Jazzy Presenting: The Fine Line Between Memorising and Flexibility

I'm very happy to have a special guest contributor for this blog: Mr. Ivo Feuerbach. He is a multi-talented and philosophical gentleman. Here are some of his thoughts and reflections on practice, memorising, and improvisation. They are well worth considering. Thank you Ivo!

 

Jazzy Presenting:

The Fine Line Between Memorising and Flexibility

 

Listening to a great jazz band is both exciting and interesting. And if you see the same band a few times you will notice that while some of the songs may be the same, they are presented and played differently each night. That’s part of the spirit and secret of jazz: it reacts to the audience, the moods of the performers, the time, the location, and so on. It is free and alive, able to change and react, yet still stay musical and captivating.

Presenting and pitching can have a lot in common with jazz if you think about it. There’s a fine line between memorising your pitch, and being flexible enough to improvise during it. But what is that line?

We’ve all been told: practice, practice, practice. Practice to the point where everything runs along almost automatically, and by itself. Get into the state of ‘flow’: like when you arrive home and as you park the car you realise you don’t remember the last few blocks (and not because you were drinking or taking drugs!). But it’s important to realise that the flow you want doesn’t mean that you are fixed and unable to react to unexpected situations.

For example, in presenting, if we are too slavishly devoted to the exact presentation that we have practiced, even an unexpected question could throw us off. If we must follow one specific path, and are not polished and practiced enough to be flexible, then a question from (for example) the most important person in the room could completely throw us off. If the question doesn’t fit in to what we have practiced, then we can stumble. We’re not sure what to do. Suddenly we don’t know how to proceed with our presentation… where were we? What comes next? The carefully prepared and practiced script has now been altered and we don’t know how to continue…

This is the great risk of learning things by heart… by memorising. The more we learn a presentation or pitch by heart, the less flexible we are. If something unexpected happens, we stumble.

Let’s compare a memorised speech to a normal conversation. Every typical conversation is in a sense unexpected. It is unscripted. There may be certain formalities that are customary, but what specifically will be said is unknown to either party. We can’t know what our counterpart will say next, but it’s not a problem for us. A human being is usually flexible enough to react to every twist and turn in a conversation.

In contrast to this, when we memorise something, we can turn to stone; we are lithified. We are not able to react in a flexible way because we are scheduled and stuck to a specific speech.

So… does this mean that it makes no sense to practice and practice to the point where we know everything by heart? Are all the people wrong who have told us to do it like this? Yes and no…

They aren’t wrong in the sense that to present something well, we have to be sure what we want to say. We have to feel confident with our topic in order to create the right impression. We have to pay attention to and practice the right emphasis, body language, eye contact and so on. If we don’t practice these things, we won’t achieve our goals. So yes, we need to practice and practice again.

But another question is: what exactly to practice? Sometimes we might try to learn every word by heart. We all had to do this in school, when we learned a poem or vocabulary. The goal was to learn each word. But this leads to the problem mentioned before: inflexibility and the danger of freezing if something unexpected happens or our memory fails us.

So, in order to prepare a presentation properly I would propose a different way: let’s call it ‘’jazz’’. We need to know the content perfectly, but we don’t need to memorise every word. We need to know the most important  or key words, and what to emphasise, but not the whole sentence. We need to practice being comfortable moving on stage, but not worry about exactly where we have to stand or be at each specific moment.

The end goal would be to feel confident and safe, but without losing that important flexibility. In other words, it is more jazz than orchestra. We know the music, but like a good jazz band, we will play it differently every time.

Unfortunately there is no rule as to what or how much should be memorised and what can be left open. It depends on many factors. What kind of presentation is it? More formal? More casual?

Is the presentation in my mother tongue? If so I am more confident and able to naturally be more flexible. If (as in my case) I have to present in English (which is not my mother tongue), I will probably need to be sure I have learned all the necessary vocabulary and I will probably feel less confident, and as a result less likely to be flexible.

And if it’s a 3 minute pitch, every single word becomes much more important, so once again the amount of flexibility will decline.

So in the end, we need to think about the amount of flexibility that is required for each situation. We also need to consider our own style and what makes us more comfortable: do I feel safer learning by heart? Or am I more of a jazzy freestyler?

Once we have the content of a presentation worked out, it’s time to answer the question about what we want to do about the fine line between memorisation and flexibility. In my opinion, keeping it jazzy is the way to go. Flexible, adaptable, yet still powerful and relevant.

Ivo Feuerbach