Do. Not. Memorize It. I’m serious. My colleague Neela describes the phenomenon of watching someone deliver a speech from rote memory as being like they are reading it from a ticker tape right in front of their eyes—they aren’t connecting with the audience because their brain space and focus are all taken up with remembering the speech word for word.

I can hear you now: “But that’s the only way I can be sure I won’t forget anything!” “But lots of great speakers memorize!”

Let’s address these comments one at a time. First, the ever popular: “But that’s the only way I can be sure I won’t forget anything!” I have a couple of points to make about this. A.) Just because you don’t know another way doesn’t mean there’s not one. I’ll teach you a better way to be sure that you cover everything you need to in your presentation. B.) It doesn’t matter if you forget something, unless you’re giving CPR instructions to someone who is simultaneously using them. C.) The intention of your speech should not be “to make sure I don’t forget anything.”

Next! “But lots of great speakers memorize!” I’m not so sure about that. Lots of very practiced speakers use teleprompters, and are really good at it. Those speakers (think President Obama) also have writers who do a spectacular job of writing in the voice of the person who will be speaking—also, Obama edits and rewrites his speeches so that he can deliver them authentically. People like this—who speak frequently and on a huge scale—are in a different category. Their job and lifestyle support an immense amount of preparation and deliberate practice. In other words, they do their speeches so often that they move through “memorized” as our friend Neela describes it, and they come out on the other side, where they truly inhabit the content. In this way, they’re like actors. I had a client argue with me once that she should be allowed to memorize her speech “since that’s what actors do.” I asked her, “Are you an actor?” “No,” she said, “I’m an accountant.”

For most people, memorizing a speech word for word is going to result in a speech that comes off as rote and robotic to the audience. The speaker has dedicated all her prep time to memorization instead of working specifically on what impact she wants to have on her audience. This is misplaced time and energy.

One other problem with memorized speeches is that the people who write and deliver them are often at the mercy of their more “writerly” phrases and structures. Most people don’t write a presentation as if they are actually going to say it out loud; they write it as though it’s going to be read. So when it comes time to say it out loud, it sounds strange and stilted. How do we avoid that? Practice out loud. Note what sentences and phrases sound awkward. They may have been fine on the page, but they aren’t going to translate to the stage.

If you insist on memorizing, remember you’re going to have to put about twice or three times the amount of time into preparing. This is because once you’ve memorized it, the real work begins—making the presentation seem natural, and connecting with your audience.

Did you ever have one of those days? A lot to do, a lot that I’m excited about, and it’s all making me move a little too fast. I can’t even type without tripping over my fingers.

What if, and stay with me here, the power of our great work is in slowing down? What if we actually cannot do the work we’re capable of when we’re in overdrive? And when we choose not to slow down, when we keep saying “yes” and squeezing more and more into our packed calendars…what are we losing out on? What are we afraid will show up if we make space for the “fertile void”?

I was in a tiny, rural diner yesterday. Next to my table were a man and woman, maybe in their 60s. The table was at right angles to mine, so I could see the woman’s face, and hear her clearly. Here is what she said:

I am so lonely.
You travel so much, and I am alone.
I try to fill that emptiness with other people, being sociable, but…
I have to get out of here.

I never heard the man say anything. They left in separate cars.

When you have to do something you don’t want to do, how do you talk to yourself about it?

“I guess I’ll get it over with.”
“This isn’t fair.”
“I’ll probably screw this up.”
“There are a million reasons I shouldn’t have to do this.”
“What am I going to get out of this?”
“I’m resentful, so I’ll won’t put much effort into it. That’ll show ‘em.”

It can feel comfortable and familiar to be mad, to be resentful, to roll around in our grumpy feelings, to talk to other people about how much we don’t want to do whatever it is.

What happens when we make a decision to try something else? To say, instead:

“I’ll give this my best shot.”
“I don’t have to love it, but I’ll focus completely.”
“I get to decide what this experience means to me.”
“There are a million reasons I get to do this.”
“I’ll knock this out of the park. That’ll show ‘em!”

The voice that sets the tone isn’t the one of the person who tells us what to do. It’s the one in our head that tells us how to feel about it.

Has your coffee worn off?

Are you feeling anxious or out of sorts?

The spine roll, demonstrated in this video, is a surefire way to reset your energy. Ignite CSP coaches Neela Muñoz and Vivian Smith will talk you through it! (You might want to try this in a place where people aren’t walking by your glassed-in office or open cubicle. Or maybe you do! Get them to join in!)

Once we start noticing intention, we see it everywhere, in everything. We relax into the glorious intentional care of a restaurant that notices all the details, and we get irritated at the default intention of the furnace-repair company that doesn’t follow through on its promise to let you know when they are on their way.

The summer camp my kids grew up going to is a model of consistent intention. Everything they do is a reflection of who they are and the experience they create for the kids at camp. It’s an (intentionally) small camp, nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains, held on a working farm. The kids have chores (like tending the garden, taking care of the cows, and setting the table for meals), and they spend almost every waking hour outside. The camp has been run by the same family for three generations.

They send their communication via snail mail, and I know just when to expect it (quarterly). More than that, they send mail just to stay in touch—they send photos they took at camp on a holiday card, they send a letter in the spring giving us an update on the farm animals and the garden, and they say hi. The letters include a pen and ink drawing of some place on the camp grounds. This has been their standard for at least 30 years—I grew up going to this camp as well, and the look and voice of their letters has always been the same.

The family that runs the camp believes in the values of good, simple food, lots of time in nature, and contributing to the community around you. The kids don’t bring technology of any kind to camp, and parents and other loved ones are asked not to send candy or junk food. They believe that one of the best reasons for kids to go to camp is to have an experience away from their regular roles and responsibilities, so parents don’t visit and don’t phone, and the camp doesn’t post photos or have a live feed of what your kid is doing. It’s for them, not you.

The look of their communication, the type of people they hire to be counselors, the responsiveness of the staff, the families they ask to host small gatherings to help get the word out about the camp…every choice supports the place they are and the values they hold. That’s intention.

I see a lot of presentations. Between clients, and the boards I serve on, and general life, there are just a lot of presentations out there in the world. The question I am most often left with is this: what is it for?

I was recently asked to speak at a conference, and the event planner told me to print out my slide deck ahead of time and give it to the audience, so that they could follow along as I spoke. This instruction makes a couple of assumptions:

1.) there is going to be information on my slides that people can read, and

2.) the slides will be relevant to the audience when I’m not there speaking to them.

My presentations don’t follow these assumptions. My slides are few, and mostly images. My “what is it for” = connecting with this audience in this time with this content.

A lot of presentations don’t know what they want to be. There’s too much information on offer for the audience to take in, or for the presenter to remember. So it goes on the slides and gets printed out. But then…couldn’t you have emailed the deck to them? What is it for? What is the point of all these people being in the same place at the same time if the act of communication itself is delegated to the slide deck?

Unless the occasion is a multi-hour interactive training, in which the participants really need to walk away knowing something tangible, the purpose of a presentation is to connect with the audience around an idea. You want to get them excited, not to tell them everything you know about it. Tell them the important part. Tell them a story. Get them excited to learn more, not wishing you would just let them read your deck in peace.

P.S. You don’t have to use slides. I know, crazy, right?

P.P.S. Shout out to http://gratisography.com. Try their super interesting, evocative, and free images instead of text in your next deck:

I just started reading Sherry Turkle’s book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. http://www.reclaimingconversationbook.com/

Turkle is an acclaimed author and professor at MIT, and she has done a ton of research on how our current mania for being digitally connected is impeding our ability to actually have conversations with real people. The cost of our texting is real, Turkle says, and a whole generation of people is growing up more comfortable with their phones than looking other people in the eye.

“I’d rather not talk to a person.”
“It’s so much easier to text.”
“I hate being on the phone.”

I hear comments like this a lot, and have definitely made some of them myself. But what this research is suggesting is that we are forgetting how to have in-person conversations, the ones that matter, because we are outsourcing even routine talking to our apps and our devices. We no longer have to call to order food, or talk to a grocery store check-out person. We are systematically reducing the opportunities for a serendipitous conversation, the chance to talk to someone we don’t know.

What would happen if we left our phones in our pockets while we’re in line at the drugstore? Who might we see? What might we observe? Maybe nothing, maybe…something.

Putting in the work.

Bit by bit, over days and weeks and months, we can get better at something. Problem is, we often don’t think about putting in the work until it really matters—and then it’s too late.

There are so many things we’ve learned this way, though. When we were small, everything was like this—walking, talking, reading, shapes, you name it. We had to learn everything there is to know, and we had to do it one tiny bit at a time. Oh, and we had to fail, a lot.

As adults, though, we want to skip straight to the part where we’re good at something. It’s frustrating to fail, it takes too much time to put in the work. Plus, we can look around and see other people who are already good at the thing, whatever it is, and compare ourselves, unfavorably, to them.

What if we put in the work every day? What if we show up for a few minutes ready to fail and learn and try again? What can we get better at?