If you’ve taken any of our speaking classes, or read some of the other posts on this blog, you know that we put a lot of emphasis on taking the “I” out of a public speech. While your professional training, experience, or research may provide you the qualifications to be on the stage, being overly concerned with yourself and how you look can take the focus away from the message, and even worse, give you crippling public speaking anxiety.
When you factor in all of the things it takes to be prepared to give a moving presentation, you don’t need to be weighed down with self-consciousness. But what if you could disarm your anxious thoughts while practicing your talk and virtually memorize your outline at the same time? Let’s talk about the ancient and powerful Roman Room Technique.
The Roman Room for Public Speaking
The Roman Room technique is an ancient memorization technique for speeches. It was developed by the Roman orator Cicero in the 1st century BCE. As explained in his doctorate thesis at Cambridge in 2021, Joe Grimwade explains: “The technique was not used by poets, but by speakers who memorized the main talking points of their orations and delivered largely improvised performances.”
How Ancient Orators Used It:
Ancient orators used the Roman Room technique to commit the main points of their outlines to memory so that they could focus on the more important aspects of delivering a speech effectively and fluently. It involves creating a mental journey, often a room, that has stopping points that carry information.
To do this, they would often walk through their homes or other familiar places while reciting their speeches aloud, connecting each idea to a specific object or location. Then later, as they walked through the room in their mind, the stopping points provided information via memorable mental images that followed the order of their outline.
How You Can Use This Powerful Technique:
- Choose a Location: Select a familiar place, such as your house or workplace.
- Visualize the Space: Walk through the location in your mind, noting specific features (furniture, walls, doors).
- Create Images: Associate each point of your speech with a particular object or location in the room.
- Assign Order: Establish a logical order for your ideas and assign them specific places within the room.
So let’s consider a brief example. Let’s say that you were going to give a speech about the Roman Room Technique and how it works. Your outline points up to here might be an introduction that explains that it helps with memorization, that it was developed by Cicero in the 1st century, and that it involves mental imagery.
Now stop reading for a moment and take a look around the space that you’re reading this article in. If you were going to walk from your current location across to the other side of that space, what 3 things would you encounter, in order? For me, I’m typing just outside the kitchen. So I would pass the dining table and the large decorative lamp hanging above it, the kitchen island, and the television hanging on the far wall.
So if I walked through the kitchen in my imagination, I would first think of the lightbulb in the lamp over the table as an “idea” bulb that appears over the heads of cartoons when they think of/recall something. That’s the cue for my introduction. Second, as I approach the island in the middle of the kitchen, I imagine an old Roman man in robes with a foam finger (like you see in sporting events), and my little sister in a sports jersey with the number “0” on it. Finally, as I pass by the TV, it’s showing a yellow brick road lined with different strange images as it trails off into the distance.
How does this help me? As I practice initially with my notes, I recall the “idea” bulb and my introduction. As I see the old Roman man, I see his #1 foam finger indicating the 1st century, and my sister in the jersey. This becomes: ‘Sis’ + ‘zero’= sis-zero, or Cicero. Finally, the TV is filled with imagery that reminds me to talk about how the technique involves the use of an imaginary journey and mental imagery. Now whenever I want to practice, I can walk through the kitchen and remember the order of my outline.
What’s great about this method is that it’s scalable to any length of talk, you can jump in and out of the journey at any place and remember where you are, even if you want to go back to something, and it’s very easy to use. Even better, you can remember as many speeches as you want, simply by mentally programming another journey in another place.
What the Roman Room Doesn’t Do
The Roman Room method does not replace practice or necessarily help you memorize the exact wording of your speech (although I guess that can depend on your imagination). The primary usefulness of the technique has two-stages: first is to help you exercise your recall with your notes. This aided practice will help you slowly simplify your notes as you progressively commit more details to memory. Second, the technique obviously allows you more freedom on stage to present the information extemporaneously, or more naturally.
If you’re a perfectionist like me, it can be tough to risk losing some of the phrasing you prefer to say exactly. This can be managed in a few different ways. One, you obviously can memorize those most important phrases. Two, simple notes or cue cards never killed anyone. And three, you can place those most important points in your visuals if you’re using slides.
And as the Romans felt, there is a lot more to giving an effective speech than just the order of the points. Using specific teaching/storytelling/rhetorical techniques are often more important than the exact wording in the outline. Visualizing your outline won’t remove the need for those techniques to keep the audiences attention and inspire them.
But What Does This Have to do With Anxiety?
I’m glad you asked. As I mentioned at the beginning, if we want to avoid being overly anxious, and if we want to give our audience our best, we need to take ourselves out of focus as much as possible. This method is a great way to do that.
Think about it, when you’re lost in a story, you’re not just listening to words. You’re experiencing the world through the eyes of another person. You’re feeling their emotions, their hopes, and their fears. When you practice your outline using the Roman Room technique, you’re preloading another world onto your awareness and immersing yourself in another world. As you walk on the journey, you’re taking yourself off of the stage and putting yourself in that kitchen, or whatever room, trail, or shopping center that you map out in your mind. This is a powerful distraction from anxious thoughts and forces your awareness into the contents of your speech.
To round it all up, the benefits of the Roman Room technique include:
- Improved Memory: By connecting ideas to specific locations, the speaker can easily retrieve them in the correct order.
- Reduced Anxiety: Visualizing the familiar surroundings can reduce stress and improve confidence during the speech.
- Enhanced Engagement: Using the Roman Room technique, speakers can deliver their speeches with greater naturalness and connection to the audience.
This method does demand a healthy imagination and clever word associations. I like to use Google image searches and a thesaurus when I get stuck.
And the Roman Room is just one of the outlining methods I use. Depending on the topic, length and available equipment, I might not use it at all. However, if you give presentations regularly, you might find the Roman Room a handy tool in your arsenal.
