Afraid to Get Started in Voice Over?

afraid of getting started in voice over hi there i'm bill duis pro voice over talent and voice over career coach and first of all let me assure you that there is no one who has launched in voiceover who hasn't had some bit of fear and trepidation about stepping into waters and which had never been before it's perfectly human to be afraid but there's there's the perceived reality and there's the actual reality and that's what i want to talk about today do you have real reason to be afraid the short answer to that is no you don't but let me explain a little bit further and start by sharing a little bit about my story which i think will make sense and will give you a sense of perspective and hopefully put your mind at ease as well the hardest job that i ever took on in my life first of all wasn't voiceover wasn't even close to voiceover it was a job that i took following my freshman year of college i grew up in a family we didn't have very much money so for me to go to college required that i worked it required that i worked while i was in school and also uh you know especially the summers between years when i really had a chance to make some some some hopefully decent money at least work full-time to make more money than i could during the school year and so um it was coming toward the end of my freshman year and my father who worked in a glass factory um had he told me he said son i really i don't want you to come home this summer it's not because i don't want to see you because i do but i don't want you to come home because i'm afraid that you'll take a summer job at the glass factory where i work where i've seen so many young men do the same come home for the summer and work and then get used to making a little bit of money and then they never leave and go back to school and my father was the biggest fan and supporter of me and he wanted to make sure that i achieved my goals and he knew to do that i really need needed to stay in school so i saw a posting one day and it was regarding a job where uh they uh they assured the people who took this job they could make more money than they could otherwise doing a regular full-time you know job summer job and that is by selling books i was intrigued so i attended a meeting long story short i signed up and it required that i go to nashville for a week of training and then what they would do is and this is all college students by the way and then they would they would send us off and there were hundreds if not thousands of us who did this and they would assign us to cities around across the country and uh i i think they strategically picked cities that were nowhere close to home because they knew what we were in store for far more than we did and so i was i grew up near columbus ohio but i was sent to gastonia north carolina and for that summer following my freshman year that is where i lived and where i worked and it was with a small group of young men about my age they were college kids there were maybe six or seven of us and uh we weren't we had to we were completely responsible for everything getting there finding a place to live for our own food in other words there was no salary where there was no money provided up front everything that we were to get we would have to earn and so uh this group of guys myself included found this place a little place above a chiropractor's office that he rented to us and so for the next three months six days a week thirteen and a half hours a day beginning at eight a.m in the morning until nine thirty at night we knocked on doors door-to-door not together separately we split in the morning in a place i had never been before trying to talk and sell books to people that i did not know so 13 and a half hours a day six days a week 81 hours a week i did this for three months um kind of to jump to the end i did better than i had than i really ever imagined i made like four thousand dollars that that summer which back then was more than i could have made in a regular you know a full-time job uh but here's the thing by nature i am an introvert i'm i'm very quiet uh i if you were to put me in a room of a hundred people at a party you wouldn't even know i was there because i wouldn't be the one talking i would be the one listening that's just my that's my nature that's how that's how i'm wired so for me to go out put myself out to knock on a door to try to sell a book was the single hardest thing in my life and let me tell you it wasn't just a knocking on the door because i didn't know the people it was the way i was treated by people i had doors slammed in my face i was sworn at i was threatened i was chased off of property i had the police called on me i was picked up and taken into the police station i mean it was you know in many ways it was pretty hellacious that's it was hard it was hard there was hardly a summer where any of those guys we would meet up together have breakfast when we leave i don't know that there was a morning where we didn't have tears in our eyes before we went out to knock on that first door it was emotionally grueling hard hard work so i share that with you to give you yeah so you have a better sense of me where i'm coming from but to give you a sense of perspective and i think when you're launching out into something like this you need perspective starting and building a voiceover business has been nothing and not remotely related in terms of difficulty as selling books and i think one of the biggest fears that we as performers have is that of rejection and certainly selling books i i mean it was just it was a summer of abuse you know punctuated occasionally by selling a book there were days where i would go for 13.5 hours a day and sell absolutely nothing and be chaste and sworn at and you know treated cruelly uh in voiceover the only people i've been treated poorly by voiceover have been voice over talent themselves who don't agree with my business model and strategy of direct working directly with a client not using an agent or negotiating my own rates not working off some predetermined rate by an organization and finding rates that work best for me and my client and for that i get you know there are people who aren't very kind in their words toward me which which is fine but understand that's voice over talent that's not voice over clients i have in the 14 years i've done this full time i have never that i can recall had a voiceover client or prospective voiceover client treat me with anything but kindness and respect no one has ever sworn at me nobody has ever hung up a telephone on me or responded to an email in an unkind way now i'm not saying that it couldn't happen or that it might happen but understand i've i've had this kind of contact with thousands and thousands and thousands and more thousands of clients and prospective clients over the years so a lot of the fear that you have right now in launching the voice over it's a paper tiger made of parchment it's thin there's no substance to it it's it's loud in your ear and you know you're afraid to approach it but if you poke at it you'll see there's really it turns to dust there's what you perceive to be the reality is not the reality at all now the reality is it's a lot of hard work you know if anybody tells you otherwise then you know you really need to question the person that you're hearing this from because building any business requires work it does require uh at least figuratively figuratively if not literally knocking on doors and there are many other lessons we could talk about about knocking on doors and the value of that and perhaps i will at some other time but today the purpose is to let you know that the fear that you have while it's real the fear is real it's based in a perceived reality that doesn't exist or probably will be something that you never actually experience and that's part of growing it's part of growing into your potential it's part of creating something that doesn't exist right now because to create something that doesn't exist that you haven't created you have to become a different person or at least more fully realize the person that you are which means you got to get uncomfortable yeah you've got to at least figuratively knock on some doors it might require some phone calls might require some emails might require putting yourself out there in a way where you risk feeling silly or stupid or even embarrassed and yes i have embarrassed myself more times than i can count that's part of growth that's just the way it works so i say all that to say that hey you're in good company is it you know this is this is not easy to launch out into and if somebody tells you otherwise they're not telling you the the truth it's simple in what you have to do it's not complicated it's not complicated but to emotionally put yourself out there is work and it's hard work but what you'll find is the more that you do it the easier it becomes and then it just becomes second nature becomes part of what you do but to get any place different from where you are will require you going on to a different path and doing things that you haven't done i know you know this already but i just want to remind you and i want to let you know that it's been the same story for me i didn't magically drop out of the sky and just start doing voiceovers successfully it's it took a lot of work and it took a lot of work before i got into voiceover i did some things that i didn't know such as selling books for a summer to put myself through college which prepared me emotionally and mentally for business and again i just want to remind you that the the the the fierce tiger lion that that you that you fear right now is really it is a paper tiger it doesn't really exist it's loud but there's no substance to it and all you have to do is move forward and to do the next step and that's why i do voiceover coaching that's why i help to direct people to help them understand that if they just take the necessary steps when you have a system you don't have to be the most talented person in the world you just have to be willing to work the steps and if you do that you will find success some will find more than others but everybody can find their place at the table in voiceover including you so i hope you'll take that as a word of encouragement and hopefully it will motivate you to do the things that you've been you've been afraid to and when you do just remember that there's at least one person out there who's been through that and knows what it feels like to experience you know the rejection the humiliation the difficulty it's just part of growth it's part of life and growing into the thing that you want to do and i believe you i know you can do it because believe me if i can do it i know that you can do it and i hope you will and if you want to learn more about my my voice voiceover training program i encourage you to go to the link that i'm going to put in the description below or you can schedule a discovery call to learn more about the program and to get your questions answered and to give you a system to where you can be surrounded with the information and the people to help you achieve success thanks for checking out the video i do hope that you'll like that you'll share but most importantly i hope you will take action on the information you've heard today and i wish you great success

Channel: Bill DeWees

Views: 8,742

Keywords: vo, voiceover, voice over, voice talent, voice over jobs, voice over business, voice over coach, voice over training, Side hustle, Sell your voice online, Side hustle ideas, Make money online, work from home, Streams of income ideas, Work from home, Work from home jobs, Work from home jobs no experience, Voice over lessons, Voice acting, Voice over teaching, Voice over school, Voice over questions, Voice over artist, Voice over training

Id: bXtCNz_2Png

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020