7 Habits of Highly Successful Voice Actors + 2 Bonus Tools
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” This quote will be familiar to you if you’ve read Atomic Habits by James Clear.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
What does that mean? Clear says, and he’s right, the goal is not what separates people. Every Olympian has a goal of winning gold. Every team starts the season with the goal of a championship.
It’s the systems, the habits, that separate elite from very good, very good, from good, good from mediocre, and mediocre from bad.
So today, I’m going to lay out for you the Top 7 Habits of Highly Successful Voice Actors – the seven strategic systems or habits I believe to be the most effective for building a successful career in VO. And stick around because I’ll have a two special free bonus tools for you as we go through these.
7. Ongoing Performance Training
Successful voice actors know if you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse, because everyone around you is getting better. Training is not something you check off a list, like, “Yep, training. Did that.”
Great voice actors, great athletes, musicians, artists, they all work on their craft continuously, and more importantly, they got great by working on their craft continuously. Tiger Woods at the peak of his career had a swing coach, and Tiger Woods when he was 3 years old had a swing coach. Granted it was his Dad, but the point is to be great takes continuous training with a reputable coach.
Working with a coach isn’t just about getting better at what you do; it’s about becoming the best version of yourself.
6. Mastering Your Time
I’ve probably said this hundreds of times: Your most valuable assets as a voice actor and an entrepreneur are your time and attention, and how you spend them makes all the difference.
One of the hardest things for new freelancers to get used to is being responsible for making your own schedule and focusing your attention. “I don’t have time to train with a coach.” “I don’t have time to market.” “I don’t have time to audition.”
You have the same 24 hours in a day, same 168 hours in a week as people who are wildly successful.
You have the time. But maybe you don’t have the willingness.
Do you have the willingness to give up the things that don’t serve your success? Successful people don’t get that way by scrolling social media every day. They don’t plan their lives around being home for House of the Dragon every week.
Successful freelancers have a plan. They budget their time. They schedule the important stuff first. Not the most fun. Not the most relaxing. Not even the most urgent. They make sure the important habits get scheduled consistently to give them the best chance of getting them done consistently.
Many freelancers don’t even know how they’re actually spending their time from week to week. It that’s you, and you really want to learn where actually spending your time, I have a free Daily Time Audit Worksheet you can download here: https://welcome.vopro.pro/time-audit
You fall to the level of your systems and if you do not have a system for managing your time, I highly recommend our VO Pro course, Time Mastery for Voice Actors, which you can get for FREE with a VO Pro membership for a limited time.
5. Strategic Goal Setting
Voiceover, freelancing… it’s all a journey. Mastering your time is about mastering your days and weeks and the habits and systems you build to propel you forward.
Strategic goal setting answers the question, “Where are you going?”
Clear says, “Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress.”
Progress is pointless without direction. You need both.
Others may differ, but I keep my long-term planning to a year at a time. Each December, I schedule time to evaluate where I am and where I want to go with my career and my business in the next 12 months.
I usually brainstorm all the goals I can first. Then, I whittle these down to 3 major goals for the year. I then brainstorm strategies to achieve those goals and prioritize them on how effective I think they will be and my ability to execute them. Then I reverse engineer the habits and behaviors I’ll need (the tactics) to execute those strategies.
Then, I break everything down by quarter and month and, voila! My strategic goal setting has produced a plan that I can use to schedule my time and attention week-to-week.
Now I have a destination and the gas in the car to get there.
4. Marketing
J. Michael Collins famously said last year that the days of talent entering this business and sitting on the pay-to-plays making enough money to build a career on are gone.
In 2024 and beyond, you cannot rely on P2PSs and agents to produce enough opportunities for you to build a sustainable career.
You must market your services to buyers consistently to build a career.
A study conducted by Freelancer.com showed that freelancers who spend more time on marketing work – like pitching to clients and maintaining an online presence - report higher earnings. In fact, who spent at least 10 hours a week on marketing activities earned 50% more than those who didn’t.
There is an avalanche of other data that support this. The fact is, the more you market, the more you make.
The problem, yet again, is most people don’t have a system and a plan for marketing. One big reason is only about 10% of the workforce has any marketing or sales experience at all, and most of them haven’t the foggiest idea how to market a freelance voice over business.
I’ve had career salespeople tell me, “I’ve sold my whole life, but I have no idea how to sell this.”
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. If you don’t have a system to market your business, you don’t stand much of a chance. If that’s you, check out the VO Freedom Master Plan at vofreedommasterplan.com.
3. Accountability
“A choice without consequences is no choice at all.” That’s a quote from author Tom Robbins. It’s one thing to make promises to yourself. It’s another thing entirely to declare an intention to someone else.
A wedding is just an idea until the invitations are in the mail.
Accountability works because we are much less likely to break a social contract with someone else than we are to break a promise to ourselves. That’s just human nature.
There are lots of frameworks for accountability:
1. Accountability buddies (1-on-1)
My accountability buddy is Craig Williams. We met years ago at VO Atlanta and we’ve had an accountability call almost every Monday for the last 6 or 7 years. I can honestly say without those calls, I would not be here. We keep each other accountable and on track strategically, mentally, and emotionally. We’ve talk each other off the ledge, kicked each other in the pants, celebrated each other’s wins, and from those calls I’ve gotten a career and a friendship I couldn’t even dream of years ago.
2. Accountability Groups
These are small groups that meet regularly, either weekly or monthly, to set intentions before the group and report back with progress.
3. Mastermind Groups
Mastermind groups are a kind of accountability group that meets regularly and uses a combination of brainstorming, problem-solving, and accountability to reach goals more quickly. Masterminds help members achieve success by trading best practices and solutions, and shortening the learning curve. The members challenge each other to set strong goals — and more importantly, to accomplish those goals.
Accountability is such an effective strategy, we’ve baked it right into our VO Pro Community. Every Monday, we post our goals for the week in Monday Goals, and every Friday we post our progress and celebrate our wins in Friday Wins.
This isn’t just some made of community engagement strategy. It’s a strategy to systematize accountability in the group so that we all go farther and faster.
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
2. Community
Successful freelancers do not isolate. As voice actors we’re all guilty of the old trope about being stuck in our tiny padded cells talking to ourselves all day. What we do as solopreneurs is isolating by definition and the problem with that is we spend all our time in our own little individual bubbles and we lose perspective.
We assume that our problems and struggles and challenges are all our own and unique to us and I am here to tell you they are not. When the only voice you hear all day is the one in your own head, then that lone voice becomes your truth and that’s a dangerous thing.
When we get in community with other people who do what we do, we find that we are not alone, that we aren’t dying of terminal uniqueness, and that there are tons of other people who have had the same challenges we have and we can help each other navigate them.
A community is a framework, a system, to connect with each other, support each other, and learn from each other. Great communities are more than the sum of all the members. They are places where relationships can start, grow, and deepen.
1. Gratitude
Scientific studies show that people who regularly practice gratitude have higher levels of life satisfaction and overall well-being and that grateful people have a greater sense of purpose and meaning in life.
Look, this business is hard. Life is hard. It beats you down relentlessly. You have to have a way to build yourself back up, and the best way I and modern science has found is gratitude.
So how do you practice gratitude? First, practice means you have to do it regularly. Ideally, every damn day. It can be making a mental note of three things you’re grateful for before bed. It can be a morning gratitude journal. It can be weekly thank you notes to people who have done you a kindness during the week. It can be tracking and sharing gratitude for your wins each week.
How you do it doesn’t matter nearly as much as doing it regularly.
And here’s the thing: find what works for you. If that’s journaling, great. If that’s thank you notes, wonderful. But don’t commit to something you find to be a chore. “Oh, I’ve got to write my goddamn thank you notes again!” That’s not gratitude. You can’t practice gratitude and resentment at the same time.
None of us achieves a damn thing of any real value without others.
Now, I promised you a bonus. If you are inclined to keep, or open to starting a gratitude journal, I’ve put together 25 Gratitude Journal Prompts and you can download that for free right here: https://welcome.vopro.pro/gratitude
And again, the link for this and everything else we’ve mentioned are below.
Thanks for the conversations we have here on YouTube, on the blog, in the VO Pro community and the VO community at large. The more we talk, the more we listen, the more we exchange ideas and information, the better, stronger voiceover industry we can have.
We’ll see ya again here soon.
Free Time Audit Worksheet: https://welcome.vopro.pro/time-audit
Time Mastery for Voice Actors – Free with VO Pro for a limited time: https://vopro.pro/vo-pro-1
VO Freedom Master Plan: https://vofreedommasterplan.com
VO Pro Community: https://vopro.pro/vo-pro-1
Free 25 Gratitude Journaling Prompts: https://welcome.vopro.pro/gratitude