One of the most common challenges I hear among beginning voice-over professionals is, “I just don’t have the time to get my voice-over career off the ground.”
I constantly hear things like, “I put it on the back burner because the timing hasn’t been right, and I have no time to do auditions.” I also hear excuses like, “I don’t know how to put my website together. I can’t begin marketing myself because I don’t have my studio set up yet, and I can’t reach out to any media companies because I’m moving next month.”
Keep in mind, these excuses come after spending three to four months training, acquiring the equipment, creating professional demos, and setting up a foundation for a voice-over business.
As a coach here at SuchAVoice.com, one of my responsibilities is to conduct follow up and follow through interviews with our students. Our goal is to check in with our voice-over talents and verify that they have all the tools in place to begin auditioning and to make certain they are ready to begin competing for professional voice-over gigs.
Often, I discover that they are ready by all reasonable metrics except one. They haven’t adjusted their thinking to fit voice-over activities into their lives. They simply haven’t planned for how their voice-over business will change their daily routines. They haven’t made working their voice-over business into a healthy habit, and without healthy habits the results simply do not fall into place.
Hey, I get it. The truth is a new voice-over business, at the beginning, is just one more thing to do in an already overloaded busy life. Without a work/life balance plan, new habits are tough to form and old ones are tough to break. A beginning voice-over talent needs predictable expectations of how much work will it take, how much time will it take, and an accountability partner who can help them to set and stay true to their business goals.
In this article, I’ll outline three primary challenges new voice-over talents face with respect to their work/life balance and strategies they can use to integrate voice-overs into their lives. The only tool needed to deal with these challenges is a calendar.
# 1. Schedule Time for Auditions
Auditions are a cornerstone to successful emergence into the world of voice-over. They must be done with consistency, and for that, they must be scheduled. A time carved into one’s calendar for daily auditions will work wonders over time. Block out 30 minutes per day from 9 PM to 9:30 PM as an example. If it’s scheduled, it will get done. If it isn’t, it won’t. The time is there, provided it is planned for.
# 2. Schedule Time for Marketing
Marketing dominates a new voice talent’s business activities for the beginning stages of a voice-over career. Marketing activities can take many forms, but it ultimately results in the building of a list of viable prospects who hire voice talents on a consistent basis and who express an interest in hiring the talent. Scheduling 30 minutes per day for the purpose of sending three emails, finding three new leads, or inviting three qualified prospects to listen to a demo will create results over time.
# 3. Schedule Time for Fun
Activities that have no enjoyment will be much more difficult to maintain. Conscientious initiative to make voice-over activities fun will transform the process of forming healthy habits. That which is enjoyed will fill an individual with immense energy.
Just Play. Have fun. Enjoy the game. Auditions can be fun. Listening and analyzing other VO talents demos can be fun. Poking about other VO talent’s websites can be fun. The most common trait I discover when speaking to successful voice-over professionals is the ability to enjoy the work. Just make it fun.
Such A Voice offers coaching programs for emerging voice-over talents centered in fundamental voice-over technique, mastery of equipment setup and utilization, simple sound engineering and sound editing, and in career development and business planning.
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