Why Can't I Get Myself to Record the Video?
You're not avoiding the video because you aren't any good on camera, or because your equipment isn't good enough. You're avoiding it because somewhere along the line it stopped being a video and turned into a performance, one that has to be scripted, memorized, edited, and worth somebody's time. Almost none of that is required, and the version that is required is a lot smaller than the one sitting in your head.
What You'll Learn:
- Why the video is the task that rolls over week after week when everything else gets done
- The two completely different problems that look like one problem, and the ten-second test that separates them
- Why comparing your first take to someone else's finished video doesn't feel like comparing
- What to use as the standard instead of "worth watching"
- Why you can't know whether video works for you until one exists
Why is the video always the thing that doesn't get done?
Think about the letter you keep meaning to write.
You'd text them in a second. Two lines, done, sent before you've thought about it. But you decided this one should be a letter. Nice paper. Proper thoughts. The right words, in the right order, because it matters.
So five months go by and they still haven't heard from you.
Nothing was wrong with your handwriting.
That's the video. You upgraded it. Somewhere between "I should do a video" and actually opening the camera, it became A Video, and A Video needs a script, a hook, decent lighting, an edit, and something genuinely worth saying.
And here's what I want you to see. Every single one of those is a real, sensible thing to want. That's what makes this so sticky.
You didn't get less willing to do the work your business requires. You got ambitious, in the one place where ambition costs you the whole thing.
What's the belief underneath it?
There are, on the surface, two. But you'll see they're actually the same thing.
- I don't have a plan or strategy, therefore, I can't get started.
- I see so many polished videos, professional videos, and I'm worried mine are going to come across as amateur, unprofessional, or just plain lame.
The underbelly of it all: I don't trust myself to figure this out, be imperfect for a bit, and maybe even a little worry about being judged.
And truthfully, that's a fair conclusion from where you're standing. It IS hard. You sit down, you know your material cold, you've taught it a hundred times, and the second the camera is on, it's gone. You can't remember your own point. Or worse, you remember the point, but it comes out all robotic and blah.
But look at what we're comparing ourselves to.
You are watching somebody's finished video. Their take forty. After the edit, after the retakes, after the bit where they lost their place and said a swear word and started again. Video is the single most edited thing anybody publishes.
And you're measuring your first take against it.
Nobody sees anyone else's first take. Ever. So the comparison isn't just unfair, it's invisible as a comparison — it doesn't feel like comparing, it feels like noticing.
Then there's the scrolling. You go and look at what everybody else is doing, and you find the channels with eleven subscribers, and the ones with sixty thousand, and somewhere in there the thought arrives: is that going to be me?
Or better said, please, please, please, don't let that be me.
That's a rotten twenty minutes. I know. I know. And you're not being precious about it, that genuinely is a rotten twenty minutes.
And there's one more layer. If the video is bad, it doesn't just mean the video was bad. It means something about you. About whether you're actually any good at this thing you've told people you do.
So not recording it is safer. As long as it doesn't exist, it can't be evidence.
Except it can't be evidence of the good thing either.
How do I tell which problem I actually have?
There are two completely different things in your way, and most of us try to solve them as one thing, which is why neither one moves.
The mechanical ones. Noise outside. No time that isn't already spoken for. Too tired by evening. Don't know how to edit. Don't have a quality camera.
The mindset ones. What do I even say. I can't retain my own lines. I'll look wrong, sound wrong, look like I'm reading a script, be boring.
Here's the test. The mechanical ones have an answer you can buy, or put in the calendar. The mindset ones don't. So if you catch yourself researching microphones for the fourth evening running, that's the mindset one wearing the mechanical one's coat.
(We all do this. Window shopping feels like progress, and it's free.)
And the internal half is not a separate track from the business.
Mind Management is recognizing and managing the thoughts, emotions, assumptions, and reactions that affect business decisions and follow-through. It is treated as business work rather than a separate personal-development track, because the internal and external work happen together.
Business work. Not a self-improvement project you do in the evenings once the real work is finished.
Because the decision not to record today is a business decision. It has an effect on your business. It just doesn't look like one, so it never gets counted as one, and so it never gets managed.
What should the standard be instead?
This is the part that actually unsticks it.
Small Wins are the everyday completed actions that keep a business moving: getting the post out, having the conversation with a potential client, finally recording the video you had been avoiding. They are ordinary and frequent, and they matter more than the occasional big outcome because they are what is actually available to do on most days. Doing the small thing you have been avoiding counts as much as doing the small thing that was easy.
Read that middle bit again, because it names your exact situation on purpose: finally recording the video you had been avoiding.
Recorded is the win. Not viewed, not liked, not shared, not good. RECORDED.
That sounds like a consolation prize, but right now the video has to earn its existence before you'll make it. It has to be worth watching, or why bother? So the standard sits above your head, and you never clear it, and nothing gets made.
Move the standard to recorded and you'll make forty of them.
Forty is how any of us got good. There is no other route. The people whose take forty you've been watching got there by making thirty-nine worse ones first. Every one of them. Nobody gets to skip this part.
And forty sounds like a lot right now, I know. It isn't a target though. It's just what happens once the standard is low enough to clear on a Tuesday.
How do I know whether video even works for me?
This is the marketing half, but many coaches never even make it to assessing this part.
Find Out First is getting actual information — feedback, data, conversation, outside perspective — before deciding what a result means. A quiet result is information, not a verdict, and most of the time it is unreadable, because nothing was being measured.
You've already got a verdict about video. It's this probably won't work for me, and I'll be bad at it.
Where did that come from?
Not from a video. There isn't one. So it came from imagining one, which is the same as deciding a launch failed before you ran it.
The people who don't know you yet, and who prefer to watch videos, have no way to find you, and no way to work out whether they like you. That's the actual cost, and it's a marketing cost, not a confidence one. One recorded video is worth more than another month of deciding whether you'd be good at it, because it's the only thing that can tell you.
And you don't need a script to do it. You need to know the four or five things you're going to say, in order, and be willing to say them however they come out.
Don't overthink the wording. There's no right version of it, and nobody is grading the first one.
Personally, I prefer an imperfect video where the person in the video makes mistakes, laughs, rambles a bit, and shows me who they are. I can stand beside that person because they're not perfect and neither am I.
What did this look like for me?
I don't record from a script. I record from bullet points.
That wasn't a preference. It was the fix for a real problem — I kept trying to record from a written script, and it kept not working.
You could totally see I was reading. I'm not good at not looking like I'm reading. And while I'm so focused on not losing my place in the script (and yes, I've tried teleprompters) my personality takes a back seat. The conversational tone disappears.
So now the only things written word-for-word are the handful of lines that have to be exact. A definition I'm precise about on purpose, or a quote. Everything else is a bullet, and I say it however it comes out on the day.
That one change is why the video gets made.
I'm still not 100% there with video. It's two parts strategy and one part mind management that's left for me to solve. But I'm close. I have tested enough to know that my current approach has no real demand on YouTube. But I've been doing my homework, so it's time to test round 467. Just kidding, this is really only round 5, probably.
And then there's the mind management piece. I have to get around the production issue. I loathe editing. Even though I've made it as easy as possible, I still avoid it.
So the solution might literally be — no edits. Just publish.
FAQ
Don't I need decent equipment first? You need to be audible and visible. That's it, you don't need a studio — some recording platforms will turn what you record into studio quality anyway. Here's the real test though: if you've been researching gear for more than about an evening, the gear was never the blocker. Buying something is a really comfortable way to feel like you're working on it.
What if I hate how I look and sound? You will, at first. We all do, because you've never experienced yourself from the outside before and your own voice sounds wrong to you in a way it doesn't to anyone else. It fades around video ten. You did not get better looking. You just stopped being the audience for it.
How long should the video be? Shorter than you think, and one idea. A video that makes one point clearly beats one that covers five, and it's about a tenth of the work. If you can't say what the one point is before you hit record, that's not a filming problem, that's an "the idea isn't clear yet" problem. Truthfully, the right length is whatever length of video you'll get done today.
What if nobody watches it? Then you've learned something real, which is more than you have now. But check what you're actually measuring first — the first few will be watched by almost nobody, and that's not unusual. It's a start, not a final result. You need a run of them before there's anything to read.
Do I need a script? No. You need to know the four or five things you're going to say, in order. Scripting is what makes most people look like they're reading, and it's usually the thing that takes their personality out of the video.
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Michelle Sera
Founder of ElevatedMind®, Marketing Coach, Happiness Coach and creator of the Binge-Able Business™. Click below to get your Binge-Able Business Recipe.
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