What if I go blank? | The Speaker’s Edge

Hey guys, welcome back to The Speaker’s Edge podcast. The podcast dedicated to helping you to learn from some of the world’s very best speakers and communicators so that you can learn to master your message and inspire your audience every single time you speak. I’m your host for this podcast, Roddy Galbraith. And if you want to be a better communicator, then you are in the right place. You really are because on every episode of The Speaker’s Edge podcast, we’re building on the idea that communication is a learnable skill. It’s a learnable skill and it’s worth learning because it will do more for you, more for your business, more for your career, more for your self-confidence than any other skill you can develop.

Because if you think about it, we all speak pretty much every day, don’t we? We’re interacting with other people. We’re speaking to other people, whether it’s on stage or in a meeting or on a podcast, virtually, live in person, or just across the kitchen table with your family or your friends. The ability to express yourself clearly and confidently changes everything. It really does. And this is something that you absolutely can do. And getting better at it is literally getting better at life.

And so to help you with that, if that’s what you want to do — and you should want to do — then we have another great lesson from one of the world’s best speakers, Bruce Lipton. But before we get to that, if you haven’t downloaded the companion guide for the show, go to maxwellleadership.com/thespeakersedge. You can download the companion guide. And we would love it if you enjoy the show. We’d love it if you rate and review the show.

Now, over the last 20 years or so, I’ve been very, very blessed. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the world’s very best speakers and communicators. And so we’ve had many of them on the show over the last year. And so, I decided we’d do a four-part mini-series, two or three weeks back. We’re in week three now of a four-part mini-series, and we’d take some of the lessons from some of those great speakers, and we put it together. The best advice I’ve ever got.

So, in the first episode of that four-part mini-series, we looked at connecting. It’s not just what you say, but who you’re saying it to and how you can connect with them. We learned from John Maxwell, Bonnie St. John, Les Brown, and Seth Godin. Then last week in the second episode of the four-part mini-series, we talked about the reps that no one sees. Two great lessons, one from Teresa Scanlan, Miss America 2011, and Simon Sinek, who I’m sure you’ve heard of.

In this episode, episode three, we’re going to look at the effects of fear on the body of a speaker and a communicator. And we’re going to take some lessons from cellular biologist Bruce Lipton.

Now, when your brain goes blank, it doesn’t mean that it’s not working. In fact, it’s working exactly as it should, ironically, because your body is amazing. You are amazing. You just need to understand what’s going on, the physiology of what’s happening, and how you then can work with it rather than have it work against you.

So, in this episode, we’re going to look at why you go blank and what you can do about it. What you can do about it.

Now, I’m sure many speakers — I’ve had this experience, you may well have had this experience — where you’re speaking or you’re in a situation where you have to speak, you feel a little uncomfortable for whatever reason, you just go completely blank.

It’s a fear for people, isn’t it? When they’re thinking about their anxiety before standing up and speaking, they’re worried about going blank. What am I going to say? What if I forget what I’m going to say? And you look out and you see the faces looking at you and maybe the audience gets a little bit shifty as you’re getting a little bit shifty and you know you know it. You know what you’re trying to say. You’ve said it countless times to different people in different ways, but it’s not there for you. It’s like your mind goes blank and you can’t access it.

Now, in that situation, really, you’ve got two different options, haven’t you? One is: this is never going to happen to me again. I’m going to learn what I need to learn from whoever I need to learn it from. I’m going to do whatever I need to do to make sure this never happens to me again. That’s one response.

Another response is in the moment for you to make meaning out of it and to make it mean something that it doesn’t actually mean. For you to turn it into something like, I’m just not cut out for this. I’m not confident enough to stand up and speak in front of people. I always forget what I’m gonna say. That’s what many people do, isn’t it? And then they avoid speaking because they think that they’re no good at it.

But here’s the truth. Going blank has very little to do with your confidence actually and a lot more to do with your biology. And this is what Bruce Lipton brought out so well in the interview with him. So, I want to share with you one of the most freeing lessons really that I’ve ever learned about speaking from cellular biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton. Because once you understand what’s really going on in that marvelous body of yours, then you can work with it instead of fighting it.

Now, when I interviewed Bruce, we went deep into this, deep into the physiology of fear. Not the mindset, not motivation, but biology. The physiology of what’s going on at a cellular level in our body. It’s fascinating really when you think about it.

Now, when we perceive a stress, the body does something amazing, really. It’s incredibly intelligent. It mobilizes all of your body’s resources so that you can deal with the threat in the most efficient way possible. And it does it incredibly quickly. In one-tenth of a second, the body’s resources are mobilized in order to deal with the threat.

So, blood — which is energy, isn’t it? Blood is fuel — blood is redirected away from the systems that won’t help us survive. So like digestion and your immune system, for example. There’s no point in digesting food if you’re just about to be eaten by a tiger. There’s no point in fighting off an infection. Might kill you in 10 days if you’re going to be eaten in the next 10 seconds, is there?

So the blood is directed away from the parts that won’t help us and sent to the parts that will: our limbs, our reflexes. Because blood really is energy. It’s like quite literally the lifeblood. Blood is the lifeblood of our system.

So we don’t need to digest that food. We don’t need to fight off that infection. We don’t really need to think. As strange as that sounds, we need to react and we need to fight or flee or maybe freeze. We need to deal with this. But we don’t need to think. Thinking is too clumsy. Thinking is too slow.

Thinking is marvelous because we can do something different. But it takes too long to deal with threats. And so the way the body deals with that is blood is moved away from the thinking part of the brain to the hindbrain, which is the reflexive part of the brain.

So the same hormones that move the blood away from our internal organs and push it out to the limbs by constricting the capillaries does the same thing in our brain. So it restricts the capillaries at the front — the forebrain — and forces the blood to the hindbrain. So that energy goes to reflexive behaviors that are much more likely to help us avoid the threat.

So it’s amazing what happens when our body’s under pressure. Our brain enables our body to react very, very quickly, but our ability to think and to recall memories and to process ideas drops off significantly, drastically.

We’ve all experienced this at one time or other, haven’t we, with exam stress. It’s the same kind of thing. We know it, but we just can’t quite seem to recall it in the moment where anxiety is high, when we’re feeling stressed or in the exam. If you’ve ever tried doing math calculations in front of an audience, it’s the same kind of thing. You know that you’re good at maths. You know you can do mental arithmetic. But then when you’re looking out at people and people looking at you, then somehow those processes seem to just disappear.

Now when that happens, when you’re in the situation where you’re looking out and you’ve gone blank and the audience is staring at you, nothing has gone wrong. This is the important thing to remember. This is a critical reframe. Nothing has gone wrong. Your body is doing exactly what it’s designed to do. And that very same process has very likely already saved your life many times.

So the problem is not fear. The problem is your expectation that thinking will save you when you’re feeling stressed. It can’t. Your body’s giving you different resources to deal with the threat. So thinking is not going to help you in that situation while you’re stressed. Your physiology has removed your thinking response. But crucially, it hasn’t removed your habitual response.

Now, in working with thousands and thousands of people over the last 20 years, often people tell me — because many people deal with anxiety when they’re speaking — often people tell me that they’re most likely to experience stress before they speak, anticipating going up and speaking, and then at the start of when they’re speaking, at the beginning of their presentation.

And so this is not the time — if that’s when you’re going to feel stress — that’s not the time when you want to be relying on your conscious thinking.

So if you can delegate the first things you’re going to say — if you’re going to feel most stressed at the beginning — delegate your open, if you can delegate it to habit so that you can reflexively almost deliver your message at the beginning rather than having to try and remember the words, then you’re much more likely to be able to deal with it.

So don’t leave your open to chance. Delegate it to habit.

This is a great strategy for dealing with anxiety. This means that your open can be rehearsed. It can be familiar and it can become automatic.

So it doesn’t matter how stressed you are, you’re still going to be able to share nursery rhymes you knew when you were young. You’re still going to be able to do your ABCs, aren’t you? And share the alphabet.

So if you can work on your open — the first few lines, the first 60 seconds, 90 seconds — then you’re going to delegate it to habit. And even if you feel stressed, it’s still going to be there for you.

So when stress shows up, your body can do what it needs to do. And your open will still be available to you and it can still run smoothly even if you feel terrified.

Same thing with body language. If you have good, natural, comfortable-looking body language habits, even if you feel stress, you’ll look natural if you have natural habits. It’s amazing how it works. It really is.

So you won’t need to do this forever, by the way. This is a great hack if you like to deal with anxiety, but you will gradually outgrow that fear. You will move on from that fear. You will be free from that fear. But you can only do it by stepping into the fear.

So you need some strategies. You need some techniques in order to get you through that. So in order to break free, you need to step into the fear. And this is one of the best ways. And this is one of the easiest ways to do it as well. Anyone can do this.

So what you’re doing is you’re practicing being courageous. You’re practicing courage, but you’re doing it with the safety net. You’re doing it with the backup of habit. So you’ve got the habit there to rely upon.

So prepare, overprepare. Preparation is your best friend when it comes to dealing with anxiety.

Now, there’s one little watch note here. You need to keep the magic of the first time every time. So even if you’re saying something you said many times, you may be bored with it. The audience has never heard it before. So you have to keep the magic of the first time. You need to say it as if you’re saying it for the first time. And then preparation can really, really help you. It can really be your friend.

So, we can boil all of this down then to one really lovely idea. When you stand up to speak, you’re not going to rise to the occasion. You’re going to fall to the foundations of habit. You’re going to fall to the level of your training.

You’re not going to rise to the occasion just because you want to. If you haven’t done the work, I know you’re going to do your best, but the best is not going to be good enough if you haven’t done the work. You’re going to fall to the foundations of habit, the level of your training.

So before your next presentation, put this into action. Work on your opening. If it helps you to script it and go through it and read it out and listen to it, then do it. If that’s what you need to do.

If you need to create bullets and work from bullets or do it from memory and struggle to remember it and then check what you remembered and check what you missed — whatever works for you. You just put the reps in. Try it many different ways. Practice it until it becomes automatic.

If you know your first 60 or 90 seconds, then it will be such a relief for you.

Now remember to keep the magic of the first time every time even when you’re practicing because that’s becoming habitual as well. So keep the magic of the first time and that preparation will give you confidence. It will give you balance. It will make you feel safe when you stand up to speak.

And once you realize that you’re actually getting good at it, then the body will settle down. And then you can focus on how you’re going to help the audience rather than thinking what will they think of me.

It works. It works better than anything. There’s lots of different techniques that you can read about for dealing with fear. Nothing works better than preparation. So give it a try. I think you’ll love it.

If you build it up in pieces as well, then it becomes even more resilient. So maybe just start with your first 10 seconds. What are you going to say in the first 10 seconds? Start with 10 seconds, 5 seconds, wherever you need to start. Make it so small it’s easy for you to tackle. Then maybe 20 seconds and then 30 seconds and then a minute and three minutes, five minutes, 20 minutes. Build it up gradually. 20 minutes, 40 minutes, two days. It’s the same process. It’s the same principle.

Build it up in pieces and experiment with different ways of sharing those little pieces and then piecing them together like you’re threading beads on a necklace. And you will be bulletproof in the delivery because you’ve tried so many different ways to get there. Not word perfect. It doesn’t need to be word perfect. It can be authentic, but it’s still you at your best.

Enjoy the process as well. There’s no rules that say you can’t enjoy overcoming fear. You can’t enjoy outgrowing it. Experiment with different ways of saying your message. Discover better ways of saying it. Try different things. Your message will evolve and so will you.

Now, before we wrap up, I want to quickly mention something that I’m deeply passionate about that you’ll know if you’re a regular listener of the show. I’m very proud to be a member of the Maxwell Leadership Certified Team. For me, it’s been one of the most meaningful ways to grow, not just as a communicator, but as a leader and in life generally.

So, if you feel called to develop your leadership, your communication, your ability to influence other people at a very high level, then it might be really good for you, too. So go to maxwellleadership.com/speak. Jump on and book a call with a program advisor. Find out. It’s no obligation. It’s a no-brainer really. You’ll get world-class training, an incredible community, and an opportunity to make a really genuine difference both personally and professionally. So check it out. I think you’ll be very glad you did.

All right, that’s it for this week. Don’t forget to download the companion resources. As I said at the beginning, maxwellleadership.com/thespeakersedge. Remember, communication is one of the most important skills that you can develop and it is a learnable skill. So keep learning and you’ll learn to master your message and inspire your audience every single time you speak.

Thanks for listening today. I’ll see you in the next episode next week for part four of the mini-series. Until then, see you soon. Take care. Bye-bye. God bless

Ep. 046 — Overcoming Speaking Anxiety: What to Do When You Go Blank

Release date: January 12, 2026

Hosted by Roddy Galbraith

A Maxwell Leadership Podcast Network production

Weekly highlights from The Speaker’s Edge — a Maxwell Leadership Podcast Network production hosted by Roddy Galbraith. Learn how to communicate with clarity, confidence, and impact — in business, on stage, and in life.

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Released: January 12, 2026

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Weekly highlights from The Speaker’s Edge, a Maxwell Leadership Podcast Network production hosted by Roddy Galbraith. Learn how to communiate with clarity, confidence, and impact — in business, on stage, and in life.

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