Tuesday VO Tech Tip: The Arc Into The New Year

Time continues to move forward. While some may already be outlining goals and ideas for the new year, there can also be a feeling of dread as we swing into the final weeks of the calendar year.

Part of the challenge of this business is that there’s not really a natural downtime. Books keep getting written and desparately need talented narrators. There’s that constant impetus to find the next project or tease out a few audition opportunities. We all have a list of those clients who we should really reach back out to in order to see if they might need our services. The pressure is real and can lock us onto an ever-quickening treadmill. It is important to step off periodically.

Recovery Matters

While we need to engage in order to find work, it is far too easy to neglect recovery. We are not machines. Even if we were, expecting ourselves to always run at full throttle is not reasonable. There’s a need to ease back, find perspective, and let ideas percolate a bit. However, recovery won’t find its way into our schedule unless we put it there.

Book Time With Yourself

One of the things I try to encourage other voice actors to do is book time with their most important client: themselves. Creating a sacrosant hour every week to focus on more distant horizons will pay outsized benefits in our VO business practice. Setting that session with ourselves means we’re not focused on meeting deadlines or immediate goals, but asking bigger questions.

Though we may not solve those bigger challenges immediately, it lets us start assembling ideas. These Ideas are the seeds for more strategic change. Creating a specific time when we gather them each week lets us leverage that act into the larger context.

The simple act of carrying a small notebook and pencil, or telling our phones to “set a reminder” when we’re out walking lets us start collecting those moments of insight (funny how many take place when we are far removed from our studios…). Simply start and then repeat. It’s amazing how many ideas you’ll accumulate.

“Nothing But Blue Skies”

It seems as though there’s been a recent surge of interest in Bluesky among voice actors and narrators. That spurred me to establish profiles for JimEdgarVoices and JustAskJimVO. I’m not sure how much I’ll be hanging out there, but for the time being it seems much more direct and ad-free than other online options. If you are on it and want to follow my feeds there, I’d be happy to return the favor. (And while I’m rooting around my social media toy box, does anyone have a strong opinion about Threads? I’d decided to wait and see on that platform and would love to hear from folks who are using it and have some experience and opinions about it).

Have you tested your studio’s audio quality to make sure it meets professional standards? For a free review of your vocal recordings, please use the upload tool on my Audio Review page.

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