Going Blank in Important Conversations?
5 Ways to Get Your Words Back
by Jana Denker
A few weeks ago, I gave a presentation. I was well prepared, enjoying it, and I wasn’t even particularly nervous. Then, halfway through, the thing every presenter dreads happened. My brain turned to cotton. The words were... just gone. I knew what I wanted to say. But for a few seconds, I simply couldn’t access it.
If this has happened to you in a presentation or an important conversation, you’ll know how strange it feels. One moment you’re perfectly articulate; the next, you’re searching for words you know are there.
So what is actually happening in that moment? And more importantly, what can you do about it?
What happens when you go blank
Your brain has limited capacity. In an ordinary conversation, plenty of that capacity is available for remembering what you want to say, finding words and shaping your next thought. Under pressure, the balance can change.
Your nervous system picks up that something important is happening and prepares you to respond. Your heart may beat faster, you are breathing shallow and your muscles become more ready for action. In the brain, attention starts to narrow towards whatever seems most important in that moment.
That is useful if you need to react quickly. It is less helpful when you need to hold several thoughts in mind, retrieve a name or formulate a nuanced answer. Some of the mental resources you normally have available for those tasks are now occupied elsewhere.
Which explains the strange experience of going blank: you haven’t suddenly forgotten everything. Your brain is having more difficulty accessing it.
And this is where the body becomes useful.
Information doesn’t only travel from the brain down into the body. Signals from the body continually travel back to the brain too. So rather than trying to solve everything by thinking harder, we can also work bottom up: through movement, breathing and physical sensation.
The aim isn’t to become completely calm. It is to bring the level of activation down enough that you have better access to your thinking and your words again.
Then we can work with the words themselves too.
Here are five ways to do both
Stop monitoring yourself
How do I sound? Do I look nervous? What do they think of me?
Every time your attention moves towards evaluating your own performance, there is less of it available for the conversation.
Bring your attention back to the person in front of you or your purpose.
Prepare ideas, not scripts
A memorised script can work beautifully until someone asks the question you weren’t expecting.
Prepare the thinking underneath it instead. Know your main message and the few points you want to make. If the conversation takes an unexpected turn, you still know where you are going, even if the exact words change.
Prepare your body too
We tend to prepare the content of an important conversation and forget about the body that has to carry us through it.
Move before you go in. Walk around the room or down the corridor. Shake out your hands. Or use something smaller: press your index finger and thumb together and pay attention to the sensation.
You are giving your nervous system sensory input and your attention something concrete to come back to.
If you go blank, don’t chase the sentence
The instinct is often to try harder: Come on. What was I going to say?
That can add more pressure.
Take a sip of water. Let your exhale become a little longer. Look at something steady in the room and give yourself a few seconds.
Then return to the idea you wanted to express rather than searching for the exact sentence you lost. The pause will usually feel much longer to you than it does to the other person.
Give yourself an anchor
Before the conversation, choose one sentence you can always come back to.
“The one thing I want you to leave with is…”
That may be all you need to find your way back in. You don’t have to reconstruct your carefully prepared answer. You know what matters, and you have a sentence that takes you there. Your words are still there
Being articulate when you are relaxed and being able to access your words under pressure are different things.
The five practices above can help in the moment. But there is also a deeper layer to this work: building the capacity to stay connected to your thinking, your voice and what you want to say when there is pressure in the room.
That is something we can train.
If communication is becoming a bottleneck in your work or life, this is part of what I work on with women in my 1:1 coaching. Let's have a chat.
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