The recording was forty-three seconds old when I paused it.
I was sitting on the edge of a hotel bed in Linz, laptop open, watching footage I had recorded the previous evening at a corporate event. A mid-size technology company had hired me to deliver a keynote on innovation, and I had woven three mentalism pieces into the presentation. The audience had responded well. People came up afterwards with the usual mix of enthusiasm and bewilderment. By any reasonable external measure, it had gone well.
And yet, forty-three seconds into the recording, I could not bring myself to keep watching.
The person on the screen was doing something with his shoulders. A kind of upward hitch, almost imperceptible, that happened every time he transitioned between speaking and performing. He was also standing slightly off-center, favoring his right leg in a way that made him look like he was about to walk somewhere but had not quite committed. And his face — my face — had an expression during the opening that I can only describe as “trying very hard to look relaxed,” which is the precise opposite of looking relaxed.
I paused the video. I closed the laptop. I went and got a glass of water. Then I opened it again, rewound to the beginning, and forced myself to keep watching.
That pattern — watch, cringe, stop, steel yourself, resume — defined my first several months of video self-review. It is, as I eventually learned, completely normal. And it is the single biggest reason most performers never develop the habit of reviewing their own footage.
The Universal Resistance
Ken Weber addresses this directly in Maximum Entertainment. “Typically, performers who have achieved some degree of success fight the idea of critically viewing a tape of their performance,” he writes. “‘I hate watching myself,’ several have said to me.” His response is characteristically blunt: “I know. I do too. But you’ll have to break through that psychological barrier.”
When I first read that, I appreciated the honesty. Weber is not pretending the process is pleasant. He is acknowledging that even experienced professionals find it painful. But I did not fully understand the nature of the pain until I experienced it myself.
The pain is not about vanity in the simple, surface-level sense. It is not that you think you are ugly or your voice sounds weird — although those things do cross your mind. The pain is about the collision between two versions of yourself: the performer you experience from the inside and the performer the camera reveals.
From the inside, you feel dynamic, expressive, in control. You feel the rhythm of the performance. You feel the connection with the audience. You feel the precision of your movements. You are fully immersed in the experience, and the experience feels compelling.
From the outside — from the camera’s perspective — you might be all of those things. Or you might be a slightly awkward person with stiff shoulders and a tendency to talk too fast. The camera does not care which version is true. It just shows you what is there.
The Specifics That Horrified Me
Let me be concrete about what I saw in my first few video review sessions, because I think specificity is more useful than generalizations about “the cringe factor.”
The first thing I noticed was my hands. When I was not actively using them for a purpose — holding something, gesturing to make a point, directing attention — they were busy. Fidgeting. Adjusting my jacket. Touching my face. Moving to my pockets and then back out. I looked like someone who did not know what to do with his own body, which, in retrospect, was exactly accurate. I did not know what to do with my hands during the in-between moments, and without the camera, I had no idea they were broadcasting that uncertainty to everyone in the room.
The second thing was my eye contact. I thought I was making good eye contact with the audience. I felt like I was scanning the room, connecting with individuals, creating that sense of personal attention that every performance book recommends. What the camera showed was that I was looking at people, but in a rapid, scanning pattern that never lingered long enough to create actual connection. My eyes were moving like a security camera, not like a person having a conversation. The difference between those two things is enormous, and I could not have known it without the footage.
The third thing was pacing. I was faster than I thought. Not dramatically faster — I was not racing through the material in some kind of panicked sprint. But I was consistently about fifteen percent quicker than the tempo that would have felt natural to an audience. Moments that needed a beat of silence got half a beat. Transitions that should have breathed were slightly compressed. The cumulative effect was a performance that felt slightly rushed, not in a way that any individual audience member would have identified as a specific problem, but in a way that subtly undermined the sense of ease and control I was trying to project.
The fourth thing — and this one genuinely embarrassed me — was a verbal tic. I had developed the habit of saying “right” as a transition word. “So I am going to ask you to think of a number, right, and hold it in your mind, right, and…” I had no idea I was doing this. None. It was completely invisible to me during performance. On the recording, it was like a metronome of linguistic filler, clicking away every fifteen or twenty seconds, and once I heard it, I could not un-hear it.
These four problems were not catastrophic. Nobody in the audience had walked out. Nobody had complained. The event organizer had been happy. But each of these issues was a leak in the hull — small enough to ignore individually, collectively enough to keep the ship from sailing as fast as it could.
Why the Internal Experience Lies to You
There is a psychological reason the gap between felt performance and actual performance is so large, and understanding it helped me stop taking the camera’s revelations so personally.
When you perform, your brain is operating at high cognitive load. You are tracking multiple streams of information simultaneously: your script, your audience’s reactions, your physical positioning, the technical requirements of whatever effect you are performing, the timing of transitions, the management of props. This level of cognitive engagement creates a kind of experiential richness that feels, from the inside, like a compelling performance.
But the audience is not experiencing your cognitive load. They are experiencing the output. They see your body, hear your voice, and process the narrative and visual information you are presenting. They have no access to the rich internal world of concentration and intention that you are navigating. All they have is what is visible and audible.
The camera captures what is visible and audible. It strips away everything internal. And when you watch the footage, you are — for the first time — experiencing your own performance the way the audience does. Without the internal richness. Without the feeling of being in the zone. Without the cushion of your own engagement.
This is why it feels so flat. This is why it feels so disappointing. Not because the performance was bad, but because you are comparing the stripped-down external version to the full-spectrum internal version, and the external version will always seem diminished by comparison.
Once I understood this, I stopped interpreting the cringe response as evidence that I was terrible. I started interpreting it as evidence that I was finally seeing what the audience sees — which is exactly the point.
The Discipline of Not Looking Away
The hardest part of video review is not pressing record. It is not even pressing play. It is staying with the footage when every instinct is telling you to stop.
I developed a personal rule early on: I would watch the entire recording before I made any notes or judgments. No pausing. No rewinding. No skipping ahead. The first viewing was for watching, not analyzing. Just sit there and see the whole thing.
This was brutal at first. There were moments where I wanted to fast-forward so badly my finger was hovering over the keyboard. Moments where I said something clumsy or moved awkwardly and the desire to skip past it was almost physical. But I forced myself to keep watching because I knew that the impulse to skip was itself information. The moments I most wanted to avoid were precisely the moments I most needed to see.
After the first full viewing, I would take a break. Not a long one — fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. Enough time to let the initial emotional reaction settle. Then I would watch again, this time with a notebook, and this time I would pause and rewind as needed.
The second viewing was always different from the first. The shock had diminished. The cringe response was still there, but quieter. And I started seeing things I had missed the first time — not because they were not there, but because the first viewing had been too emotionally charged for me to notice them.
What Happened When I Made It a Habit
The first three or four video review sessions were painful. The fifth was uncomfortable. By the tenth, something had shifted. Not that I enjoyed watching myself — I do not think I will ever fully enjoy it — but the emotional charge had diminished to the point where I could use the footage as a tool rather than experiencing it as an assault.
And the improvements started coming faster.
Within a few weeks of consistent video review, I had identified and begun correcting the hand-fidgeting problem. I had slowed my pacing by a noticeable margin. I had eliminated the “right” tic. My eye contact was still a work in progress, but I had at least become conscious of the scanning pattern and started deliberately holding my gaze longer on individual faces.
None of these improvements required new knowledge. I already knew, intellectually, that fidgeting was bad and pacing should be measured and filler words should be eliminated. Every performance book I had read said these things. But knowing them intellectually and seeing them in your own footage are two entirely different categories of understanding.
The intellectual knowledge is abstract. The video makes it concrete. You cannot argue with the camera. You cannot tell yourself that your pacing is fine when you can watch yourself rushing. You cannot pretend your hands are calm when you can see them fidgeting. The camera eliminates the possibility of self-deception, and while that is uncomfortable, it is also the prerequisite for genuine improvement.
The Gift Nobody Wants
I have started recommending video self-review to every performer I know, and the reaction is almost always the same. They agree in principle. They acknowledge it would be useful. They say they will do it soon. And then they do not do it, or they do it once, have the same cringe reaction I had, and never do it again.
I understand the resistance. I lived it. But I also know, now, that the discomfort of watching yourself is the price of admission to a level of self-awareness that no other tool can provide. You can practice for a thousand hours, read every book on performance, attend every workshop, and you will still have blind spots that only the camera can reveal.
The camera is not your enemy. The camera is the most honest friend you will ever have. It will show you things you do not want to see, and every one of those things is a gift — if you have the discipline to receive it.
The next post will go deeper into the process of what happens when you commit to watching the same footage multiple times. Because it turns out that one viewing, no matter how painful, is not enough. The real insights do not arrive until the third, fourth, or fifth time through. And that is a whole different kind of discipline.