A New Year and Thoughts for the Season – VO Studio Tech Tip

As we head through the Winter Solstice and Holiday Season, it can be a good time to step back and check in on things.

As voice actors, we face shifting priorities of creative and technical challenges while running our business. Though we set strategic goals, tactical realities of the week, day, or even the hour can cause some of these to be left incomplete. Momentum and demands push goals to the side, leaving them in a confused tangle. Insights and creative sparks can get overwhelmed by the day-to-day requirements of getting work out the door. 

Dragging these goals back out into the light lets us see what can simply be discarded, and what still might need our attention. Maybe it’s a new section to our website, a way of communicating with a client, or a slightly modified approach to juice our creativity.

Of course, everyone’s jumble of the undone is different. Many at-the-time important goals no longer matter. It’s a good opportunity to let those less useful things go. Are we clinging to anything out of habit?

Other things emerge from hibernation and still have resonance. It’s worth asking what we can do to keep them more prominent.

This time of the year, I’ll go back through my journals and notebooks looking for thoughts that encapsulate those ideas of resonance. Here are some of the ones I found, with some further thoughts.

• Book time with yourself
  • Create an hour each week in your calendar to check in with yourself. This is about working “on” your business rather than “in” your business, helping to restore a bit of order and perspective to things.
• Block out your rest periods
  • This is one of the things I’ve always had trouble with. Simply sitting down with a calendar and blocking out recovery and vacation time will let you maintain high quality work. An engine that always runs in the red will burn itself out.
• Review your processes
  • How much of what you do is habit? Is there a benefit from holding onto it? Could there be a simpler or more direct way to achieve the same result? Even a small efficiency can pay outsized dividends when multiplied out over the time spent on a project.
• Review your work
  • It’s usually easier to accurately evaluate our performance once a little time has passed. Is it as bad as it seemed? Is it as good as you thought? Are there technical deficiencies? Are you stuck in a rut? What worked really well?
• That person needs to hear from you
  • Maybe it’s a mentor you haven’t touched base with in a while, or just a good friend who always makes you laugh. Maybe someone you can help to laugh. 
• Are you too device focused?
  • What would happen if your interface had to change, or you had to use a different mic? Would it undercut your confidence in the booth?
• What skills do you need to move forward?
  • New software? A different type of read? A VO genre you know nothing about? What is changing in the VO industry and where will the new opportunities arise?
• What can you give up?
  • Do you have enough room to say “yes” to a key challenge?
• What are you missing?
  • A bit more music and a few more bike rides. But that’s just me.

Thank you for support and attention. May the new year bring great success!

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