Our story continues now with the “Perils of Bloviating” in which a kindly blogger asked a few simple questions in search of a few simple answers only to find out that voice talkers never use two words when two thousand words are available.

2. What habits have blocked you from success?

In the voice over business, like in almost any business, we voice talents can’t get out of our own way regarding our success sometimes and that’s been true for me too. We are called voice artists and that term artist brings with it a lot of baggage including ego, opinion, self deprecation, fear, loathing, lack of focus, self-worth, selfishness and about a thesaurus’ worth of even more descriptions all of which can be the first (but not that last) things that can get in my/your/our way on the path to success.

Learning from history but not dwelling on it was one of the first thoughts that came to mind with this question. The wouldas, shouldas and couldas of this business can haunt you and occasionally that gets in my head too. Sometimes the voice “artist” in us sporadically wants to make us suffer…we need to turn the slider on the microphone of that “artist” voice down to 0.

Lost opportunities, poor choices, slow responses in a myriad of business situations over a career dot everyone’s professional landscape, mine too. The key take away, though is to learn from the mistakes but also learn to let go of the mistake. If your business is in a lull, don’t think about the wouldas, shouldas and couldas but rather the “ares” and “ams”. “We are going to make some calls to prospects today” or “I am going to attend a local networking event.” Positive wins and action achieves.

Another challenge is not focusing enough time to manage the business. Sometimes it’s the work load and sometimes organizing your profit and loss statement just isn’t very interesting. But at the end of the year or at tax time when you’ve found that over the past year you were spending like a drunken sailor and your net profit isn’t as large as you’d hoped or needed, you’ll be sorry you didn’t focus a bit more on the debits, credits and other core elements of the business.

More tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.

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Tags: blogs, commentary, peter o'connell, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover blog // 1 Comment »