Lateral Thinking for Every Day

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Memory technique: The virtual journey

Professional speakers use a simple and effective technique to flawlessly remember the topics they plan to cover in a speech. It is called the virtual journey. It enables you easily to remember a list in sequence. You take an imaginary journey around a familiar route – say your house, your road or your town – and you attach the things you want to remember to the places along the way.

Say for example you want to remember a sequence of key points for a conference speech you are giving. The first nine items are:

1. A description of how customers have problems with your products

2. A story about when you were at junior school

3. A quote from Abraham Lincoln

4. An anecdote about Barack Obama

5. An example of book marketing ...