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I’m not sure if it’s because I’m getting older or if there is some other reason for it, but more than once when I’ve been about half-way through a speech, I’ve lost my train of thought. I mean it was just there – I knew what I wanted to say and then poof – it was gone. Not only is this annoying, but depending on the importance of your audience and your speech, it can be downright terrifying!
Picture It In Your Mind
With a little luck, you have practiced for the speech that you are currently giving when your train of thought leaves you – we all understand the importance of public speaking, right?. This is good news because what it means is that your mind is filled with pictures that should be able to help you to get back on track.
What you’re going to have to do when you lose your place is to stop, and then try to picture in your mind’s eye what you saw when you were practicing your speech. Think about the outline that you had created – did you put it on 3×5 file cards or was it printed out on a sheet of paper? Think about the last thing that you just said and let the picture of what was next on your list come floating back into your mind.
Let’s Get Physical
The wonderful thing about giving a speech is that your audience already expects you to be using physical gestures as a part of your speech. What that means for you is that if you lose your spot when you’re giving your speech, you can stop the show and go physical.
The whole purpose of a physical gesture at this point-in-time is simply to buy you some time to remember what comes next in your speech. You can pause and appear to be in the middle of a deep thought, you can appear to be thinking of just exactly what the correct next word should be, and you could raise your hands up to the sky as if asking for just a bit of help. Ham it up and then laugh along with your audience and you’ll find that you have all of the time that you need to get back on track.
Time For Some Humor
When you find yourself off the tracks, you can always turn to your good friend Mr. Humor to help you out. The great thing about making a joke is that humor can be inserted into a speech at any point-in-time and your audience won’t view it as being out-of-place.
It can be very hard to come up with something humorous to say just after you’ve realized that you’ve lost your spot. In order to take the pressure off of you, identify something humorous that you can say before your speech starts. Pick a generic humorous statement about your speech topic or about some characteristic of your audience. Practice what you would say and then if you need it, the words will roll off of your lips and appear to be part of your speech to your audience.
What All Of This Means For You
I wish that I could tell you that I’ve never forgotten what I wanted to say next while giving a speech, but that just wouldn’t be true. I have forgotten the next thing that I wanted to say many times and I fully understand the sense of panic that we all feel when this happens.
The next time that you lose your train of thought, you need to take action – any type of action! One of the benefits of public speaking is that this situation can be recovered from. Your possibilities include tapping into your visual memory, getting physical, and even using the time to tell your audience a joke or a funny story.
Losing your train of thought happens to all of us. It’s not the end of the world. Instead, we need to treat this as what it is – just another event that can occur during a presentation. As public speakers we need to be prepared to deal with it and know how to handle it when it happens. Trains will go off their tracks, it’s how quickly that we can get them back on the track that really matters!
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: When you lose your train of thought, do you think that you should tell your audience that its happened?
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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!
One of the worst nightmares associated with public speaking is the fear of going blank during your presentation. We call this phenomenon various names including mind drains, brain freeze, going blank, losing it and in my case, a senior’s moment. We have all seen people who have struggled when trying to remember some detail or some facts.
Michael Grinder talks about how it is more important to recover than it is to be perfect. Lots of things can happen when you are public speaking, including equipment failures, time pressures and your mind going blank. No speaker is perfect, and it is how you recover from the event that is important.
Here are some recovery strategies that you can use when your mind goes blank when public speaking.
If you don’t tell your audience that you lost your way or had a brain drain, your audience will not know. Your audience generally has no idea of what you are going to say next so they wouldn’t really know if your mind went blank unless you tell them.
- Ask your audience to do something
Use the time when your audience is doing an activity or an exercise to recover or gather your thoughts. Asking your audience to do something is also a way to engage your audience and make your presentation more interactive.
- Go to your notes or cheat sheet
The alternative to worrying about your mind going blank or having a brain drain while presenting is to read from your script, word by word. But that’s not good public speaking. But it’s not saying you shouldn’t have notes. You should have notes or a mind map that you can use as a backup, especially if you know you’re at risk of going blank in the middle of your presentation.
- Go back to core message
When your mind goes blank and you lose track of what you’re going to say next, you can always default and go back to your core message. That will generally buy you time that you can use to recover the thoughts that you were going to say. You want your audience to walk away with your core message, so there’s no harm in emphasising that and reiterating it a couple of times during your talk. - Remain calm and carry on
The ability to stay calm while under fire is a wonderful trait. When you realize that you’ve got nothing or you’re not sure what you’re going to say next, staying calm really helps.
The next time you are presenting and your mind goes blank, don’t panic, remain calm and use one of these strategies to recover. Remember that even the most professional public speaker can lose their train of thought and forget what they’re going to say next. So, this is something that happens normally and can be inevitable. So, what you can do is to prepare and practice how you will recover.
If you would like to learn more on how to think and speak on your feet, I am running a workshop on Thinking and Speaking Off The Cuff on 14 February.
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You can tell when an audience has stopped listening to you during a presentation. Phones come out, and attendees surreptitiously text underneath the table. Instead of leaning forward and nodding along with your points, they begin slouching or tapping their feet. The more brazen may even start whispering to one another.
As a speaker, it’s dispiriting when you feel you’re trying to convey important information and your audience has obviously lost interest. But your only chance at being heard is finding a way —somehow — to re-engage them.
As a professional speaker who has given more than 300 talks over the past half-decade, I’ve addressed plenty of audiences under adverse conditions, from the serious (employees smarting from news of an impending reorg) to the banal (fighting to be heard over the clank of silverware during a lunchtime speaking slot). Here are four strategies that have helped me regain control of the room.
First, one of my favorite techniques for reclaiming attention is to move to a different part of the stage. Many presenters — hemmed in by the standard stage setup — default to delivering their remarks from behind a podium. This often feels safer to novice speakers because they have a place to stash their notes and don’t feel as exposed. But it means missing out on a huge opportunity to leverage your physical presence.
If you’ve been planted in one spot, in front of one part of the audience, you can reengage the rest of the group by moving to the opposite side of the stage. (Whether out of surprise or politeness, your sudden proximity will force attendees to focus on you.) If you’re not on a stage, you can take this even further and walk around the room. You don’t want to overdo this maneuver, but used judiciously it keeps audience members guessing where you’ll go next, which means their eyes are trained on you.
Another strategy is to speed up — or slow down — the pace of your remarks. Everyone knows that speaking in a monotone voice is deadly. But a corollary mistake is that, even if your voice has plenty of range, speakers often use the same rate of speech all the time.
Fast speakers barrage their audiences, slow speakers keep drawling, and audience members — confident they know what to expect — starts to fidget. But when you deliberately change speed, they take note: What’s different here? Why does this part sound distinct? And they’ll once again focus on your content.
Lowering your voice or pausing can have the same effect. When I want an audience to focus on a key point, I’ll deliberately lower my voice to a near-whisper, so they need to focus intently in order to understand what’s going on. I may even pause in silence for several beats, to the point where they’re itching to hear the conclusion. This is especially effective if you stop after a rhetorical question. “Winning 40% market share might sound unattainable,” you could say. “So how do we do it?” A well-timed pause adds just enough suspense that your listeners can’t help but anticipate your answer.
So far, we’ve discussed physical techniques for snapping the audience back to attention. But these will only have a limited effect if they’re zoning out because your material is too dry or technical. The same presentation that’s perfect for the engineering department may be way too detailed for the broader leadership team, for instance. Thus, a final technique is to reconnect with the crowd by introducing a story or analogy that illustrates your point.
Even if your audience isn’t versed in particular technical specifications, they can still understand the difference between, say, a regional Amtrak versus a high-speed train. Citing a real-world parallel will help you make your point in a way everyone grasps (if investing an additional $1 million in R&D will get you “high-speed” performance, that may well be a compelling proposition).
Effective speakers ensure that audiences are actually paying attention to their remarks. If you truly want to inform, educate, or inspire people, you must to learn how to capture their attention and re-engage it when necessary. By following these strategies, you can recover more quickly from interruptions or distractions and ensure your message is far more likely to be heard.