE
In a world saturated with information and presentations, being
memorable is critical. One recent survey reported that technology
workers hear on average one presentation a day. You need to
make your presentations memorable if you are to have any chance
of having your ideas live on and get traction. By invoking three key
tools—variation, relevance, and emotion—you can help your
audience to remember your content and call to action.
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Matt Abrahams ©
Your job as a presenter is to engage your audience, to pull them
forward in their seats. Unfortunately, audiences can be easily
distracted, and they habituate quickly. To counter these natural
tendencies, you must diversify your material to keep people’s
attention, with variation in your voice, variation in your evidence,
and variation in your visuals. You have likely been the victim of a
monotonous speaker who drones on in a flat vocal style, like Ben
Stein’s character in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Vary your volume and
speaking rate to help keep your audience’s attention and motivate
them to listen. And by speaking expressively, your passion for your
topic comes through. However, for many presenters, especially
those newer to English, this type of speaking is not natural. I often
instruct less expressive speakers to infuse their presentations with
emotive words, such as “excited,” “valuable,” and “challenging,“
and to inflect their voice to reflect the meaning of these words. If
you are speaking about a big opportunity, then speak “big” in a big
way. With practice, you will feel more comfortable with this type of
vocal variety.
Varying the type of evidence you use to support the claims in your
presentation is equally important. Too often, presenters exclusively
use their favorite type of evidence. You might over-rely on data or
on anecdotes. But both qualitative and quantitative academic
research have found that when you triangulate your support you
provide more compelling and memorable results. So, try providing
three different types of evidence, such as a data point, a
testimonial, and an anecdote. This triangulation neatly reinforces
your point, and it allows your audience multiple opportunities to
connect with your idea and remember it, which is why it’s a
technique often used by advertisers to reinforce that you should buy
their product.
By varying your voice and evidence, you will make the words you
speak more memorable. But what your audience sees is also critical.
Just as a monotonous speaker can cause mental shutdown in an
audience, repetitive body movements, and slides jammed with
words can fatigue and distract an audience. People are very poor
multitaskers. When distracted by spurious gestures or a wall of bullet
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Matt Abrahams ©
points, audience members have fewer cognitive resources available
to remember the content of what you’re saying. To increase the
variety of your nonverbal delivery (e.g., gestures and movement),
audio record yourself delivering your presentation, then play the
recording while you move and practice your gestures. Since you do
not have to think about what to say, you can play with adding
variation to your body movement without the distraction of
speaking.
LESS IS MORE: THINK VISUALLY
Think visually to rescue yourself from the trap of creating verbose
slides that act more as eye charts than helpful aids. A useful
visualization tool is Google Image search. Look up the idea or point
you are trying to convey and see what comes up. Since many
images have copyright issues, you are better served to use what
you find as a starting point for your own creative ideas, rather than
adding the exact images you find to your presentation.
Variety truly is the spice of life and memorable presentations. By
varying your voice, evidence, movements, and slides, you help your
audience to stay engaged and remember what you’re saying.
As a speaker, your job is to be in service of your audience. You need
to be sure that you make it easy for them to understand your
message. I am not suggesting you “dumb down” your content.
Rather, I argue you should spend time to make sure your content is
relevant and easily accessible to them. Relevance is based on
empathy. You need to diagnose your audience’s knowledge,
expectations, and attitudes, and then tailor your content to their
needs, particularly when presenting statistics.
Too often, presenters deliver numbers devoid of context, which
makes it hard for the audience to see their relevance, much less
remember them. As an example, I worked with an executive at a
global financial institution who presented an astonishingly large
number when referring to how much money went through his firm’s
5. KNOW
YOUR
AUDIENCE
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Matt Abrahams ©
banks everyday. Unfortunately, the number was too large for me to
grasp and remember. To facilitate comprehension and memory, we
determined that he should relate that the amount of money going
through his firm’s banks was equivalent to 25% of the world’s money
each day. With this context, his number suddenly became much
more relevant to my understanding, and more impactful. Clearly,
context matters. By making it relevant, you make it memorable.
Another way to make things relevant is to connect your content with
information your audience already knows. Analogies are a perfect
tool for this. By comparing new information to something your
audience is already familiar with, analogies activate the audience’s
existing mental constructs, which allows for quicker information
processing and understanding.
For example, when I teach the purpose and value of organizing a
presentation, I often say that a presenter’s job is to be a tour guide.
We then discuss the most important tour guide imperative: “Never
lose the members of your tour group!” This analogy allows my
students to leverage all of their experiences of being on tours to
understand not only the importance of organizing a presentation, but
other ideas, as well, such as setting expectations, checking in with
audience members, transitioning between ideas, etc.
By focusing on your audience’s perspective and making your
content relevant to them, you help them more easily understand your
points, and remember those points, too.
Most of us can quickly recall where we were on Tuesday, September
11, 2001, yet far fewer of us can remember our whereabouts on
Monday, September 10, 2001. The emotional toll of the terrifying and
tragic 9/11 terrorist attacks demonstrates a truism that has been
known since the ancient Greeks studied rhetoric: Emotion sticks.
People remember emotionally charged messages much more
readily than fact-based ones. In fact, modern scientists are finding
that our emotional responses have a fast track to our long-term
memory. So when possible, try to bring some emotion into your
presentation, whether in the form of your delivery or the content
6. GIVE YOUR
AUDIENCE A
REASON TO
CARE
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Matt Abrahams ©
itself. This emotion will bolster engagement in the moment and
memory in the future
To help your audience remember your message, work to have your
tone and delivery match the emotional impact you desire. You
must take time to reflect on the emotional response you want and
then work to make sure that your delivery is congruent with the
emotional impact you desire. However, be careful not to be too
scripted or theatrical. For emotion to help you, it must be authentic
and credible.
I am often challenged when I assert that emotion is an important
ingredient for engagement and memory. My technical and
scientific clients and students claim that their presentations need to
be highly detailed and descriptive, and, thus, emotion is antithetical
and incompatible to their speaking goals. I fully believe that even
the most technical and scientific talks can have emotion infused in
them. Further, I have seen firsthand how emotion can elevate the
involvement, impact, and memory of these types of presentations.
The best way to bring emotion in is to focus on benefits and
implications of the technology or science. Benefits are inherently
emotional….saving time, saving money, saving trees, saving
lives…these are emotional. I recently worked with a large graphics
chip maker whose standard presentations are jammed full of
technical detail, jargon, and data. These presentations lead to
what one of my former students termed “verbal anesthesia.”
Audience members were overwhelmed with the presenters’
information and underwhelmed in their comprehension and
retention. However, once the presenters focused on the benefits of
the graphics chips to the audience’s lives, such as powering their
mobile devices, car navigation systems, etc., the presentations had
more impact. By including an emotional component to your
presentations via your tone, delivery, and connection to your
audience, you can expedite engagement and increase long-tern
retention .
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Matt Abrahams ©
FROM NOW ON…
By invoking specific techniques and practices, you can deliver a
presentation that is memorable for both you and your audience, no
matter your presentation environment or topic. To help you
remember your presentation, focus on your preparation, message
structure, and practice. To aid your audience in remem b e ring your
presentation, tend to your message’s relevance, variation, and
emotion. When combined together, these tools will lead to
confident, compelling, and connected presentations.
ABOUT MATT ABRAHAMS
Matt Abrahams is a passionate, collaborative and innovative
educator and coach who teaches Strategic Communication for
Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and Presentation
Skills for Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program, while also teaching
at De Anza College. He has published research articles on cognitive
planning, persuasion, and interpersonal communication. Matt
recently published the second edition of Speaking Up Without
Freaking Out, a book written to help the millions of people who
suffer from anxiety around speaking in public. Additionally, Matt
developed an iPad app called eValue8 that provides instant,
proscriptive feedback to presenters. Matt also curates
NoFreakingSpeaking.com to help those looking to be confident
presenters.
Matt is Co-Founder of Bold Echo Communication Solutions, a
presentation and communication skills company that helps people
improve their presentation skills. Matt has worked with executives to
help prepare and present keynote addresses, IPO road shows,
conduct media interviews, and deliver TED talks.