I just returned to Seattle after my first ever voiceover conference, VOAtlanta 2023. 

I feel like I just went through a wonderful tornado of information, inspiration, and cool new people

(and I don’t just say “tornado” because on my last night in Atlanta there was a huge thunderstorm and tornadoes closer by than I am used to up to in the Pacific Northwest where we have a total of two small dust-devils a year 😅).

No! I say tornado because WOW was it moving fast and spinning all around me. 

I was chatting with new friends left and right, learning something new every hour from some of the best in the biz on video games, animation, commercial, marketing, networking, improv, and filling up with more inspiration than I thought was possible.

And I loved every second of this tornado (to be clear, this is not an invitation for real tornadoes to enter my life. Metaphorical tornadoes only, please).

First off: It is true for ALL people (not just extroverts) that the energy exchange of speaking IN PERSON, IN REAL LIFE to another person does all sorts of yummy things for our brains. 

And boy could we use it after 3 years on Zoom (which is like 10 in Zoom years–50 if you’re a dog on Zoom) 

And second: There is nothing more buzzy and magical (for me) than when incredibly verbally creative people get together. 

I have spent most of my life being told I was talking too much, analyzing too much, being too loud.. the list goes ON. So being with about 1000 people who matched me in this way… I was just flying inside. 

They get it. And they get me. I kept having moments of “these are my people. I am in the right place.”

I wish I could bottle that feeling up and save it for those rainy Seattle days where I’m alone in my recording booth trying to overcome the gray.

But that’s what conferences are for. THIS is why all of my mentors have told me voiceover conferences, specifically VOAtlanta, are so special and so important.  

I started the first day by myself because I didn’t know anyone and I was completely doubting that I should even be there. 

By the end of the conference, I had a handful of buzzy, creative, talkative, intelligent friends from across the country and no doubt in my mind that I’ll be back next year. 

PLUS a big reminder, a big FAT reminder, that my brain and my mouth and ME have a place in this world. 

And that’s pretty cool.

I’ve had this feeling before, sure, but maybe this one feels bigger and more magical because it just happened last week.

• It happened the first time I tried stand up comedy.
• It happened again, especially, when I found a stand up show that was focused on queer women and subsequently joined the production team on that show.
• It happened when I first got to my college theatre department after attending a high school that did not have a theatre program. (Boy, oh boy, THAT was a big one).

Go find your people. If you are feeling like a weirdo, like a fish out of water, know that your people are OUT THERE.

And once you find them, you get to hold them in your back pocket as you enter the corners of the world where you feel like an outsider.

Go find them on Reddit, Twitter, at a Meetup app event (that’s a really good one for meeting people with similar interests in your area!).

You’ll find them at Emerald City Comicon. You’ll find them at the local renaissance fair. You’ll find them at Fred Meyer (sorry, not that, that’s an old commercial, but hey, maybe your people are at Fred Meyer. You never know!)

Pay attention to which groups fire you up. What do those people have that you recognize in yourself? What do all these groups have in common?

If I have one takeaway from looking at which groups I find myself energized by — I am a performer. From birth. At my center. To my core. I have no choice. I. am. a. performer.

Period.

End of story.

That is it!

I don’t have a conclusion to this.

All I know is I am vibrating after VOA and some things are really clicking for me.

I’m just… so grateful and I can’t wait to see these folks next year (or, hey, maybe I’ll hit up Get Your Game On conference 2023 😉)

 

I know it has been said countless times by other Voice Over Artists and other small business owners, but I wanted to pop on to give a quick testimony to HOW IMPORTANT SOCIAL MEDIA IS TO YOUR BUSINESS!

 

The focus of my business is voice over, but I also offer Social Media Coaching to other VO and creative entrepreneurs like authors, bloggers, and artists.

For some people, social media comes easily, for others it is like pulling teeth: painful and only when necessary. This message is for anyone that is struggling to see how the blood, sweat, and oh-so-many tears that they’re putting into their social media presence will pay off.

I am very active on social media.

I am constantly adding new folks and posting. Some mediums come easier to me like Instagram, and some I have to work to create content, like LinkedIn. I have been very surprised to learn just how much of a HOT BED LinkedIn is for voice over!!! I was just not expecting that! But it makes sense, VO is often where performance meets marketing and business so it follows that our ideal clients (business people) will be found on LinkedIn.

So, advice number 1 for other VO:

GET ON LINKEDIN IF YOU AREN’T ALREADY!

 

I do want to mention and give credit: much of what I learned from LinkedIn I learned from Tracey Lindley who offers courses for marketing your VO specifically on LinkedIn. And, without spoiling her course, she really emphasizes relationship building with potential clients.*

So for many months I have been building my network of other VO artists, VO adjacent professionals, and potential VO clients on all social media, but especially on my LinkedIn.

Adding folks left and right, striking up virtual-conversations with them, and, in the meantime, not expecting anything from it, just going about my regular social media business.

 

LAST WEEK, I got a phone call out of the blue. It was a production company rep that I had connected with on LinkedIn weeks earlier. She needed a last minute commercial spot and remembered me from our brief, yet meaningful, online interaction.

Boom! All because I’ve been adding folks online and making relationships. The seeds you sow now may seem so very inconsequential, but they sprout! All of a sudden and seemingly out of the blue!

 

Advice #2: Change your mind about social media

• Yes, social media is overwhelming.
• Yes, it changes very quickly.
• Yes, it sometimes seems like an insurmountable mountain of new learning, and a ridiculous amount of buttons.
• AND social media is also an incredibly effective method of forming new relationships.
• AND social media can be a really fun tool for creative expression.
• AND social media is a place for you to take up space, share your gifts and unique personality with the world.

Stop looking at social media as a monster, and start thinking about it as a place to forge relationships. Period. Make everything you do on social media fall under your genuine desire to have relationships with clients, friends, and peers in your industry.

 

Advice # 3: If you do nothing else on social media, add new people and start a conversation with them. Then let the other legs fall in.

Engaging online is how I’ve met almost all of my social media clients, it’s how I get booked for comedy shows, it’s how I end up on podcasts with people across the country, and so much more.

All because I

1. showcase my genuine personality and talents and
2. actively reach out to form new relationships.

AND YOU CAN TOO!

I hope this little story can offer some hope for anyone that is struggling in their social media journey, as well as permission to take that journey slow and steady. It is an absolutely effective tool, but don’t let its monstrous presence scare you off from learning, relating, and sharing your gifts online.

 

*I want to say fully that Tracey and other professionals offering courses are really fantastic resources. I offer something different than she does and do not want to steal her clients in any way. Go to Tracey! Go to Jonathan Tilley for Instagram tips! What I offer is one-on-one coaching where I will personally assess your profiles and we will walk through revamping them together via video conference, as far as I understand they offer courses. Great courses!

It may sound like I have a lot of eggs in many baskets, but in reality, my interests could not be more related!

For my undergrad, I had such an explosive experience studying Psychology and Theatre. Not to mention, I also started my journey in therapy simultaneously. Everything around me was centered around the experience of being human: learning about Pavlov’s dog in my psych classes, empathizing with the villain in order to play them truthfully in the theatre, and empathizing with MYSELF in counseling, to name a few. It was the greatest combination and amounted to an incredible amount of self-exploration. I could not be more grateful for how I chose to spend my time in college.

I noticed overlap every day between these three facets of my life: First, I would understand pragmatically the psychological systems that were motivating my characters’ choices:

• “That character has been rewarded in the past for this behavior so, of course, they’re going to continue it.”
• “The child in this story has an anxious attachment so it makes sense that she is pining for approval.”
• “This character is suffering from serious addiction and even though he wants to stop, that’s very difficult to achieve when the cues in his environment haven’t changed and he continues to have a neurological reaction to those cues.”

But this approach to theatre does not work in isolation! Understanding the why is excellent research, but it doesn’t necessarily allow you to embody a character.

So then my thinking shifts to a concept that was repeated both in therapy and my acting training that allowed me to release the analytical approach: Very rarely is there a cut and dry “right” or “wrong,” there is just doing, being, and living based on learned behavior, environment, and motivation. Regardless of attributed moral value, people continue to behave in sometimes questionable ways. We are not robots. There is no “if behavior is ‘wrong,’ then do not do it.” (There’s a little programming reference from that one robotics class I took to fulfill a math credit).

Knowing that an action is problematic or otherwise harmful, does not automatically transfer over into the ending of the behavior. Our brains don’t typically think “this is right or wrong,” in fact, they don’t really think at all when it comes to ingrained behavior–they just react and continue to do what they know will fulfill our needs.

Accepting myself for my own messy human experience allowed me “to go there” within characters. If you cannot forgive your character, you cannot play them truthfully! If you play villain, that is, if you play “I, the actor, knows this behavior is wrong” you ruin it for the audience. They don’t want your judgment, they want to experience the story of people living in full mess; BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THE AUDIENCE DOES EVERY DAY! THAT is one of the reasons people come to the theatre: to see and be seen.

Instead of playing the villain, you understand the villain is human and behaving, in their mind, in the best way they know how in order to achieve their needs. Psychology gave me a basis of knowledge, but therapy and my acting training allowed me to forgive myself and my characters for being humans.*

“Okay, Andrea, where the heck is the comedy? I thought you were a Comedian!” I’m getting to that part!

So! At the same time as I’m having this really expansive understanding of myself and others, I was also starting my first years as an open-mic comedian! A series of dominoes that had been triggering each other since the day of my birth finally tipped over the comedy domino in my third year at school. On one side of the performance and humanity coin, I had theatre and on the other side, I had comedy. Both require so much authenticity, groundedness, and understanding of self and others  (What’s that you say? That this is the whole point of the idea of “comedy/tragedy” and I am not the first person to realize they are two sides of the same coin? Preposterous!)

Comedy was an amazing discovery for me. I could write, direct, cast, and perform all by myself;

I didn’t need anybody except the audience. And I was making people laugh! Oh my GOD do I love nothing more than the dopamine rush that happens when a joke lands. And again, I was finding that all of my interests were coinciding on the stage:

• best practices of stage performance
• self-expression & vulnerability
• understanding which experiences are going to land because they are universally relatable
• and, like most comedians, over the years I have learned what material belongs on stage and what truly does belong in therapy! Ha!

But the process of learning that was exactly an application of everything I was discussing above:

Allow myself to live fully on stage as a human, take big swings and make very embarrassing mistakes. Then get off the stage and dissect why it did or didn’t work and apply that learning to my next performance. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Here I am, five years later, still doing stand-up, 3 years after graduating with my degree. And now I’ve put it all together in my career as a Voice Actor. Everything I’ve learned as a performer and emotional creature comes into play with VO. The only difference is now I have to have BIG, REAL EMOTIONS in a tiny booth without costume, setting, or other actors to inspire me. I have to make characters jump off the page, while making sure my audio levels are correct. I have to be authentic while minimizing the amount of mouth-clicks and making sure I stay close enough to the mic.

And, boy, do I love it! The entire reason I got into acting in the first place was because I wanted to be just like Robin Williams in the opening scene of Mrs. Doubtfire when he improvises the voice for a cigarette-smoking bird! And now I’m a super energized, zany Comedian and Voice Actor! Achievement unlocked in the eyes of little baby Andrea.

Whatever kind of performer I am, have been, and will become, my time in college will always be my strong foundation. I will always call upon the very human experience I had tearing through my understanding of self and others.

There is no performance without humanity– Stand-Up Comedy, Straight Theatre, Voice Acting, or otherwise.

So, moral of the story in my eyes: let go of judgment of yourself. Please, for the love of God, Andrea, let go of judgment of yourself. Honest performance cannot exist simultaneously with judgment. And living your life with freedom and joy can’t either.

Now off to try my hand in improv classes! Toodaloo!

 

*I feel strongly that this line of thinking be used to allow ourselves and our characters to live freely and outside of the prison of self-judgment. While 90% of the time this thinking can also be used in view of other people, I do not promote applying this to unsafe people “because they are human.” If a person’s behavior is not safe or otherwise makes you uncomfortable, remove yourself. Save the grace for yourself, your closest loved ones, and your characters.

“This is going to sound sexist, but a woman cannot be a powerhouse,” he told me, assuming his qualifier would absolve him of his blatant sexism. Spoiler Alert: It did not.

I was a new Voice Actor. A new, young Voice Actor. A new, young, female Voice Actor. Twenty-five years old and in my very first meeting to create my very first shiny website (which I assume you have seen since you’ve found this blog. Very shiny, right?!) I was still getting my lay of the Voice-Over-Land and this was the cherry on top of a handful of vaguely sexist interactions I had had with various gentlemen in the bizz. Was this the reality of acting? Were all those 90s movies about “becoming a star” true: is this just part of the package? If I want to be successful, do I just need to “suck it up” and “deal with it?”

When you’re in a one-on-one meeting (you, a young woman with very little experience, and he, a middle-aged man with loads) it becomes very easy to doubt your gut. Your energy says “I have questions” and his energy says “I know all the answers” and there isn’t anyone else to fact check those answers so you feel like you have to trust him. I don’t have to tell you that this is not an experience exclusive to Voice Over.

The men who say things like this want to take away your power because they are afraid of it. If a woman can be a powerhouse, then where does that leave men? All they have had for so long is their claim to power! They have had power in the workplace, power in being the breadwinner, power in “wearing the pants in the relationship,” physical power, fiscal power, political power…. So if women get to claim that too, where does that leave them? And if women in Voice Over suddenly have “powerhouse” energy and voices, where is the market for the men? (Well, first let me tell you, there is no shortage of a market for men in VO, don’t you worry your little head about that one…)

SECOND, let me tell you: what I have learned in my studies of VO so far mirrors exactly what is happening in the world around us–People are bored of inauthenticity, they want the real thing. And why is that? Because people are living more authentic lives, in part, by disregarding gender expectations. We are seeing more stay-at-home dads than ever, more women staying single, pursuing their careers and being true to themselves. And when consumers are being true to themselves, they want to hear that in their voice overs; they want more authenticity.

Authenticity means that every person–woman, man, or otherwise–has the capacity for every emotional experience, including the capacity for power AND for softness. Strength AND weakness. Bravery AND doubt. These experiences are not exclusive to gender expression! They are universal! And when we express these experiences with our voice over we tell the consumer “I see you and you have the permission to be all that you are.” THAT is what people want (and NEED) right now and THAT is how we, as actors, create a more genuine connection with our audience.

I am not angry at men. I WAS angry at this particular man, but in the end I hope he and many other men feel this same permission to experience softness, weakness, and vulnerability in their voice over and especially in their personal relationships. It can only make our performances and our world better.

“You really are a woman of your generation,” he jabbed with a tone meant to condescend.

“Yes, I am. Powerful.”