How to Be More Confident

Anybody who wants to be in the business of creating videos, or to star in videos, wants to learn how to be more confident. I agree that building self confidence especiallly in front of a camera can be daunting. But never impossible!

There are two different directions you can take with this:

LOOKING (or SOUNDING) more confident and ACTUALLY be more confident

Let’s look into this a little bit further:

1. Learn how to look or sound more confident.

Here, you’ll only be tweaking some habits and practices. The first big one is practice. If you have a script or a presentation, what you must keep doing is to PRACTICE! Just by reading your script over and over in front of a camera, trying out some hand gestures that can work, and playing with the tone of your voice, can either make you feel more confident or at least make you sound a little bit more confident. I believe both will happen.

I remember when I started making these videos which is when I started my web design company, I was a total mess! I was firm in my decision to use videos to market and explain my services, but I found it REALLY hard for me to make any good videos!

Why? Because I lacked confidence!

Whenever I got in front of my camera, I’ll have a whole bunch of bullet points listed out, but I didn’t want to keep looking down to check on my list and back at the camera, so what did I do?

I tried to memorize everything and get in front of it, but then I messed up still and I thought “Oh I gotta redo the whole thing again” and I go through it and have to redo the whole thing AGAIN! And so I tried hanging a little paper below the camera and have small bullet points, but guess what happened?

For a short 3-minute video, I ended up recording for a whole hour! It was DIFFICULT.

One thing that was able to finally help me was a teleprompter! In the video above, I showed my actual teleprompter which I lug around with me whenever I have videoshoots on locations and even in my studio. It’s got this beam splitter glass and my iPod with a special teleprompter that goes inside there. The words shine up and reflect all off of the glass towards me, and the camera goes behind it. That way, I can look right at the camera and I can still see the words.

In the beginning, using a teleprompter was a big help! It just helped me feel a lot more confident to make these videos that I was able to actually make better ones. The production quality came out great too! I was able to just look straight at the camera and yet I didn’t have to stress so much about my words so it really cut down on the amount of time that I was putting in to each of these videos.

The one drawback of using a teleprompter is sounding scripted. You can easily get into that rut when you’re reading something, right? So that’s an area where you’d want to practice as well. Read your script and see how you sound. You want to make sure you’re sounding conversational as though you’re talking to someone through that camera or someone on the other side of it.

Note: Don’t be afraid of making mistakes while recording! Remember, you can edit the video and erase all of your mistakes!

One more tip here on how to look and sound confident:

Talk only about things you REALLY know about.  And if you have a strong opinion about a particular issue or topic, definitely SHARE YOUR OPINION because you will come across as way more confident.

2. Learn how to build confidence INTERNALLY.

I’ve definitely grown a lot over the years and as I look back at the history of videos that I’ve created, it was evident how big of a progress I made over time. Part of that came from PRACTICE and REPETITION, and getting more comfortable with things, but part of it was also a CHOICE.

See, I recognized that I struggled with self confidence. And I intentionally chose to put myself in uncomfortable situation so that I become more confident and more comfortable. As I started training on videos and training people LIVE, I had to commit to myself that I knew what I was talking about and that my opinions were valuable.

Just by making that choice, it allowed me to be more confident!

Also, try taking a step of vulnerability – knowing that you’re going to put yourself out there and let people see YOU and see if they’ll like you or not. I consciously made the decision that I like ME! I like who I am. In fact, I love myself. And it won’t matter what other people think, and I just had to repeat that affirmation over and over. THAT absolutely helped me in building self confidence.

Confidence is really a DECISION. If you decide that you’re confident, then you tell yourself “I am confident. I am a confident person”. It really will result in YOU becoming MORE confident!

If you, on the other hand, say things like “I”m…I’m shy” or “I… those things scare me” or “I’m timid. I don’t like being in front of a camera. I don’t like speaking in front of people”, then it’s NEVER going to translate into that level of confidence you’re looking for.