If you feel nervous or uncomfortable on camera, there’s a few tricks you can use to calm yourself and make a great connection with your audience. We’ll share 3 quick and easy tips you can use to deliver a great performance on camera in this video, as well as some advice that was helpful for Tim when he got started making YouTube videos.
One of the most common experiences that new creators have is they sit down, they turn on the camera, they’re ready to record, and then they feel like super, super, super, nervous, like they’re standing on stage in front of a million people– cause it might be, on YouTube. Today we want to talk with you a few ideas to help you calm those nerves and help you feel comfortable on camera.
Daniel Read will offer his insight as he trains people how to feel comfortable on camera. Mostly actors, who are doing commercials and television stuff.
But today we want to talk to you guys about how to ease your nerves. Now, we actually have a whole course that we’re shooting about this, and you can find out more about this linked up below. It’s called Find Your Voice, and it’s all about helping you feel comfortable on camera. And even if you do you feel comfortable camera, it also helps you just present your authentic, real self so it’s really easy for your audience to build a connection with you and feel like there’s a natural, human bond going on there.
There’s a whole lesson in this course called Dealing with Nerves that handles this whole topic specifically, and Daniel’s going to share with us a few things from that lesson to help us overcome those nerves.
Tension & Release
You might be inclined to have kind of shaky hands, or your body gets overly nervous and fidgety. So if you can physically tense up your muscles, like, very conscientiously every muscle group in your body and then systematically, one by one, start to release and relax each of those muscle groups, you will actually feel a lot calmer when it comes time to speak. So if you scrunch up your face and then relax, bam. You’ve just very conscientiously actually relaxed your body and eliminated some of those nerves.
Correct Breathing
Second would be to breathe properly. You want to make sure that you’re taking in deep breaths, you’re not breathing in shallow. If you’re taking in all these shallow breaths, then your heart rate is going to go up, you’re going to sound really weird, like you just ran a marathon, because you have these shallow breaths. So you’re going to start taking these deep breaths. I like to think it like drinking a milkshake. I just, personally, I really resonate with that.
I’m breathing in through here, through my diaphragm, and then I’m blowing out a full breath. You don’t see my chest move a lot. Actually, I’m moving my gut as I breathe in and out. And if you just take some time to breathe in for a six second count, then blow out for a six second count, you end up with this cyclical breathing pattern. By slowing down your breathing pattern, you’re actually going to slow down your heart rate. Which, again, is going to give you a little bit more control over what you’re doing, help you feel a little bit less nervous, help get some of those butterflies out of your system.
Trust
All right, the third thing is the power of trust. You been at this some amount of time to bring you to where you are. You’ve put in the time, you’ve practiced, you are now ready to shoot, and it’s your own mind that’s actually getting in your way. You are your own worst enemy.
So you just need to allow yourself to trust your abilities. You’re capable of doing more than you think you are, chances are, so if you just allow yourself to believe it, you’re going to be able to produce some really great content. The camera, the audience, everybody is rooting for you. So trust that. Trust in your own abilities, just like everybody else is.
One thing that helped me was when I started actually picturing people there, too. Rather than looking at the camera, like, I know those of you guys who are watching this video on YouTube, you’re counting every video, and so that helps me relax. Like, oh, I’m not talking to the camera anymore, now I’m picturing the people who watch this and comment. I think it’s really important because people are rooting for you, and when you start looking at the camera less and start looking at the comments and the people that are going to be watching and interacting, you’re picturing the people. So that makes a big difference.
If this is something you want to learn more about, you want to dig into more about how do I feel comfortable on camera and, even more importantly, how do I present my real, true, authentic self. We have a lesson on dealing with nerves which some of these things came from that. But there’s a whole course that goes into way more detail about telling good stories, making connections with the audience, body posture and language, and a lot of other stuff. So check out the course herehttps://videocreators.com/findyourvoiceyt1.
And I would love to hear from you guys in the comments below because you guys talk to the camera all the time. I would love to hear what advice and tips you have, and those of you who do feel nervous on camera, and you want to learn more about how to present your true, authentic self, read the comments people are leaving down there.
I know you’ll learn a ton from them, as I always do. And if this is your first time here, I’d love to have you subscribe because every week we do content just like this to help you guys in ways that grow your YouTube channel, helps you make better videos, in this case, for more human, natural connection with your audience in a way that lets you spread messages that change people’s lives.