Letting go of Notes

Moving Yourself away from Notes_Tropic City Toastmasters

Moving yourself away from notes can be one of the biggest hurdles when performing a speech. Having the full speech written in front of you provides security when it comes to delivering a succinct message, within a short timeframe. Reading notes word for word does, however, break the connection between you and the audience.

EYE CONTACT

When you are looking at your notes, you have lost eye contact with the audience. The audience feels less engaged in the message… and they start looking elsewhere. To maintain a highly engaged audience, Toastmasters encourage the use of good eye contact. How do you achieve this? Rehearsal!

REHEARSAL

A well prepared speech does include a great deal of practice. According to Janice Tomish (Tomish, 2024), a rule of thumb for practicing a 60-minute keynote speech is 30 times. A 30-minute speech should be practiced 60 times. Some people practice up to 600 times if it is a speech that will impact their career. LinkedIn (LinkedIn, 2024) suggests the use of the 1:6 rule. That is, a 10 minute speech should be practiced for a least 60 minutes. Just listening to yourself give the speech over and over, can make an incredible impact to your confidence in the subject matter (Walker, 2001). Recording and playing back the speech whilst doing other tasks, is also a great tip.

Practice for 60mins_Tropic City Toastmasters

CATERING FOR NERVES

Despite your practice, don’t expect you will be free of nerves when it comes to that final moment. So, although you have rehearsed well and know your speech off by heart, expect that nerves could throw you off balance. To mitigate this, Diane Windingland (Virtual Speech Coach, 2020) suggests 10 ways to internalise your speech.

Repetition.
Chunk your content and practice it out of order. Ie. beginning, conclusion, points.
Use specific gestures that help you remember where you are in the speech. This is a kinaesthetic approach.
Mind journey – This technique involves practicing parts of the speech in different parts of a room or house. This can help with transitions; that is, knowing which chunk is next. I recall studying a specific subject only on a bus. This assisted my recall memory; when I focused on being on the bus, the information was front of mind. This is an ancient Greek technique. Practising this method serves as a visual aid to internalise your speech.
Keywords – Reduce your well-rehearsed speech to keywords. Then practice your speech just using keywords. The keywords are now an additional back-up and take the place of the full text. The tip to maintain eye contact, is to not speak when you look at your keywords. Only speak when you look at the audience.
Use pictures – A PowerPoint presentation is a great way to assist you to transition between segments of your speech. Your notes can consist of simply the thumbnails of your slides. If you don’t have access to PowerPoint, a summary of your presentation in images is still a powerful tool to carry you through.
Ensure the pictures represent the outline of your speech.
Tell stories – this helps you (and your audience) remember your content.
Use graphs if possible. Statistics illustrated as a graph, can assist you by not having to memorise these fine details.
Use notes on the back of the handout. In many cases you will have a handout to give to your audience as a take-home of what your speech was about. This sheet is likely to have your contact details on it. The blank area on the back of one of these is an ideal place to put your keywords or key pictures.