Why does showing up on camera for my business feel so fake?
Woman in a joke disguise taking a selfie, representing feeling fake on camera
“Ugh, I sound so fake on camera”
“My face does this weird thing when I talk”
“I look like a rabbit caught in the headlights when the camera’s on me”
These are the things I often hear when I talk to business owners at networking events or workshops.
Now before we go any further, lets’s just clarify, feeling fake on camera doesn't mean you are fake. It means there's a gap between two versions of you, that gap is completely normal. Let's talk about why it's there, and what may close it.
The gap you're feeling is real, but it ain’t what you think it is
There's the version of you that shows up with your best mate over coffee. Relaxed, funny, saying whatever comes to mind, not thinking twice about how you sound. Then there's the version of you the second a camera turns on. Stiffer. More careful. Reciting rather than talking.
That gap between the two is real. But it isn’t a gap between the "real you" and the "fake you." It's a gap between practised and unpractised. You've had decades of practice being yourself with the people you trust. You've had almost no practice being yourself in front of a lens. Which is why one feels natural and the other doesn't.
Why it feels like a character gap, when it's really a skill gap
The discomfort often feels so personal like it's revealing something true about you, some inauthentic version lurking under the surface, a blind spot that only the camera reveals. It really isn't. It’s simply lack of practice. If it were a character flaw, like being a ‘liar liar pants on fire’ [dishonest person] no amount of practice would help. But it does help, every time, for every person I've ever worked with on this. Skill gaps close with repetition. Character flaws? … yeh not so much. That alone tells you which one you're actually dealing with.
The people who look confident online aren't confident-first
Here's a little something that’s worth knowing: almost nobody who shows up looking easy and natural on camera started out that way. What you're watching, when you watch someone who seems effortless on video, is usually hundreds of hours of unseen, awkward, cringey practice that happened off-camera or in early videos nobody watched. Confidence didn't arrive first and then let them post. Posting, again and again, badly at first, is what built the confidence. It's backwards from how it looks.
If you're waiting to feel confident before you show up, you've got the order reversed. The confidence is on the other side of the reps, not before them.
What closes the gap
I mean look, you can watch the tutorials on how to be a better presenter, there’s some gold nuggets to be had in interweb land, but no amount of preparation can replace jumping in and doing the thing for reals. What closes the gap between "coffee with a mate you" and "camera you" is simply doing the camera version more often, in smaller, lower-stakes ways, until it stops feeling like a separate performance and starts feeling like just... you, talking, with a camera pointed at you.
Some practical starting points:
Film something with no intention of posting it. Just to get the "first ten seconds are always weird" feeling out of the way without an audience watching.
Talk to the camera the way you'd talk to one specific person you like, rather than "an audience." One friendly face in your head, not a crowd.
Let the first few attempts be genuinely bad. These are the ones that you have to get through to make the good ones that come later, great.
My take, after years of doing this work with women
As common as the term ‘build your confidence’ is, it’s something of a mis-sell. Confidence isn't something you build from scratch, like constructing a wall. It's more of an archeological dig. It’s something you excavate brushing away what's been sitting on top of it for years: self-consciousness, old comments, comparison, the belief that you need to look a certain way or sound a certain way before you're "allowed" to show up. It was always there. When we talk about ‘the work’ this isn’t about building confidence, it’s clearing the way so it can come through.
That's true whether we're talking about a woman's face in a mirror or a woman's face on a screen. Same principle, different reflector.
If this is the thing actually stopping you
If this feeling has been the reason you've stayed quiet, delayed posting, or handed the camera side of your business to someone else because you "just don't come across right" This is exactly the kind of work I'm building into Get Over Yourself . If this is the thing that’s holding you back, keep an eye out, or pop your email below and I'll let you know the moment doors open. In true Glow School fashion, there will be tips for looking more polished on camera, but more than that, we’ll be closing that gap between the woman that chatters away during coffee with her chums , and the woman you let show up for your business.
