The Performer
How the Self-View Turns a Video Call Participant Into the Director of Their Own Performance
Let's return to Nelly, the psychotherapist with fifteen years of experience we introduced in Part I. When working in her physical office, Nelly focuses all her attention on the client. Facial expressions, pauses, intonation, body language—nothing escapes her notice. Therapeutic contact is the primary tool in psychotherapy, and Nelly knows exactly how to wield it. When her practice migrated to Zoom, she didn't anticipate any particular difficulties. She had the experience, her skills were honed, and many of her clients remained the same.
The problem didn't reveal itself immediately. After a few weeks of working online, Nelly noticed that during sessions, a portion of her attention was leaking into the window showing her own image. "My face turned out to be far more expressive than I thought," she articulated later [1]. In her physical office, she never saw what she looked like while listening. On Zoom, she did. And what she saw troubled her: overly active facial expressions, involuntary grimaces of surprise, furrowed brows precisely when the client was sharing something painful. "Do I look empathetic enough?"—this question had never arisen in her physical office. On video calls, it became an intrusive background hum.
Nelly is not an anxious person. She doesn't have social phobia, she doesn't suffer from dysmorphia, and she doesn't struggle with self-esteem. She is not a Controller; she doesn't feel that "everything will collapse" if she stops monitoring her face. But she is a professional for whom the impression she makes is a working tool. A therapist must look calm, attentive, and accepting. When you are suddenly given the ability to see yourself through your client's eyes in real-time, giving up that monitoring proves surprisingly difficult. Not out of fear, but out of a commitment to the quality of service.
In our classification, Nelly is a Performer. It might surprise her clients, but even she cannot resist the self-view.
Nelly's experience is no exception. In 2021, researchers at Rutgers University surveyed 448 practicing clinicians—psychologists and psychotherapists—about their transition to telehealth. One consistent finding was that many participants rated one hour of video therapy as the equivalent of four to five hours of in-person work in terms of subjective exhaustion [2]. That ratio seems unrealistic—until you remember that a therapist on a video call is performing a job that simply did not exist in an in-person format: they are simultaneously conducting a session and watching themselves conduct it.
Think about it: a psychotherapist is a person professionally trained to manage attention, self-reflect, and sustain focus on another human being. If even a highly trained specialist cannot withstand the gravitational pull of the self-view, it speaks volumes about the sheer power of the mechanism. The Performer is the archetype that manifests most vividly in people for whom communication is the profession: educators, executives, trainers, broadcasters, salespeople, journalists, politicians. People who genuinely have something to lose if they don't look the part.
A Stage Without a Backstage
In 1959, Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in which he proposed a dramaturgical model of social interaction [3]. According to Goffman's concept—which remains highly influential in psychology today—we are always playing a role in the presence of others. This doesn't mean we are faking or deceiving; it refers to the structure of interaction itself: we choose what to show, what to hide, and how to present ourselves. We are one way with our parents, another with our colleagues, and yet another with our neighbors. Goffman called this impression management.
The central element of this model was the division of space into the front stage and the back stage. The front stage is where we are "in public": a meeting, a presentation, a job interview. Here, expectations and norms apply, behavior is controlled, and an image is maintained. The back stage is the space where we can take off the mask, relax, and stop managing impressions. In normal life, these zones alternate naturally. You finish a meeting, step into the hallway, pour a cup of coffee, and exhale. The front stage has ended; the back stage has begun.
Video conferencing deforms this architecture. First, the boundaries between the front and back stages blur: you are sitting at home, but your colleagues or clients can see you. Your home office becomes a simultaneously public and private space. The bookshelf behind you, the kitchen in the frame, a child accidentally walking in—all of this previously belonged to the back stage and required no control. Now, it does.
Second—and more importantly—the self-view annihilates the back stage entirely. During an in-person meeting, there is a natural shift in focus: when you are speaking, you are on the front stage; when you are listening, you can allow yourself to retreat to the periphery, relax your face, and stop managing the impression, because the room's natural focus shifts to the next speaker. You become part of the background. On a video call with the self-view enabled, this automatic shift does not exist. Even when you are not speaking, but merely listening, you continue to see yourself. And therefore, you continue to manage the impression. As long as the visual feedback loop is active, the brain cannot ignore it.
In an in-person setting, the Performer gets pauses. They finish their pitch, sit down, relax their face, and step off the "stage." On a video call, there are no pauses. The self-view displays your face continuously, meaning the front stage never ends. The Performer turns into an actor who is simultaneously playing a role, watching a live playback of their performance, and trying to adjust what they see on the fly.
During a live conversation, you do not know what your face looks like. This ignorance is, in fact, a profound blessing—it allows you to stop thinking about your face and focus on the interaction. The self-view, by eliminating this blissful ignorance, creates a task that never existed before: managing your own broadcast image in real-time.
The Proteus Effect
In 2007, Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford University described a phenomenon they called the Proteus effect: the physical appearance of an avatar in a virtual environment unconsciously alters the behavior of its owner [5]. Participants assigned taller avatars in the experiment negotiated more aggressively, offering less favorable terms to their opponents and insisting on their own way more often. Those given more attractive avatars stood closer to virtual strangers and were more open in communication. Crucially, the participants did not know their avatars differed from anyone else's. They didn't make a conscious decision to "act more confidently"—the change happened automatically, below the threshold of awareness.
The Proteus effect operates via the self-perception mechanism described by Daryl Bem in 1972: we draw conclusions about ourselves by observing our own behavior and appearance [6]. If I see myself as tall and confident, I begin to act more confidently. If I see myself as pale, with dark circles under my eyes and a crooked smile (which is exactly how most people look through a wide-angle webcam under poor lighting)—my conclusions about myself will align with that image.
The self-view on a video call is not an avatar in the strictest sense. But to the brain, the difference is negligible: it sees an image it associates with the self, and it calibrates behavior to match what it sees. A Performer who sees a face on the screen that feels insufficiently convincing begins to overcompensate: they amplify their facial expressions, straighten their posture, and try to project more energy. This compensatory behavior demands severe cognitive resources. And yet, the image in the self-view—subject to camera distortion and flat lighting—still fails to look the way the Performer wants it to. (At least, until they invest in a high-end camera with proper depth of field, professional lighting, set design, or software filters—though even then, the core dynamic remains). The result is a growing, often unconscious gap between effort and result, which steadily metastasizes into exhaustion.
A Performance With No Audience
As we recall from the eye-tracking data, video call participants systematically overestimate how much attention others pay to them. The spotlight effect, first described by Gilovich, Medvec, and Savitsky, operates in full force here [7]. Every participant on a video conference feels like they are standing in the center of their own spotlight, while in reality, they exist on the periphery of everyone else's.
For the Performer, this means a massive chunk of their effort is directed at an audience that isn't watching. They tweak their lighting, calibrate their micro-expressions, and monitor their eye contact—while their colleagues are busy doing the exact same thing: looking at their own windows. The grand production into which the Performer pours their cognitive budget largely plays to an empty house.
Unfortunately, the simple intellectual understanding that "no one is looking at me" is not enough to shut down the automatic impression management process. As long as the self-view is on, the brain receives visual feedback about its own image and reacts to it. The Performer can fully agree that their efforts are redundant while simultaneously continuing to exert them.
The Performer vs. The Controller
The Controller and the Performer look identical from the outside—both frequently check the self-view and meticulously manage their facial expressions. The difference lies in the vector of their motivation, which is critical from a practical standpoint.
While the Controller is driven by the fear of catastrophe and the desire to avoid failure ("Do I look weird?"), the Performer is driven by ambition. They are concerned with the quality of the act: "Am I convincing enough? Am I at my best?" The Controller is playing defense, using the self-view as a security monitor. The Performer is chasing an ideal, treating the little window as a director's monitor.
The distinction may seem subtle, but it dictates both the subjective experience and the type of vicious cycle they fall into. Consequently, the "fuel" burning in their respective engines is different. The Controller burns up in classic Clark-Wells social anxiety. The Performer suffers from perfectionistic strain and total fatigue: they aren't afraid of a catastrophe; they are simply exhausted from the relentless manual override of their own image. Their cycle is rooted in perfectionism: High standard → monitor for compliance → detect discrepancy → increase effort to eliminate discrepancy → exhaustion → drop in quality → increase monitoring.
In practice, archetypes frequently blend. A person might start a meeting as a Performer—striving to look as persuasive as possible—but halfway through, as fatigue sets in and control slips, they downshift into Controller mode: "I think I look exhausted. If they notice, my position weakens. I need to force a better face so they don't see it."
What the Performer Should Do
The Performer's core problem is a split—or even a fracturing—of identity: they are simultaneously trying to be a participant in the conversation, the director of their own broadcast, and the audience in the front row. These are two or three separate tasks aggressively competing for the same limited cognitive resource.
The way out is to consciously choose a single task: to be, to appear, or to observe. Not all at once. For instance, during the actual online event, the Performer can decide to commit fully to "being the speaker" or "being the actor," and satisfy the "director" and "audience" components later by watching the recording. This approach aligns perfectly with David Clark's classic protocol: post-event video feedback is infinitely more effective than real-time self-monitoring. By watching the recording later, you will discover that the micro-flubs that felt catastrophic in the moment are completely invisible on screen. This allows you to gradually break the habit of live self-monitoring while still leaving room for professional growth.
This doesn't necessarily mean a blanket ban on the self-view. For the Performer, it is genuinely useful at times—specifically as a technical feedback tool. If you are a lecturer starting a class or a journalist recording an interview, it is highly adaptive to check your framing, your lighting, and ensure you don't have breakfast in your beard before you begin. The problem only arises when a technical check morphs into a continuous broadcast.
Listening is the moment when impression management is definitively unnecessary. It doesn't help; it only drains resources.
Should the Performer continuously or periodically look at themselves while they are speaking? The stance of this book is: still no. While arguments in favor of this tactic have been made by Bailenson and by Olga Krasnova and her colleagues (we will dissect those studies in Chapter 12), both for preventing a slide into the Controller's anxiety loop and for maximizing communication efficacy, it is always more valuable for the Performer to receive feedback from the audience (rather than "feedback" from their own reflection) and to calibrate based on the reactions of engaged participants.
The second tool is restoring the back stage. Goffman described the back stage as the space where you don't have to perform. In a remote work environment, this space must be engineered intentionally. Pauses between meetings should not be treated as a luxury, but as a functional necessity: five minutes off-camera and away from the self-view are required to step off the stage and drop the role. For someone executing six to eight video calls a day, the absence of a back stage means six to eight hours of continuous front-stage performance. The cognitive budget is not designed for that. If the organization doesn't mandate breaks, the Performer must create them: end the call two minutes early, turn off the camera for a minute before the next one starts (or even during it), and physically shift positions—stand up, pace, look out a window. The body needs a signal: The front stage is closed. Stand down. Return to baseline.
Finally—and this is perhaps the hardest step, often requiring personal psychotherapy—the Performer needs to audit some of their core beliefs. For instance: while the Performer might believe it in the moment, do twelve years of hard-earned professional expertise genuinely evaporate just because the webcam caught a bad angle? Is it possible that the interlocutor is evaluating the content, not just the visual packaging? Can you survive without micromanaging every single facial expression and trust that the conversation won't fall apart?
Nelly, the therapist from the beginning of this chapter, eventually made the decision to hide the self-view during her sessions. Not immediately, not without internal resistance, and not permanently. But during the sessions where her own image wasn't devouring her attention, that attention naturally flowed back to the client. Nelly's face ceased to be an object requiring manual transmission. Therapeutic contact—the exact tool this entire setup was supposed to facilitate—was restored. The results of these experiments convinced Nelly to abandon the self-view entirely. It allowed her to stop observing her own professionalism and simply begin embodying it.
References
[1] Neidich, H. (2021). Quoted in: Schulman, A. My Face Was Far More Expressive Than I Thought. Business Insider, 2021.
[2] Situational data from Rutgers University survey of 448 clinicians on telehealth fatigue, reported in professional telehealth literature, 2021.
[3] Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday.
[4] Günther, J. (2020). Quoted in materials by TherapyDen, 2020.
[5] Yee, N., & Bailenson, J. N. (2007). The Proteus effect: The effect of transformed self-representation on behavior. Human Communication Research, 33(3), 271–290.
[6] Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 1–62). Academic Press.
[7] Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one's own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211–222. [https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211](https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.2.211)