I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen it happen. A truly impressive, capable senior person, someone who can command a room of two hundred people and share a story over dinner with such warmth that everyone leans in, completely captivated. Yet when the camera turns on, their voice grows a bit tense, and their face takes on a careful, slightly guarded expression. It’s like they shift into a different mode, revealing a different side of themselves.
The warmth that once filled the room last week now seems elusive, replaced by a flat, cautious tone directed at a lens that offers no response. After they finish, there’s often a sense that they know something has changed. The missing element that once made their words worth hearing is no longer present.
We now have a term for this phenomenon: digital stage fright. It refers to the unease that arises when speaking to a camera rather than to people. This feeling is genuine, widespread, and unrelated to a person’s speaking skills. I’d like to explain why this occurs. However, first, I want to honestly acknowledge something the phrase subtly conceals: the fear is not one-sided.
Two directions of the same fear
For every person who is confident in the room and undone by the camera, there is another who is precisely the reverse. I have worked with people who are relaxed, articulate and quietly magnetic on video calls, yet feel something close to dread at the thought of walking to the front of a real room. The screen, for them, is not the problem. The screen provides safety. It provides a frame that crops at the shoulders, a script they can lean on just out of shot, a chat box to hide behind, and the constant option to switch off the camera. Remove all of that, place them in a room with real people and real eyes, with no second chances, and the nerves they never experience online hit them all at once.
We talk about presentation nerves as though everyone is fighting the same battle, and they are not. The person beside you on the team call may be struggling with the exact opposite of whatever you are struggling with, and neither of you would ever know, because both of you are far too busy managing your own fear to notice anyone else’s.
It is something I see in almost every group I work with, and a good deal of our presentation skills training for teams begins simply by naming it out loud. Neither version reflects a weakness or fault in your character. Instead, both are your nervous system’s natural response to the sudden loss of conditions it has depended on to feel safe around others.
What the camera takes away
When you speak to a room full of people, you are reassured almost constantly, though you rarely notice it. A nod here, someone leaning forward there, a face softening into recognition, a person reaching for a pen. You read those signals without any conscious effort, and they tell you, moment by moment, that you are not alone and that you are landing. At its best, speaking to a live audience is a conversation, even when only one person is talking.
The camera cuts the conversation sharply. The lens shows nothing, no nod, no warmth, no change in the room’s ambience, because there is no real room or warmth, only a small, dark glass circle and the growing certainty that everyone on the other side has gone silent. As humans, we’re wired to read crowds, and when they disappear, the silence feels like judgement. In that emptiness, the mind, given no clues, tends to imagine the worst possible story.
Then there is the strangest cruelty of video, the one I think does the most damage of all. You can see yourself. No one has ever delivered a wedding speech while staring into a mirror, yet that is more or less what the little self-view window asks of you: to watch your own face, your own hair, that particular thing your mouth does when you are thinking, all while trying to speak with any kind of presence at all. Your attention splits down the middle. Half of you is trying to reach another human being, and the other half is monitoring the performance and self-consciousness, which is nothing more or less than consciousness of the self, floods into the space where your message used to be.
Notice, though, what none of this is about. It is not about how well you speak. It is about a broken connection and divided attention, which are very different things and, as it happens, are also where the way back begins.
What the room takes away
For the person who is at ease on camera and anxious in the flesh, it runs in exactly the opposite direction. The screen offered distance, and distance felt like protection, and in a room all of that protection is gone at once. They are fully visible now, head to foot, with no frame to hide behind. The eyes in the room are real, and they are close. There is no mute button, no camera to switch off, no second attempt. They can feel the physical nearness of other people in a way that a grid of thumbnails could never carry, and for some of them that nearness is the whole of the fear.
The video call lets them decide how much of themselves they let into the room. Standing in front of people asks for all of it, and asks for it immediately. That is a genuinely different challenge, and I have never once seen it helped by the old advice about imagining the audience with no clothes on. What helps is the same quiet shift I would offer the camera-shy speaker, only approached from the opposite side.
The thing underneath both
Here is what I have come to believe after many years of watching this in real rooms and on real screens. The camera and the room are not the real problem. They are merely the conditions under which the same thing happens: a frightened speaker stops being a person and becomes a presenter. The warmth goes, humanity retreats, and in comes the performance of competence that convinces no one, least of all the one delivering it. Whether the trigger is a lens or a lectern, the loss is identical, and it is always the same loss.
Whoever is on the other side, whether the two hundred people in the hall or the single colleague watching your webinar alone from their kitchen table, wants exactly what every audience has always wanted. Not just to be informed. Not to be impressed by the fluency of your delivery or the polish of your slides. They want to feel that you actually see them, and that you have cared enough to speak to them as people rather than performing at them from behind a mask. That longing does not weaken because the medium has changed. If anything, it grows, because a lonely square on a screen is even hungrier to feel something than a warm and crowded room.
Digital stage fright, then, is not really a fear of technology. It is the fear of being seen, arriving at the precise moment we most need to let ourselves be seen, and the answer to it is not a clever trick. It is a return.
Coming back
Most of what helps, wherever your own fear happens to sit, is a matter of returning your attention to the one place it keeps fleeing: the present moment and the actual human being in it. So much of my one-to-one coaching comes down to this single return, not adding technique but helping someone come home to themselves in the moment before they speak.
A surprising amount is settled before you ever go live. Give yourself a few real minutes rather than diving in from whatever came before. Breathe slowly, making the out-breath longer than the in-breath, which is one of the quickest ways to tell your body that nothing here is dangerous. Lift the camera to eye level so you are meeting people rather than looking down at them, and deal with the microphone and the light in advance so that no small technical worry can hijack you halfway through a thought.
When you start, do the one thing most people resist: look directly at the lens rather than at the faces on your screen. To the viewer, the lens is your eyes, while everything else appears to drift away. If possible, hide your image or cover it with a piece of paper, as that small box often causes self-consciousness on camera, something you’ve never truly needed. Also, slow your pace. Nervousness makes us rush, but video tends to flatten us out. Moving at a pace that feels slow to you will usually come across as calm and confident to others.
If the room is where you feel challenged, remember the core idea still applies; only the details change. Try arriving early and finding a quiet spot before everyone gets there, so it feels more comfortable and less unfamiliar when others arrive. When you start, look for one or two friendly faces and speak to them like old friends rather than addressing the whole group. Instead of feeling embarrassed about the rush of energy that comes when you’re being watched, see it as a positive force, something that can power you up.
In both cases the real move is the same, and it is smaller and quieter than you would expect. Stop focusing on how you are coming across and put your attention back on the person you are speaking to. Anxiety rushes in to fill the space we leave the moment we abandon the present. Coming home to your feet, to your breath, to one real human being on the far side of the glass or the far side of the room, is very often enough to loosen its grip, not because you have defeated the fear but because you have stopped feeding it.
A practice, not a cure
I will not pretend there is a technique that permanently removes the nerves, and I would gently distrust anyone who tells you there is. What I have watched happen instead is slower and far more dependable. The more often you speak in the setting that frightens you, and speak from your own presence rather than your own panic, the more your nervous system learns, in a way no reassurance from me could ever teach it, that the setting is safe. Familiarity does most of the quiet work. It is the whole reason our public speaking courses put people back on their feet again and again in a single day, in a room that is safe enough to get it wrong. The camera stops being a threat, or the room does, and becomes what it always was beneath your fear: simply a way to reach people who would like to hear from you.
Every composed speaker you have ever admired was once stiff and self-conscious somewhere, on a screen or in a hall, certain they could not do this. They did not wait to feel confident before they began. They began, gently and repeatedly, and the confidence grew in the doing, as it always does.
So the next time you feel it rise, from whichever direction it chooses to come, I would ask you to remember the question I care about more than almost any other, the one I ask every person before every workshop I run. Not what you intend to say, and not how you hope to appear, but this: how do you want them to feel when it is over? Answer that honestly, let it become larger than your fear of the lens or the room, and you will find you have somewhere to put your attention other than yourself. There is a person on the other side, hoping you will be real with them. Take a breath, feel your feet, and speak to them.
Camera nerves are one form of a broader problem. Our guide to overcoming public speaking anxiety covers the rest of it.
If this shifts how you think about your own nerves, whether they meet you on a screen or in a room, share it with a colleague who could use the same reminder.
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