“So how was the new restaurant you tried?” As soon as I ask you the question you immediately begin to access the memory of the experience. For some reason, before you recall anything from the experience you feel agitated and disturbed. Then one side of your mouth tightens while one eye brow is lifted with a gaze back at me. Then, you give me two words, “Not good.”

How do we store memories?

I found this research from Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, absolutely fascinating. But, I’ll admit I’m a little nerdy when it comes to our brains and psychology.

According to Gilbert, our brains don’t store every bit of information from a memory. Instead, we store important chunks of information. Your experience at the restaurant is stored as a series of words or short phrases.

• Rude waiter
• Steak was over done
• Decent wine
• Overall too pricey

In other words, we store our memories in headlines and feelings.

What we personally define as important is dependent on many internal filters we use to create our personal perceptions of the world around us. Most of us have heard this described as our personal biases. They’re impossible to completely remove, but in my opinion (bias included and acknowledged), I wouldn’t really want to have everyone remove their biases! I personally believe that our different opinions create more variety and better solutions in the world.

How do we recall memories?

Did you know our memories are always under construction? Gilbert points out how we recall information from our memories in those small chunks. Then, we fill in the blanks using the feeling we experienced during the creation of the memory and other elements from our present situation.

In other words, we recall the key elements and the feeling to quickly reconstruct the entire memory… Wow.  Now that is pretty cool. (Sorry… was my neuroscience nerd showing again?)

Why is this important to a Public Speaker?

When you speak to an audience, understand what their brain is doing… it ‘s looking for the headlines. It has to decide what’s important and what’s not important. This is hard work for an audience!

Our brains are busy and just like many things in life that require us to work, we look for the path of least resistance! In other words, what’s the easiest way to get this done? If your audience is listening to you speak and you’re giving them tons of data, they will be working hard to find the most important pieces to remember… and they’re looking for an easy way to do that.

The longer you talk and the harder you make it for them to pick out the important pieces, the more tired they get. And when your audience gets tired of working so hard… they’ll quit! Remember, we’re all looking for an easy way to do our work. I’m sure you can picture this… can you tell me what an audience full of listening quitters looks like in today’s day and age? You guessed it! They’re all on their smartphones!

How can you make it easy on your audience?

We all love the speaker who makes it easy to be in the audience. When you’re the speaker, you can do your audience and yourself a favor by giving them the headlines while you’re speaking. Don’t make them work hard to create their own headlines. You just need to give them the headlines they’re already looking for.

Here are some of the ways you can give your audience a headline:

• Repeated phrases
• Anything that sounds different (think emphasis, volume, pauses, inflections)
• 6-Word headlines
• Something that generates a feeling (think stories, passion, questions, illustrations)

Your audience is busy constructing a memory of your presentation. How are you going to help them remember your message? When you’re constructing your message, always identify the key elements (headlines) for the audience. Then, make sure you call attention to those headlines when you deliver the message to the audience. In other words… do the work for them!

Don’t make them distill your entire message down to a few simple ideas on their own. Do the work for them!

When they recall the memory of your message, they’ll pull up the headlines you provided, then instantly remember the feeling they experienced at that time (gratitude and appreciation for you doing the work for them!), and finally they’ll fill in the blank spots with related material to recreate the full memory.

Congratulations! You did the work for them!

Give the audience a headline because that’s what their brains really want… It’s the path of least resistance they’ve been waiting for and they’re going to remember you for doing the work for them!

Have a great week,
Russ