People often ask me, How can I remember my speech? I appreciate this this harder if you are more nervous. So do be aware that it's perfectly fine to use notes. I think we can put too much pressure on ourselves to memorize everything and feel like somehow it's very uncool to use No, I don't think that's true. I still use notes. And I've been a professional speaker for a long time and I get paid to speak.

I still sometimes take notes with me. And that's because I want to give the best service that I can to the audience, rather than be trying to pull off some trick of having remembered everything. But if you do want to memorize here's a couple of good tips that I found have really worked for my clients. The first one comes from my acting background. When we used to rehearse a play one of the early things we would do in a play is to block it out. This idea of blocking Is that you go and walk to the places on the stage where you are always going to say that line.

And this works very well for speaking, if you're going to be on a stage where you do move around, then try planting different parts of the speech in different places and memorizing it like that. Another good way to think of this is if you want to talk about problem and solution, or past and future is to put those in the correct place on the stage. Where do you think that might be? If it was the left and the right? Do you think that the past would be over here or over here? Well, in this country, we read left to right.

So in countries where that is true, then what we normally do is go and stand down here when we're talking about the past or a problem. So that for the audience is left, and then we go and stand here if we're talking about the future or a solution. And that's when the audience is right. It just makes more sense for them and how they're used to seeing things. So that's a good Way to memorize is to teach your body where you go in order to say that line. It saved me many times as an actress, when I forget my line, I would just walk, and then I'd find the line would pop out of my mouth automatically.

Another way to do it and memorize is if you're stuck behind a lectern, then you're saying to me, Well, I can't walk to different parts of the stage to memorize this. Then what I want you to do is to put different bits of the speech in different parts of the room. I do this when I'm doing songs because they can be quite long and complicated, and I can't remember which order things come in. So I might look right and always think the same thing then. So I might say, keep standing by you've got to entertain me, and then I'll look left. Champagne, me.

And I've imagined in my mind, the champagne bar is over there. And that's why I always Look over there for champagne. So you can do that with your speech. You can plant bits into the room and I find this works very very well particularly when you're behind a lectern. Good luck with memorizing your speech and don't forget, it's completely fine to use note