Are you like me? I know it was over a week ago, but I don’t want Halloween to be over. sigh
Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year. I’ve loved dressing up in costumes and facing the spooky stuff for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I was always in some sort of costume. Or reading Christopher Pike novels. Or convincing the neighborhood kids that I was a witch.
When I was younger, though, haunted houses freaked me out. My friends and I devised a method of going through the Jaycees Haunted House in a line, each girl holding onto the girl in front of her, with our hoodies on backwards, so if shit got to be too much, we could cover our faces and not see what was happening.
Apparently, if you can’t see it, it’s not there?
Well, when I was about 8 or 9, my mom was dating a guy who was a camera man for the local TV news station. He was doing a story on the Jaycees Haunted House, and I was invited to tag along. We went through with the lights on to get B-roll for the story.
MY NINE YEAR OLD BRAIN WAS ‘SPLODED. 🤯
The mouth that you walk through with the sharp teeth and the spongy tongue? It was just foam and painted plywood!
My brain is foggy on most of the details, but I do remember that mouth, and then seeing where the actors put on their makeup.
Ever since, I’m just not scared of haunted houses. Not even the really scary ones where you sign waivers.
One time, I was separated from my group and ended up in a dark room, being forced to slow dance with a ghoul. Another time, a creepy Santa gave me a whisker rub on the side of my face with his beard. Both times, I just laughed and played along.
I’d seen the reality, and it wasn’t anything to be scared of.
Ooooooohhhhh….plastic serial killer with brightly colored gel lighting. How terrifying.
Unlike a lot of people, I never had the fear of performing in public…except when I was myself. I could do anything while playing a character, but giving a speech or singing karaoke turned my mouth into a sand trap.
Just after college, I decided to take on the fear of singing as myself, and I started going to karaoke twice a week.
At first, karaoke required my friends being there to support me, the safety of a song I knew well, and some liquid courage. But eventually, I got to where I no longer cared if I was singing a song I’d never heard in front of a room full of strangers fully sober.
Until I got comfortable with it and didn’t need them anymore, I was happy to use my best friend Katie, a Red Bull and vodka, and a song I could sing in my sleep as crutches.
My main fear around acting was always the auditions.
I was afraid of them, because I wasn’t good at them…
Which caused me to avoid preparing for them properly…
Which meant that I did poorly at them and then beat myself up about it.
You see the problem with this circular pattern?
My fear created a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It also caused me to frequently drag my feet about getting to them, which caused me to not always be on time.
Or sometimes, I would just cancel them, telling myself that I wasn’t going to do good at them anyway, and did I REALLY want to be in that show…?
At the worst point in this destructive cycle, I actually forgot about two auditions in one single week. Just spaced them entirely.
After that incident, I knew something had to change.
My fear was causing me to not act like a professional, and I knew if I didn’t clean up my act, I was certain I’d soon find myself blacklisted from auditioning at certain theatre companies.
(Side note: Actors being flaky is a common stereotype, and I kind of wonder if that stereotype is caused by actors avoiding certain situations out of fear…but I digress)
After I missed those auditions, I got my shit together.
Every week, I would look at the following week’s auditions, and plan ahead.
For each audition, I would tweak my resume as needed, print it, attach it to my headshot, and then on a post-it note, I would write which show and company it was for, the time, date, and location of the audition, and which monologues or songs I planned to use.
Eventually, I created a mini folder in which I kept: extra resumes for each agent I had, extra headshots, scotch tape, a mini scissors, and printed copies of all my monologues.
Do you need a system to keep track of everything you need to do for your voiceover business? (Nod yes)
And besides getting organized, the other huge step I took:
I FACED MY FEAR.
When psychologists work with people who have severe phobias, they often do some kind of exposure therapy, gradually increasing a person’s exposure to the object or situation they fear.
With snakes, that might start with objects that are roughly the same shape (shoelaces for instance), and then move on to a photo or video of a snake, and then the real thing. Apparently, in some cases, exposure therapy can see really amazing results in just a few hours!
AKA snek, AKA danger noodle
I knew I would never get over my fear by only going to auditions that I cared deeply about. The stakes were too high, and there weren’t enough of them to really make a dent in my exposure.
I decided I would go to every single audition that would take me.
At the end of that year, and 55 stage auditions later, I didn’t get nervous about auditions like I used to.
Sure certain theatre companies or directors sometimes would make me a jumbly mess of nerves without breath support or the ability to make small talk, but those were few and far between.
One director = greater fear quotient than an entire audience full of people
Voiceover is a little bit different, but I’ll bet you’ve still got some fears holding you back:
Marketing outreach
Social anxiety around networking
Stage fright around workshops or agent nights
Intimidation around approaching people in the industry who might be able to help you
So, let’s boil this down to three tips to get over those fears and get moving toward a better voiceover career, shall we?
The path to your dreams is through your fears
Four Tips for Facing Your VO Fears
First: Shine a light on it
Going back to my story about the haunted house—shine a light on whatever it is that you are afraid of. It’s really easy to be afraid of things that are mysterious, so don’t just sit in the dark! Demystify that crap, whether through research, coaching, or whatever.
Second: Get organized.
Whatever it is you’re afraid of doing, you need a plan in place to make yourself confront it. Maybe it’s committing to doing five auditions a day, or 30 cold emails a week. Choose a place and a time to do it, and break it down into the smallest possible task, so you have no excuse to not do it.
Be specific, too. If your task is doing five auditions, but your process includes turning on your computer, opening your DAW, turning off the HVAC, silencing your phone, printing scripts, etc, and you somehow find it difficult to get started, it might be because your brain can’t skip through all those steps straight to the task. Include those tiny steps in your brain instructions for a while and see if that helps until it becomes automatic.
Third: Find support
Examples of voiceover support might be an accountability group, a work buddy (literally to sit there while you both do work and not talk), a “press-the-button” friend who will force you to press send on important emails you’re afraid to send, a buddy to attend social events with if you’re afraid to go alone, or someone who already knows that big-name coach and can introduce you if you’re feeling shy.
And if you need a glass of wine and a pink wig to feel comfortable talking to an agent at a huge voiceover conference, who am I to judge?
Fourth: Gain exposure
No, not the kind of exposure these cheapskate clients want to pay you in. The kind of exposure where you encounter the thing you’re afraid of over and over again in short succession.
Inoculate yourself to whatever it is you fear. Do it once—realize that even if it was hard, you didn’t die. Do it again. And again. And again. And if you still can’t get yourself to do it, then you probably need to revisit step three and get the right kind of support.
Hope these tips help! Want to chat about facing your voiceover fears or anything else? Please reach out!