I have always been the awkward type of person – someone who doesn’t like to put themselves out there, someone who doesn’t want attention on themselves, and tries to make themselves small so that they hope no one looks at them. But since I am trying to create content that has fundamentally changed. Now I realized that to get what you want from the world, you have to ask for it. You have to ask for it multiple times, you have to ask it clearly, and you have to say things to people. That made me realize that talking is an integral part of the human experience and it is fundamental to any type of growth.

So if you’re creating content, it is most likely to perform better if you are yourself on the camera, if you are very authentic. If you are able to express emotions for the character or for yourself as naturally as possible, as if an instinct.

So when I started, I had to build it all up from the foundation. The first thing you have to get comfortable with is standing in front of a camera and understanding where you are supposed to stand. My general rule of thumb is have the lens on your eye height and stay one hand distance away from it.Then comes the part where you are supposed to talk in front of the camera. You will run out of breath, you will stutter in your sentences, and you will pause after two-three words in almost all the sentences. You will do like four or five texts for a six- or seven-word sentence, and that’s natural. That’s how most of it works. By the end of it, you will have a long video which is full of stutters.You can edit it all out and then you have a video where you are standing in front of the camera. You’re not able to make proper eye contact or sound a bit unnatural.And you are supposed to post that video.

Over time, you finally understand how to talk in front of the camera and you get natural at it. You don’t stutter as much, and you also know how to control your breath. Soon you are comfortable enough that your facial expressions start to emerge naturally as you speak, and that’s a great thing. Your videos now feel less robotic. And this might be the time around which you will notice that, “Hey, my videos are getting a bit more views.”

And then comes the stage where you naturally start moving your hands around, turning your face, tilting your head as you speak, and it fits the context of whatever you are saying. This was something you could have never scripted or acted out, but it is now naturally happening as you speak. And I am currently at this stage, but I want more.

I think the next stage is when you move around while talking, you shift weight on your legs, you alternate between poses, you lean against things, you’re comfortable with location being changed as you’re talking. You don’t run out of breath when you’re talking. Those are the things that I’m chasing right now. Each spoken word should be accompanied with a body language that is as casual, natural, and comfortable as possible. That’s how a video won’t seem like it is missing something. A video that doesn’t seem out of place or unnatural. A video that seems like it has everything in its perfect place, and it belongs on someone’s feed.

Basically, what I’m chasing now after unlocking the stages of being able to position myself in front of a camera, talk without running out of breath, move my hands around and have some facial expressions, is the ability to change poses and move around and have more movements that are not just limited to my face and arms. The confidence to occupy the space more boldly and move around more fluidly. Where instead of it looking like I’m putting in the effort to set up a camera and talk to it, it feels like I just happen to be speaking and the camera is documenting it.

I am chasing all this naturalness because I know it will look very shabby if I try to do it by choreographing it. It will be a million times better if I just let myself become comfortable, more confident, and let myself occupy the space. It will happen naturally a lot better.

It happens to remind me of the time when I was regaining my ability to read. I used to not be able to read more than two or three sentences without zoning out. Then I tried to learn how to read better because I wanted to crack some exams for MBA admission, and they needed me to be good at reading comprehension. I tried reading up on some theories about this. This is how you’re supposed to read; you’re supposed to do that. But they didn’t work for me. It is very choreographed, but soon I poured in more effort, I got more confident and built my own innate method to read and understand complicated things. And that ability resulted in me becoming one of the nation’s best readers (99.65 percentile in VARC), as per the results of CAT 2023. Put in the effort, Let things happen naturally, and you will end up being one of the best at it.

And I know for sure that just because of all the efforts I am putting in, I am going to be one of the best content creators this world has ever seen, and I am going to be one of the best entrepreneurs this world has ever seen. I am going to do big things.