[0:47] Welcome to the Confident Live Marketing Podcast with Ian Anderson Gray. Helping you level up your impact, authority, and profits through the power of confident live video. Optimize your mindset and communication. And increase your confidence in front of the camera. Get confident with the tech and gear. And get confident with the content and marketing. Together, we can go live!
[1:17] Ian: Hello, welcome to the confident live marketing podcast. My name is Ian Anderson Gray. And in today's episode, we are again focusing on confidence and communication, whether it's in front of the camera, microphone, or even on stage. That's what we're going to be talking about on this show. I'm excited to invite back a guest who's already been on the show.
[1:40] It is the fantastic Tanya Smith, who is a premier video coach. Savvy business strategist and the quietly charismatic host of stream like a boss TV She is among some of the most sought after speakers in content marketing known for her soothing voice cutting edge livestream engagement strategies and software Recommendations.
[2:03] Welcome to the show Tanya
[2:05] Tanya: Hey, thank you for having me.
[2:07] Ian: great to have you back on the show and to hear your fantastic soothing voice. And, last time you came on the show, we were getting all techie and looking at the gear and it was funny because we were talking about very, a lot of the stuff that you were talking about I very much empathize with you, like the microphone graveyard you were talking about and wanting to upgrade all the time.
[2:29] There's all this cool new stuff that comes out and trying to resist that temptation. And I think one of the things that I find is that we as content creators, We sometimes think that buying new gear is going to solve a lot of our problems, and actually a lot of it is down to mindset. So could you go, could you talk to us about your background in terms of content creation?
[2:53] You did talk about this last time you were on, but I'd like you to maybe to focus a little bit more on maybe some of the struggles that you had in actually showing up. You mentioned last time that you're an introvert. Was, did that kind of play a part? In your journey.
[3:06] Tanya: Absolutely. Being introvert, you find oftentimes that there are not a lot of people that express themselves the same way that you do. And so when I first decided to venture into this space of video, it was really it was scary. It was scary because I was okay with being behind the camera. I was okay with speaking to people through audio podcasts.
[3:30] For instance, I used to do blog talk radio and all of those things, but deciding to be on camera was really A bit frightening for a couple of reasons. One, because it felt like you're just open wide to the world. It felt okay, anyone can judge you. Anyone can say anything they want to about you.
[3:49] People may not like your face. They may not like the background that you have. They just may not like you. And it felt very, I felt very vulnerable to be honest with you at the time. The other thing is I also knew that doing this would be a super stretch for me. So initially I did not put my face on camera.
[4:07] And when I first started doing any type of video, I would put slides up. And I would just talk over the slides. So I did something called Click of the Week, which is a just a YouTube thing I was trying out. And I would simply just screen share. I would screen share what I was talking about and speak over that.
[4:24] And I thought that's sufficient, that'll do it. That's video.
[4:27] But it wasn't the traction and I knew better. I knew I would have to put myself out there and be more be more open to trying something new and seeing what would happen. And
[4:37] Ian: Sorry to interrupt you, this is really interesting what you're saying there, because Like sometimes I go back to look at some of my old content and I'll say, Oh, I wish I'd like embraced video earlier. And but actually looking back and knowing a little bit more about myself now, I think I would, if somebody had forced me in front of the camera, like if somebody had pushed me in the deep end, I think I would have, I don't know, not had a heart attack, but almost like it would have been too much.
[5:01] The anxiety would be too much. And I wonder whether for you. Whether that was actually a probably a good thing just to start dipping your toe in the water with getting the slides up and doing that was your first step and then moving on to embracing video, like putting yourself on the camera. Do you think that was a good thing?
[5:19] Looking back?
[5:20] Tanya: I do now but at the time I felt a little wimpy. I felt like I was lacking courage. I felt like maybe I should do more, but I just, I'm too scared. And honestly, I hear a lot of people who are just starting out or thinking about doing video. They make excuses just like I did. I don't want to do it cause I'm not quite ready.
[5:38] My hair's not right. Oh, I don't have the right background. I made a lot of excuses not to do video. But to your point, yes, I think taking the baby steps absolutely helped to to get, help me to build my confidence muscle, if you will, on camera.
[5:54] Ian: Yeah, I think that's a really good way of putting it confidence muscle. And so I think both of those things are right. It's certainly been my experience. It sounds like it's been your experience that Yes, we make lots of excuses. I didn't go live for a whole month because I was worried about my background being boring.
[6:08] It's ridiculous now. I think what a complete idiot I was. But on the other hand, I had to work through those kind of issues that I had with myself. Like I didn't like the way I looked and the way I sounded. And I was worried about probably imposter syndrome, all those kinds of things. So takes time.
[6:24] What, so what has helped you? Overcome those fears, is there some kind of personal development that you've had? Is it the help of other people combination? I'd love to hear what's helped you now embrace video in a much more direct way than you did when you first started.
[6:40] Tanya: Wow. I'll tell a really quick story and tell you that I have never had a problem feeling confident about what I know. So if I'm really comfortable with the topic, if I have studied, if I have researched, if I have planned in advance and I know what I'm going to say, then I feel a lot more comfortable with that part of things.
[7:02] But what helped me in terms of the camera. was simply doing it. The more I got on camera, the more comfortable it got for me. But there was an incident that really set me back for a few months. There was a woman that showed up in my feed when I was doing a I was doing a live stream actually, and it was during the time that my husband was going through chemotherapy for cancer, colon cancer.
[7:27] And when he was going through this stressful period, I was experiencing the stress too, and I had a lot of acne, and I had, my hair was falling out in chunks, and so I just had my hair cut off completely, just boy short crew cut. And a woman popped into my feed, because I still was doing video, a woman popped in my feed and she said if I were to look up the definition of unprofessional, your face would be next to it.
[7:51] It was really
[7:53] rude. So it wasn't even the typical troll that says something super crazy where you're like, instead, this was a statement that was a personal attack. And I internalized that, Ian, and I did not realize how much I internalized that until months later, when I look back, I saw, I started wearing wigs.
[8:13] I started buying wigs. I was on this kick of buying wigs because I was afraid of how other people might respond to my look. And at some point within that next few months, it wasn't a light bulb moment. It was me questioning, why am I carrying her issue? That was her self loathing.
[8:32] It had nothing to do with me. And so I ended up taking those wigs off. And my hair was starting to grow back then at the time and things were starting to improve. But mentally, I realized moving forward, I will never take on anyone else's baggage.
[8:47] I think there was a lot of growth that came from doing live and from putting myself out there.
[8:51] Now, if I had stopped altogether, I would never have experienced that growth. So that's what's something I want to make sure your people know.
[8:58] Ian: but that's thank you so much for showing that's an amazing story because It is, you mentioned the word vulnerability earlier, like it is, we're making ourselves quite vulnerable getting in front of the camera, particularly if we turn up being ourselves, there is that temptation, isn't there, to put on a, put a put up our facade and kind of change the way we are because we're worried about, People judging us, whereas if they're judging a different character that we're putting on it's not so bad, but like in that situation, that troll, that person was cutting really deep into something that, it's very personal, particularly at a time when you were.
[9:35] You were struggling. That must've been horrific time for you, but
[9:38] it's just an amazing thing that you were able then to turn that around. And I'm sure that wasn't like straight away. I think you mentioned it was at least a few months took time. So like working on yourself is so important.
[9:49] I'm not going to lie, getting in front of the camera, being yourself is. It is a scary thing, but at the end of the day, people, the people that you, your people are the people that are going to love you, you want to repel the people like that woman.
[10:02] Tanya: It was the community of people that I started to surround myself with. It was a community of people that were watching the videos. It was a community of people that I said, Hey, I want to learn as you're learning video. I want to learn too. And that's what led me to try to create my own space for others like me that felt either I'm too old, I'm too, whatever my weight is, I'm too all the things.
[10:28] I wanted other people to feel that they were supported and encouraged because that was another thing that helped me to get through that time is community
[10:37] Ian: Yeah. Community is so important. And we don't want, there's this temptation to, to be like other people that we need to be, we need to we can't be introverted. We have to be extroverted. We don't want to be softly spoken. I had a Bob Gentle on the show recently, and he was talking about the same thing that he felt that as a he's quite a shy person.
[10:57] And like the idea of getting in front of the camera for him was just like, that's, no way. But people, there are many people like him that, that need things explained in a way from his point of view and his personality. All of these excuses, we all make them and we need to remember that our personality is the perfect personality for our perfect audience, really.
[11:21] Yeah. We've so we talked a little bit about this, but I want to dive in a little bit deeper into this about personality and this is, we're going to talk about personality and communication here. You've mentioned you're an introvert. So maybe explain to viewers and listeners what you define, what does it mean to you to be an introvert and how does that affect the way you turn up on camera or, if you're on a podcast, how you turn up on one of those?
[11:45] Yeah, tell us a little bit more about that.
[11:47] Tanya: being an introvert, first of all, doesn't mean shy. It doesn't mean that I don't know how to talk to people. It doesn't mean I'm going to run away into a forest and never come out. But for me, what it does mean is that where I get my energy source from where I am. most uplifted and where I am filled up enough to be able to present myself as the best person that I am, that I'm, meant to be is internally.
[12:18] Whereas extroverts tend to get a lot of validation from other people. So it's just a way of expressing ourselves. And personally, as an introvert, there's a couple of things that come with that for me. And some of the challenges that I had to overcome are because of this. So I used to go to a lot of in person networking events, and I would be the person that would sit off in the corner by myself because I could never figure out exactly how extroverts would come into this crowded room and just start having this conversation and be all excited.
[12:50] As a matter of fact, that drained the life out of me. And what I ended up learning to do over time in those situations is to have deeper conversations, not broad, but deeper conversations with one or two people. So instead of me going and getting hundreds of business cards and having, hundreds of conversations while I'm at an event, I'll just pick one.
[13:13] One or two people to have a deeper conversation to really get to know them to understand who they are, what they're about. And I'd ask them questions so that they could talk and I could listen and then reflect that back, their answers back to them. And that gained me the ability to be able to really, it helped me to be able to feel better about the conversation being something that mattered to me.
[13:35] So on live streaming, the way that translated over into video, and this is why I think I love live stream so much is that I feel like I'm having conversations one on one with people. Not with a big crowd of folks, but I'm having deeper, more interactive and engaging conversations. I know the people that come back into my community, into the audience.
[13:57] I remember things that they mentioned about their families or their life and can recall that and that helps with the engagement. Now that's different from other people that I see that are much more extroverted. It's a comfort zone for them to just be able to broadcast to a bunch of folks and maybe they have much larger communities and they can manage that.
[14:17] For me, I love the small community because of the intimacy.
[14:20] Ian: Yeah, the intimacy is really powerful part of it. So for listeners and viewers who would describe themselves as an introvert, and I think you're right, it's not to do with shyness. You could be a shy introvert, but you could equally be the opposite, a bold introvert as well. So what would you what are the strategies that you would recommend for somebody who is an introvert who wants to be a bit more visible But is a little bit reticent about it is is worried about the energy levels So managing energy levels is probably part of this.
[14:55] What would be your recommendation?
[14:57] Tanya: That's huge. The energy levels is a big thing. So one of the things that I had to do early on is to really experiment with the time of day. Because you're right, as an introvert, sometimes we may seem a little bit more low key than some of the extroverts, right? So I knew I wanted to make sure that I always was at a higher level of energy and I used an app called Rise.
[15:20] to actually monitor my peak levels. Like when am I going to be at my peak and when am I going to be like on the down slope. And not only that, so I used to try to do mornings. Mornings were not my happy place. I was not at my best. I wasn't as coherent, even though I love mornings for my quiet time to reflect and to write and that type of thing.
[15:43] Speaking on camera was not the best for me. In the evenings, if it's too late, same thing. But there was this happy place that I identified for myself where I knew people would show up because you still have to look for that to your audience. What time of day do they want to actually consume your content?
[16:02] And then how was I feeling? And I found that happy medium, but it took a few times for me to experiment. I do think energy levels play a big role. for us as introverts. And we have to identify when are we going to be up? Because that gets magnified on the camera.
[16:19] Ian: I think you're so right and I apologize for this being an early morning for you. Thank you so much for taking the time But I think you're right because actually for me the recording this, you know It's nearly 3 p. m. In the afternoon here in the UK and for me That is a good time because I like mornings is my productive time in terms of creating other types of content.
[16:40] But if, in terms of my brain being a little bit more awake and it's a good time. And also like for going live, this is a reasonably reasonable time, let's say 3 p. m. Because. It's a little bit, it's a little bit early in the morning for Pacific Coast U.S., but it's not like the end of the world, whereas I find that if I was doing it at 6, 7 p.
[16:59] m. First of all, it gets in the way of family life, we've got kids, 13 and 15 year old kids who are, want to be ferried everywhere and taxied everywhere. So you've got, it's got to work with your life, it's got to work with your energy levels. I think that's so true. We're almost out of time, Tanya.
[17:15] We've had so much else I want to ask you. There's, it's just so interesting, but what would be if you were to do a live, say you've got a live this afternoon for you. What would be, what would you be doing to prepare for that? And I'm not talking about from a tech point of view or anything like that.
[17:30] This is more from a mindset point of view. What do you do before you go live to make sure that you are, Your best. It's the best version of yourself.
[17:38] Tanya: of the things that I have to really remind myself of, this is a mantra that I adopted when I first started doing lives. We can often get caught up in the, Oh my God, is anybody going to be there? What if they don't, we can start asking ourselves all the questions that we mentioned a little bit earlier.
[17:56] So my mantra is this. Right person, right message, right time. And I remind myself and I have a little sticky note on my screen, right message, right person, right time. Meaning that I put myself in the mindset that it doesn't matter who shows up because whoever shows up, they're the ideal audience. They're the ones who need this content.
[18:18] And I'm going to be prepared to gift them what I have to share. What is it that I've learned? What's my experience? What can I share with them that will offer value to that one person, even if it's just one? So I honestly have adopted that. And Ian, frankly, that has been the number one thing that's helped me to prepare for every live is to remember that, to keep that in mind and in focus.
[18:43] Ian: I've not heard of that kind of phrase when it could have applied to turning up for a live video for a live stream. I really love that. I've had, I think I've had that strategy. If we call it that. When I've gone to a conference, like I remember the first Social Media Marketing World I attended, this was like back in 2015.
[19:02] And I remember getting really stressed and anxious about that. All the people that I knew I probably should meet. And particularly as an introvert, I was thinking, ah, and I ended up just thinking, you know what Ian, like I was talking to myself and I said like all mad people do and I said I'm just gonna let it go.
[19:18] And I'm just going to just see who I meet. And it was what you're saying. It was like the people that I just bump into, I'm just going to give them. My time and have a really good conversation. And it was amazing. Like it was just the people I met where they just the right kind of people that I could talk to.
[19:37] And, there was a few people that maybe weren't, but most of the time those conversations were amazing and just turning up and just being myself. And sometimes we can overthink things. So I think that's really good advice. Thank you for that. So we are out of time but just, I always like to ask my guests to finish really with some words of encouragement for listeners and viewers who are aiming to improve their confidence and communication.
[20:04] Maybe they're a little bit nervous. Maybe they're very nervous. Maybe they think they are boring or they don't like the way they look or they sound. What's your kind of last words of encouragement for people so that they can just turn up and be themselves and communicate their message.
[20:19] Tanya: Really, I want to encourage anyone who's thinking about doing video. First of all, let me be honest with you and say video is not for everyone. So if it's not for you, that is okay. But there is, you have a voice and there is something that you have that you only you can share in the way that you can share it.
[20:39] And the challenge for you is to find the right media to be able to share that because it's not you that is going to lose out. If you don't share that voice on video, it's the other people who you could have impacted. So I just want to encourage you to find your voice, whether it's through video or some other channel.
[20:59] But I absolutely think video is one of the best ways to reach people that you otherwise might not have reached because you get that 3D effect. You get that effect of a voice. You get that effect of the visuals, and then you get that effect of the feeling and the passion that's combined that comes from that combined voice and voice and video, right?
[21:20] That visual thing, all of that together helps to really communicate your message in a way that you might not have otherwise reached the people who need your message. Get out there and try it.
[21:31] Ian: Yeah. And you're right. It doesn't necessarily have to be video. Yes. It could be further down the line. Just turn up, create content. It might be audio stuff. And that's cool. You could do what you did, Tanya, and start off with. Putting slides up and talk over the video, but get started.
[21:47] And you might find that live video, like I have found that live video is that perfect antidote to recovering perfectionists because it's never going to be perfect. You just have to, you just have to let it go. And,
[21:59] Tanya: You're okay with it. Because it's live and so it's transparent and it's authentic and it's real and you don't have to be perfect. No one expects you to be perfect with live. That's what I love about it.
[22:09] Ian: definitely. And it's funny, like this the first 200 and whatever episodes of this show were all done live. And now I'm making this the next two seasons pre recorded and it's almost like I think I'm now ready to embrace creating the content pre recorded. It sounds like it's so topsy turvy. It's weird.
[22:28] Thank you, Tanya. It's been great to have you on the show. I've really enjoyed your wisdom and hearing your story. It's been just wonderful. So thank you for that. How can people Find out more about you and tell us a little bit more about what you're currently working on.
[22:40] Tanya: Give us a visit over at getnoticedwithvideo. com. We also have established our program library and center over at contentcreatorscafe. com. Those are the two spots where I typically hang out and they have my socials as well as everything else. Now I do broadcast live on Stream Like a Boss TV over on YouTube, but you'll see that link as well from those two sites.
[23:05] And what we're working on right now is getting ready to do a membership drive to build up our community called Stream Bosses Academy. where we really work with part time content creators for and coaches as well to get ready to use video so that they can build their brand and create conversational engagement that leads to sales.
[23:26] So super excited about that.
[23:28] Ian: That sounds cool. And actually, probably by the time this episode comes out, yeah, that will all be out there. It's likely that's the case. Thank you, Tanya. It's been great to have you on the show. Also hopefully later this year, you'll be coming back to the Ecamm Creator Camp and we can see each other in the flesh again.
[23:43] That'd be really cool. Thank you. It's been awesome. We are out of time. We are out of that. How did that happen? It's just, it's been so fun getting, digging into these stories of confidence and improving your communication. I, Tanya would love to hear from you. I would love to hear from you. So don't be shy.
[23:59] Do reach out to us. We are actually human beings. We are in this world of AI. We are not AI generated avatars. I promise you, so you can get in touch with us, but we are out of time and until next time. I encourage you to level up your impact authority and profits through the power of confident live video.
[24:16] See you soon, toodaloo, bye!
[24:17] Thanks for listening to the Confident Live Marketing Podcast with Ian Anderson Gray. Make sure you subscribe at iag.me/podcast so you can continue to level up your impact, authority and profits through the power of live video. And until next time, Toodle
