When we commit to memorizing all or part of our talk, we also have to make another commitment. It’s this: we must commit to rehearsing in a way that ensures that our intention isn’t “to say the words in the right order.”

This came to mind for me recently when a client told me he had memorized the first few sentences of his talk. In general, I think this is a good idea. If you’re using notes or a prompter, you should still know your introduction cold. It allows you to be present and not look away to check your next words.  

However, in this case my client was less than an hour from doing his presentation. Delivering his memorized content was likely to have the effect of undoing all the work we had done on him being present and connected, since he would be thinking mostly about making sure he said all the words he memorized.

I asked him if we could run through the introduction a few times. I explained that I wanted him to be able to layer this new work, the lines he had memorized, onto the work we had already done. Happily, he was amenable, and even better, he was able to use his deliberate intention to animate the memorized section. 

In an ideal world, we rehearse with deliberate intention all the time. When we need to memorize our words, we approach that process with the knowledge that those words will carry our intention. We never memorize in a vacuum.