Never Forget Your Speech Again: How to Use a Memory Palace for Public Speaking

How I Memorise Speeches

I hate awkward silences. I remember when I was dating sitting across from women, my mouth dry, completely out of things to say.

Forgetting your words on stage in front of an audience is even worse. Your adrenaline surges, your mind goes blank, you start to sweat. It’s hard to recover—and this has happened to me before.

Memorising speeches has always been hard for me. Some members come to my Toastmasters club and, within a speech or two, are happily working from memory. I do not share this ability.

For years, I relied on notes. I moved from full scripts on the lectern to cue cards, then to discreet notes in my pocket. But I never fully let go—until I found a technique that finally worked. It freed my mind, improved my movement, and let me focus on vocal variety and stage presence and allowed me to win our annual club speech contest in 2025 ??

Key Principles

• The audience knows when you are reciting—your goal is not to memorise word for word but to know your key points and where you are going.
• Don’t worry about saying every word exactly as you wrote it—your audience doesn’t know your script. What matters is delivering your message clearly and effectively.
• Our brains remember images better than words. We can use this to make memorisation easier.
• Public speaking is a skill that takes time to hone—be kind to yourself. It’s easier for some than others, but it will require work to improve, and this may take months or years.
• Repetition over time is key. A short practice session each day for a week or two before is far more effective than long cramming sessions in the days before the event.
• Embrace pauses. Silence feels longer to you than to the audience, but a well-placed pause adds emphasis and gives you a moment to think.
• Your opening and closing are the most important parts. Hook your audience at the start, and leave them with something memorable at the end. You may want to remember your wording specifically for these to ensure maximum impact.

Speech Prep

• Write your speech out word for word. You can record yourself speaking naturally for a couple of minutes and calculate your average words per minute to determine how many words this should be. For me, to fit within the Toastmasters five-to-seven-minute slot, this is around 800 words.
• Take a break before editing. After a day or two away from your speech, you'll spot things you missed the first time.
• Convert your speech into a series of bullet points capturing the key points. Most paragraphs will have a single key point, so one bullet point per paragraph is how this normally works for me.
• Put your written piece away—you will not be looking at it again during this process. Again, you do not want to aim for remembering it word for word. However, it is nice to be able to re-read your written speeches in the future, so they are not wasted. You may also consider repurposing them for a LinkedIn post? ??
• Practise reciting your speech from these bullet points until you can get through the whole thing. It won’t be perfect—don’t stress about that. Repetition is key.
• Record yourself (audio is fine, but video is better) and listen back. If something sounds off, tweak it. You'll hear a recording differently than you will saying it aloud.
• Refine your bullet points. As you get more familiar with the material, you may find you do not need as many. You may also find yourself naturally saying similar words each time by this stage, and that is fine—just don’t get married to them.

Memorisation: The Memory Palace

Now that you've structured your speech, it's time to move from preparation to memorisation. This is where the Memory Palace technique comes in.

Our brains retain images better than words. When speaking, recalling words can be difficult, but visualising pictures is easier. You can use this to mentally cue what’s coming next.

• Convert each of your bullet points into an image—the sillier, the better. This makes it easier to remember. I use Image Search to find pictures online that help trigger my memory. For example, a key bridge in my recent competition speech was "Let's explore the English language." In my Memory Palace (see below), I chose Dora the Explorer to represent this point—after all, who is better at exploring?
• Choose a familiar location—I use my house, and you should probably use yours. Ideally, each room represents a section of your speech.
• Lay your images around your chosen location. I drew a rough floor plan of my house in GIMP and added all my images as layers. You could do this in MS Paint or any other drawing tool—no one else will see it.
• Practise using your Memory Palace. Walk through your location in your mind’s eye, looking at each image and recalling the key point it represents. At this stage, refer to your visual aid if needed—the goal is to get comfortable retrieving your speech using images.
• Gradually remove the visual aid. Once you can recall your speech comfortably using your Memory Palace, put your picture away and practise purely from memory. Walk through your location mentally, seeing the images without looking at your notes.
• Practise delivering your speech as you mentally walk through your Memory Palace. Each time you reach an image, recall the key idea and explain it naturally—without worrying about exact words.
• Refine your delivery. Recording yourself on video allows you to see how you are moving your body and refine your stage presence.

Potential Issues & Fixes

• I keep forgetting parts of my speech, even with the Memory Palace. Your images might not be memorable enough—make them exaggerated, funny, rude, bizarre, or emotionally charged. Instead of just picturing a book to represent knowledge, imagine a giant, glowing book floating in mid-air, flapping its pages like wings and whispering secrets. The more niche your image, however, the harder it will be to find existing imagery online, but you can draw it, use AI tools, or stack stock images together to create something unique. Once you’ve settled on your images, spend time truly visualising them in your physical space—the more vividly you imagine them, the better they will stick.
• I get stuck thinking about my images while speaking. Images should be cues, not distractions. If you’re overthinking them, practise speeding up your "mental walk" through your Memory Palace to make recall more automatic.
• My speech sounds robotic when I don’t use notes. Instead of memorising word-for-word, focus on delivering ideas. Use your images to cue natural explanations rather than rigid phrasing. Talk to your audience, not at them.

Example: How I Memorised This Speech

• "I'm literally dying" opening → Fallout guy resuscitating a dead body.
• Use of "literal" → A quill representing literature.
• Using it differently → Odd (different) socks.
• Nokia joke → A Nokia phone dialling 999.
• and so on ...

Below is my final Memory Palace for this speech. If you watch the video and follow along you can see how I hit these key points as the speech unfolds.