There are a lot of reasons to watch videos of yourself practicing. Watching videos of yourself helps you improve your body language. It helps you improve your content, and it helps you improve your opening and closing.
But mainly, watching videos of yourself helps you get out of your head.
Watching yourself on video, watching yourself from the outside, is a reminder that the noise going on inside your head is almost never, NEVER, the same as the noise going on inside the heads of your audience.
You might be feeling really nervous. You might even feel like vomiting or fainting. But your audience is probably not thinking about any of those things.
And remember, when you are presenting, what’s going on inside the audience’s heads is more important than what’s going on inside your head.
So it doesn’t matter if you’re nervous. The only thing that matters is this: “Is your audience getting something out of your presentation?”
And if the answer to that is yes, you can relax, because, remember, your presentation isn’t about you.
It’s about your audience, and they only want to be able to answer “yes” if someone asks them, “Did you get something out of that presentation?”
They only want to answer “yes,” and your only job is to give them something they can say “yes” to.