A short livestream segment in which TJ Walker discusses becoming comfortable and natural on camera. He argues that frequent practice and repetition (making many videos) reduces nervousness and makes one sound conversational rather than scripted; recommends producing videos weekly or multiple times per week to build confidence.
Chapters
Forgive me. I'm going to share something with you that is going to sound like I'm being self serving. It's going to sound like a brag, or a humble brag as people like to call now. So if someone writes in to me and says, tj, you are my role model, I want to sound as comfortable as you speaking. It seems impossible. How can I ever do this? And this is one of my online students. I share this with you because I do get this from time to time. And sure, it's nice for my ego, but that's not what's important here. The key thing is anybody can do that now for most people, even if they're comfortable, confident speakers when they're speaking on video the first time, the second time, the 30th time, it feels awkward. You feel contrived, you feel like, oh, what do I say? I need to get it just right. Where's the director? Where's my script? What am I going to say five seconds from now? So what happens is you start to sound artificial. Your natural speech patterns don't come out the way they normally do. It's either choppier, it's faster, your head, your body doesn't move as much and that's what makes you seem unnatural. So why Zoodar, I'm so good at. Well, it's not that I'm so good at it, it's simply a function of how many times I've done it. Now I make anywhere from a hundred to sometimes more than a thousand videos a year. Now, I don't watch every minute of all of them, but I typically watch at least a couple of seconds to make sure the audio is on and things are okay. So I get used to hearing myself and seeing myself. What happens is when you do something so often, I've been doing that for 15 or so years. That YouTube has been running, I guess 13 years, but I've been doing it for a lot longer than that and really ever since the 1980s. So what that has done is simply made it impossible for me to be nervous because I do it so often. It's hard for anyone to be nervous when they're doing something regularly. And over time, once you lose that nervousness, you can just talk to the camera as if you're talking to one friend. You don't have to script it all out and memorize. You can just talk. That's what I'm doing now. I have a general sense of what I want to convey to you in this video. But I didn't write it all down word for word. I'm not following some other set script. I'm sharing an insight with you exactly as you would do if a client or a customer came to you after a meeting, one on one, and asked you a more specific question about your area of expertise. You would just talk to them. You wouldn't say, Well, I need 20 minutes to create a PowerPoint. No, you would just talk to them. So the way to get better at this is to just do it frequently. That's the thing you'll see that is remarkably consistent among all YouTube stars. And I'm not a YouTube star with billions of followers, but the YouTube stars doesn't matter if they're 10 years old, 30, 40, 50, or 80. The ones who've been at it, who have huge audiences, they're all the same in that they sound like they're just talking to someone. They don't sound artificial or contrived at all unless it's a specific act they're doing. But for Most people on YouTube who come across really well, it's that they're so relaxed and natural because they've done so many. It's a sheer function of the number of times you do it. So if you want to get better, my advice is, of course, I'd love for you to take more of my online courses and hire me for in person training, but the reality is you don't need that. If you just produce videos regularly, if you do one a year, you're probably not going to get any better. You do one a month, well, that's better than nothing. But do one a week or certainly a couple a week, and you're going to be completely relaxed, comfortable, conversational, and exude confidence. You can do it. I'm telling you, if you've ever had one good conversation with any friend in the world, you already have every skill you need to come across really well with great confidence on camera.
