A Case Study By Syahrita Devi Amanullah, Work & Life Coach, NETHERLANDS
Reframing a Perspective Trust versus Doubt
Ms. A is a multiple business owner, and she plans to expand her coaching business by creating videos and reels to promote her company and services. She is a confident woman and has been in her profession as a coach for almost a decade. However, she finds herself insecure when she must make videos of herself. She prefers and enjoys personal interaction with clients and sees the one-sided conversation with a video camera to be challenging.
Today with social media providing platforms for businesses to expose their products and entice new customers, Ms. A knows the value of using social media to promote herself. The trend of posting reels and videos is one that she is hesitant to participate in as it takes her a long time to make a video of herself. She is not easily satisfied with the results.
She wants to overcome this barrier of insecurity when taking videos of herself and she wants to find a way how to feel more confident when making videos; to feel more comfortable and to like making videos, next to posting text and photos online. She finds herself overthinking when preparing for the making of her videos. She feels stressed when she records and so she worries and messes up the words. Her wish by the end of the session is for her to be able to relax her mind when the moment comes for her to press that recording button.
Trust versus Doubt: Body
FlipIt – Find It
We started our session with her explaining what she wanted to talk about which is her struggles with making videos of herself promoting her coaching services. She further explained that when she talks to (potential) clients face to face or via live video calls, she feels confident and comfortable as there is interaction between them and she is calm.
However, when she makes a video of herself, she feels an immense sense of stress in her chest. She placed her hands there and her eyes started to widen. The stress is caused by her mindset of wanting the video to be perfect. She would watch videos of other coaches and find them doing an excellent job and she would compare their performance with hers, concluding that she cannot be as brilliant as them in her videos as they are in theirs.
FlipIt – Feel It
I explored the difference in her perspective between talking with a client and taking a video of herself. When talking with a client, she feels their emotions and energy, she can see their facial expressions. When there are questions, they can talk about it and come to an understanding; there is live interaction. She can present her services and advise her future clients on how to be of service to them. However, when talking to a video recorder or camera, she does not know how the audience/future clients react. She cannot see them, so it feels fake to her. Hence, she does not like doing this, but she also knows how important it is to make and post videos on social media if she wants to expand her business and gain more clients. She believes that future clients find it important how one presents oneself in a video: the voice, the look, the words, but she is unsure of the results of her videos: is she making her points across?
Her goal of making videos is to provide visibility for her coaching center, to explain who she is coaching for, how the coaching center works, which methods they use and to invite clients to their workshops. She wants to make more videos per week to promote their services. I asked who she was making the videos with, and she confirmed that she was making them together with her relative who is a professional video maker. To make, in her words, perfect and good-quality videos, she needs to think about so many things such as her posture, how she moves her head, how she says her lines, etc. She feels she cannot do all this and feels calm at the same time when talking to the camera.
I acknowledged her bravery in stepping out of her comfort zone by doing videos. She said that during networking, others would ask her why we never heard of you. She said she was too busy working and had no time for promotional videos and advertisements. People who know her and have used her before, would inform others by word of mouth and this is how she gains clients, but this is not enough. When people give her good feedback on her coaching, she feels great about this. She is the type who focuses on her work and not on selling herself online, but she knows that the more views she receives online, the more visibility she will gain. She believes she is a good coach and has received wonderful reviews from her clients. She is confident when talking to clients. She hopes to convey this confidence in her videos.
FlipIt – Frame It
I shared another observation and acknowledged her energy shift between talking with clients face to face (she smiled then) and when she talked about having to make videos that make her feel stressed (she placed her hands on her chest). When I explored why she feels stressed, she mentioned that she feels that she is wasting time when making videos but that she must do it as it is part of her job to make videos and promote her business. She continued to explain what she meant by wasting time, which is the hour spent on making a video, she could have done something else that was important. I asked her why she feels making videos is not important, she responded that videos are not real as she does not feel the client’s emotions on the other side of the video. There is no other energy flowing but hers in front of the camera. Hence, this is not real, not alive. So, I asked if there were other ways to make videos so they would feel real to her. She said she had a colleague who was present last time during the making of the videos, so she was able to see her reaction. Seeing other people’s reactions is important to her and having her colleague there and seeing her reaction, calmed her.
FlipIt – Flip It
I noticed a shift in her energy again and shared this observation that when she mentioned her colleague being present, that made her feel more relaxed when making a video. She said yes, it did as she could see her reaction and have interaction. They can discuss what needs to be changed and she said with a laugh that she can share the stress and responsibility with everyone present (her colleague and her relative who is recording g the video); this is another calming thought.
When asked if there is an option to invite more people to the making of the video, to share her responsibility, she said that adding one more person would be a wonderful idea as this can then be a group task. Her co-trainer can be invited to the recording as she can then also fix the video content. When asked if there were other tools to help with calming herself before making the video and what the preparations were, she said she must prepare well, practice a lot, know her lines, and visualize that there is someone in front of her. She remembers that in the past, after lots of practice, she will know her lines so well that she will feel more confident. She decided that she would adopt this method again now. This thought makes her feel more relaxed. She plans to take a couple of practice videos a day to practice her lines before recording the final one with her newfound team. She says she will start practicing right away and is feeling more relaxed now. Her success measure is that she will be ready when recording videos and she will know she has achieved this when she feels calm and comfortable.
When asked what the biggest takeaway of the session was, she responded by saying that she realized that there are other options and methods in preparing the videos and recording them, so she can relax. This realization calms her. And that the time spent on making the videos whose goal is to get clients, has shifted her mindset. Talking to potential clients through her videos is not a waste of time as there is a chance that the videos may result in her acquiring new clients. I acknowledged her new perspective and shared with her that I was glad she was looking at the situation from a different frame. She will start practicing today and she agrees to end the session with a smile, a relieved laugh and a thank you.
Trust versus Doubt: A Confident Coach
Ms. A is a confident coach when dealing with clients face to face in order for her to feel more confident when dealing with potential clients via videos, she needed to have trust in the preparation to get her calm and ready and create alternative methods for recording the videos in order to create an environment where she can feel more relaxed. The doubt that she had was overcome by trusting the process and in herself by preparing well as she knows she is a good coach, and she knows her lines. She also needed to trust that the video’s goal was to increase the visibility of her coaching practice and to gain new clients.
FlipItWorksheet
Power Tools
References
FlipIt Worksheet from FlipItuserguide on Coach Campus
Power Tools from FlipIt Power Tools manual on Coach Campus