Camera Confidence

• You wouldn’t care so much about what people think of you if you realized how seldom they do.
• People are either haters, champions, or bored. Bored is the biggest camp. They’re not judging, and it’s your job to shift them to champions.
• Practice, practice, practice.
• Learn to laugh at yourself.
• Camera confidence depends on true confidence. You develop true self-confidence by becoming comfortable in your own skin. That is built both by internal identity work and outward actions and accomplishments.
  • Thought and action have a bi-directional, symbiotic relationship. Your thoughts directly lead to your actions, but your actions also influence your future thoughts.
  • Think about the last time you went for a long walk, or went to the gym. You probably felt better afterwards, right? Perhaps you were in a better mood afterward, and even felt more motivated to do your work.
  • Action shifts thought. Though drives action. The two form a perpetual cycle.
  • So to develop camera confidence, you must:
    • Get right in your mind – change your self-talk around how you look and sound on camera.
      • Realize that you’re going to get better. Your current output is just one step on a journey.
    • Talk to the camera. A lot. The more you do it, the easier it’s going to get, and the better you’re going to get at it.
• Remember: the audience will never know what you didn’t say.
• Focus less on you – how you look, sound, how cool you seem – and more on others. What are you giving to them?

Small tips:

• Edit backwards: You won’t to sift through all your flubs.
  • It also means it doesn’t matter how much you flub. It won’t really affect you that much in the edit (or inconvenience your editor if you have one).
    • You’ll learn to recognize patterns in the audio waveforms and edit very quickly.
• If you’re stuck on a line, try saying it in a silly voice
  • [speech therapy technique, King’s Speech where the king can swear just fine]
• Do a table read, or a “practice run”. Sleep on it, and re-film the next day. It’ll almost always be better the second time.
• Try livestreaming, speaking live, and podcasting – both alone and with guests. The more modes of speaking under pressure you can expose yourself to, the more comfortable you’ll become.
• Try a teleprompter. This can be especially helpful when you’re talking about something you don’t know well enough to speak extemporaneously on.
• My technique: have the script or outline next to you on an iPad, your phone, or a piece of paper. Read each line off the script to yourself until you’ve memorized it (short-term), then say it to the camera until you get it right (or even more times if you want to “keep going until it stops getting better”)

Philosophy:

• Learn to laugh at yourself. Learn to be the butt of the joke and have a great time with it. If you’ve built up strong internal self confidence, then being the butt of the joke is fine.
  • And if you’re ok with that, you’ll be ok looking silly on camera or flubbing some lines.
• I know even successful people who have a chip on their shoulder; they’re afraid to let their guard down and look silly from time to time. In my opinion, this limits them.
  • We’re all dinguses. We all fart loudly sometimes. We all accidentally run into the side of doorways. It’s fine.
  • Being unpolished is how you get polished.
    • This applies both to getting a polished final product with a single video, but also honing polished speaking skills in general.

Useful Videos and Resources

My video on gaining more confidence:

Here’s an old video of me speaking very poorly in front of an audience:

Here I am about 5 years later: