A few months ago I started offering something called an On-Camera Presence Audit. A private call where I look at your actual setup, your light, your sound, your camera, your background, and tell you the truth about what it’s saying before you ever open your mouth. I made them complimentary, and I said right on the page: complimentary for now, but not forever.

They booked out. Not slowly. My entire August calendar filled, and I found myself with a very good problem and a very real one.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect.

The calls kept running long. They were sold as thirty minutes. They kept becoming an hour, sometimes more, because I’d spot something fixable and I could not help myself. Somebody would mention a microphone still sitting in its box, and twenty minutes later we’d have it out, plugged in, gain set, positioned right, and I’d be listening to them describe their lunch so we could hear the difference together.

I was performing the surgery during the X-ray. Every single time.

And that told me something I couldn’t unhear: there was a whole group of people showing up to these calls who weren’t ready for my full studio work, and might not be for a while, but who needed way more than a free half hour. People right in the middle of the becoming. On camera more and more, hosting workshops, going live, starting podcasts, and getting exactly zero support between “read my articles for free” and “hire me to build your studio.”

That gap had a shape. I just had to build the room.

Every stage has one

In my world, the green room is the room off to the side of the stage. It’s where things get checked, the mic gets clipped on, and somebody tells you your collar is flipped before you walk out in front of people.

Every theater has one. Every studio has one. I’ve spent twenty years of my career in and around them.

Online, nobody has one. You click the link and you’re just... on. Live, recorded, broadcast, with whatever light and sound and background you happened to have, telling whatever story it happens to tell.

So I built one. It’s called The Green Room, and it’s my new paid community here on Substack.

It’s where my new eight-part video training series lives, Be Seen as the Authority You Actually Are. It’s the deepest teaching I’ve ever done on the 5 On-Camera Trust Levers. It’s where the On-Camera Presence Clinic happens every four weeks, live hot seats where you come on camera and I tell you the one thing to change/elevate before the next clinic. It’s where the audit now lives too, as a members-only benefit, because the thing that booked out my calendar needed a better home than my free time.

And it’s filling up faster than I expected. New members keep sending notes when they join, and this one from Monique stopped me:

“One introductory call with Tommy and he gave me small tweaks to make with my settings, microphone, and lighting that make such a difference in how I physically look and sound on camera.”

Small tweaks. Such a difference. That’s the whole thesis, honestly. Most people are a handful of informed adjustments away from a screen that finally tells the truth about them. They just don’t know which adjustments, and they’ve been guessing alone.

Not a membership

Here’s the thing I decided early, and it shaped everything: I didn’t want to run a membership.

Memberships are treadmills. Content calendars, retention campaigns, the constant low hum of “am I giving them enough this month.” I’ve watched people build memberships that quietly became a second job they pay themselves badly for. It’s a mistake I’ve made myself many times already too so I knew I wanted to make this different and it is.

When you join The Green Room, you’re buying something real: a training library that grows and never shrinks, a live clinic every four weeks, my gear guides sorted by budget, and access to sit down with me for a one-on-one. Nothing ever gets taken away. There’s no curriculum to fall behind on, no homework, no keeping up.

Because here’s what I know about the people this room is for: you don’t want to become an expert at cameras and lighting. You want to stop thinking about them. You want to open the Zoom room, or hit go live, or start the recording, and know, not hope, know, that what people see matches who you actually are.

That’s what gets built in a green room. That’s why it’s called that.

The honest part

The room is still under construction. I opened the doors before it was finished, on purpose, and the people walking in during the building phase are getting the builder’s deal: $88 for the year, locked in for as long as they stay, before the price goes to $222 after August.

And an update since I opened the doors: the first live On-Camera Presence Clinic was set for September 18. It’s now Friday, August 21, because nearly 50 people joined in the first week and I’m not making a room this alive wait seven weeks to gather. From there it runs every four weeks, same Friday slot, and the sooner you’re in, the sooner you’re in the hot seat lineup.

The first 100 charter members are also getting something I didn’t plan but should have: a real voice in the build. The questions coming out of this week’s audit calls and GlamCam Studio setups, how to record in HD on Zoom, best way to record audio-only podcasts, fixing the glowing streaks of light showing up on your webcam, what gear to start upgrading and when, how to hook up that mic sitting in the box or on the shelf, are literally becoming the blueprint for what gets recorded into the Vault first. This room is getting built around the people in it.

(One quick note so nobody gets confused: “charter member” is my name for everyone who joins during this building phase at $88. It’s not Substack’s “founding member” tier, so don’t hunt for a special button. The annual plan is the door.)

One more thing worth knowing before you decide to wait: members are already booking into my September audit calendar, and it’s filling faster than I expected. I run every session myself, a handful a week, so those slots go first come, first served. The $88 price waits until the end of August. The calendar doesn’t wait for anyone.

The charter window closes at the end of August. That’s not a countdown timer trick. It’s just when the construction discount stops making sense.

If you’re one of the people I built this for, on camera more than ever, hosting or about to be, tired of guessing, the door is open and the full tour is here:

Learn More & Join The Green Room

And if you’re not there yet, stay right where you are. The essays stay free, the stories stay free, and every part of the new video series opens free, the full what and the why of each lever, right up to the point where the how begins. The how is what lives in the room. The room will be here when you’re ready.

The screen should tell the truth. This is the room where we make sure yours does.

And to the nearly fifty of you already inside:

Thank you. You joined a room that was still getting built, some of you within hours of the doors opening, and that kind of trust is not lost on me. What we’re about to do together, the clinics, the hot seats, the questions that become the trainings, is exactly the work I love most, and you’re the ones shaping what this room becomes. See you August 21. Come as you are, setup and all.

Refer a friend

It’s the fastest way to go from amateur to polished. It’s usually the most impactful fix of my 5 On-Camera Trust Levers and often the cheapest. But almost nobody has it quite right.

In this video:

• Why lighting is a cue, not just brightness, and what a bad light is quietly costing your credibility

• The question almost nobody asks: not how bright, but how big and how close

• My official position on ring lights (lovingly: just say no)

• Whether your window is an asset or a liability, and why killing it entirely puts you in a cave

• A live demo: me in no light, me in desk-lamp light, and what those are doing to your face right now

• Two real clients. Tracie, whose beautiful background lights were beating her face light and leaving her in the dark. And Karen, who was broadcasting from a cave for a year.

The what and the why are free, always, to everybody. The how lives in The Green Room, and this part’s how is a good one: the exact kind of light to get, and the positioning that costs nothing and changes everything.

Why Join The Green Room?

The second half of this video is me, on camera, with the actual light you need in my hands, the one I put in front of my own clients, and then the part that matters more than the gear, where it goes, how close, how high, and why. Plus the rest of Karen’s story, which is not what you’d guess.

That all lives in The Green Room, my paid community here on Substack. It’s named for the room just off the stage, where the light gets checked and the mic gets clipped on and somebody tells you your collar is flipped, so you walk out looking like you meant it. Every real stage has one. Online, nobody does. So I built one.

Inside:

• The full series, with all of the how, including the rest of this video

• A growing vault of guides and walkthroughs

• My actual tested and approved gear recommendations, kept current

• A monthly live setup clinic where members come on camera and I tell them what I see, what I hear, and what to change first

• Access to book a private On-Camera Presence Audit with me, one on one

One click, and the rest of this video unlocks. Come get your lighting handled with me.

Join The Green Room

Read more

That moment is what this whole series is about.

I’ve spent decades behind the camera, including four years as Bob Proctor’s Creative Director, and I keep watching the same thing happen to people doing genuinely brilliant work. They ask how to finally get seen for it, and everybody hands them the same tired prescription. Post more. Go live more. Batch more content. Feed the algorithm.

I want to push back on that, hard. Because if what’s on the screen isn’t communicating the caliber of your work, making more content doesn’t fix the problem. It multiplies it.

This is Part 1 of a new eight-part series called Be Seen as the Authority You Actually Are, and it’s the foundation for everything that follows. Grab a coffee for this one.

What’s in it

• The 3-Second Authority Check, and the even faster check that happens before it

• Warmth and competence, and how your setup answers both before you speak

• Why your on-camera presence is never neutral, whether you’re paying attention to it or not

• Real client before-and-afters, and my own

• What I actually mean when I say “the truth”

What’s coming

Over the next several parts I’m walking through my 5 On-Camera Trust Levers, one at a time. Lighting. Audio. Camera. Background and Set. Platform Polish. Then we go past the mechanics into the part that matters most, which is what changes in you when the screen finally catches up.

Part 2 is Lighting. Fastest, most satisfying fix of the five.

How this series works

Every part starts with the what and the why. That part is free. Always. To everybody. Ideas travel just fine on their own.

The how lives in the Green Room.

Not because I’m gatekeeping. Because handing you a how-to and then walking away is the exact thing I’m trying to save you from. That’s the YouTube rabbit hole. That’s the pile of Amazon boxes and a setup that still feels a little off and nobody who knows this stuff to ask. Even a perfect step-by-step leaves margin for error, and I’d rather be there when you use it.

The Green Room

It’s named after the room just off the stage. The one where things get prepped and checked, the mic gets clipped on, and somebody tells you your collar is flipped so you walk out looking like you meant it.

Every real stage has one. Online, nobody does. So I built one.

Inside:

• This full series, with all of the how (All 8 parts dripping out over the next week or two)

• A growing vault of guides, walkthroughs, and trainings

• My actual tested and approved gear recommendations

• A monthly live setup clinic where members come on camera and I tell them what I see, what I hear, and what to change first

• Access to book your private 45-min On-Camera Presence Audit with me

Learn more & Join The Green Room

Because almost none of them look the way their work deserves. The conversation is a million dollars and the picture is a laptop webcam pointed up a nostril, lit by whatever the ceiling happened to be doing that day. Brilliant people, broadcasting from a default setup they never once stopped to think about.

I wanted to screenshot a few and show you. Then I remembered I’m new here and trying to make friends, so I’ll behave.

But here’s what I know is happening, because it’s the same thing I run into every time someone asks me “what camera should I get.” (I wrote a whole piece on why that’s the wrong question.) It’s not laziness. It’s not vanity going the other way. It’s one of two things. Either they’ve genuinely never thought about it, they were handed a $20 webcam that came built into their laptop and told to hit record and they never looked back. Or they’ve decided their thought leadership is the whole point, and what they look like on camera doesn’t matter.

I understand both. And I’m here, lovingly, to tell you the second one isn’t true.

What you look like on that screen is not separate from your message. It is a huge part of your message. It’s the first thing anyone receives from you, before a single word lands. And right now, for a lot of extraordinary people on here, that first thing is quietly saying don’t take me too seriously while their mouth says something brilliant.

That gap is what I close. And the word I put on the door for the work is: Glam.

But Doesn't "Glam" Sound Shallow?

One of my clients shared with me recently that she thought the name of my signature service, GlamCam Studio™, might come across a little surface-y. Like some people might read it as me trying to make them into something they’re not, forcing a shiny identity onto them.

I heard it. I even sat with renaming the whole thing for a while, because I’ve wondered the same thing myself. Does the name need to explain everything the work actually does?

And I landed on no. The name isn’t the point. The result is the point. My choice now is to teach you what Glam means in my hands, and let the word earn its place.

So let’s start with the actual dictionary definition of glamorous.

It means: Attractive in an exciting and special way.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Not fake. Not painted-on. Not sexy, not flashy, not in the Texas-y “the-higher-the-hair-the-closer-to-God” kind of way (and btw I am here for every bit of that when it’s aligned with who a woman who loves big hair actually is). Attractive in an exciting and special way. And here’s the part most people miss: you already are that. Every one of us is attractive in our own exciting and special way. The only question is whether the screen is telling that truth about you or hiding it.

Glam, to me, is redefining that word all the way back to its root. It’s not about adding a mask. It’s about revealing what’s already there and letting the outside finally line up with it.

Let me show you what I mean, because Glam looks completely different on different people.

Bob Glam

Bob Proctor would probably never have picked the word glam for himself. But friend, let me tell you, Bob Proctor was one glamorous man!

Bob wore nothing but custom-tailored suits. Off the rack wasn’t a thing for this guy. Gorgeous bespoke Antonacci suits, hand-made in Toronto, dozens of them lining his boutique of a closet, with custom shirts to match and the most beautiful collection of designer silk ties I’ve ever seen. And his shoes? Why, custom Italian leather of course.

Bob had such a thing about his wardrobe and appearance. In fact, it was a real aspect of his daily frequency. Sometimes he’d get fully dressed for an event, feel something was off, walk right back in and change the entire outfit, and then he was locked in. And his hair was immaculate every single day, working or not. He had manicures and pedicures every couple of weeks, complete with clear nail polish, because he loved how clean his hands felt and how it looked.

He was about as glammed and bejeweled as a straight, white-haired, eighty-something man was ever going to be. Beautiful cufflinks. His diamond exclamation-point pin, always perfectly placed on his lapel. Perfect clothes, perfect hair, perfect nails. And always completely himself.

He did draw the line at makeup though! 😂 A few times I went to hit him with a little anti-shine powder before we hit record, and he’d give me about fifteen seconds before,

“Okay, that’s enough, Tommy, let’s shoot it.” Fair enough, Mr. Proctor.

Now here’s why this matters.

Did anyone ever look at Bob Proctor and think, who does this guy think he is, so full of himself and his appearance? Never. Not once. Because it wasn’t vanity. It was congruence.

He would say, “people decide what they think about you the moment they see you, before they ever hear you, smell you, taste you, or touch you.”

He dressed the way he did partly for the room, but mostly for himself. He wanted to look and feel like the man he actually was. And also in his words, “to always walk in the room looking like you own the place.”

There was a time when Bob got sick of looking at himself on a crappy webcam too. So he built a million-dollar studio to look like a million bucks while he taught the world million-dollar lessons. Here’s the thing almost nobody knew though . He had all the right equipment in that room, and none of it was tuned. Not one piece dialed in. When I came into his world, I finally got to start tuning it. And by the time Bob left this planet, the equipment finally matched the man. All that million-dollar presence he already had, and the final picture told the complete truth about it.

That’s Glam. The celebration of beauty. Bob loved beautiful things, and he loved showing up as his most beautiful, most authentic, highest self. It made him feel fantastic, and his audiences felt it right through the screen.

How many of you have that same thing waiting, in your own way, and just haven’t let yourself step into it yet?

Julie Glam

Now, let’s talk about my dear friend and mentor, , and watch the word glam flip completely.

Julie is, by my expert opinion, a supermodel. Gorgeous, full stop. Whether she’s in full glam first-impression mode for day one of a masterclass with 7,000 women in the room, broadcasting from her very own GlamCam Studio setup with impeccable wardrobe and full hair and makeup, or it’s 2 weeks later and she’s in full teacher mode in her Clarity Queen ballcap, doing the work with hundreds of new students, she’s always embodying her fully glamorous self, whatever expression it’s taking that day.

But here’s the reclaim I love most about her. Julie went silver on purpose.

Back when she was a VP at IBM, approaching midlife, she felt she had to keep dyeing her hair the second it started to gray. Coloring it back, over and over, because that’s what a woman was supposed to do, right? And one day she decided, no. She was going silver. And it’s one of the best decisions she’s ever made about her appearance. It looks absolutely stunning on her.

Sit with that, because it’s the whole point. Bob’s glam was about adding, the suits, the polish, the pin. Julie’s glam was about taking away the thing society told her to hide behind. She looked at the rule and said, I earned this silver, and it’s beautiful, and I’m choosing it. I’m owning it. And she doesn’t just own it, she literally rocks it.

That’s Glam too. Sometimes reclaiming your most attractive, exciting, special self means putting something on. And sometimes it means finally taking the mask off.

Then there’s the women who thought glam wasn’t for them

These are the women I actually work with the most.

A lot of my people are not what you’d picture when you hear the word glam. They’re not paint and spray every day kinda gals. They’re more earthy. Grounded. Beautiful women who long ago made peace with their appearance and decided, rightly, that their value was never defined by their face or body, no matter how much physical beauty they perceive in themselves, or have been told that they do or don’t have by others. Some of them wear no makeup at all and are proud of it. And I say rock on, sisters!

If that’s you, I want to say this clearly, because I know exactly what can rise in your chest when a man who runs something called GlamCam Studio™ starts talking. You’re bracing to be told to “doll up”. To be handed back the very pressure you set down on purpose.

I am not asking you to doll up. I’m asking you to Glam Up in whatever glam means for you. And if you don’t know what that is, that’s my job. I’ll help you find it.

Because here’s the truth that has nothing to do with makeup. Even if you never touch a tube of anything, there is a vast difference between good lighting and bad lighting. There is a world between a cheap default webcam and a professional camera tuned specifically for your own face. There’s an enormous gap between your voice coming through a tinny laptop mic and your warm, resounding tones coming through a microphone that catches your full frequency and conveys it to your audience’s ears in the way it can land right inside their hearts. And there’s all the difference in the world between a random corner of your kitchen table and a custom set that was intentionally designed and actually built to hold you.

None of that requires you to change one thing about how you feel about your own face. It’s not about decoration. It’s about the picture finally telling The Truth.

And yes, glam is for the guys too

Before I go on, let me hold the door open. Glam is not just for the gals.

I’m a dude and I claim it. And if you’re a dude, you can too because there’s such a thing as Guy Glam, a little sweetening to pull a man’s best features forward, and every single person looks better with a touch of intention.

Right now this week, I’m in the middle of building Brian Proctor’s GlamCam Studio for his next era of on-camera presence. Much like his father, Brian may not personally reach for the word glam, and that’s fine. But trust me, by the time we’re done, he’s going to see it and feel it.

My own before and after

I’ll be honest with you about something. I was not born with a mountain of confidence about my appearance. I grew up gay and heavy and pretty sure I had nothing going for me in the looks department for the first thirty years. Three things changed that. Personal development, which taught me the truth of Who I Am. My husband Monte and learning to see myself the way he sees me. And turning my own skills on myself, finally putting myself under fantastic lighting, in front of a professionally tuned camera and microphone, with a set behind me that tells the story of who I am and what my work is about. The same tools I’d aimed at clients and colleagues for decades, now at last, pointed in my own direction.

I don’t cringe on camera anymore. When I’m sitting in front of my own GlamCam Studio setup, I know I’m looking about as good as I can look, and I finally like what I see. On a crappy webcam, I don’t feel that at all. Same face. Completely different truth being told about it.

That’s the strange magic of the camera though.

We’re deep in the digital age now, and the days of naturally beautiful images captured on film are over. Film was forgiving. It had a softness baked right into it, a natural warmth that flattered everyone without trying. Digital gives you none of that for free. Today’s cameras are little rectangles made of metal and plastic, filled with wires and circuits and glass. Little computers with eyes. And those digital eyes are cold, exacting, and painfully unforgiving. They show everything, and they’re easy to get wrong on a hundred levels. So it’s no wonder I’ve watched cameras strike fear into the hearts of brave people. CEOs, politicians, even seasoned TV personalities, shrinking at the thought of what a bad picture might say about them. I’ve never seen a tool made of nothing but tech cause that much dread.

And I’ve never seen that same tool, set up right, become such a vehicle of transformation. When someone finally trusts me to tune it for them, and they see themselves in a light they’ve never seen before, something moves that goes way past pictures. It reaches self-image. Self-worth. Self-love. The quiet permission to be seen, heard and received.

At that point, the camera stops being an image-capture device and becomes a self-image-transformation doorway.

That’s why the GlamCam name was never meant to describe the whole experience. The whole experience is beyond words. It starts at wires, circuits and glass and ends somewhere near your soul.

So this is me redefining the word.

Glam is not about painting on a version of you that doesn’t exist. It’s about revealing the truest, most accurate version of who you already are, and getting everything on the outside to line up with it. And here’s what happens that I can’t fully explain until you feel it: once the outside matches the truth of the inside, all of those pesky, lingering, false bits still on the inside, the doubt, the fear, the shame, the hesitation, the limitation, they start to change too. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes all at once.

If you’ve ever thought you don’t have much business being on camera, or the whole thing just makes you want to run, I promise you’ll change that tune the first time you see yourself set up correctly.

My body of work is my proof. My word is also proof, because I know what I’m talking about. But you don’t have to take only my word. Ask my client Lisa, who gets comments and questions about her new on-camera presence nearly every day now. Ask Judy, who started getting more views, more engagement, and more notice the moment her setup told the truth about her, and who felt better in her own skin because of it. There’s a lot more living proof coming, too, that I’m excited to share here very soon as I finish several of my latest GlamCam Studio setups, so stay tuned.

Let me leave you with this: The people already looking for you are scrolling, and their scrolling fast... Give them a reason to stop, stare, and subscribe.

If you want to know what your own screen is currently saying about you, that’s exactly what my On-Camera Presence Audit is for. For a limited time, you can get Emmy® Award-winning eyes and ears on your Live setup, with quick wins, and a clear path to being seen for the truth of who you already are. Especially if you’re broadcasting here on Substack and felt a little seen, or a little called out, by how this piece opened, this one’s for you. Not to fix you. To finally let the screen tell the truth about you.

And if you’re just here for the conversation, stick around. Redefining Glam is a whole body of work taking shape inside this publication, and we’re only getting started.

Last week my friend Julie Ciardi’s operations manager, Erin, sent me an email. A few people in Julie’s IGNITE Her® Community had written in asking the same thing:

“What camera is Julie using on Zoom? And what’s her lighting?”

Now, here’s why that question landed in my inbox and not someone else’s. In November 2025 Julie and I built her entire on-camera setup together, start to finish, over Zoom, from opposite sides of the country. That’s the work I do now. I call it GlamCam Studio™. So when her clients notice how great she looks on screen and ask how she pulled it off, Erin knew exactly who to ask.

I read the email and I heard myself utter a familiar chuckle.

Not because they are silly questions. They are totally reasonable questions. I’ve been asked questions like these a thousand times, probably more. In my DMs, on Zoom, after workshops, at events:

“What camera should I get?”
”Which camera do you have?”
”Just tell me the one to buy, Tommy!”

I have to smile because I know what people are really hoping for when they ask. They want a clean answer. A model number. A link they can click. That little hit of “okay, got that, handled” dopamine. Buy the thing, and the thing is done.

And honestly? I get it. I’d want that too. It’s just not how a single bit of this actually works. So let me walk you through it, the way I would if you were sitting across the table from me…

The answer that doesn’t help

Here’s the truth, and I say this with all the love in the world: even if I gave you the exact specs of what camera/tech Julie has in front of her, or I have in front of me, you’d be a mess. You’d open the many boxes and have no idea what to do with any of it.

I’m not being dramatic, I promise. Out of the box, in the wrong hands, the exact camera(s) my clients and I use could make you look worse than the webcam built into your laptop. That is not a knock on you! Why on earth would you know what to do with it? You’ve spent your years getting genuinely brilliant at the thing you actually do. I’ve spent mine learning the hundred tiny decisions that turn a good camera into a great image. Those are just very different lanes.

Because that’s what it really is, a stack of decisions. That image you’re admiring, the one that made you go “oooh, what camera is that,” is not one purchase. It’s a composite of a hundred, sometimes two hundred little choices stacked on top of each other. The lens. Where the light’s coming from. Color. Settings most people never even open. What’s behind you. And then the part nobody sees, the way every one of those choices is dialed in to ALL the others. The camera itself is maybe one lever out of five, and I’ll be honest, it’s not even the first one I’d reach for.

So when somebody asks me what camera to buy thinking that’s the finish line, I just chuckle. There’s just no one-size-fits-all answer to give them. This right here is the exact part of the work where most people need me the most.

And the “right” camera keeps moving anyway

Here’s the part that really lets the air out of the whole model-number thing.

The gear I had Julie buy is already coming up on a year old. And in that time, what I use and recommend has changed. I’ve moved to a setup that costs less and looks every bit as good, and there are more “Tommy Approved” options on the market now than there were when I set her up. So if I handed you “Julie’s camera” today, I’d literally be handing you last year’s answer.

That’s the trap with chasing the equipment. The “right camera” is a moving target, always. Buy the answer today and you’re holding an outdated one by next year. The thing that doesn’t go stale is knowing how to choose well for your space, and how to make the whole thing sing once it’s in the room. That’s not something you buy. That’s a skill, and a stubborn, hard-won one at that.

Why I’m not going to hand you the list

Now, I could still give you a gear list. Julie wouldn’t mind a bit. But I’m not going to, and I want to be straight with you about why.

What works gorgeously in Julie’s space, with her brand, her light, her face, the story she’s telling, is not automatically right for you. Different room. Different light. Different level you’re stepping into.

And here’s the thing, Julie teaches this better than just about anybody. Her whole body of work is built on the idea that there are no borrowed formulas, that you don’t become more yourself by copying somebody else’s blueprint. So if I handed you her gear list, I’d be doing the exact thing she and I both spend our lives begging people not to do, take somebody else’s answer and try to wedge it into your life.

So no, I’m not gatekeeping. I’m just refusing to give you a one-size answer to a question that deserves a real one. Yours.

What you’re actually asking for

Let me tell you what I think is really going on when you watch Julie (or anyone else with an awesome setup that you’re admiring) and find yourself reaching for the model number.

You don’t actually want her camera. You want what you felt watching her. That ease. That presence. That sense that what you’re seeing on screen is finally telling the truth about who she is and the level she works at. And that feeling has a cause, but the cause is not a product you can add to cart.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand after doing this for a couple of decades. The problem was never that you’re not impressive enough.

My whole job, really, is closing that gap. Getting the screen to show the person who’s really (and already) there. I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count, that little moment when the setup finally clicks and someone sees themselves on screen and goes quiet for a second. “Ohhh…There I am!” That’s the whole thing. That’s what you’re actually asking for. Not a camera. That.

Bob Proctor understood this decades ago, by the way. He knew that if he was going to teach million-dollar ideas to the whole world, the room had to match the level, so he went and built his iconic, million dollar studio in his back yard. The good news is that here in 2026 it no longer takes a million dollars to look like a million dollars. But it does take knowing what you’re doing. Or knowing somebody who does. (Hi.👋)

So here’s my real answer

Next time you catch yourself asking “what camera should I get,” try gently swapping the question. The better one goes like this: “What do I want people to feel when they see me, and how far is that from what my screen is showing right now?”

That I can help with. The camera question, not so much, and not because I’m holding out on you. It’s because the model number was never going to be the thing that helped.

If you want, I’ll just look at where you are. I offer an On-Camera Presence Audit, a short call where I can actually see your current setup and your space, hear about the work you do, your goals, and your timeline, and give you the honest, specific next step that makes sense for you. Sometimes that’s a couple of small tweaks to gear you already own. Sometimes it’s the full custom GlamCam Studio™ build. There’s more than one way in, and the entire point of the call is to find yours.

The Audit is complimentary for now, though I'll be honest, not for much longer. So if it's calling you, I wouldn't wait too long.

No existing setup details required. Just come as you actually are. Turns out that’s the whole thing I’m trying to get on screen anyway.

Below: Julie’s before and after. Same brilliant woman in both. The screen just finally caught up to the real her.

I have to tell you about something that’s been giving me chills all week. This Sunday, July 5th, is Bob Proctor’s birthday. He would have turned 92.

Most years, a mentor’s birthday comes and goes with a quiet moment of gratitude. This year, something lined up that stopped me in my tracks, and I need to share it with you, because it feels like more than a coincidence. It feels like a message.

Let me back up for a second…

Over the last couple of years, a dear friend and mentor of mine, Julie Ciardi, introduced me to Human Design. I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t go looking for it. I didn’t even know I was searching for anything. But after Bob passed, a lot of things stopped making sense to me. And Human Design became one of the tools that finally helped me start making sense of myself again.

In Human Design, we all carry certain frequencies. Julie teaches them by their gate numbers, and each one has a low expression and a high one. Two of those frequencies are lit up in the sky this entire week, right through Bob’s birthday. Gate 39 and Gate 38.

Here’s the part that got me.

Those same two gates were two of the core frequencies Bob Proctor was born with. His conscious Sun sits in Gate 39. His conscious Earth sits in Gate 38. They were part of the fundamental signal of who he was.

And this week, the sun in the sky is moving through Gate 39, and the earth is sitting in Gate 38.

Now, anyone who knows Human Design will tell you this happens every year, and they'd be right. It's called a solar return. Every birthday, the sun comes back to the exact spot it held the day you were born, and the earth swings around to meet it on the other side. So this isn't a fluke of timing. It's a homecoming. Every July 5th, the sky returns to the signal Bob arrived broadcasting. This is simply the first year I had the eyes to see it. And it's his 92nd.

Now let me tell you what those two gates actually are. When you hear it, you’re going to understand why I got goosebumps…

Julie calls Gate 39 the Dynamic Liberator. She describes its whole purpose as provocation. Not provocation to create conflict. In her words, to “provoke to awaken others, to activate, to help them awaken into their purpose.” The low expression pushes buttons and makes people react. The high expression wakes people up and sets them free.

Friend, that is Bob Proctor. Not close to Bob. That is Bob, exactly.

I had the honor of serving as Bob’s Creative Director for the last four years of his life, which means I got to watch him work up close, almost every single day. On a stage in front of thousands or sitting one on one with a single client in a hot seat, the man was a constant, relentless, loving provocation. One moment to the next. Always poking at your small thinking. Always challenging the story you’d been telling yourself. Always daring you to pick up the reins of your own life, set a real goal, and decide to become the person you were capable of becoming.

He talked about playing the lead in your own movie. Being the star of it. The director of it. He provoked people awake to their own possibility, over and over, for decades. It was the great privilege of my life to experience that first as his student, and then to stand beside him and watch him do it.

That’s Gate 39.

Then there’s Gate 38. Julie calls it the Honorable Warrior. Its low expression is combativeness. Fighting just to fight. Arguing to be right. Its high expression is having a cause. She quotes Richard Rudd on this, and the line has stuck with me: the only difference between the shadow of the 38 and the gift of it is the nature of the fight. It has to be the right fight. It’s about finding your soapbox. The cause worth pouring your heart and body and soul into.

That was Bob too.

Bob’s fight was never for Bob. His cause was always bigger than himself. He wanted to reach the whole world with the truth about paradigms, about the power every one of us has to change our thinking and therefore change our lives. That was the hill he lived on.

And here’s something you might not know about him. Bob wasn’t especially interested in talking about his own legacy. He never sat around trying to architect what he’d leave behind. He figured that would get sorted out after he was gone, and it wasn’t his job to plan it. His job was to wake up as many people as he possibly could while he was still here. He trusted that the more people he reached, the more the work would carry itself forward.

And look at what happened. The thousands of people he mentored are out in the world right now, teaching the same principles in their own voices. The cause outlived the man precisely because he never made it about the man.

That’s Gate 38.

So now put it all together with me, because this is where it gets almost too much….

There’s a program I collaborated to bring into the world after Bob’s passing called Proctor’s Principles, built on Bob’s work and facilitated by his firstborn son Brian Proctor, who spent sixty years at his father’s side, along with Brian’s wife Cory. Proctor’s Principles launched on July 5th, 2024. Bob’s birthday.

This week, on July 5th, 2026, the first era of Proctor’s Principles is completing. Taking a breather. A pause before whatever the next era becomes.

And this week, I had the pleasure of facilitating the finale of our practical application sessions of this cohort. The very last one.

All of it landing on this week of Bob’s birthday. While the sky runs his frequency.

I don’t usually over-read a coincidence. But when a man’s two core gates show up in the heavens on his birthday, at the exact moment an era built on his teaching quietly completes, it stops feeling like coincidence and starts feeling like a hand on your shoulder. It feels like Bob is here. Like his spirit is broadcasting straight through those two frequencies, saying the same thing he said every day of his life. Wake up. Find your cause. Go.

Here’s why I think it landed on me the way it did.

When Bob died, I lost my compass. I don’t think I’ve said that out loud before, not really. So much of my direction, my goals, my sense of where I was headed had been wrapped up in being close to him and being part of that mission. When it ended, I drifted. For a lot longer than I’d like to admit. I had all this potential energy and no big, clear cause of my own to aim it at.

That is actually the low side of these very gates. Julie describes the shadow of the 39 as a trapped spirit. Like an animal backed into a corner. Full of life force with nowhere to send it. That was me for a while. A lot of drive, a lot of gifts, and no soapbox to stand on.

This is where I want to give credit where it’s due. , the friend and mentor who brought Human Design into my life, was a Dynamic Liberator for me. She was and is my new Gate 39. She provoked me to awaken to a whole new way of seeing myself, right when I needed it most. She didn’t comfort me. She activated me. Which is exactly what the 39 is designed to do.

Because here’s what’s finally true this year, for the first time since Bob took off.

I have a yes worth protecting.

There’s a line I love from Proctor’s Principles:

For a long time, my yes was always somebody else’s mission. I’m a giver by nature, and I love that about myself. But I spent decades pouring my creative gifts into everyone else’s message and everyone else’s stage. Supporting. Producing. Making other people look and sound like the fullest version of themselves. Beautiful work. And also, if I’m honest, a very comfortable place to hide.

I’ve been saying a lot of no’s lately to protect a new yes. My own platform. My own voice. My own soapbox. This one, right here, that you’re reading.

Julie confessed something similar in the same teaching that sparked all of this. She said that for six years she’s had to keep pulling herself back from the easy, lucrative thing she could do in her sleep, because it isn’t her real cause. The right fight is almost never the easiest one. The 38 isn’t only about the willingness to fight. It’s about the discipline to keep choosing your true fight over the convenient one.

So this is me. Choosing.

Here’s the part about this week I don’t want you to miss.

That frequency in the sky isn’t only Bob’s. It’s on loan to all of us right now. For these few days, the whole world is running the Dynamic Liberator and the Honorable Warrior. You get to feel, borrowed for a moment, the exact signal Bob got to live inside of permanently.

So let the sky ask you what it’s been asking me.

Who are you here to provoke awake? Not to push their buttons. To free them.

And what is the cause worth fighting for? Your real one. Your soapbox. The fight that’s actually yours, not the easy one you keep defaulting to because it’s familiar.

Julie teaches, borrowing from Dr. David Hawkins, that courage is the tipping point. It’s the switch that flips you from a low frequency to a high one. You don’t have to have it all figured out. You just need enough courage to choose your cause and stand on it.

If you’re one of the coaches, teachers, creatives, guides, and light-bringers reading this, I suspect your real work overlaps with Bob’s, with Julie’s and with mine. It’s some version of helping people wake up. The world is in a state right now that needs a lot more of us awake, and a lot more of us standing firmly on the right soapbox. Yours matters. We need it.

When I look up this week, I feel him.

There he is. The provocation. The cause. The refusal to let any of us stay small.

And then the frequency turns, and it points back at me, and at you.

Here I am. There you are.

Happy 92nd birthday, Bob. Thank you for provoking so many of us awake, and for fighting the right fight that was always so much bigger than yourself. I’m picking up my piece of it now. Finally standing on my own soapbox. I think you’d be glad. 💙

My heart was pounding a little as it rang. I wasn’t even sure the number still worked. I half expected a stranger to answer, or no one at all. But on the second ring, there she was, exactly as I remembered her: “Well, my goodness sake, how are you?!” she said with surprise and delight.

Her name is Carolyn Fineran. She’s eighty-four years old, an artist, an entrepreneur, and a humanitarian, and for decades she’s been one of the major forces in Colorado fashion and well beyond it. She owned a beloved Cherry Creek boutique called Tapestry for twenty-five years, she served in the Peace Corps as a young woman, and in her later years flew to Guatemala to help indigenous weavers bring their work to the world. She still hops a plane to London when it suits her. She is, I’ve come to realize, a big part of the reason I do the work I do now. She didn’t know that. For a long time, neither did I.

Let me take you back to the day I’m talking about…

The shoot

It was May of 2010. Carolyn had closed Tapestry years earlier, and when it closed, something else closed with it. She’d spent a lifetime as a businesswoman, a buyer, a name, someone with a storefront and a reason to get dressed in the morning. She once told a Denver Post reporter, about the day she finally let it go, “My heart stopped being there.” And then that life was gone. In her own words to me, simply: she didn’t have her business anymore, and without it, she wasn’t sure who she was.

She was ready to start again. A new venture, a jewelry line called Gypsies Collection, and a website in the works where the world could see it. She wanted one photograph to mark the moment. Not a headshot. Not a glamour shot. A picture, in her words, “to showcase my new life.”

So my partner in crime Patti and I went to her house.

I should tell you about Patti real quick, because she played a huge role in my early career. For over two decades, Patti Shyne was the appearance coach at 9NEWS KUSA, the NBC affiliate in Denver (and dozens of other stations around the United States), back in the days when stations still had the budget for it and cared enough about their on-air talent to keep a coach on the payroll. She styled and coached the people you watched read the news every night, making sure they always showed up looking their very best. She was the one who first pulled me into this whole world, who saw something in my photography and started sending me toward it. That day at Carolyn’s, Patti worked her magic — hair, makeup, styling. Not to cover Carolyn. To bring her forward.

Here’s what I want you to understand about that shoot, because it’s the part that changed me. We didn’t set up a backdrop and start shooting. We slowed all the way down. We spent the better part of a day with Carolyn. We walked through her home, which was like an art and fashion exhibit. We spent time in her studio as she showed us her art, her jewelry, the textiles, the scarves, the countless beautiful things she’d collected over a lifetime. We listened to her stories. And then we did something I had never done before in my life: instead of putting Carolyn in front of a blank studio wall, we built an entire scene out of her own world. Her things. Her light. Her living room, arranged piece by piece until the frame didn’t just contain Carolyn. It told the truth about her.

She named it well when we spoke the other day, all these years later: “It was my personal brand, before anyone ever called it that.”

She was nervous that day. Of course she was. It had been a decade since she’d sat for a portrait that was about her and not about promoting her boutique. Years later she described the feeling exactly: “I was nervous, because it felt like I was revealing myself. And you were really seeing me.”

This was before I shot tethered into a computer, before clients could watch the images appear live on a screen. So Carolyn couldn’t see it happening. She just had to trust us. She had to sit there, exposed, and believe that the people in the room saw something worth capturing, something that matched the picture she carried of herself on the inside.

“It takes a lot of courage to do a picture like that,” she told me. “Because you’re exposed.”

Thankfully, she found the courage that day. We shot several frames by the time we wrapped, but the very first one we captured turned out to be the one. The one she’d still be looking at sixteen years later.

What I mean by “the truth”

I keep using that word, “truth,” and I want to be careful with it, because it’s easy to misunderstand what I actually do.

A cheap camera tells the truth. A bad webcam, harsh unintentional light, a phone held at the wrong angle — they are all brutally honest. They will faithfully report the shadow, the bad angle, the “flaw” you were already self-conscious about. That’s a kind of truth. But it’s a shallow one. It tells the truth of the surface and completely misses the truth of the soul.

Some people assume my work is the opposite problem. That it’s about gluing on glamour. Making someone look like a version of themselves that doesn’t really exist. Smoothing, flattering, faking.

It is not that. It is the reverse of that.

There are two kinds of truth a camera can tell. The truth of the flaws, and the truth of who you are. A bad camera setup is fluent in the first and blind to the second. It catches the flaw of the day and misses the entire human, the spirit within. My work is about building the conditions where the deeper truth, the one the bad setup hides, finally makes it through the lens. Not a prettier you. The real you, the one the surface keeps getting in the way of.

That is the whole thing. That’s what I didn’t have words for in Carolyn’s living room, and what I’ve spent the years since learning to do on purpose.

And here’s the part that gives me chills, something I didn’t learn until the other day. Carolyn had spent twenty-five years running Tapestry by a single motto: “Dressing the spirit, not just the body.” She had built her whole life on the same idea I was reaching for with my camera, and neither of us had ever said it out loud to the other. She was dressing the spirit. I was learning how to photograph it. Same truth, different tools.

What I didn’t have words for yet

I was young. Twenty-four. I didn’t know if I really knew what I was doing. Looking back now, I knew more than I thought. An art school degree and five years of practice had quietly prepared me for the first real, deep, soul-shifting moment I ever made happen with my camera.

Because something unfolded in that living room that I have since witnessed thousands of times, but had never seen before. Carolyn stopped bracing. She surrendered to the process, to the idea that she could be revealed instead of hidden. And the image that came out of it wasn’t flattering in the cheap sense. It was true. The vivid, electric, artistic spirit that lived inside her, the one she was quietly afraid the camera would miss, was right there in the frame. Undeniable.

That was the day my camera stopped being a tool for taking pictures and became something else entirely. A tool for telling the truth about a person. For helping someone see, on the outside, the self they already were on the inside.

And Carolyn was the first person whose whole being-ness I ever brought into a single frame on purpose, with intention, love, and the utmost care. Not just how her face and body looked on camera, but the entire world around her, consciously designed and styled to carry deeper layers of her story. I didn’t think of it as a discipline or an art yet. I just knew the room, and every element in it, had to say something true about her too. Everything I do today, every set I build around a person — so the screen finally shows who they actually are — started right there. She was the first. She just happened to become the proof, too.

The note I’d totally forgotten

When I framed the print for her, I stuck a small handwritten note to the bottom of it. I’d completely forgotten about it. She hadn’t.

On the phone, she walked upstairs to her studio to read it to me, and her voice caught.

The note says: “CAROLYN — WHEN IN DOUBT, LOOK AT THIS PHOTO AND ASK: ‘WHAT WOULD SHE DO?’”

Then she told me why those words landed the way they did. She’d lost her business, and with it her sense of who she was. The photo, and that note, gave her something to steer by.

I had handed a woman a photograph and told her the person in it was someone worth returning to. Not someone to become, because she had already been that woman her whole life. Someone she’d simply lost sight of. Someone worth finding her way back to, again and again. And she believed me.

For sixteen years.

“Tommy, I look at that picture every day,” she said. “I have the big one you framed for me up in my studio. And on days when I wonder who I am, I look at it and go, ‘Oh, there she is.’”

There she is…

In all the years since, I have built my whole life’s work around that exact idea, and I never once told her that. She said it back to me, on her own, sixteen years later, about a photograph that’s been hanging in her studio the entire time.

She’s eighty-four now, and her life is full. Her wonderful husband passed many years ago, but she still lives her beautiful life in the same house in Cherry Creek. It’s an artist’s house, a sanctuary, every corner of it holding something beautiful she’s collected or made. She still creates. She still buys and sells beautiful things. She still travels. And she told me she takes thousands of selfies, and then she told me why, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it: she takes them, she said, because she wants to know if she’s still here.

And then she said the truest thing anyone has ever said to me about my own work, without any idea that’s what she was doing. She could always see herself in the mirror, she said. But it’s through photographs that she sees who she is.

That is the distinction I’ve spent my career chasing. The mirror shows you your face, your body. A photograph, made by someone who actually sees you, can show you your self. For Carolyn, the difference between those two things was the difference between wondering who she was and remembering.

Why I’m telling you this

I work now with accomplished humans, women mostly, whose problem is not so different from Carolyn’s that day. Women with real authority, real wisdom, a real body of work. And so many of them have quietly decided they are “bad on camera.” That they’re not photogenic. That they need to lose the weight, or feel more confident, or somehow become someone else before they’ll let themselves be truly seen.

I want to offer you what that living room photoshoot with Carolyn taught me. It may not be you. It may be that nothing around you has been designed to tell the truth about you yet. The vivid, capable, magnetic person you know yourself to be, the one your clients feel the moment you walk into the room, in person or on a screen, she might simply not be making it through. Not because she isn’t there. Because the setup is just taking a picture instead of telling the truth.

There is a difference between being photographed and being seen. Carolyn felt it the moment we stopped pointing a camera at her and started designing a scene that told the truth about her. And once you’ve been seen like that, really seen, you can’t unsee it. You stop fighting the camera. You start showing up. Because the version of you on the screen is finally the one you’ve known you were all along.

One more thing

Near the end of our call, Carolyn told me she’s being told, by more than one person now, that she should be writing a book and speaking on stages. At eighty-four, she is stepping into a brand new act, again. And about my calling her out of nowhere after all these years, she said this:

“You and I are both smart enough to know that when it’s time, it’s time. And to have you call me sixteen years later? I think it’s time.”

The photograph is still doing its job. It’s still telling her the truth on the mornings she forgets it.

If any part of this felt like it was about you, stay close. There’s a lot more coming, and I’d love for you to subscribe so you don’t miss it. And when you’re ready to be seen accurately, to have your audience’s screens finally tell the truth about the authority you already carry, there will be a door.

There she is. There you are. I can’t wait for the world to see you.

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P.S. — Meet Carolyn.

Carolyn Fineran is still creating, still curating, still finding beautiful things and putting them into the world. Her jewelry line, Gypsies Collection, is a lifetime of taste in one place. If this story moved you, go say hello on her Substack and have a look around her gorgeous collection on her Etsy page.

My first official piece is a story about a portrait, a woman who changed my life, and a note I wrote in 2010 that I’d completely forgotten, but as it turns out, was the moment the work I do now was actually born.

Welcome to Designed, Aligned & Primed™.

Glad you’re here. There’s a lot coming.