Forgetting your words in front of an audience can feel like the end of the world.
Your heart starts racing. You scramble to remember what comes next. And suddenly, you’re more worried about looking foolish than what you were trying to say.
But a Broadway actress once discovered that what feels like a disaster on stage can look completely different from the audience.
Her experience is a useful lesson for anyone who gives presentations, pitches ideas or speaks in front of a crowd.
The Broadway actress who forgot her lyrics
In 2014, Anika Larsen was performing on Broadway in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.
She played Cynthia Weil, a talented songwriter who, in one scene, demonstrates her skills by singing a new version of “Happy Days Are Here Again”.
It’s an important moment for the character. Except that a few weeks into the run, right in the middle of the show, Larsen suddenly forgot the lyrics.
The music was playing, the audience was watching, and she had absolutely no idea what came next.
So she stopped the orchestra.
“Let’s start this whole thing again!”
It was a clever decision. Because her character was a songwriter demonstrating her work, Larsen hoped the audience might believe she’d simply decided to give the song another go.
There was just one problem.
She still didn’t know whether she’d remember the lyrics the second time.
But she started again anyway.
And somehow, every word came back. She finished the song correctly and continued with the show.
Problem solved, right?
Not quite.
What happened next surprised her
Although she’d recovered, Larsen couldn’t stop thinking about the mistake.
She was convinced the audience had noticed. Worse, she worried they were now feeling nervous for her, waiting to see whether she’d make another mistake.
So she did what experienced performers learn to do. She kept playing the scene as though nothing had happened.
About a minute later, she delivered her next funny line.
The audience burst out laughing.
And that changed everything.
Larsen reasoned that if the audience had been worried about her, they wouldn’t have been relaxed enough to laugh.
The fact that they responded normally suggested they hadn’t recognised her mistake at all.
What had felt like a disaster to Larsen had simply been another moment in the performance for everyone else.
She now shares the story with younger performers to explain an important lesson about professionalism.
Being a professional doesn’t mean never making mistakes. It means knowing how to recover when you do.
Why your mistakes feel bigger than they really are
There’s actually a psychological reason we tend to worry so much about what other people think of our mistakes.
It’s called the spotlight effect.
In a 2000 study, researchers at Cornell University found that people tend to overestimate how much others notice their appearance and behaviour.
In one experiment, participants were asked to wear an embarrassing T-shirt into a room of other students.
When asked how many people had noticed it, they estimated far more than actually had.
The explanation is simple. We’re so aware of our own experiences that we assume everyone else must be paying just as much attention.
And you can see how this plays out during a presentation.
You forget a sentence you spent hours rehearsing. To you, it’s a glaring mistake. But the audience has never heard your script. They don’t know which words were supposed to come next.
You pause for three seconds while you gather your thoughts. To you, the silence feels painfully long. But your audience might simply think you’re taking a moment to consider your next point.
Even when people do notice a mistake, that doesn’t mean they’re judging you as harshly as you imagine.
The trouble is that once we start worrying about a mistake, we stop paying attention to what’s happening around us.
Instead of thinking about the audience and what they need to understand, we’re stuck replaying something that happened thirty seconds ago.
And that makes the rest of the presentation much harder than it needs to be.
What to do when you forget your words
I think the most useful lesson from Larsen’s story is that she didn’t need to feel confident to recover.
She was still worried. She still thought she’d made a fool of herself.
But she continued anyway.
That’s an important skill to develop, especially if you speak regularly in meetings, presentations or pitches.
Here are three ways to make recovering easier.
1. Give yourself permission to pause
When people forget what they’re saying, their first instinct is often to fill the silence.
They start talking faster, repeating themselves or adding unnecessary words while they desperately search for the next sentence.
But that usually makes things worse.
Instead, stop speaking.
Take a breath. Look at your audience. Give yourself a moment to remember what you were trying to say.
If you need to, you can even acknowledge it.
“I’ve lost my train of thought for a moment.”
There’s nothing particularly terrible about that sentence. Most people have experienced the same thing.
And a short pause is much easier for an audience to follow than thirty seconds of confused talking.
2. Remember your point, not your script
One of the biggest problems with memorising presentations word for word is that forgetting a single sentence can throw everything off.
You know what comes next when everything goes to plan. But if you lose your place, suddenly you have no idea where to go.
That’s why I encourage people to practise remembering their main ideas rather than every word.
Imagine you’re pitching a new product.
You might forget the exact sentence you prepared about how much time it saves customers.
But you still know the point you’re trying to make: your product saves people four hours of work every week.
Start there. You can always find different words to explain an idea you understand.
And if you practise delivering the same point in different ways, you’ll become much less dependent on remembering a particular sentence.
3. Stop apologising and continue
If you make a mistake, you might be tempted to apologise repeatedly, explain what went wrong or make a joke about how terrible you are at presenting.
But every time you bring attention back to the mistake, you’re asking the audience to think about it again.
Sometimes a quick acknowledgement is useful. If you’ve given someone the wrong figure, for example, you should correct it.
But if you’ve simply stumbled over a sentence, there’s rarely any need to make a big deal of it.
Correct yourself if necessary, then continue.
Remember that your audience is there to hear your ideas. They’re not comparing every sentence against the version you rehearsed at home.
Give them something useful to listen to next.
Confidence comes from knowing you can recover
In my workshops, I often use improvisation exercises that put people in situations where they can’t prepare every word.
They might be asked an unexpected question, have to continue a story someone else started or respond to an idea they didn’t see coming.
And, inevitably, people make mistakes.
They forget what they were going to say. They stumble over their words. They give an answer that doesn’t quite make sense.
But something interesting happens when they get the chance to try again.
They realise the mistake wasn’t nearly as serious as they thought.
The other participants haven’t suddenly lost respect for them. Nobody is keeping score. And often, the mistake becomes something everyone can laugh about.
That’s why I think learning to recover is more useful than trying to eliminate every possibility of failure.
You can prepare thoroughly and still forget a sentence. You can know your subject inside out and still lose your train of thought.
And you can be an excellent communicator without getting every word right.
The next time it happens, remember Anika Larsen. She was still thinking about her mistake, but the audience had already moved on.
Often the most useful thing you can do as a speaker is move on with them.
