Having a terrible public speaking blank? – Remember the building blocks

It’s one of the speaker’s worst nightmares -that terrible blank moment – or getting to the end and realising you have forgotten important points that are crucial to the success of the presentation.

The first solution we automatically want to adopt is to read the material either from paper or from slides. Unfortunately it is really difficult to maximise the impact of your presentation if you read it. It can question your confidence with your subject, and it dampens your personality.

So we need to develop other ways of remembering our material and presenting it in the best way to create an impact.

You can start by remembering the structure of your speech.

As you created the presentation, you chose the main sections and the best order for them. Remember that decision, the logic and power of it and it will be the basic framework of your memory.

When you created the speech you would have created a single sentence that embodied what you wanted to achieve with the speech – the purpose of the speech and the message you wanted to put across. That will be the first memory cue. If you use nothing else (and I hope that is NOT the case !) then you can always return to this one cue and it will guide you back to what you want to do.