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If you forget what you wanted to say, try this.

You know the material. You’ve lived the material. You’ve over prepared the material. And then, mid-thought, the words just stop showing up. Your mind goes poof gone. You leave the room and the internal commentary that follows is rarely kind.

Most people diagnose this as a confidence problem. Sometimes a memory problem. Occasionally, a “maybe I’m just not built for this” problem. Let me tell you this with love, It’s almost always a structure problem that provides you anchors to help recall content.

At a neurological level: When your anxiety response activates, your brain releases cortisol and adrenaline. These hormones are useful in short bursts, they sharpen focus and increase alertness but at elevated levels they impair the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for retrieving organized language and logical sequencing.

A 2016 study published in Psychological Science found that working memory, the cognitive system that holds and manipulates information in real time, is among the first things to degrade under social stress. Your information isn’t gone. Your brain’s filing system has temporarily locked.

This is why “just calm down” is spectacularly unhelpful advice. You can’t willpower your way past a physiological stress response. But you can give your brain a structure it can grab onto even when the filing system is locked. So what does that actually mean in practice? Structure, in this context, works on two levels, and both matter.

The first is the structure of your speech itself. When you sit down to prepare, most people start by thinking about what they want to say and end up with a mental list of everything they know about the topic. That’s not a structure, that’s an information dump, and under pressure, all that information collapses.

What your brain actually needs is a prepared outline with a throughline. You should have mini arcs of structure throughout the outline to give your brain multiple pieces to grasp from one area to another. Based on the type of presentation you are working on, different structures for an outline can and should be applied.

Stay tuned for the next post with additional tips. Too much info for one sit down 😉

Don’t forget to unmute yourself <3

Much Love,

Hi, I'm Misty Megia!

I’m a Creative Director for high-achieving leaders who want to unmute themselves to give presentations that move people profoundly through my Corporate Speaking Program and my Theatre of Public Speaking Program.