How to stop freezing on the spot
Someone asks you a question in a meeting. You know the answer. You may even have explained it perfectly in a one-to-one earlier that week. But now everyone is looking at you. Your chest tightens. Your mind goes blank. The words are nowhere to be found. Then, a few minutes later, when nobody needs the answer anymore, you remember!
Sound familiar?
If you keep freezing when put on the spot, learning to handle the pressure deserves as much attention as preparing what you want to say. That means understanding what makes the moment feel threatening, practicing how to remain composed and gradually getting more comfortable being heard.
I learned that through a fairly uncomfortable experience.
Back in 2015, I gave the worst presentation of my career.
I’d been asked to deliver a live demo to our Global Head, who was visiting from overseas.
Quite the occasion. People were rolling out the red carpet for this fella.
I poured hours into rehearsing my part. Every mouse click. Every word.
I arrived to the room 15 minutes before to set up, the room filled up slowly with people three to five levels above me. They chatted amongst themselves while I sat quietly beside the bottom-left corner of the projector screen.
Then the Global Head walked in.
Dead silence. Showtime.
My VP opened confidently and handed it over to me. My hand shook on the mouse. My voice quivered. My heart pounded. I rushed through everything I’d rehearsed, leaving no room for a pause or even much of a breath.
Halfway through, the Global Head stopped the demo and began asking questions. He wasn’t rude. He’d simply seen enough of the demonstration.
I froze.
I can’t remember exactly what he asked. But I remember feeling stunned, embarrassed and, later, very frustrated with myself.
The whole experience had confirmed something I already feared: “I can’t present. I can’t speak in front of senior people.”
Notice how quickly one experience became a statement about who I was.
I had the technical knowledge. I’d done the preparation. What I hadn’t learned was how to stay composed when the attention turned towards me.
Why your mind goes blank under pressure
Being watched, evaluated or challenged can trigger a stress response, even when there’s no physical danger. Your heart speeds up, your muscles tense and your attention can become caught up in what might go wrong.
Meanwhile, you’re trying to listen to the question, remember the answer and monitor how you’re coming across. That’s a lot happening while you’re telling yourself to “just be normal”.
Working memory helps you hold information in mind and organise a response. In a laboratory study, Qin and colleagues found that acute psychological stress reduced working-memory-related activity in a region of the prefrontal cortex. This helps explain why pressure can interfere with thinking clearly, even when you know your subject. [Qin et al., 2009]
Remember, going blank doesn’t automatically mean you lack confidence or competence either. Stress, fatigue, unfamiliar questions and gaps in preparation can all contribute. Sometimes, though, the intensity of the reaction makes more sense when you look at what the situation represents to you.
Looking stupid. Getting something wrong. Losing someone’s respect. Being exposed as someone who never belonged there.
The room is current. But the fear may be much older.
7 ways to stop freezing in meetings and presentations
These are the approaches I’ve found useful in my own life and in coaching professionals and leaders who struggle to speak up under pressure.
1. Make peace with the past
Pretending the past has nothing to do with how confidently you show up today makes little sense. Assuming it explains everything isn’t particularly helpful either.
A teacher calls you stupid in front of the class. The moment lasts seconds. But the conclusion you draw about yourself like “I’m not smart enough” can stay with you for years.
Then you grow up. Someone questions your opinion in a meeting, and it feels far more personal than the question warrants. You’re afraid the room will confirm something you already suspect about yourself.
That’s worth exploring no?
In my coaching work, this means noticing the conclusions you formed back then and asking whether they deserve the authority you still give them. What happened may be a fact. What you decided it meant about your worth deserves questioning.
Try asking yourself: “If I got this answer wrong, what would I make that mean about me?”
There’s often more to work with in that answer than in another hour spent rehearsing your slides.
2. Rewire the old story
Once you recognise a belief, you have something to question. Changing how you respond to it takes practice. For years, I treated “I can’t speak in front of senior people” as an accurate description. It left very little room for the possibility that I could learn.
This is what I mean by working with subconscious patterns: noticing the assumptions that influence you before you’ve consciously chosen how to respond.
“If they disagree, I’ve embarrassed myself.”
“If I pause, they’ll think I don’t know.”
“If I feel nervous, I’m going to mess this up.”
You don’t have to replace those thoughts with “I’m an incredible public speaker” if every part of you argues back. Start with something you can believe:
“Feeling nervous doesn’t erase my experience.”
“I can take a moment to think.”
“Someone can disagree with me without it becoming a verdict on me.”
Then pay attention to what actually happens. Did a pause ruin the conversation? Did one imperfect answer undo your reputation? Or did the meeting carry on?
A fair review matters. If you overlook everything you handled well and replay the one awkward sentence, you keep feeding the same conclusion.
Give the new story some evidence to work with.
3. Practice regulation in the downtime
Learning to settle yourself is much easier when twelve people aren’t waiting for your answer.
Develop a small practice in the morning, before the demands of the day begin. Journalling can help catch what’s running beneath the surface. Meditation helps catch thoughts spiralling quicker and practice bringing your attention back to the present. Note, a busy meditation isn’t necessarily a failed meditation. Noticing that you’ve drifted and returning is part of the practice. That's training the pre-frontal cortex mentioned earlier.
Exercise, cold showers and different forms of breathwork are also beneficial. Take cold showers, the discomfort is an opportunity to stay present inside the physiological stress. It's training for the real thing plus it's simply great at snapping into the day. That’s the idea anyway, a cold shower isn’t a requirement for speaking confidently.
Choose one practice that suits you and that you can repeat consistently. A few quiet minutes you actually make time for are more useful than an elaborate routine you keep postponing.
I’ve written more about my own personal routine in (needs updating as it was pre baby!) [My Formula to Stay Calm]
4. Visualise the room
Before corporate workshops these days, I would often close my eyes and picture myself already inside it. I picture the room, the faces and even the distracted ones checking their phone. I picture my posture, my hands and the pace of my voice. I also leave room for things to go slightly wrong. Someone interrupting. I lose my place. A question comes up that I can’t answer immediately. Then I picture myself pausing, finding my next sentence and continuing.
A rehearsal in which everyone smiles and I deliver every word perfectly doesn’t prepare me for much beyond a perfect meeting.
For me, it’s a way to make the situation more familiar and rehearse how I want to respond, including when it gets uncomfortable. The brain doesn’t understand the difference between a visualisation and reality. The body can respond the same in each. Use it as a training ground for the real thing.
5. Use the minutes before the moment
You can spend hours preparing your content and barely a minute considering the state you’ll deliver it from.
Five minutes before the meeting, you’re still answering messages, switching tabs and squeezing in one last task. Then the camera comes on and you expect composure!?
Give yourself a transition.
Stop taking in more information. Close the inbox and put your phone aside.
Feel your feet on the floor. Backs of your legs pressing into the chair. Pressure points in your back along the backrest.
A few physiological sighs.
Choose your opening point. Know the first useful thing you want to contribute (asking a question counts too).
Research on five minutes of daily structured breathing found improvements in mood and reductions in breathing rate, with particularly promising results for exhale-focused cyclic sighing. That supports practicing the technique; it doesn’t mean a single sigh guarantees instant calm. [Balban et al., 2023]
You may still feel nervous. The goal is not to completely rid them, you are human. But you can enter that room with a little more space to think.
Reminds me of a scene with Russell Crowe playing the role of a MMA trainer in the movie Beast:
"If I can breathe, I can think. If I can think, I can win"
6. Replace performance with purpose
“How am I coming across?” is an exhausting question to carry through an entire meeting.
“What can I contribute here?” gives your attention somewhere useful to go.
Before you enter, get clear on why you’re there. What needs to be understood, decided or moved forward? What do you know that could help? What might the other people in the room be concerned about?
This won’t magically remove self-consciousness. It gives you something to return to when you catch yourself monitoring every word and facial expression.
You’re allowed to be there to do a job, without making the meeting an examination of your worth.
Sometimes your most useful contribution will be a question. Sometimes it will be an honest “I don’t know yet”. Neither requires perfection.
7. Take action (imperfectly)
You can understand your patterns, read the books and practice all the breathing techniques. Eventually, there’s a moment when you have to let yourself be heard.
I know how tempting it is to wait until you feel ready. But if feeling completely calm is the entry requirement, you may spend a long time waiting to fulfill your potential.
Start with something manageable:
Ask a question early in the first 5 minutes.
Offer one opinion before the meeting ends.
Say, “I’ll need to confirm that. Here’s what I know so far.”
Choose situations less threatening like a team meeting over a room full of 100 people, then build from there.
Afterwards, give yourself credit for what you practiced. If your voice shook and you still made your point, include both facts in the review.
“I was nervous, and I contributed” gives you somewhere to go.
“I was nervous, so it went badly” sends you back to the same starting point.
How to stop freezing on the spot
Even with preparation and practice, you can still lose your words. Have a simple way to stop freezing on the spot and bring yourself back to being present moment, even just a little.
Pause. Breathe slow and full while looking out the window. Relax the body on the exhale. Write something down on your notepad like a one word mantra. Then use a sentence that gives you time:
“I was thinking about that earlier, here’s where I’ve got so far”
“Could you repeat the last part of the question?”
“There are two parts to that. I’ll start with…”
If you don’t know the answer, say so and explain how you’ll follow up. You don’t need to know everything.
And if the moment feels awkward, let it be. Resist turning it into a description of your entire ability.
I still get nervous before calls. What’s changed since 2015 is that I recognise more of what’s happening, and I have different tools and mindset shifts I know how to use now. Those were skills I had to learn.
Back then, I left that room thinking, “I can’t do this.”
Today, I just say “Let’s do this!”
One difficult presentation had plenty to teach me.
It didn’t need to define me.
These tips give you somewhere to start. The harder part is recognising what’s driving your reaction in the first place, which let's face it, can be so overwhelming to the point of feeling like you've no control.
That’s where working together can help. We look at what sits underneath the freezing, question the subconscious beliefs keeping it in place and equip you with the awareness and tools to respond in a way that feels confident yet authentic.
If this feels like the right time to address it, happy to have a no pressure conversation to unpack your situation and see what a different path looks like for you.
In your corner,
Richie ❤️
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