Don't worry about deviating from your
perfect
script or your slides if you're giving
any online talks
or presentations. It's important to plan
and rehearse of course, but you need to
be flexible,
and actually you can use some really
clever detour strategies, as I call them,
to keep your speech more engaging. What
you need to do really is to
think about adding variety by
interrupting your own flow. You can
suddenly ask for questions from the
audience,
you can make little comments that force
a small diversion.
Interrupting the flow makes you tell a
story,
explain a side point. It gets people who
might be daydreaming while you're
talking to look up and pay attention.
And it's normally what we do in everyday
speech anyway when we're talking to
friends.
"Oh that reminds me I've got to tell you
this point." Or "Did I tell you about this?
I'll go back to that point in a minute,
but I want to explain this." All that kind
of thing,
it keeps the variety alive. And also you
can digress
actually on purpose, you know really
intentionally put that into your speech,
with a
"Oh yes when it comes to ..."  I don't know
"What I was doing yesterday
it's all about doing this more or that
more." You know whatever your story is
and obviously you'll have all your own
side anecdotes that you can put
in. These digressions literally wake
people up and they help you
appear more human and not like a
presenting avatar which
obviously can happen when you're doing
things online.
Please don't worry if you get
sidetracked or move
from those perfect presentation slides.
You really want to be
human and real on virtual platforms and
that is how human beings will connect
with you best.
