In the end, YOU are the only thing that can get in your way.

There are many roadblocks in life.  It doesn't matter who you are or what you do, there will always be a series of challenges that get in your way in any endeavor.  Sometimes, it seems even the world itself is rising up to make life difficult.  Traffic, schedules, access and other people can all prove troublesome in getting anything accomplished.  So, why would you add to that list of obstacles in life by blocking your OWN way?  Unfortunately, many of us do just that every day.

Recently, I was teaching at the SAG Conservatory in Los Angeles and I witnessed the amazing mental gymnastics someone can go to in order to stop themselves from succeeding.  There was an older gentleman in the class who asked if it was possible to have a career only auditioning for things he was age appropriate for.  He went on to tell me that the
"young snotnoses in this town" will only ever see him as a grandpa and that's IF they see him at all.  He said there was no respect for the wisdom he brought to the table and that there just wasn't any work for him.

Since this was a VO class, I told him that he didn't have to limit himself to jobs in his age range.  If he could realistically sound younger (or even older because he wasn't THAT old) than he could work those jobs.  No one cares what you look like in VO, only what you sound like.  I even advise in my book (available at www.StartingYourCareerInVoiceOvers.com) not to put your headshot on ANY of your VO marketing materials because you don't want anyone to know what you look like. To illustrate the point, I told him that I do commercials for Kingsford Charcoal.  When the casting went out for that, they asked for a 50+ year old cowboy sound, similar to Sam Elliot.  I booked that job.  Believe me, I am not a 50 year old cowboy... not even close, but I can sound like one.

He refused to accept this answer.  In fact, his response was "that is you, it won't work for me because I am old."  At this point the room turned on him and other students started arguing my point to the man.  He got angry and started getting defensive, posing the same question to me again.  The person behind him sighed loudly and the older gentleman stood up, turned on the person behind him and began yelling at him.

I settled everyone down and told the older gentleman the truth:  he was officially the only thing in his own way.

"I don't know you sir, and whether you hear what I am about to say or not is of little consequence to me, but I am going to speak very honestly right now," I said flatly. "I have just told you that I have booked jobs well out of my age range and personality type in VO.  Yet even with that information, you refuse to accept that you can do the same.  The only "snotnose" in this town that is stopping you from working at this point is you. I suggest you look in the mirror and figure out why that is."

He quieted down.

He was so attached to the reasons why he thought he wasn't succeeding he couldn't accept that he was getting in his own way.  In fact, he was willing to fight a stranger over those pre-conceptions.  Wow.

After the class, he apologized to both the person behind him and to me.  He said that no one had ever pointed his attitude and closed mindedness out to him before, and he was glad I did.  He was a very nice person, and talented as well.  He just refused to take any responsibility for booking or not booking jobs.

This is not to say that it is easy to get jobs.  It's not.  There really are 5 zillion things trying to get in your way and stop you from working in this or any industry.  But if you are standing in your own way, that is the ONLY insurmountable roadblock to success.

Give yourself every chance to succeed, that way, when you DO succeed, you will have no one to blame but yourself.  Insert winky emoticon here.

The past is passed, long live the future.

We have talked a little bit about living in the moment on this blog before.  It’s amazingly important, no matter what you are doing in life.  Every career path and person can benefit greatly from this.  But I have already trod upon those boards, so if you want some more of my rambling thoughts on that, I suggest going back to that post.

This post is a little different.  I was working with a student the other day and we had a bit of a breakthrough.  So as to keep this person’s anonymity intact, let’s call them JohnSusie Squatblatt.  JohnSusie had been noticing that whenever they nailed a read the feeling was fantastic.  They just KNEW that they had done it “right,” and it felt amazing.  When I am working with students, I will often ask them how something felt when they click in to the “right” read.  This is immensely important because there is a LOT to be learned from that feeling. 

JohnSusie, however, had been trying to recapture that feeling on every subsequent read.  Always striving for the read that felt “right” five minutes ago.  What JohnSusie didn’t realize though, was that read WAS “right”… five minutes ago.  It doesn’t apply anymore.  The next “right” read will be different, even though it may result in that same exhilarating feeling.  The breakthrough was this:  don’t try to re-capture the last “right” moment, let it go and move on to the next.

This can be amazingly hard to do.  We all suffer from a little bit of “good-student syndrome” and we want to do it “right.”  When the teacher we are trying to impress is ourselves, the desire to be “right” can be even more overwhelming!  It is so tempting to re-create that feeling we just had… I mean we JUST had it… it was right there.  But it is gone now.  That moment has passed by and the only “right” moment is the next one.  Find that moment and move on to it.

By doing this, we can create a thrilling performance and life.  We never know what we are going to do next because we haven’t done it yet.  It is living life constantly on the edge, always about to tip over into chaos, but just within our control.  I have problems with this, as do most people.  It is so hard to let moments go and move on to the next one, as we are constantly judging how we have just done things.  But dwelling on those things we just did doesn’t help; it just gives us heartburn. 

So the next time you find yourself thinking about how to recapture that sentence you just read, that show you just did, that moment you just lived or that meeting you just had… remind yourself to let it go.  It’s done.  The next great thing you are about to do is just around the corner; so let the new one happen.

You’ll be glad you did.

First of all, I wanted to give a hearty apology for being silent for a couple of weeks.  I was out of town (as you know) and then I was buried with houseguests/paperwork/other stuff and just couldn’t get around to the blog.  BUT I’M BACK BABY!  So on with this weeks blog…

This is a book.

A Book?

Yes. A Book.

Oh. A Book.

Well my book came out early!  Huzzah!  For those of you who have already bought it, I thank you.  For those of you who haven’t yet… what are you waiting for?  Here is the link: Starting Your Career In Voice-Overs, go ahead, click and buy.  I’ll wait…

OK, are you back?  Good!  Thanks for doing that.  So now on to the meat of the matter:  books. 

During my 7(!) years of theatrical training, I was assigned, and read, a huge amount of books on theatre, acting, script analysis, theory, plays etc. etc. ad nauseum.  I read ALMOST all of them.  A big apology to William McConnell Bozman who taught my theatre history class in undergrad… I didn’t read all of the plays during that class.  BUT if it makes you feel any better, I have since read them all… several times. 

I digress.  Having read all of those books, something struck me:  by themselves they are worthless.  Don’t misunderstand; the books themselves are great; filled with useful insight and tips on the craft of acting.  Now that I have written one of those books (which you can buy here) I would never tell you that those books are useless!  But without implementation and practice, they are nothing but pretty words on a page.  Theory is needed and wonderful, but unless you put that theory into practice, it means nothing.

So try things out!  Read the books and get on stage, mic or camera and try it!  You may read a book and the words resonate, but when you try to apply the words wholesale they fall flat.  Excellent!  You have learned something.  The glaring truth of the matter is that the right approach for each individual is different, and very rarely is the right approach all of what one person says.  Most often, it is a mix of things:  a little bit of Stanislavsky, a touch of Meisner, a dash of Suzuki, a scoach of Chekhov and a smidge of Beeson… oh did I mention I wrote a book?  You can get it here. 

This is what makes good teachers, writers, actors, business people and just plain ol’ people:  experience.  Locking yourself away in a room filled with books is no way to live a life.  The only way to live and learn about what you read is to get out into the world and play with those ideas.  It’s also what the author intended… so please don’t make our intentions go unfulfilled.  We just want to help.  We?  Oh, yeah, did I mention I wrote a book?  You can get it here.

This shameless self-promotion is over.

OK, one more.  My book is available here.  

Help!  We need somebody.  Help, not just anybody.  Help!  You know we need someone.  HEEEEEEEELP!

It’s a tough life as a person.  Sure, there is a whole lot of good out there.  Puppies.  Rainbows.  Children.  Milkshakes.  Sausages.  Flowers etc.  It’s important to remember that and focus on the good, but if we’re being honest:  it’s a tough life!  Trying to make a living and support yourself and your family in this day and age is difficult.  Gone are the days when you could have just one job and live comfortably on that single job.  Most of us require a series of contract jobs to make ends meet.  They don’t’ last forever, and then you find yourself looking for the next job.

Finding that next job can be hard.  Sometimes it is nigh impossible!  There was a time when you could open the want ads in your local paper to find work… but have you looked in the newspaper classifieds recently?  Let me save you thirty seconds:  there’s not much there.  So that leaves Craigs List… but you always run into the danger of crazy there.  So how about any of the sites you can pay to post your resume to and hope someone finds it there?  Or maybe the sites that you can pay to send you auditions?  Or how about the sites you can pay to find you work?  It seems you could spend more money LOOKING for work than you may actually make DOING work.

Sigh.  But what other alternative is there?  Surely you couldn’t ask a friend for help or take help when it is offered could you?  What about your pride?  Gasp.

Pride?  Swallow it.  Pride does nothing but get in the way of you eating and having a roof over your head.  There is nothing wrong with asking for and accepting help.  Maybe I’m just talking to myself here, but I have a suspicion that it is more than just me who needs to hear this.  DON’T BE AFRAID TO TAKE HELP!

It seems that just applying for work is no longer good enough.  You have to network, know people, ask favors, give favors and be willing to move in any direction to get work.  If you are too proud to take the help that is offered, you are tying both hands behind your back while your competition is getting an extra hand up.  Use the extra hands, man!

It’s hard to swallow your pride; I get it.  It’s hard to take a job that you consider beneath you.  If you are an artist, it’s hard to take a job waiting tables to make ends meet.  If you are a lawyer, it’s hard to take a job as a clerk to work your way up.  It hurts your pride to not be able to get a job in the field that you trained in (theatre degree anyone?)  But guess what?  You have to do it.  One day you will move up into your field, but until then you have to eat.  Help comes in all shapes, sizes and forms; so don’t ignore it when it comes.

The caveat here is that you need to be ready to pay back that help when the time comes.  Seek and give help… because we are all in this together.  So come on in for a hug… that’s it… feels nice doesn’t it.  Now… can I borrow a dollar? 

I will be out of town next week teaching at schools on the east coast (thanks to Salisbury U. and University of Mary Washington) so there will be no blog.  See you in a couple of weeks!

We all live in fear.

Foreboding isn’t it.  But it’s true!  As artists we all live in fear that we are going to miss out on that huge, career changing moment.  Yet it never fails that no matter how hard we try to always be available to everything, the second we decide to go out of town for a vacation, family event or last minute road trip is when our agent or manager calls with the biggest audition we’ve had in months.  If you want to get an audition… leave town.

It happens every time.  You plan a huge trip, one that you have been dying to take for years and years.  You tell all of your agents and managers that you will be out of town for two weeks at the end of September.  They have lots of advance notice since you told them two months out and reminded them two weeks before.  The DAY before you leave you will get a call from one of them trying to confirm you for an audition in two days… the exact time when you are in barthelona… oooooooo aren’t we fancy in this blog.

Of course, you have a minor meltdown and wonder if you should cancel your trip.  Is your agent going to take this as a sign of you not being committed to the business?  Is the casting director going to take it as a personal insult and never call you in again?  Have you torpedoed your career?

A couple of years ago, a very smart actor gave me a great piece of advice:  live your life.  If you spend all of your time worrying that you are going to miss that big call or that big audition or that big interview, you are never going to do anything.  You will sit by the phone all the time just waiting for that call.  Part of being an artist is experiencing the world, learning about different people, places and things.  That simply can’t be done sitting by your phone!  So go, DO!

Of course if you are constantly leaving town at the drop of a hat your agent or manager might have a problem with it, but everyone understands the need to get away for a bit or a family emergency.  Just make sure you tell them and give them notice before you go.  They will probably forget, but that’s to be expected, they are really busy people, cut them some slack, Jack.

I’m just as guilty of this as everyone… I’m an actor… I’m insecure.  Right after I got out of grad school, I was scheduled to go on a vacation with my wife’s family.  It had been planned and our departure date had been set for months.  At the end of our studies, we did a showcase for casting directors and agents in NY, Chicago and LA.  As it always happens, the day before we left I got a call from a theatre company in Chicago that I had been dying to work with for years… they wanted me to come in for an audition two days after we left. 

When I hung up the phone from the casting director after telling her I couldn’t make the audition… I was devastated.  I had blown my one shot with that company.  I was done.  The second stage of my career was over before it even started. 

The week after I got back from vacation… the company called me in to read for another role.  Because people understand that we all have a life to live.  If we are not living our life, we are not doing our job as artists.

Since I constantly need to remind myself, I figured it would be a good thing to remind all of you as well:  get out there and live your life.  Don’t live in fear, live as if you had an entire world to experience, because you do.  Your career will be there when you get back… even if you did miss out on one audition.  There will always be another.

Thanks to Bill Crounse (@billcrounse) for the idea for this blog.  Since I’m planning ahead, I can give a bit of a tease for the next topic:  we get by with a little help from our friends.  Great song.