How to Speak on Stage Without Going Blank (Fix it With This)

you are really concerned that you will freeze or you'll blank out in the middle of a presentation, in a meeting when you're speaking in front of people. Trust me, it's happened to me. In fact, I was coaching someone today. Happened to them. How do you overcome this? So, in this video, you're going to see why you blank out, why you freeze, and why it's not as big of a mystery as you might think, and more importantly, what you can actually do to address it. So blanking out, freezing. This is when you're in the middle of a presentation or you're saying something and all of a sudden things that you know how to do normally, things that you can talk about normally, all of a sudden you can't talk about. So to give you an example, I was once so nervous. I started my presentation by saying my name is anxiety in higher institutions and my presentation is about Yaser Khan. So, if I was so nervous, I flipped the order of it and I had no idea what I was saying. So, let's talk about freezing and blanking out. What is it? Freezing is all of a sudden you don't know what to say. Your mind just stops. It's overwhelmed. You don't you cannot utter a word. Blanking out, you forgot where you were. You don't know what the next word is. And the reason it's scary is because now you're in front of an audience. Maybe your boss

your superiors, people you've never met before, investors, and you're embarrassed because you don't know what to say. People are just looking at you. You feel this shame. And for so many people, this is the number one fear they have when it comes to public speaking. The reason I don't like doing it is because I'm afraid I'll blank out. Let's talk about why this happens. Okay, so let's say you are someone, this is your beautiful face. All right, You have a lot of information in your brain. These are the things that you know how to do. Maybe you're really good at project management. coding. This is all of the information that's in your mind. Now, when you're calm and when you're relaxed, you're able to access this information at will. So, if I asked you right now, tell me your phone number, which I'm not asking you, but if you want to tell me, you can. But you're able to tell me the phone number right off the top of your head. If people

still remember phone numbers that is we remember our own we don't remember anyone else's but it's somewhere in your brain and you can easily access it. Similarly if I asked you hey tell me about something you're really good at. You probably can tell me off the top of your head but what happens when we are in front of an audience. Okay let's say you have all of this information still in your mind because you are relaxed. You can access all this information, but when you're in front of an audience, all of a sudden, your brain, it perceives this situation as a threat. Something is wrong. I'm in danger. When your brain perceives a situation as a threat, this could be a meeting, a presentation. It no longer prioritizes the retrieval of the information you already have in your brain. In other words, if you are being chased by a lion, you're not going to be able to remember what you have to pay for taxes. You're not going to be able to remember things that are obvious to you because your brain is focusing on safety. Your brain is taking all of its resources to identify threats and figure out how to escape it. So, here's a an even more granular look at it. Okay, let's say you are speaking. This is you. You have an incredibly long spine. You are speaking to an audience here. Okay. When you're rehearsing or when you're in the back, you know your material inside out, but now you're on stage and you're

thinking, "Oh, people are looking at me. Are they judging me? Do I have this accent? Maybe someone came in late into the presentation. Oh, wait. They missed the first half of my presentation. They might not know what I'm talking about. Wait, this person's on their phone. This person's checking the time. They must be bored. What's happening in this situation is our brain is perceiving the situation as a threat. In a very real way, the brain believes because people don't approve of me or because I don't know what they're thinking, they might not like me. This is affecting my social status. Remember, we're all tribal creatures. We want to fit in. Back in the day, if you didn't fit in with society, you would be ostracized. You would be exiled and your chances of survival were much lower. So, our brain still has that. It still believes that if people don't approve, I will somehow die. This is what your mind is perceiving. So you think if I'm on stage and I don't do a good job, if I don't

speak well in a very real way, that means that my existence is being threatened. So if I perform in front of these people, they don't like me. I blank out. I blah blah. I might get exiled. People might not like me. My social status will drop. this threat perception because your brain is perceiving the situation as a threat, it does not prioritize retrieving the information already in your mind. Are you following me? This is why before a presentation when you're calm, you know your material. You step on stage, all of a sudden you forget what to say. You don't know where you're going. The moment you step off stage or maybe you're in a job interview, the

moment you're out of the job interview, ah, I should have said that. I can't believe I forgot to say this thing. I should have said this that way. I forgot this point. All of a sudden, all the points that you had to give, they come to your mind immediately. Why? Because now that you are no longer in this situation where you're presenting and now where you are, this is a car. You can tell I went to art school. Now, as you're sitting in a car, man, what is

this? You're relaxed. You're not in front of people anymore. You don't experience that level of threat. Now, all of those ideas start to come back to your mind. So, in a very real sense, the more calm you are, the more clearly you can speak. So, when you are calm, you're on track, you know what to say. Think about when you're talking to your friends and family. You're not agitated. You don't perceive that as a threat, assuming your friends and family are not threatening people. And when that happens, you can think normally, but now you're in front of people you don't know. And that creates uncertainty. And uncertainty is often times viewed as a threat. Let's talk about uncertainty for a bit. What is uncertainty? Uncertainty means I don't know what's going to happen. This one word is why most people are terrified of public speaking. Think about it like this. If I told you, no matter how much you prepare for this presentation, no matter what, when you step on stage, these people have been paid $100 each to boo you and to say that you had the worst presentation ever. So, it doesn't matter how well you do, know for a fact people will hate the presentation. Even though the outcome is not favorable, the fact that you know the outcome, you have certainty as opposed to uncertainty, you know what's going to happen, you can brace yourself and

you're no longer as afraid. But because you don't know for sure how the audience will react, you're thinking, "Will they like me? Will they not like me? " Uncertainty, tension. So when you're on stage, you're thinking, "Oh my god, which way will it go? Will I do well? Will I not do well? I don't know. This makes me anxious. So, most people, they're terrified because they can't handle uncertainty. But uncertainty is a part of life. No matter what you do, you have no idea something is going to happen for sure. I don't know if my presentation is going to do well. I don't know if tomorrow I'm going to be on time for my meeting. No one knows the future. So, what we need to do is figure out how to get comfortable with uncertainty. We're going to touch back on uncertainty in just a bit. So, you know, the more calm you are, the clear more clearly you can speak. And the reason most people are afraid is because of uncertainty. They're afraid of what's going to happen in the future. The reason you blank out, the reason you freeze is because your brain is perceiving the situation as a threat. Okay, let's go into some of the more finer mechanics of this. When you are presenting on stage, how can you increase the level of certainty? certainty and how can you reduce the threat you perceive? Okay, threat? Here's how you increase the level of certainty. If you

wanted to convince your brain that something can happen, that something has a high enough likelihood of happening, what would you need to do? You would need to prove to your brain that this has happened before, therefore it can happen again. In most people's mind, they have either a bad experience with public speaking or they have a visibility issue, which means they're not just afraid of public speaking. They're just afraid of performing in front of people, period. And that might be maybe they were made fun of as a child. Maybe their parents weren't supportive. Could be a variety of things, right? So because your brain, this is the brain, because your brain has the experience in the past that you did something once, it didn't go well, your brain is a prediction machine. So what it's going to do, it's going to look in the past and say, "Hey, remember when you did this thing last time and you blanked out? That's what's going to happen the next time you do it. Therefore, you should not do it again. " Your brain is going to predict the future based on the past. Now, a lot of people, they don't

even have bad experiences, but they perceive that their future will somehow have some bad experiences because they have low self-esteem. They don't believe in themselves. It could be again a variety of reasons. So, your brain is a prediction machine. Whatever you believe about yourself, whatever you have experienced in the past, it will paint a picture in the future. So, if you are afraid of public speaking or blanking out, this is one of the reasons. So then how can you give your brain a high level of certainty that things will go well? You have to create proof in your brain that things will go well. How do you do that? So let's say you got a presentation coming up. Okay? You have a 30-minute presentation. You got the slide deck 5 minutes before you're about to present. Are you going to feel a high enough degree of certainty in that situation that yes, when I speak about this topic, I'm not going to have any issue about it? Of course, you're not going to feel certain because you just got the slides. You've barely seen them. You've never said the words out loud. Your brain does not have any reason, any proof to believe that you can continue to do it. So, how do we fix this? We fix this by rehearsal. [snorts] So, rehearsal does two things. One, it trains your mind and body to say the words a certain way instead of memorizing every single word. It trains

you. You say the words enough time where your brain just memorizes it. It knows how to move the body when you say those words. So you do a rehearsal and then the other thing it does is rehearsal access proof. Hey, remember when you were in your room and you said the presentation out loud? It sounded okay. It sounded fine. Now your brain knows, hey, you've done it in the past. you can do it again. Now, if you want to increase the level of certainty even more, then you do more and more rehearsal. This is why when you see the best paid public speakers in the world, they will rehearse their entire presentation for hundreds of hours. This is why when you see people who do Broadway, they will rehearse all day every day before their big performance because they want to know they can do the thing a certain way because they have done it enough times in the past that their brain believes they can do it again in the future. Same thing with athletes. They practice a ton of times by themselves in private so that they can do it when it counts in front of a live audience. They have the proof in their mind. So you have to create proof that hey I believe that when I speak it's going to work. Most people are criminally underpracticed. Notice I didn't say underprepared. A lot of people they can put the slide deck

together but they will never say the words out loud. Your brain needs to be convinced that when you say the words out loud you are satisfied with how they sound. You don't tumble. The transitions aren't weird. All of these tiny concerns and frustrations you'll have, they will not go away by just thinking about them. you putting the slides together. They will go away when you say the words out loud. So, every time you rehearse for a presentation, you are giving yourself proof. I have done this before. I can do it again. So far, we've talked about the level of certainty. Rehearsal increases Now, let's talk about threat. How can we reduce the amount of threat? First thing, let's talk about the biology. Most people feel threatened because they think what they're experiencing in public speaking is not the right thing to experience or there's something wrong with them. So, for example, if I'm about to present and my stomach is churning and my palms are sweating and my throat is going dry, which by the way happens to me all the time still, there's something wrong with me inherently. How do I get rid of this feeling? If I can't

get rid of this feeling, I I'm not going to do public speaking. So, a lot of people when they get nervous, their first thing is how do I not get nervous? How do I get rid of this fear? The analogy that I like to give is this. I want you to imagine that this is a shower, okay? and you are about to step into a shower and it's a cold shower. You got cold water. Okay. When you step into the cold water, you know what it's going to feel like? You're going to feel chills. It's going to feel like bullets on your skin. You're going to go a little numb. But then 30 to 60 seconds later, what happens? Your body gets used to it. It just goes away naturally, right? So, you know, all you have to do when you step into the cold shower is you have to bear the first minute to two minutes and then you allow it to go away. But now, I want you to imagine that you were about to take a cold shower and you said, "How do I take a cold shower without feeling cold? I want to step into the shower, but I don't want him to feel numb. I don't want to feel cold when I do it. I'm only going to step in the shower when I don't feel cold. Isn't that ridiculous? You cannot change how your body responds in that situation. But if you're in that situation and you know what your body is going to do, excuse me. If you know how your body is

going to respond to that situation, it is no longer alien. So now you don't perceive it as a threat. Because for a lot of people, why is this happening to me? Why am I responding this way? I don't want my body to do this. When they have that experience, they are they feel like other people can tell. They feel like something's wrong with them. This creates uncertainty. They feel like they're in danger and that's why they blank out. So again, going back, your brain cannot access the information it already has when it prioritizes danger. So what we need to do is reduce the level of threat you feel. And one of the main ways you can do that in terms of your mindset is to understand your biology. This is normal. What's happening to you is normal. The same way when you lift a heavy weight and the next day you're sore. That's normal. The same way when you run on the treadmill for a bit and you sweat, that's normal. You're not going to say, "Why is my heart beating so fast when I'm at the gym? This is not normal. Something's wrong with me. " No, this is just the expected response. So all you have to do is one change your mindset around what your body is going through. It's completely normal. Every human being on in the planet on the planet experiences that. Secondly, I want you to pretend this is your level of anxiety and this is the time that goes by. You start your presentation here and you end

your presentation here. You will notice the highest level of anxiety is the time immediately leading up to your presentation. Especially the 30 seconds where you're walking on stage. Then it peaks at this point when you start and naturally the more you start to continue to talk it starts to dip lower and lower and eventually it stabilizes until the end of the presentation. This whole period will take anywhere between 1 to 3 minutes. So all you have to do is just ride the wave. Tell yourself, "Hey, for the first minute or two, I'm going to be nervous. " And that's okay. Nervous essentially means my heart races faster. This this happens to me because this is something important that I'm doing. If I wasn't nervous, is this even important to do? So that's what typically will happen. But here's the problem. Most people they get stuck in this and they can't get out of this. When they reach this peak level of anxiety at the start of the presentation, they start to become aware that they're nervous and now the self-criticism begins that loop

begins. So now, why am I getting nervous? Oh my god, I'm getting nervous. People can tell I'm nervous. And then again, oh my god, I'm getting even more nervous. Most people can tell now my throat is going. You are nervous. Here's the key about being nervous. You are nervous about the fact that you are nervous. So, can you see how this becomes an endless cycle where you're nervous, you notice you're nervous, the fact that you're nervous makes you more nervous, and then you're like, why am I nervous? And then it makes you even more nervous. So, what we need to do is we need to cut it off right here before it goes into these endless loops. I'm nervous and that's okay. There's nothing wrong. This will just go away in a minute or 2 minutes. The only time it will not go away is if I start judging myself if I start asking myself why is this happening? What you also don't want to do, say I don't want to feel this. How do I get rid of this? Because the more you push it, the more it's going to come back. This creates tension and this internal battle in your mind will make it even worse. worse for you. [gasps] So, how do you reduce the threat? You reduce it through your biology. That's number one. Number two, in order for you to perceive the audience as friendly, you need to know they're on your side. No one is expecting you to fail. You are there to benefit other people and they're there to learn from you. If you're speaking about a topic, they're trusting you with their time and attention and you're there to serve them. I want you to think about charity. When you're doing charity, are you ever thinking, I need to do charity with the right technique? If I'm feeding someone a homeless person, I'm giving them a meal, I need to make sure I'm giving them the right meal. going to the right restaurant. I need to make sure I'm in the right car, giving them the meal with the right technique. No, you don't think about that because you're trying to help. And when your focus is on the other person, a lot of those things about yourself go away. And I want you to think about that. What's in your mind, you're thinking, is my accent acceptable? Am I going too fast? slow? Is my body language good or not? Am I missing slides? Do people like me? All of these thoughts, who are they about? They're about you. Are you on stage there to get approval from people? If that's why you're there. And listen, I've been there, too. I was just safeguarding my identity so much. I just wanted to survive. But if we're there for that purpose, we're not really there to serve. We're there for validation just to survive the outcome. So remember people are on your side. So you reduce the threat by understanding the biology. other people on your side. Now let's get into some tactical side of things, right? So you you know you have to calm yourself down. The moment you stop perceiving the situation as a threat, you calm down. What can you do in a technique side of things? We talked about rehearsal. This gives you proof. This gives you confidence. The more rehearsal you introduce, the more confidence you introduce. But here's something else you can do. A lot of people, they blank out because they don't know where they're going. They don't have a structure, right? You have the information in your mind, but it's all over the place and you don't know how to arrange it. So, if you just do this, it will give you an easy structure to follow. you know where to start, where to go next, where to go next after that, and where to end. So, let's say I had to on the spot speak about Yaser. What's something you love about Chicago? I'm in Chicago right now. And oh, yeah, Chicago. What do I say about Chicago? So many things coming to mind. Uh yeah, they have, you know, great pizza and it's a very clean city. Um they have a good conference here. Uh they got a great basketball team. What else? Where do I go? Uh yeah. So is all of these things in my mind popping up at the same time and because I can't structure them. I get overloaded with information and then I don't know what to do because I don't know where I'm going. So I'm going to give you an example, right? Imagine that you were standing here and I asked you to walk to this point. Just walk. You can do that, right? You don't have to think about it too much. You just know where you're going. But what if I asked you now? When you walk, I want you to walk perfectly. I want your chin to be up high like this. I want your arms to be by your side. I want your right hand and your left leg to be synchronized. I want your left hand and your right leg to be synchronized. I want there to be a 1 and 1/2t gap between your feet as you're walking. I want you to keep your shoulders back straight. Now, walk. You're going to walk like a penguin all over here because you're overly conscious of every single thing that you are doing. And often times this is what we're doing when we're on stage. We're overloading ourselves with criticism and material and things that we need to remember that we can't do what we already know how to do. So coming back to this example here, if someone asks you, hey, what do you like about Chicago? You get so many things in your brain, you get overloaded and then you don't even know what to start with or where to go. So what you need to do is immediately excuse me immediately identify what is my focus of all the things that popped in my brain what am I going to talk about so in this case I'm going to give you a quick format that I call a sandwich technique which is essentially imagine this is a sandwich okay you answer the question again at the end and in the middle you can have reason, story, analogy, whatever you want. So, if you have a structure like the sandwich technique, you can speak on the spot and you know where you're going. So, let me give you an example of this. Let's say you asked me, "Yaser, what do you like about Chicago? " I'm on the spot. In order for me to not blank out first, I need to immediately give myself direction. Choose something to talk about so I'm not confused between this or that or this or that. So, I'm going to say the one thing I like most about Chicago is that it is clean. That's my answer. Now, I'm going to support it with reasons. I've been to many other cities in the US. I've been to New York. I've been to LA. I've been to Miami. And they're all great in their own right, but one thing they're not is clean. You will see trash everywhere in these cities. So when I came to Chicago, I was absolutely shocked by how clean this city is compared to all other major cities in the US. So for that reason, Chicago is my favorite city because it's the cleanest city that I found in the US. Did it sound like I was rambling? No, cuz I had one single reason. The reason I like Chicago is because it's clean. And I expanded on that, gave you some details, and then at the end, that's why I like Chicago, because it's clean. Now, because I know what to talk about, now because I know where to go, I'm able to speak on the spot without blanking out. So, let's do a quick recap of everything. And by the way, if you do want to learn more about how to speak like a CEO and you want to learn how to avoid some of the most common mistakes people make, check the description of the video. I'm going to have two resources available to you. One's going to be a workshop so you can learn how to speak like a CEO and two is going to be an ebook that I made on the top mistakes people make on in terms of their public speaking and how you can avoid them fix them. Okay. The reason you freeze and blank out is because you have all the information in the mind but the situation you're in, you're perceiving that situation as a threat. So you need to learn to calm yourself down. The way you calm yourself down is you increase the level of certainty by rehearsing, giving your brain some proof that you have done this before and you can do it again. Reducing the threat, you do that by knowing that feeling anxiety, feeling your heart beating is completely normal. There's nothing wrong with you. And from a technique perspective, if you have a structure, you know where to start and where to end, that will give you some confidence when you are speaking on the spot. Hope this helped. If it did, subscribe to the channel.