By bizn_fun 
I also heard from teachers, start-up founders having to present pitches for money to investors, women running workshops, delivering speeches – and fellow journalists trying to report live on-air, like me. But of course it can also hit mid-conversation, in a more intimate but no less frustrating way.
My post was about my decision to hold a page of notes on the BBC News at Ten. A story had broken late in the afternoon, following an already busy day, and by the time we reached 10pm, I knew I was getting tired and I could feel the brain fog.
I was going to talk about an outage that was affecting dozens of websites and apps, and I planned to use the technical jargon for it, as given by the company affected, and then explain what it actually meant.
But I just couldn’t get the phrase to stick in my head and I knew that without it, I wouldn’t manage the rest of what I needed to say.
I was reporting live from Glasgow. Like many of my professional peers, I do not have, and I’ve never had, autocue. And so, for the first time, I decided at the last minute to hold a page of notes with the offending phrase on it.
It felt to me at the time like an admission of failure. I have been trained never to use notes – unless there’s a specific legal reason why the wording of a statement, for example, has to be precise, or there are a lot of figures to remember.
Even then, I have prided myself on having a good enough short-term memory to get me through.