Last month I had a photo shoot; I’ve been doing it several times in recent years and it has always been quite hard. It seems to me that unless you are a photo shooting professional, you cannot lie to the camera. It captures all your inadequacies. It is worse than the mirrors used by beauticians or those found in the hotel rooms that magnify your image several times. The mirror zooms in on an image, it’s static. The photo camera captures every movement, every expression, everything we do not want to show. Our being is naked in front of the camera.
I was thinking that a psychologist or a coach with psychodynamic training could see many aspects of ourselves from the way we relate to the experience of being in front of the camera.
The education I had at Insead, during the two years of executive master in coaching and consulting (plus another year when I had the chance to have Manfred Kets de Vries as my professor in the leadership program), coupled with a certain experience of working with people and multiple personal experiences, often make me see beyond the masks that people wear, to see beyond what is unspeakable.
At a point in time, I was telling people quite quickly and directly the way I saw things. However, a very dear client of mine told me to be careful, as not many will appreciate having a mirror put in front of them. Not many people want to be in front of the camera. We are embarrassed, we have fears, we do not have the courage to admit them to ourselves, we think that the way we are got us to this point, and a change could have risks. Letting ourselves be scanned by a camera, having the courage to look in the mirror, having the courage to talk to a coach represents an act of honesty towards ourselves, like a diagnosis given by a doctor. It is better to know sooner, to start fixing as early as possible than to remain ignorant.
No matter how hard it seems, I suggest you do this photo shoot exercise. It is an investment in yourself – the best investment possible.