What to do when your mind blanks while presenting – transcript

Today I’m going to talk about a problem which has people absolutely petrified of repeating in a presentation and that is mind blank.

Mind blank tends to happen when people have suddenly forgotten what they’re talking about or what they’re gonna say next.

This can often happen because you just want to get the presentation over and done with as quickly as possible so you’re going to spit all the words out and try and get to the end and because you’re not stopping to actually refill your brain with new thoughts and actually engage with the audience and you’re not reacting to the audience and it’s not actually a normal conversation what eventually happens is that you forget what you were going to say next.

What also tends to happen is that you physically freeze.

It could be much simpler than that where you can’t find the word or the phrase that you need immediately at hand but there is a solution and that solution is to move simply by gesturing we can pull the words out of our brain words that we never knew was sitting there and just waiting to be spoken.

There is actually research to back this up by Satara Kichta Kita – I’ll put my teeth in now. I’ll say it again: Sotaro Kita.

Kita talks about how gesture precedes words so if you’re stuck about what to say next simply move. A gesture will help pull the words out of your mouth or you could move to the right or to the left and that will also help you. It buys you time, drops the breathing, relaxes you more and you will find what to say next.