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How to Crush Self-Doubt

So there's one more thing we need to talk about before we go any further, and that is self doubt. So, you know I asked this morning, what was holding you back from doing videos? Was "self doubt" a part of anyone's answer? Even if you didn't use a word "self doubt"? Yeah, okay. (laughing) Everybody's like, "kind of me". So yeah, this is a thing. (laughing) Is that it's hard to be on camera and have your energy up and help people. If you are in the least bit shy, or maybe you're new at doing what you do, or you just aren't entirely sure. Like, "am I an expert enough? "Are people gonna, do I know enough? "I'm not sure." That's all what I mean by "self doubt". Is anything where you're like, "I don't know if I'm, fancy enough, "or good enough, or pretty enough to make this happen." So I want to talk about self doubt and it's flip side is "confidence". Confidence is a belief that you can do something and no matter what happens, you'll be fine. It's not the belief that you'll do something and...

be excellent at it. Confidence is knowing that even if you totally fall on your face, you're gonna be fine. So it's important 'cause people think, "well I can't have confidence 'til I know I'll be perfect." No, that's not what confidence is. It's believing that you're gonna be fine no matter what. The only way that you'll believe you'll be fine no matter what, is when you actually do hard things, try them, and you don't die . (laughing) And you live through it. So, there is some really interesting research on confidence, and one of the things that they found is that confidence is built on competence. "Competence" being your actual ability and skill to do something. Well, you only get ability and skill to do something when you actually do it. Not when you read about it, not when you learn about it, not when you talk to friends about it, but when you actually do the thing, that's how competence is built, which then leads to more confidence. So the only way to get confident in doing videos and feel okay on video and not feel weird and nervous, is to do it. Is to do it over and over again, and also fail, and know that you're fine. Because if you have the constant fear that you have to be perfect, you're not ever gonna post anything. So you have to know that even when you're not perfect, it'll be fine. And you only know that through doing it, and doing it again. Super good news, every single video gets better. Every video. How you're sitting in the light gets better. The way you talk and sound gets better. The way you configure your set up gets better. Like that whole stack of books I had with my laptop on top of it, that took me a while, that totally improved my videos. Angle is just better. So everything, doing it over and over, you're gonna get better at it. But, the only way you'll do that is if you actually do it and again and again and again. This is why I said I did the challenge of the daily videos, is because doing it every day just took away all remaining, "Oh no I have to get everything perfect before I can record" because, you just, on some days, you just don't have the time to do that. So if you give yourself a challenge to do it more often than you actually think you have time for, you're gonna get better faster. That make sense? Yeah. So you're not gonna just walk out of here with some sense of, "I can do videos perfectly!" You have to practice again and again, it's the only way to get good at YouTube, and YouTube rewards you for doing it again and again, and posting videos. YouTube doesn't reward videos that are perfectly shot and edited because YouTube can't see that. What they reward, is the consistency and all the uploading and the more and more people watching, clicking, and liking. Are there any questions in the chat room before we? I see MT was just saying, "I find it helps to do videos, "that I don't plan on posting just to get "comfortable with the camera." So just kind of Yes Proving a similar point, really. Exactly, exactly. The more you do it. Now the one caveat is if you find yourself doing a lot of videos and you've posted none of them, that's not gonna help your business. (laughing) Those videos on your hard drive aren't doing anything for you. So I always tell people, if you need to shoot two or three times, but post the last one. And if you need to set a timer, where you're like, "I'll give myself 15 minutes of just practicing, "but then at the end of the 15 minutes "I'm gonna actually do it." So, your challenge, is to shoot your first video. Everybody has smart phones? Yeah? Okay, so you're gonna shoot a video, if you wanna do a talking head, you just, hold your camera out here and talk into it. If you wanna do an interview show, grab somebody, and be like "can I ask you three questions about, "whatever it is you do?" Right? So if you're a teacher, you know what your students needs, you can ask some questions. Yours is a little more difficult 'cause you do customer testimonials. (laughing) So you can call them up and, whoever is your recent customer you wanna get a testimonial out of, schedule some times to get together, and do those videos. And then shoot an intro video. "Hey, I'm Tara and this is how I help people, and I'm gonna be posting videos more regularly now, so welcome." That's what your video can say. In the next segment we're gonna talk about intros, outros, how to make a call to action, how to lead people into buying. At this point I just want you to, just hit record. Did you have a question? What's the typical or recommended duration of the actual video? That's good question. So, the more people watch the entire video when it's under four minutes. But, that's not necessarily effective at making sales. So, if you wanna do short, four minute, talking head videos and do them more often, you're gonna get more views and more people watching the entire thing. But if you want to talk about, you want to demonstrate your expertise, or you want to have a good conversation that's kind of behind the scenes-y and shows people what's going on, it's gonna last longer. So, the length is really determined by the quality. So, to get a video shorter, I recommend cutting out the boring bits. Not, limiting yourself to four minutes. Does that make sense? And also, I mean all of my videos are over four minutes because I'm explaining concepts and mindset, and I talk about confidence a lot in your small business and I just can't get it in in under four minutes. (laughing) So, you just go with what's gonna be quality and actually say something. 'cause a lot of people in four minutes, just won't say anything that useful. So you can cut out the non-useful part to get it in. Okay? Are you guys all ready to go shoot your video? (collective agreeing) Alright. There's a couple of questions that might help for the technical aspect, so one actually, you just pretty much answered about the format whether to do short or a longer, and certainly for this exercise it's gonna just be a short video, so don't worry too much about that. "What about the viewing format? "For YouTube the horizontal format is best, "but so many other platforms prefer the vertical format." That's a great question "If you're posting more than one platform, "what is the best way to record the video?" So I would do horizontal for YouTube. 'Cause we're talking about YouTube. And Facebook Live, you can also do horizontal, so if you wanna, for those of you out there who are already doing Facebook Live, record that always horizontal. And if you record that on your computer, it's gonna end up horizontal anyhow. So for this challenge, shoot it horizontal. Really it's Instagram and Snapchat that do the vertical, and the thing is those videos, that's different. Those are short. Really small little clips and so what I will often do, is if you're doing a vlog format, right? I'll do an Instagram story of, "Oh I'm walking through the Creative Live offices". And then I'll turn it, I'll post that to Instagram, I'll turn it, and do the same thing horizontal, with a little better for YouTube. 'Cause I'm gonna put it together in a Vlog. It's also fine if what you have is a bunch of vertical, you can absolutely take those and edit them together. What you don't want to do, is edit together a vertical and a horizontal. It's very disconcerting for the viewer. But there are, in your editing software, there's even ways to zoom in to make it. But for now, all of you, I kept saying like this, so actually hold it like this. (laughing) Or like this. When you record. And use your headphones if you have headphones and your not talking to someone else in the video, use them you're gonna get slightly better sound. "What about adding music or other features to "the audio videos and advice about using music and "other content that might need copyright issues?" Of course you always gotta be careful. Yes. So the editing software I recommended Famorgo and I think even iMovie and Windows Movie Maker all have safe music on there for you to use. If you want to get other music, you can search for "pod safe music". There are sites that list, we're gonna talk about this in podcasting, but there are sites that list music that people have under a, it's a kind of copyright where you're welcome to use it in your video. But you don't go using popular music. (laughing) Or any other kinds of music, because you don't wanna get sued. So, yeah. You can look for that but if you're using some of that editing software they have some tracks built in. What I use on my podcast is my husband actually just made something in GarageBand while he was futzing around, just compiling drums, piano, whatever. So, you can do that as well if you like messing around in GarageBand. When you first started, did you used to kind of, put your content past, say your husband for example, like, "take a look at this, "tell me if you think it's too long, "too short, like, what's missing?" Or did you kind of just put it out there? Stick to your own judgement (laughing) It's funny you mentioned my husband. He lives with me, he does not also want to see me talking about small business videos. So no, I just put it out there because, also, my husband who is lovely, is not at all my right audience. So, the same thing, (laughing) You laughed at that 'cause you get it, right? Like that's not at all, I'm always thinking about my audience, and so if anything I would send it to a student. But I didn't do that in the beginning 'cause I actually melt under any kind of negative feedback at all. So I knew it would stop me. So instead I just posted it. And if it's really bad I can take it down later. But, if you constantly go around looking for feedback, you're gonna only listen to the stuff that's negative. And it's gonna slow you down. So our brains are actually wired to hear the negative louder and more often than the positive, so even if 10 people tell you it's positive and one person is like, "uh, you slouched a little". Your brain will be like, "I slouched! Ah!" And you won't put it out. So I say, don't run it by anybody, and then tell your customers it's there. The people who already love you and buy from you, tell them and say, "what else would you like? "What else could I do for you?" And if you ask the question, "What else would you like to see?" You're gonna get a different kind of feedback then, "what's wrong with this video?". 'Cause "what's wrong with this video?" is gonna get a list of things that are wrong with it. That's not helpful, actually. (laughing) But "what could I do better to serve you?", is gonna get, like, "oh I'd love to see you do this!" Which is a positive direction you can take it.