Are you concerned that you might suffer a mind blank during a presentation? The fear of a mind blank can be a large part of the fear of public speaking for many people. It even happened to Sally Field in her Emmy Acceptance speech in 2007.

How can you avoid this happening to you? How to reduce the risk of a mind blank? These strategies fall into three areas: your beliefs about public speaking, rehearsal strategies and presenting strategies:

Useful Beliefs About Public Speaking

Silence is OK
Do you find silence uncomfortable when you’re presenting? If you have a mind blank, you’ll be desperate to fill the silence. That piles on the pressure and makes it harder for you to think of the word you want.

So get comfortable with silence when you’re presenting. Video yourself rehearsing with friends and colleagues and make a point of elongating your silences past what is comfortable for you. Then look back at your video with one of your friends and see whether the silence was OK from the audience’s point of view. If you don’t have a video, simply ask for your friends’ opinions. Most often you’ll find that what felt like an eternity to you was a momentary pause for the people watching.

There is no such thing as the right word
Often we suffer mind blanks when we want to get just the right word. Most of the time there are alternatives - even specific technical terms can be described using other words. For example, DNA could be described as “the complex double-helix molecule that makes up the genes of animals”.

When you’re rehearsing, practice saying things in alternative ways. If you weren’t allowed to use a particular word, how would you express yourself. Challenge yourself to come up with as many different ways as possible.

A mind blank is not a catastrophe
It’s easy to become focused on what you see as the horror of suffering a mind blank. And I get that it can feel pretty awful at the time. If it’s happened to you before, consciously work on putting the incident into perspective with the help of these questions:

Can anyone else who was there, remember it?
Did it affect your career?
Have you handled worse things in your life?
Would you prefer to suffer a mind blank or lose your hand?

Rehearsal Strategies

Don’t memorize your speech
Memorizing your speech is a counterproductive approach. It leads you to thinking there’s only one way of saying something. If you suffer a mind blank your brain will focus on trying to remember the memorized speech, rather than thinking of alternative ways of saying the same thing.

Prepare and practice with hard-copy notes
Having hard copy notes that you can refer to is essential. Giving a speech without hard copy notes is like getting into a small boat without a life jacket. If things go wrong you’re stuffed. Here are some guidelines on creating notes.

Do rehearse with your notes so that you check that your notes do indeed remind you of what you want to say next - rather than leaving you even more flummoxed. I’ve seen people stare at their notes in horror because they can’t read their own handwriting.

Practice remembering
If you can’t think of what you want to say during a rehearsal, don’t jump straight to your notes. Try and remember what you want to say. This will strengthen your memory for the flow of the presentation and will train your brain to remember - rather than panic.

Develop a recovery routine
Work out how you’ll recover from a mind blank. Here’s my suggested recovery routine:

Stop talking
Look at your notes and find your place
Look ahead in your notes to see what comes next
Decide what you will say next
Look up again
Find someone to talk to
Start talking.

Practice the routine
Military units and emergency response teams practice what they will do when things go wrong. So should you. Practice your recovery routine so that it becomes second nature. Then if your mind goes blank, instead of panicking, you’ll automatically start the routine.

Presenting Strategies

Use gestures
Gesturing helps your fluency and your ability to retrieve specific words. In one scientific study researchers found that people with unrestricted gestures were more fluent than people who had their arms immobilized. In a second study, the researchers concluded:

Participants with unrestricted hand gestures retrieved and subsequently recalled significantly more words than participants whose hands were restricted.

You may be restricting your hands by holding them together or putting them in your pockets. If you feel them come together, separate them. You’re likely to start gesturing just as you would in normal conversation.

Use your notes
Refer to your notes even when you don’t need to. Often people suffer a mind blank because they’ve been talking away without any help from their notes and then suddenly their brain isn’t feeding them any more information. They don’t think of looking at their notes because they’re not in the habit of it. And even if they did, they would have difficulty finding the right place in their notes, because they’ve galloped ahead. So get in the habit of looking at your notes.

If you start feeling wobbly, activate the routine
Often you get prior warning that you’re heading for a mind blank. It’s like you’re a train rattling down the tracks and you start to feel a wheel getting wobbly. The sensible thing to do is to stop the train, put the wheel back on the track, and then carry on.

Take the pressure off
A moment of forgetfulness turns into a mind blank because of the pressure you put on yourself in that moment. So remind yourself that:

You have time. One of the reasons that Sally Field got so flustered was that she was racing against the clock. You’re unlikely to be in quite the same situation.
It’s OK to be silent
You don’t have to get exactly the right word
You have notes to help you out.

2. How to recover from a mind blank
You practiced your recovery routine - now’s the time to use it. Look at your notes. You may have trouble focusing on the words. Take your time till you’ve found your place and what you want to say next. When you’re ready look up, find a friendly person to look at and start talking again.

Because you’ve been referring to your notes earlier in your presentation, your moment of blankness will go unnoticed by the audience, unless you draw attention to it. Do not verbalize your inner turmoil. As with other things than can go wrong in public speaking, it’s not the mistake that matters, it’s the way you react to the mistake.

What if you haven’t got notes to kick-start your presentation? Here are two suggestions:

Do a quick rewind to the start of the sentence you were on. This is what Sally Fields did and it got her flowing again.

Ask the audience “I’ve lost my place - where was I?” This is also a good tactic if you can’t remember the name of a book, film or person. Describe it and someone will probably help you out.