What to Do When Your Mind Goes Blank During a Presentation

If your mind has ever gone blank in the middle of a presentation, you will not need me to describe it, because you will probably remember that moment far more vividly than anything you actually said that day. One moment you are talking about something you know well, something you have prepared and perhaps rehearsed many times, and the next there is nothing there at all, no next sentence and no next point, just the sound of your own silence and the growing awareness that everyone in the room is waiting for you to carry on.

What happens next is, for me, the more interesting part. In my experience, very few people are left alone with the blankness for long, because a voice arrives almost immediately to fill it, and it is rarely a kind one. Why can’t I remember? They can all see it. This is a disaster. The harder you listen to that voice, and the harder you try to force the missing words to appear, the further away they seem to drift.

I call that voice the Headstuff.

It is the foundation of The Presenter’s Operating System™, the framework at the heart of my coaching, and it describes the accumulated fears, inherited stories and inner critic that stop so many professionals from arriving in a room as themselves. It is never louder than in the moment your mind goes blank, which is why I want to say clearly, before anything else, that going blank does not mean you are a poor speaker, and it certainly does not mean you do not know your subject.

Why your mind goes blank

In November 2011, Rick Perry, then governor of Texas, took part in a televised Republican presidential debate. He told the audience there were three government departments he would close if he became president, named Commerce and Education, and then could not find the third. For 53 seconds, by the New York Times’ count, he searched, looked through his notes and briefly accepted a wrong suggestion from one of his rivals, before finally giving up: “The third one, I can’t. Sorry. Oops.” The department he had forgotten was Energy, one he was reported to criticise almost every day on the campaign trail, and he remembered it later in the debate.

It was a subject he talked about constantly, and in that moment, it simply was not there.

I do not believe going blank is always about nerves. I have seen it happen to people who were tired, to people knocked off course by a question or an interruption, and to people who, as far as they or I could tell, were perfectly calm and it happened anyway, in the same way that the name of a good friend can vanish halfway through a sentence over dinner. So, if it has happened to you, please know that you are not alone.

When nerves are involved, though, something else happens. In my experience, part of your mind tries to get your message across while another part watches you do it, asking whether you are speaking too quickly, whether you look nervous, whether they are interested, and what they are thinking of you. All that commentary takes your attention away from what you are trying to say, and even when a blank begins as nothing more than a lost thread, I find the Headstuff arrives quickly, turning a moment of ordinary forgetfulness into a nervous one.

That is why I don’t believe the answer is to try harder to remember. The answer is to build a presentation you can find your way around under pressure, and to know exactly what to do in the few seconds when you cannot. Here are seven ways to do both.

1. Remember ideas, not sentences

Creating and rehearsing your full presentation until it feels natural can be a very reassuring way to get ready. Just keep in mind that depending too heavily on a script might feel a bit limiting: if you forget a sentence, it can become a little challenging to smoothly move on to your next point.

Now imagine that instead of focusing on each sentence, you understand your ideas and their sequence—like the problem, why it matters, an example, and your recommendation. You don’t need specific sentences to guide you from one point to the next because you’re clear on where you’re going. You might express it a little differently each time, and that’s perfectly fine.

Actually, I think it’s even better than just fine. When someone recites a presentation word for word, it can often sound a bit mechanical, like they’re just reciting. I really prefer hearing someone speak naturally and genuinely rather than performing a script for me.

2. Know where each section is going

Every part of your presentation should be there to make one point, and if you cannot say in a single sentence what that point is, I think it is hard to see how your audience will find it, or how you will find it again when your memory wobbles. So, before you rehearse a section, ask yourself what the one thing is that you want the people in the room to understand from it. That becomes the destination for that section, and if you lose your place halfway through, you do not need to recover the exact sentence you had planned. You simply head back towards the destination by the most direct route you can find.

This is the Message layer of The Presenter’s Operating System at work, being crystal clear about what each message really is, and it goes hand in hand with Clarity, which I describe as removing the noise that buries the message. The less clutter there is between you and each point, the less there is to get lost in.

Rick Perry’s moment carries one more lesson. Telling an audience that three things are coming is usually a good idea because a list of three is easy to follow and remember. The danger is only this: by naming the number, he also told everyone precisely what was missing, and from that moment it was very hard for him to quietly move on. So, if you are going to promise a number, write the items down where you can see them, and if one of them still deserts you, be willing to let it go and come back to it later rather than searching for it in front of the room.

3. Know your first thirty seconds extremely well

I don’t encourage people to memorise a whole presentation, but I make an exception for the opening. In the first moments, you are still getting used to the room, the faces, the light, and the sound of your own voice; in my experience, that’s when the Headstuff is most insistent, so asking yourself to improvise then is asking a great deal.

Know your first thirty seconds so well that they need no effort at all, and your attention is free for the people in front of you. It matters for another reason too. I teach that your very first challenge as a speaker is to win the audience’s attention, interest and curiosity, and that this starts with the first thing you say, so your opening deserves far better than “So, I’m just going to talk you through…”. An opening you know thoroughly gives you momentum, and I have always found momentum a great deal easier to keep than to find.

4. When it happens: stop, breathe out, find the point, continue

No matter how prepared you are, there might still be a moment when that next thought just doesn’t come. What I often notice is the natural tendency to fill the silence with ums, errs, and so’s while searching for the words, or to speak faster to beat the silence. Both actions might feel like they’re helping, but in reality, neither provides what you truly need: a peaceful few seconds of space to gather yourself.

Stop, plant your feet, drop your shoulders and take a slow breath out, because anxiety can make us hold our breath or breathe fast and shallow. I teach a 5-2-8 pattern, breathing in for five, holding for two and out for eight, but it is only one of many, and what suits one person may not suit another. What matters far more is finding a practice that works for you and building it into your everyday life, rather than trying to remember it for the first time when you are on your feet.

Then ask yourself one useful question in place of the unhelpful ones the Headstuff is offering. What was I trying to say? What is the point of this section? What do I want them to take from it? Instead of asking yourself what has gone wrong, point your attention toward the way back, and when you find the point, say it in whatever words come. Nobody in the room knows the sentence you had planned.

The silence will almost certainly feel much longer to you than it does to the people listening; that has certainly been my experience, both as a speaker and as a member of an audience. A speaker who pauses, breathes and carries on calmly has always looked composed to me rather than lost. In The Presenter’s Operating System, the breath and body belong to Voice, the layer that carries everything you say into the room.

5. Speak to one person at a time

I believe part of what makes going blank so frightening is the feeling of being watched by everybody at once, twenty, fifty or five hundred pairs of eyes, all apparently waiting. That is an enormous weight to carry at the very moment you are searching for your next thought, and trying to take in the whole room by constantly scanning it only adds to it.

I teach eye contact as giving the audience the gift of connection. Rather than sweeping your eyes across the room, share one thought with one person, then move to someone else for the next thought, and over time include everyone, not only the smiler, the nodder, the smiler or the most senior person there. When you do this, it stops feeling like performing to a crowd and starts to feel like a series of conversations, and you already know how to have a conversation without a script.

6. If you forget, say so and move on

This is the one that asks for a little courage, because every instinct will tell you to hide what has happened. Yet one of the simplest ways through a blank is to name it lightly and keep going, with something like “I’ve lost my thread for a moment”, followed by a pause and a breath, or “Let me come back to the main point”, and then doing exactly that.

It helps enormously to remember that your audience does not know what you were going to say. They have not seen your notes or heard your rehearsals, and the sentence you have just lost exists only in your head. Unless you have told them what is missing, as Rick Perry did, you have far more freedom than it feels like in the moment. If the thought will not come back, move on to the next one, and if it returns later, as Perry’s did, you can bring it in then.

To find courage, decide in advance what you will say, so that in the moment you deliver a line you have already chosen rather than making a confession on the spot. The reward is that a small moment stays small.

7. Rehearse the recovery, not just the presentation

Most people I work with rehearse by trying to get it right, stopping and going back to the beginning whenever they stumble, which means they practise the presentation many times and the recovery not at all. Yet recovery is the skill you will actually need if your mind goes blank, and like any other skill, it improves with practice.

So, build difficulty into your rehearsal on purpose. Stop halfway through a section and make yourself find the way back without looking at your notes. Ask a colleague to interrupt you at an awkward moment. Switch the slides off and carry on without them. Each time you recover, you teach yourself something far more valuable than a perfect memory: that when something goes wrong, you know what to do.

This also takes courage, because practising things going wrong is uncomfortable, and it is tempting to settle for one more smooth run-through instead. But a smooth run-through only proves that you can do it when everything goes well. Rehearsing the recovery lets you walk into the room knowing you can handle it when it doesn’t.

The shift that matters most

A paradox lies at the heart of all this. In my experience, the more frightened people are of going blank, the more they think about it, and the more room that fear takes up, so that trying not to go blank can become one of the things that makes it more likely.

I would invite you instead to carry a different thought into the room: I might lose my thread, and if I do, I know exactly what to do. That is not a lesser kind of confidence. I would argue it is the only kind worth having, because confidence is not the belief that nothing will go wrong. It is knowing you can handle it when something does.

I have never believed audiences are waiting for a flawless performance. What I believe they want is to understand you, follow your thinking, and leave with something worth their time; a pause will not take that from them any more than a forgotten sentence will. What matters far more, to my mind, is whether you stayed connected to your message, and to them, when things did not go exactly to plan.

How I can help

If you would like to feel calm, clear and in control every time you speak, here are three ways I can help:

Public speaking courses: mindfulpresenter.com/public-speaking-courses-london

One-to-one coaching: mindfulpresenter.com/public-speaking-coaching-london

Presentation skills training for teams: mindfulpresenter.com/presentation-skills-training

If you found this useful, please share it with someone who has a presentation coming up.

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