What’s my logo? I don’t have one. Snappy name for my business? Don’t have that either. My business is me: my knowledge, my skills and my experience. I am my business. That might sound potentially arrogant. Actually, it’s a little terrifying.
A few weeks ago, as I always do, I woke up at the beginning of a new week and listened to two excellent podcasts aimed at tutors and education businesses, both of which release on a Monday. If you haven’t come across them, I do recommend. One is called the “Upgrade Your Education Business” podcast by Sumantha McMahon. The other is the “Love Mondays Club” by Helen Dickman. While both of them spend a good deal of time talking about things on a scale not only beyond my reach but frankly beyond my desires, I have continued to enjoy listening to them and have gained a huge amount from doing so. Both podcasts have encouraged me to think about and to question what I’m doing; both have solidified some of my thinking about what direction I want to go in and what I do and don’t want for my business. Perhaps most importantly, they have helped me to crystalise in my mind what is unique about what I offer, and this has helped me with how I present myself on my website and on social media. I am enormously grateful to both of them for the sheer number of tips, ideas and questions they have put out there for free.
It was on the Love Mondays podcast that I heard Helen – a very successful tutor and business coach – talk about her own fears of being in front of the camera. This was something of a shock given how much she places herself front and centre of her promotion campaigns! Helen acknowledged that people who have met her online as she presents herself now will probably have assumed that she is fine being in front of the camera, and has no qualms about placing herself at the centre of her promotional material. But she revealed how she used to hide her face on social media, using her pet dog instead of herself as a muse and generally avoiding showing herself on screen. Everything she said rang true with me, and I started to wonder just how many other apparently confident and successful business owners feel the same.
On this particular podcast, Helen had a guest: the photographer that she had commissionaed to take the professional images that she is currently using on her website and on social media. Kika Mitchell, who specialises in family shoots and personal branding, had me laughing within minutes. She came across as the funniest, most self-effacing and genuine character one could hope to meet. I felt the same when I got in touch with her; I felt the same when I spoke to her on the phone; I felt the same when she came to my house and made me front and centre of my very own photo shoot: something I never could have imagined myself agreeing to.
If you’d asked me a few years ago whether I’d consider myself a person who needed to employ a photographer to improve my personal branding, I’d have hooted with laughter. But the more I listened to Helen’s podcast and listened to Kika talk about what she does, the more I came to realise that’s exactly what I needed. It had been on my mind for months that my website was looking a little tired. Beyond that, the reality was that I had one photo – one! – that I was comfortable sharing on social media. As they said in Roman times, vincit qui se vincit: the one who conquers themselves conquers overall. I knew I had to face my fears and conquer them.
In a business like mine, when I am fundamentally selling myself, I understand that people want to see the person that they’re investing in. Of course they do – I feel the same! There is no way I would feel so comfortable picking up the phone and talking to someone about something as person-centred as tutoring unless I had seen an image of them looking warm, open and humane. So my personal loathing of being in front of the camera was a huge problem. Not just that, I do genuinely look awful in photographs: not because of my appearance per se – I understand that my hang-ups about that are personal – but because whenever a camera is pointed in my direction I immediately tense up and look tense and awkward. On our wedding day, my instructions to the photographer were: I don’t want to know you’re there. I knew that this was the only way we stood any chance of capturing an image of me looking happy and relaxed. Point a lens in my face and – as a rule – I look like a complete weirdo. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Fortunately, he took me at my word, and did a great job in capturing both me and my husband without my knowledge.
Having convinced myself that a professional photo shoot was something I should do, I decided that choosing someone I felt comfortable and relaxed with was going to be essential. This is what’s so great about Kika. She seems particularly adept at working with people who feel as I do – people who find the idea of having a camera pointed in their face genuinely awful. Kika’s skill lies in forcing you to be yourself. She was mercilessly insistent that I should be smiling and laughing and achieved this by … making me smile and laugh! I laugh a lot in real life. On camera, not so much; but Kika managed to capture me laughing and smiling, and those images have turned out to be some of my favourites.
I’ll be honest and say that I do hope these images last a fair while; I am not sure that I am miraculously converted to the thought of being a model in the longterm! But if Kika can take a series of images of me that I am comfortable with, I’d say she can do it for anyone.
