Kristin Thompson at the Presentation Summit 2012

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After a photo session showing the events of the past three days, Rick handed over to Kristin Thompson, the keynote speaker for Wednesday morning. Kristin, who is based out of Portland, Oregon did a session that discusses memory power, and how it can help you get ahead in your life and career.

She explained that memory as a skill is not typically something inherited by your genes, but developed using techniques.

Kristin added that it’s important that you remember your talk when you have to do a presentation. If you are worried about remembering your talk, or speak in the wrong order — then you lose your confidence even before you begin your presentation.

Kristin explained that she was not always a memory trainer. She started as a sales and marketing coach — but she stumbled into memory training due to circumstances. She used to work as part of a sales team for almost a decade, and this involved so much training, strenuous hours, and plenty of travel. Sales was one of those things that you did, or did not — there were no half measures and a life in sales required sacrificing many of life’s small moments, and putting family life to compromise.

In 2007, Kristin decided to change her career so that she did not have to travel much. She then joined a personal development company — presenting to rooms of people so that she could sell training sessions. She realized that she needed a better memory if she needed to put information in her head and out of her mouth. And then she got pregnant! The doctor had some bad news — her child had only a 20% chance of survival. She fought this against all odds, and succeeded in a normal delivery — but with a huge stack of medical bills!

Based on her own struggles to form a better memory, Kristin started a $99 dollar workshop — luckily she got 30 participants at first go, and then she never looked back.

Kristin involved the audience in a game to test their memory. She asked the audience to pick up 15 items randomly to create a list of words to remember. Here are the first 10 words that the audience chose:

1. Dog
2. Moleskin Journal
3. Broccoli
4. Beach Ball
5. Kayak
6. PowerPoint
7. Mountain
8. Exit Sign
9. Happy Hour
10. Car

So why did I not put up all the 15 words here? That’s because we only memory-tested the first 10 words to demonstrate memory retention skills. To make it easier for us to remember any list of 10 or less words, Kristin asked the audience to identify 10 parts of the human body, from the toe to above, and associate each word with a number.

1. Toes
   
2. Knee
   
3. Thigh
   
4. Rear
   
5. Lungs
   
6. Shoulder
   
7. Collar
   
8. Face
   
9. Head
   
10. Ceiling (or Sky)

Kristin then suggested we do two exercises:

1. Identify the numbers for the human body parts, and always remember them — it’s easiest to remember the numbers 1, 5, and 10 and what they associate with — the answers are Toes, Lungs, and Ceiling — then we can easily identify that 6 is the number after 5 (thus Shoulder comes above Lungs), and that 9 is the number before 10 (thus the Head is below the ceiling).
2. And then associate every word in your list with the number of the body part — so place a picture in your thoughts about a “Dog” licking your “Toes” — or of a “Car” suspended from the “Ceiling”. These pictures, when associated in the mind are not easily forgotten — so you can easily identify that Car was numbered 10 on the list since the Ceiling is numbered 10 on our remembrance list. Also a car suspended from the ceiling is a visual not easy to forget!

Here’s some more help from Kristin — she said that the real trick is to remember is three Ps:

1. Picture
   
2. Place
   
3. Possess

Here are some thoughts from Kristin:

Stress is a memory killer.

Memory has nothing to do with your brain — it is a lack of strategy. The strategy you need is called the “internal cheerleader strategy”.

Your memory works in pictures.

Kristin Thompson is the creator of the Presentation Memory Power and Command Any Room programs. Kristin left her successful media sales career to be a mom and learned to leverage her expertise and create a full-time income while working part time. Kristin now teaches others how to turn their missions and messages into new clients and higher visibility.

Categories: powerpoint, presentationsummit