“How can I get over my own self-consciousness about using video during meetings?”

If you’ve read and understood all the received wisdom about how video deepens connectedness and interaction in online meetings, you might be feeling awkward about how awkward you still feel about it - the whole idea of appearing on video, and interacting that way.

After all, we’re not used to what we look like, never mind how we move and gesture when communicating. We’re far more used to looking at other people. If we were heading out to an important face-to-face meeting we might remember to brush our hair and check for spinach in our teeth by glancing in a mirror before we left, but after that we’d forget about our own appearance, in favour of what we and others have to say. We simply don’t conduct most conversations sitting opposite a large moving image of ourselves, and it’s OK to recognise that this is a bit unnatural and strange.

Increasingly we’re seeing ‘improvements’ in video chat applications which allow you to filter and enhance your appearance, crossing over from consumer tech to the business world.

Not like that!

While replacing your home office background with something blurred or more professional is one thing, I’d argue that these tools do nothing to help us all just get over what we look like and relax into using our calls tech naturally and professionally, which is ultimately what we need to do - just like we have all mostly got over how we look in static photos and selfies now they are so common. Surely it’s better to get comfortable with how we actually look to others, instead of trying to Snapchat that into something stylised and beautified?

Yes, pay attention to your lighting and angles and so on before you start, but then it’s probably best to move on and just have the call, remembering that everyone is in the same boat anyway.

However if it truly “weirds you out” to the extent that it’s affecting the quality of your interaction, Zoom and other platforms now let you turn off the feed from your own camera to your screen. Everyone else can still see you, but you don’t have to look at yourself, and get distracted by that thing you keep doing with your eyebrows - “arghh, now I am thinking about how odd it is and that’s making me do it more…”

Or you can go low-tech and simply stick a post-it note over your face. No, not your actual face, the video box on the screen...

For more on running online meetings, check out the book Online Meetings that Matter - a guide for managers of remote teams.