Three Simple Steps to Increase Your Speaking Focus
by Stéphanie Walter
Here are some ideas to help you maintain focus on your talk remotely.
Breathe. One of my main problems--whether speaking remotely, teaching, or in-person--is usually stressing. When I stress, I tend to speak really fast and forget to breathe. People have a hard time understanding me. This trick might sound super strange but bear with me: to force me to breathe, I actually put BREATH--full caps, with a few line breaks before and after--in my speaker notes. Just seeing that in the notes usually helps me take this small little “breathing” pause. I sometimes put 2 or 3 breaths on the same slide, usually after each “big” idea on this slide.
Shut down notifications. When you’re speaking remotely, prepare in advance to make sure nothing will disturb the presentation on your computer. This means shutting down emails and any notifications (some OSs have “do not disturb” modes now, which makes this easy). On the Mac I use Pliim for that. Also, disable background sync (dropbox, google, etc.) because it takes a lot of bandwidth and you will need that for screen sharing.
Have someone else run your chat if you can. Last but not least: it’s complicated to speak and follow the chat at the same time. Usually, people talk in the chat while you speak, and many even ask questions. If possible, try to have a speaking assistant. It can be a friend; it can also be the organizer of the conference/meetup. The idea is to have someone who can pick up interesting questions in the chat (and refer to them later in the QA), and answer quick questions (like when people ask for a reference or a link for example). If you are using Zoom for more interactive workshops, that person can handle polls and do all the little things around the talk to free you up to concentrate on delivering a great presentation.
A few simple changes can help you focus and make your remote presentation go much more smoothly.
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