“Sometimes, the space outside your comfort zone, is the only place to find the best version of yourself.”
Sandy Adams
In 2018, I joined the JS101 team as a part-time instructor co-teaching along with another instructor, Royce Thomason. At the time, JS101 was looking at ways to uplift their marketing and as a non-profit that meant using as little money as possible.
LinkedIN, at the time, had being testing live video streaming on their platform, but it was not available to the general public. I knew from past experience and research that live video on any social platform was instantly a huge boost in your account’s organic reach.
I submitted our request to LinkedIN for live video broadcasting permission and it was granted to us. Now the hard part was deciding what we were going to broadcast and how. I was good at content creation and had no problem speaking in front of people, but I was a tad uncomfortable speaking on live video. The truth was that I was thinking too much about what I was saying and not focusing on relaxing.
Finally the day came for Royce and I to go live with our first stream. We had prepped with questions, but we did not have a rhythm of how to interact on live video. We also made the mistake of not having notes in front of us and for some reason in our heads we were thinking that we needed to remember our notes and not look at them. Newscasters have a teleprompter, which we did not and still don’t.
Our first live was definitely NOT the greatest. We were too stiff and never smiled nor moved or even blinked our eyes, but we did get through it. Three years later we have a routine and flow plus we no longer expect ourselves to be “perfect”, therefore when we do flub our lines we can recover quickly and not distract from the show.
We’ve had a lot of shows that were not perfect and some where either myself or Royce or both of us would start laughing non stop. No matter what though, we continued to show up every single week and do our live broadcast.
Our journey with live video was eye-opening and pushed us outside our comfort zone indeed. However, we are both better versions of ourselves and at the same time helped JS101 improve its marketing both in volume and in professionalism.
We saw an opportunity and looked at ways to market JS101 regardless of our discomfort. Now our comfort zone has been expanded even farther as a result.
The only way stay out from the crowd is to step into the discomfort and learn on fly. Want to learn about improving your marketing skills and upleveling your mindset? Join me on the inside of The Inner Warrior Tribe where I coach professionals how to be more confident, uplift their mindset and give them the knowledge to move ahead of their counterparts. Are you ready to join the Tribe?
Sandy Adams 