Are Your Voiceover Expectations CrAzY?

Why so....serious?!? Sometimes we all get a little crazy... or a lot crazy! But if it's because you're setting your business expectations too high - then don't worry! Your girl, Gab has got your back. Let's talk about how we can fix those crazy high pressures and get you feeling more confident in your voiceover career!

Are Your Voiceover Expectations CrAzY? - 5:32

Haven’t you heard? We’re all a little mad here. [unhinged laugh] Welcome to another edition of “TheGift of Gab.” So you feeling a little crazy? You’re not alone, I promise. It’s actually a really normal thing to hear performers and voice actors say. Do you feel like a failure, “should I just give up, like totally just quit this whole voiceover thing, give it up completely?” Are you just so stressed out that you don’t know what to do anymore? Well, then let me ask you, friend, are you just expecting too much of yourself? Let’s talk about unrealistic expectations and what that leads to in the voiceover industry.

Look, every actor is guilty of it, every business owner is guilty of it. At some point in our careers, we put way, way too much pressure on ourselves and too much expectation. And in many cases the reason we’re under so much stress and so much pressure is because we’ve done it to ourselves. We’ve actually set our expectations a little bit too high. We are comparing ourselves to other people, which is never a good thing, and we get into these weird self blaming, self deprecating cycles. And social media is absolutely no help at all. [Beep] you Facebook, [beep] you Instagram. I’m so glad MySpace is gone.

Look it’s really simple, ok, and really hard at the same time. When we start comparing ourselves to others, and we start looking at other voice talents, careers and the jobs they’re booking and what we think they’re booking or how much money we think they’re making, we are probably not working with actual data. We’re just going off of what we might see probably again in social media, and it affects us. How could it not? How could you not feel like you’re doing something wrong and someone else is doing everything right?

So what do you do about it? How do you fix it? How do you get back on track? How do

you get back to that place of validating your efforts? Well, that, my friends, is the keyword: validation. We all have the need to feel validated. We all want to

feel like we belong. And if we’re having a rough patch, if we’re not booking the way we want to, if we’re auditioning and we feel like we’re getting no traction, well guess what, we feel un-validated --invalidated? Un? In? Not validated. We’ll go with that. So how do we fix it? First off, talk to people. Talk to your voiceover friends, talk to colleagues, talk to your coaches, talk to your agent, talk to the people that you know are behind you and are backing you and believe in you. One of the things I like to do, look at your last voiceover check. Because here’s the thing. If you’ve ever been paid ever to do a voiceover job, you’ve been validated. Someone out there hired you, someone out there paid you to do this. They ‘e not wrong! You should absolutely always have your last check as a reminder of the fact that you do belong in this business, and you should keep going. And lastly reevaluate your expectations, take some yoga classes, start working on some meditation. Do whatever you can to reduce your stress level and at the same time start setting realistic business goals that you know are achievable in a shorter amount of time. This way not only do you get some motivation back, but you also feel like you’re accomplishing things, and that is such a huge, huge factor in whether or not people give up, not just in this industry but in any industry. If you don’t feel like you’re accomplishing something, you’re going to bail. I’d like to see you stay.

Last piece to the puzzle is community. The more you do to make connections, to meet people, to network, and to feel apart of something and to feel apart of this crazy, wacky, bizaro family we call voiceover, the more likely you are to stay and things are gonna start going your way. There will be a change to the tide. If you want to check out some experiences, ways that you can do that, there’s loads of them. I’ve run a group called the VVE, the Virtual Voiceover Exchange. You can learn more about it on my website, GabrielleNistico.com, and with the VVE, we get together once a month via Zoom. We have people from all over the country and sometimes all over the world who come to join us, to meet one another, to support each other, and to learn about specific areas of the industry as well as to validate why we’re all here. Thanks for watching. Be, ok bye. Ok, Bye-bye. Bye-bye. [laughs]

704-674-8294 / GabrielleNistico.com / gabby@voiceovervixen.com

Gabrielle Nistico, Gabby Nistico, The Voiceover Vixen, The Business First VO Coach, #VoiceoverVixen #VoiceOnFire #BusinessFirstVOCoach Voiceover, Charlotte, North Carolina, Voiceover Demo, Voiceover Coaching Advice, What Not To Do, Working Actors, Los Angeles, New York, Great Expectations