[dmuso]

How do you deal with “talking to the void” at the beginning? I speak publicly fairly regular and I get a lot of energy from people in the crowd. I’ve done some YouTube and converted that to podcast format. I can’t seem to get motivated to do it as I can’t see/interact with people. People I know in my niche community will tell me they watched my video or listened to the podcast, I think “oh that’s nice I guess” and I go back home to stare at a camera and I can’t seem to connect making a video with audience interaction. Is this a thing? How do you think I could deal with it?

[mwidell]

Yeah in the beginning it definitely felt extremely weird talking to a camera, with no other person in the room. I had trouble talking as naturally as I do to a live audience or even to a friend.

This was actually so hard for me in the beginning, that I avoided talking directly to the camera for a long time. Instead I recorded footage of me doing things and then did a voiceover track to put over that.

But it is mostly a matter of practice and becoming used to, and comfortable with, that situation.

After 1-2 years of weekly videos it didn’t feel weird anymore for me. And nowadays I can talk just as naturally to the camera as to a friend.

But yeah definitely a big hurdle for many people I have talked to as well.

I think what I nowadays do, without thinking about it, is I imagine the camera is a person in my core audience.