Mental blocks: Think on your feet & respond when your mind goes blank

A very warm welcome to Cultural Communication Confidence with me, Victoria Rennoldson. Now, I want you to imagine a situation. You’re in a meeting, and you are asked a question. It’s quite a tricky question. And, you go to answer, but your mind goes blank. You have no idea what you’re going to say, and you’re hesitating, and the time is ticking, and you’re feeling the pressure to say something, anything. Everybody is looking at you, and yet you have no idea how to move forward. Has this happened to you?

It happened to a client of mine recently, and she talked about the fact that she was in this meeting, she was asked a question, and, suddenly her mind went completely blank. Now, for you personally, that might be for a variety of reasons. Maybe it’s a difficult topic. Perhaps the question is slightly outside your area of expertise. Maybe the question just isn’t clear and you’re not sure how to answer it. It might be that you’re feeling tired or stressed or distracted by something else that’s going on in your personal or professional life. But whatever the reason is, for you, as it was for my client, in that moment, she needed strategies to move through, to find a way to cope with that situation so that she could say something, so that she could respond, she could think on her feet and get through that mental block in the moment. And I thought this was a really important topic for us to talk about here today because, I want to give you some very practical strategies to be able to handle this if it comes up, and maybe you are experiencing it regularly, in which case I got some really particular ways to help you with this.

Okay, so let’s come to the strategies themselves. The first thing I want you to do if you find this is happening, is to hit the pause button. What I mean by this is that, what often happens is that we kick into a stress response. Maybe you’ve heard about some of the stress responses to threats, which are fight, flight or freeze. And these stress responses are ingrained in us. They are ancient human, reactions to being threatened by physical things like animals or creatures, or, greater threats of being killed in ancient history. Now, the problem that we have is that, these stress reactors still exist in our brain today, even though we’re not often being physically threatened in this way. So if we are in a meeting and having this mental block, we’re in the freeze zone. We have no idea how we’re going to move forward. And, our brain literally freezes over. We kind of get stuck, almost like a rabbit stuck in the headlights of a car, they get completely phased. So this is important to recognize that you’re having a stress response.

So the best thing that you can do is hit the pause button. And, one very simple strategy that can help you with this is to pick up your glass of water and take a sip. Just like that. So taking a sip of water gives you a, moment to collect yourself, to feel into that you’re safe. You’re in a meeting room, it’s fine. The other strategy that goes with this is become hyper present. And this, what I mean by this is to really feel into the here and now. Feel your feet flat on the floor, feel your hands, wherever they are. Maybe they’re on your legs, maybe they’re on the table, but really feel what’s underneath your fingers and your hands, whether it’s soft or hard. And just notice these physical elements to really ground yourself into the current moment again to help you feel safe and that there is no real threat. It’s also a really important strategy when we do this to physically use parts of our, body to do this, because it’s not obvious to other people, we just do this silently in our heads and it stops us with the mental whirring. So it stops you from panicking or the brain going into hyperdrive and focusing on what you’re going to do. So just for a moment, come into the here and now.

Now, once you’ve done that, hopefully you’re feeling a little bit calmer. But then there comes the moment of, well, what is it you’re going to say when you don’t know what you’re going to say next? Well, let’s say your mind went blank in the middle of speaking. So you were saying something, you were explaining something, and then you’ve totally forgotten what your next point is in this situation. I highly recommend PSS. This is one of my strategies I, ah, use with my clients to really help them move forward in, any kind of moment where they’re under pressure and things haven’t gone according to the plan. And what is PSS? It stands for pause, smile, start again. And the idea of this really is just to kind of smile, acknowledge. You can even say it, oh, wow, I’ve lost my train of thought. Something like this, or I’ve lost my point. Okay, let’s just move into the next point. So really just focus on the moving on part. Don’t worry about what you’ve forgotten to say. Don’t worry about, the fact that you have, missed something just move into the next point you want to share.

So that is if you’re speaking and then you forget. But what if it’s more about a question just like my client had? So she got asked a question, her mind went blank, she had no idea what she was going to say. Well beyond the grounding, the sip of water, getting hyper present some other strategies which can be really helpful is to give yourself a bit more time. So the first thing is, is to say thank you, thank you for such a great question. Acknowledging the contribution and appreciating them, adding to the conversation. Then you can reflect or re express the question back to them. Now this can be helpful because maybe the issue is that you’re not quite sure what this question is about or maybe sometimes people ask multiple questions in one question and it’s confused your brain, there’s just too much for you to think about and hold in your brain. If you really just couldn’t even catch the question, you lost your train of thought in the middle. Just ask them to repeat it to make sure it’s clear to you what it is you want to answer with that. So take your time to make sure that the question is clear in your mind.

Now when it comes to responding to it, maybe your don’t have the perfect answer and maybe that’s part of the mind blowing blank here that you’re just not sure what the right answer is. And here we have a couple of strategies we can use in this situation where you still want to appear professional, you want to appear obviously still expert in what you’re talking about, but maybe this is a question you weren’t quite expecting. So one way of doing this is just using the first thoughts framework. And very simply put, this is where you share your first thoughts. You make it clear that maybe this is something that you haven’t fully considered but you’re prepared to share an opinion or maybe some ideas about what the answer might be. So for example, that might frame the conversation around something like my first thoughts on that topic are and generally we want to be fairly to the point and succinct because in this kind of situation the risk is that we go into overdrive and we try and explain and go into loads and loads of detail which we just don’t need. So I again would like to share a couple of ways of doing this.

The first way is the idea of three, three key points. So if you can in the moment, go: ‘Well my first thoughts are firstly, this, next maybe there is that, and finally or last, there is this area to consider.’ So three key points that you frame as first, next and last, or words similar to that. But maybe you don’t have three points. Maybe in your first thoughts you can only really think of one way to reply. One way to extend out that answer is to really consider how you frame it by presenting the contrasting idea or opinion. And that is through phrases like, you know, on the one hand we could look at it this way, but on the other hand we can consider it from this angle. And this is quite a considered way of answering a question where you’re presenting both points of view. But the real kind of I suppose the focus of this is really making sure that you’re framing your ideas simply, succinctly and to the point. If these are first thoughts, if you’re thinking on your feet, you want to keep it very simple in your mind. So those are another area of strategy to think about. But let’s say the reason why this question has thrown you and your mind’s gone blank is that it’s a really tricky question politically maybe within your organisation, or maybe you genuinely just don’t have the answer to this, but you don’t particularly want to say this again, I have some strategies for you.

So the first strategy is to delay it and to say, well, you know, what I would love to do is to answer that question in the Q&A right at the end. And this gives you a bit more time to think about it, to maybe come up with some ideas and then answer that as a part of other questions that come up. But if you’re not feeling confident that you would have an answer by the end of the meeting, then the other things that you can do include offering to pick up with somebody one to one afterwards. Now why that is really great is that it shows that you’re committed to answering the question, but it perhaps indicates that maybe it’s too much detail for here and now, maybe, maybe it’s a topic that needs a bit of a deeper conversation that might take you on a tangent away from the main topic in the meeting. And so it’s a really good part of a strategy which I use with my clients to think about a meeting as not just what happens during the time you’re sitting down around a table, but also to think about a meeting is what happens before you’re in the room during the meeting time and what happens afterwards. So you have that 360 degree communication happening not just during the meeting time itself. So pick up with somebody afterwards. This will give you time to consider, to reflect, and then go back and have the conversation.

The final way is what I call the car park. And I quite like this one, which is hearing a question, maybe you feel the reason it’s tricky to answer, your mind is going blank, is that maybe it’s not quite on topic with what is being discussed in the meeting. If that’s the case, then you can offer to park the topic and then to indicate that you’d like to come back to that topic in another meeting or set up a separate meeting to dedicate more time to it. And, I think, again, that’s a very controlled way of managing the conversation so that you are feeling back in control of what you’re speaking about. But then you can come to that topic at a later point, again with a bit more. With the advantage of a bit more time to consider it.

So there we go, some strategies for you. And I wonder whether you have experienced this. Have you ever had that moment where your mind went blank and you started to panic and didn’t know what you were going to say? Which of these strategies do you think are, most helpful to you to help you in the moment? Is it more about the physical grounding? Is it about confirming and reflecting on the question? Or is it about maybe first thoughts and succinctly finding that answer? Or perhaps you’re somebody who, in the moment, prefer to delay and have more time for reflection? Really consider this.

And although I really hope that you don’t experience this too often, do recognize that when we have mental blocks, we do have strategies to move through this, that we can think on our feet and spontaneously come up with an answer. I hope these strategies have helped you here today. And, if you are somebody who does experience this, does have challenges in meetings, do you find yourself going blank or struggling to communicate what it is you want to say? Then this is something I would absolutely love to help you with. And, I have worked with many clients in this space to really help them overcome their challenges when they feel themselves under pressure and under stress in meetings. If that’s you, let’s talk. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Message me over there. My personal profile is Victoria Rennoldson and we can set up a time to talk about how I can best support you in the meantime. Thank you so much for joining me again for this episode. Hope you have a really good day ahead or evening and look forward to speaking to you and seeing you next time, on Cultural Communication Confidence.