I coach camera confidence. I hadn't posted in three months.

I coach people to feel more confident on camera. And until this week, I hadn't posted a video to my own channel in three months.

Not a YouTube upload, not a blog video, nothing for the newsletter. Three months of quiet, from someone whose whole job is helping people show up and be seen. I want to be straight with you about that, because I think the gap itself is worth talking about, more than pretending it didn't happen and picking back up as if nothing had changed.

Here's the strange part. I haven't been off camera at all. A normal week for me is two or three training sessions, sometimes four, delivered straight down the lens. I coach clients online, so that's the camera too. In the last three months I've written and recorded three full online training programmes for clients. I've been on camera almost every working day.

Just not here. Not in my own name, for my own audience, with nobody else's agenda to stand behind.

That's the bit I've been sitting with. It turns out I can show up easily when it's in service of someone else, a client, a room, a course somebody commissioned. The moment it's just me and you, with nothing to hide behind, it gets quietly harder. And I don't think I'm the only one this is true for. Plenty of people are perfectly fine presenting for work and then freeze at the thought of posting something as themselves.

The longer I left it, the harder it got. That's the part that caught me out. There were no real stakes, nobody waiting, no deadline. But in my head the stakes crept up anyway. A week becomes a month becomes "well, it's been so long now, the next one has to be really good." Which is, of course, the fastest way to never make the next one at all.

So this week I made the video I'd been avoiding. Not because I felt I ought to, but because I like making these. I've been making videos for over twenty years, since I started out in coaching and training, and I made plenty of them back when the view count was zero and nobody was watching. I enjoyed it then. I still do.

There's a phrase I kept coming back to, that old Nike line: just do it. Not as a motivational slogan, I'm wary of those, but as the plainest possible instruction. Stop weighing it up. Press record.

This one is raw. No graphics, no polish, topped and tailed and that's it. I usually like a bit more production, and there's nothing wrong with that, but there's a whole sliding scale between raw and polished, and every point on it is valid. This week, raw was the honest choice, because waiting until I had the time and energy for the full treatment was just another way of putting it off.

If you've been meaning to start, or start again, and it keeps feeling heavier than it should, I made this one for you as much as for me. There's no right time. You haven't missed the boat. The world can still use the particular way you'd say a thing.

You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/krWVWuK5_24?si=7nG6nqWSdLMV5_wz

And I'd like to know: what's your relationship with video right now? Is there something you've been meaning to hit record on and keep not doing? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.