In this episode I explore how tutors can overcome discomfort around showing up online by aligning their visibility efforts with their personality and comfort levels. I offer practical strategies for building confidence and staying authentic while increasing online presence.

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👋🏽 Hello! I'm Sumantha McMahon, and I've supported over 100 tutors and education business owners.

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Okay, so you want to be more visible, but you're not sure whether you're the sort of person who jumps around online or records videos or constantly shows your face. You know it would probably help your business, but every time you sit down to do something about it, that voice creeps in again, the one that says, I'm just not that sort of person. If that sounds familiar, then you're in the right place because today is about showing up and being visible regardless of your personality and preferences. I'm not going to be saying just push through it and do it anywhere. I'm actually going to be giving you some things you can do so that you feel comfortable. So we're going to find ways that suit you and ways that you that feel more aligned. And I just want to challenge something while we're here. We all get told to get out of your comfort zone, feel the fear, and do it anyway. And sometimes it's decent advice, but in my opinion, it's about half right.

Because there are two very different reasons that being visible makes you uncomfortable and one of them means keep going and the other one means stop. Working out which one you're in changes everything about what you do next. If you're new to the podcast, welcome. I'm Samantha and I help tutors earn more without working more hours and to help them build a business that gives them future options. And the reason this topic sits inside that work is that how you show up online is actually a design decision. Your business is a reflection of who you are. So the way you show up, the way you're visible, has to match the person running it. When it doesn't, you can feel it and so can everyone else. When it comes to showing up online, there's a lot of pressure to be polished, to be charismatic, high energy, well edited. And I want to be fair to that because presentation does matter. Would you stop and listen to someone who came across as unprofessional? Probably not. So professional counts. The problem lies with what we've decided professional looks like. On Instagram, I see a lot of talking head videos from content creators whose whole business is.

Things like social media marketing or their influences. You know, maybe they sell courses on it and their videos are very polished. Lots of transitions, effects, sound effects, cuts every two seconds. And when I started thinking about making Talking Head videos myself, my first instinct was to copy that, make it slick, add all the bells and whistles. And then I stopped because that just isn't me. Plus, it was incredibly time consuming, so I couldn't have kept it going anyway. Think about how my podcast looks on YouTube if you're watching on YouTube. I'd like to think it looks professional. I've invested in some decent lighting, I care about the sound. But there isn't any fancy editing going on. There are no effects, there's nothing flashy. The way I show up is very me. I'm generally quite calm. I don't really wave my arms around too much. I don't dance, I don't pull faces, and there's nothing wrong with anyone who does, it's just not me.

So if I suddenly appeared on Instagram doing a talking head video full of effects and moving around like a completely different person, it would be strange. It wouldn't look like anything else that I've ever made. So being professional doesn't mean being someone you're not. Good lighting, yes. Sound people can actually listen to, yes. A studio production with personality to match? No. That was never the requirement. We just decided it was because of the stuff. That we're seeing from the professionals around us. And I'll say this: if you used to teach, I really do get why being visible feels harder. When you're in the classroom, you have to be so strict about students not being able to contact you online, so you lock everything down. Then all of a sudden, you're running a business and you have to do the complete opposite and put yourself out there. That takes a bit of untangling. I felt exactly the same. So if part of you is resisting it, it might not be that you're shy. It may just be that you spent years being trained to do the opposite.

Okay, really, really quickly, if what I'm talking about is useful to you, then follow or subscribe wherever you're listening or if you're watching on YouTube so that my next episode finds you without you having to go looking. It really helps small podcasters like me because then it reaches more people and it means I can help more people. Now, before I get into the next bit, which is the bit I really want you to hear, I want to quickly tell you about the tutor's mastermind because this is really relevant to what we're talking about right now. If you're listening on the day that I've released this, the doors are currently open. The Mastermind, the Tutor's Mastermind, is a membership community for tutors and it gives you two big things. It gives you direction because there is a vast action-focused training library, and you choose what you focus on and when.

with plenty in there to help you figure out what that should be. And it gives you a community so you're not making decisions on your own. Honestly, we talk about more than business. We have a health and fitness accountability group, for instance. So the doors are open right now. If you're listening or watching at the time I've released this and you can click the link in the show notes to secure your place. It's pay monthly cancel anytime. And if you've missed the window, don't worry, just join the waiting list and you'll actually be the first to know. Next time I open the doors because I always give my waiting list early access. Okay, back to the episode. This is the bit I really want to talk to you about. I want to talk about something that I call the discomfort test. We talk a lot about getting out of our comfort zone, and I think it's a balancing act because sometimes when something feels uncomfortable, we need to pay attention to why. That's actually the thing that steers what we should do next. There are two kinds of discomfort.

And they need completely different responses. The first kind is unfamiliar. You've simply never done it before. You've never recorded yourself talking to camera. You've never posted a photo of your face. You've never written anything personal on LinkedIn, let's say. So it feels uncomfortable because it's new, and that feeling reliably fades with repetition. That's the discomfort that's worth pushing through. And I'd say push through it in small steps rather than one big leap. The second kind is when it's off brand. It doesn't feel wrong because it's new, it feels wrong because it isn't you. There's a trend going around at the moment where people kind of sit down on a chair and pretend they're recording a Netflix documentary about something in their business. There's the kind of sitting down, the drama, the acting. Now, I would feel deeply uncomfortable doing that, even though it's a trend, because I don't really like acting online, especially.

Some people are great at it and they have a lot of fun with it and they're really creative, but I'm not keen, it's not me. And it would be very tempting to read that as a comfort zone problem, that I should just be brave and just do it anyway. But it isn't. I feel uncomfortable because it's completely off-brand for me and no amount of bravery is going to fix that. If I did it anyway, then I'd have made something that doesn't sound like me, it doesn't look like anything else I produce, and it would confuse the exact people I'm trying to reach. And I've noticed this pattern. Every so often a tutor forces themselves into a trend because they think that they should, and then they kind of go quiet afterwards because it never felt like them and they couldn't keep it up. That's not a discipline problem. It's just the wrong ladder step for that person. So the discomfort test is all about asking the right question. Am I uncomfortable because this is new or because this just isn't me? New means just take a smaller step.

Not me means stop and go find the version that is you. That discomfort was doing its job. It was information and it was protecting you from doing something that was totally off-brand. Now, this is one of the reasons I talk about it's about deliberately designing your business because the word design means making intentional decisions. And when you make intentional decisions, sometimes the result is a no. That's the answer. It means you're not going to go for something. And there's intention behind that rather than saying no for the wrong reasons. Now, let's say something's unfamiliar and you want to build the confidence. We need to approach that in a way where we're actually gonna that we're gonna stick to because if we feel constantly vulnerable and constantly uncomfortable, we will stop. It's exhausting. So how does the confidence actually get built? I work with a lot of tutors who want to put themselves out there.

And they feel really shy about it. Sometimes it's because they are introverts. Sometimes it's simply they've never done it before, and it just feels really exposing. And what I want you to see is that confidence gets built by doing in stages, not by waiting until you feel ready. When I first started putting my picture out there, I felt incredibly uncomfortable. Asked my husband to take a few photos in my office because my selfies were dreadful and I hated all of them. Eventually, I booked a professional photographer to come to the house and she put me completely at ease. I liked the pictures and I used them everywhere. That was the first rung of the ladder for me. That was my first step and it worked. Because seeing good photos of myself out in the world made the whole idea a little less frightening. Then after a while, I got fed up. I was recycling the same handful of images and I'd cut my hair so the pictures didn't even really look like me anymore.

But by then something had changed. Because I've been sharing photos of myself for so long, taking a selfie no longer felt like a big deal. So I took one, it wasn't perfect, and I posted it. And the more I've done that, the easier it has got. I didn't start at the selfie, I tried, and it didn't work. And I never would have managed the selfie confidently at the start. My stepping stone was the professional photographer. And here's the thing, your your ladder won't look like mine. One of my one-to-one clients has worked with me for three months, and she had never promoted on social media before. She had a one-to-one tuition offering built entirely through word of mouth, really successful, and now she's launching in-person tuition. So she's starting from scratch. Just from seven posts on her Facebook page, plus some offline marketing, she's already filling her books and getting inquiries in. But here's what she did.

Because it was new to her, she didn't want to keep showing her face, so she blended it. A little bit of her face, plus some behind-the-scenes content. She showed her setup in the library space that she's hired for the in-person lessons, and she's connecting with people offline because she feels more comfortable talking to people. And so it's very aligned with what she's offering anyway. So the blend works because she's showing up visibly, but she's doing it naturally in a way that suits her right now. Her content is strong, it's effective, and it's bringing people in fast. And that's the power of showing up in a way that's aligned with you and using the discomfort test so you know when to say yes and when to say no. And I'll say this: doing the uncomfortable thing is a lot easier when you're not doing it on your own. Half of what happens in the tutor's mastermind and even in my one-to-one program is somebody saying they're going to post something and feeling a bit sick about it, and everyone else cheering them on, or it's people doing things together. A few of my clients decide to practice selling to each other on Zoom just to get comfortable with it. That's not a small thing, it's often the difference between a plan and actually doing something that you've been procrastinating or avoiding. So your job is to find the rung that you can reach right now, not the one you think you should be on, just the next one up from where you are.

Now. The honest part of this is that there might be a temptation for some people just not to show their face and not really show up in that way at all. But there is something we need to acknowledge. Showing your face does make a difference in our industry because ours is a human industry. We're asking parents to trust us with their children and whether we like it or not, people form impressions from what someone looks like and the way they speak, alongside everything else. Seeing you speeds that trust up. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. However, there's a lot of room between hiding completely and going live every day. So whatever you need in order to feel confident, do it. I'm fine showing my face, for example, without makeup. What I'm not comfortable with is my hair not being sorted, and that's because I have PCOS and a while ago I lost a lot of hair. It's much thinner than it was, and I was really self-conscious about it for years. So now, unless my hair looks okay, I don't feel confident on camera. That's my thing.

Yours might be a particular outfit. It might be a filter. It might be doing your face properly first. I'm not here to judge any of it. I'm here to tell you to do whatever gets you to the point of pressing post, that point of being visible comfortably, or at least more confidently, shall we say. And this isn't only about online. If you feel nervous about showing up in person, let's say, think about what would help. Maybe it's a smaller event that you need. Maybe it's dressing in a way that makes you feel like yourself. Maybe it's knowing exactly what's happening on the day, knowing the venue, and knowing that you can duck out whenever you want. It's the same principle, just lower the rung until you can reach it. And if showing your face is genuinely just off the table for now, there are ways around it. You could hold a book up so it covers most of your face and only your eyes show. You could use a side profile of your mid-lesson rather than a full portrait. You could photograph your hands, your desk, your resources, your workspace. You could film your setup or a voiceover over what you're doing rather than a piece where you're speaking to the camera. You could share screenshots of a lovely message from a parent with permission. All of that shows something real about you and how you work and how you interact, which does a version of the same job. So start where you can stand to start.

The version of visible that you'll actually keep doing beats the impressive one that you'll abandon in a fortnight because it's just too much right now. Now, quick reminder before I go: the tutor's mastermind is open for a few more days. If you're listening or watching on the day that this is released, and the link is in the show notes. Or if you're watching later, you can join the waiting list. And I always give waiting list first priority. And if there's one thing I'd love you to take away from this episode, it's this. You don't have to become someone else to be visible. You just have to find the version of visible that's actually you and take the next small step towards it. Thank you for giving me your time today and you'll hear from me on Wednesday.