Next up, memorization. Now, I will say this is a controversial topic when it comes to TED and TEDx speaking. Here's why. A lot of people think you should absolutely not memorize your talk, it will sound very disconnected and not authentic to your audience.

I was working with a speaker a couple of weeks ago and he's getting ready for his TEDx stage. He's a very well-known speaker, he's spoken internationally, does this for a living, over 20 years of speaking experience and he is used to speaking off the cuff. He knows his topics so well that when he's on stage he just kind of channels and whatever comes out comes out, it's always brilliant, he always gets standing ovations. When we started working on this period of time in his run-up to the TEDx circle I was talking to him about memorization. He said, "Nope, I'm not going to do that, I'm going to sound like a robot." Okay. You're not going to sound like a robot and he didn't either so I was able to get him over that.

Here's the thing, you'll sound like a robot if you don't move, and that's another video series that we're going to talk about. Robotic-sounding speakers are when you're in your brain thinking, "What comes next, what's that paragraph, what's that sentence, what comes next?" That's not what memorization is, not in my world. Memorization is allowing you to know your talk, every word, every sentence, every tone, everything, so that you get it so integrated in your body and then you can then play with it on stage.

We also want you to memorize your talks and know your paragraphs out of order. When you are at that level of memorization then you can really enhance your movement in a circle. We can't you there though if you don't know your lines and you don't know what's coming next.

Now as you're working on your talk and your lead-up to the red circle, ideally you want to have your content locked down at least 30 days before you hit the stage. That way your content is locked down and you have memorized your talk and that last month is full practice on the performance, on the delivery of your talk. That will give you the time that you need.

Now that's ideal, it doesn't always happen. Sometimes people only have a week to memorize because of different circumstances. In a perfect world give yourself an entire month to memorize and if you have more, beautiful. You can go deeper and farther and more advanced with your movement within that space once you have your talk memorized.

Now, we have a series on this called Mindful Memorization {LINK} and I go through all kinds of different techniques that you can try and use. Here's the thing though. Figure out works for you and whatever it is to get that talk into your cells, use that. Once you do you'll be ready to take the next step.