What to do when you lose your thread

Losing your thread is perfectly natural. It usually happens for one of two reasons: either a high dose of nerves has caught up with you, or your brain has started running faster than your mouth and has simply grown tired of thinking at the pace you had hoped to keep.

Once the thread is gone, the trick is to find it again, and as we all know, that is not always as easy as it sounds. So what can we actually do to repair the damage? Here are my favourite ways to buy yourself a quiet moment and find your way back.

Ways back to the thread

• Ask your listeners to turn to one another in pairs and discuss how they feel about what you have just said, or to come up with a solution, a suggestion, or a reflection. While they talk, you gather yourself.
• Repeat something important you said earlier, and trust that the thread finds its way back to you along the way.
• Do not be afraid of a pause. Give yourself ten seconds, breathe calmly, and think about what you have just said. Often that is all it takes.
• Start leafing through your papers as though you are looking for something, but really search inside your head for the thread. The papers are only a decoy.
• Ask your audience a question that is relevant to what you have just been saying.
• Take a short break and stretch your legs.
• Knock over your glass of water and buy yourself a little breathing room.
• Or simply admit that you have lost your thread.

That last one is worth sitting with. Audiences are far kinder than we fear, and a warm, honest "now, where was I?" almost always earns a smile rather than a groan. Losing your thread does not undo you. How gracefully you find it again is the thing they will remember.