Scary Stories
Being interviewed with a camera in your face is scary for most of us (including me).
We’ve all had those moments when we were on a video or in front of a crowd and we thought we totally messed up. Your reaction is automatic: you turn red and look around at people for reassurance, but all you see is what you perceive as judgment.
As a result, we avoid future embarrassment by reducing the chance of those moments ever happening again. We tell ourselves we are not good in front of people with just one or two “bad” experiences.
I get that a lot of that from business owners before I start a video shoot.
I hear things like: “I don’t do video” “I don’t look good on video” or “I don’t know what to say”…
But you’d be TOTALLY wrong. I experience the opposite when I review the video rough cuts.
How’s that?
Making videos a discussion
Typically, interviews last 20-25 minutes. There’s an ice breaker question, a discussion about your motivation, what got you started in your business and what makes your business special.
What I found from my video interviews, job interviews, podcast interviews is:
- After a few minutes, people tend to relax when they are talking with someone that is positive and a good listener
- Everyone gets excited when they explain their journey in life
- Once things get rolling, we have fun
Like the moment David Samaha talked about working on a broken go cart during my video with him.
When he was a kid, there was a neighborhood go cart that got passed around from kid to kid. When it got to him, it was not running at all. With a little help from an adult mechanic, he rebuilt the go cart engine over the winter and by the spring it was the fastest thing around. (As a parent that sounds a little scary, but he is still around.)
When David told this story during the video, his face lit up. I felt his excitement and knew it would come through in the video.
While everyone doesn’t have a story like David’s, EVERYONE has a unique and interesting story.
How do I learn to be more comfortable in a video?
If you want to make sure you are ready for an interview, use the concepts I learned in improvisation.
To help me feel more comfortable in new situations, I took quite a few improv classes. I can tell you improv is a game changer. It’s a lot of fun, kinda scary, but it gets easier the more you do it.
The first class I took, the instructor said you must learn to “let go and not stop yourself”. Sounds easy, but it ain’t. It was incredibly difficult, but very important.
When you are in improv, everything that happens during a scene is fair game. For instance, I was in a scene with a lady and the suggestion was airplane and board game. I chose a board game and the person I was playing with blurted out “our plane is going down, do something co-pilot”. I went from a relaxing game of checkers to a being in a cockpit at 12,000 feet and falling.
What I didn’t anticipate was the reaction of the other students. They watched me go from relaxed to stressed in a split second and laughed uncontrollably. My reaction was priceless, even though I felt like crap and didn’t know what to say.
I felt totally out of comfort zone, but I ended up playing along and had a great time doing it.
Takeaway
The lesson learned, we all have those moments. We feel like something we experienced was horrible and everyone was judging us, but that is the story you tell yourself, not based on facts.
When you are a little vulnerable or show some emotion on a video, you create moments. Those moments go a long way to separate you from your clients. It also builds a relationship between you and the customer, before you ever meet.
So, give it chance. Create a video and I guarantee a videographer that understands editing and how to craft a story can make an engaging video that tells your unique story.
Promise.
