Summary: One of the biggest fears in public speaking is having a mental blank. Here's some tips to help you overcome a brain fade. TRANSCRIPT: One of the big fears regarding public speaking is “What if I forget my lines?” I don't advocate having a script that you work too but having dot points, key points that can jog your memory that's good, but what happens if you're midway through selling some aspect of your talk and you have a total brain fade it's all gone. That is the fear of most people there I am in front of 250 people midway through a sentence I’ve forgotten absolutely everything where do I go what do I well there are a few techniques. Remember that the people watching you don't know where you're heading with your talk and if you have a bit of a lapse they might think this part of the talk, they don't know ,so it is all with you it's about how you recover so you buy yourself some time . Now you forgotten exactly where you are you've got your your notes in front of you your dot points but you've still lost that train of thought. What do you do? Well one good to do is to reach for a glass of water, people understand that to you get a bit of thirst dry mouth while you’re giving a talk, so you reach over and grab your water take a sip and in those few seconds you're likely to remember and which direction your heading with your talk. Or another way is to ask your audience a question “look before I go any further does anyone have any questions about what I've just said?” so you're taking the emphasis away from where you were heading throwing it back on your audience and you may not get a question that doesn't matter, it still buys you a bit of time. Or even use a summation a summary “so so far we've talked about this that and the other.” I hear some people say this would’nt have happened if I just read the script. Well that's true, sure have your script, but don't think you're going to communicate because the art of communication is not by reading notes. I was giving a workshop and one station this woman, a very competent speaker said she talked about a subject , she had what she thought was a captive audience read out her notes and about 10 minutes in she realised she lost them. I said so you were reading it all the way through and she said well yes I was. And I said well why didn't you just post out your speech because you weren't giving it you were just reading it out. There was no eye contact, there was no communication. So don't memorise make notes, make dot points and rely on those and if you're going to make a stumble don't forget you're not going to be perfect nobody giving a speech is perfect they will make a stumble a miss pronunciation in someway they'll get distracted because that's the beauty of working live and people will be with you, the audience understand that, they know that you're not infallible and in fact a little mistake can actually endear you to the audience. Forget trying to be perfect, it isn't going to happen particularly when it come to public speaking. and don't fear, you going to forget from time to time, it's how you recover, that's what matters.
