Peter O'Connell responds.

Voice talent Peter O'Connell took time from his busy schedule of bagel noshing to respond to my breakfast story with a wonderful & hilarious post about networking and marketing. Peter is a very funny guy, but his post is not purely comedy - it is full of excellent ideas for voice actors (and all business people).

And, I'm very relieved to report, Peter has excused me for the time being from the requirement to leave my grape-nuts, Kefir and berries behind and go out into the world for bagels with potential colleagues. It isn't the time, the venue, or the meal that matters, of course - it's networking early and often. Take karate for example - one of my few long-term rituals. A few weeks ago I read about a medical communications company I had not heard of (it's huge, so I must have been networking with ostriches before this). I entered a few key words into Google to learn more about it and try to find someone whom I might contact about medical narration. To my astonishment, Google Desktop turned up an email in one of my very own folders from a karate colleague in New York. She is the Creative Director at this company! And she put me in touch with the head of the video department there - who as it turns out attended the same small private school I attended in Manhattan years ago.

I assure you that no bagels changed hands in all of this. And no grape-nuts. No food at all. As in karate, I realised (again) that you must always keep your eyes open and be aware of your surroundings.

Which is what Peter O'Connell has been saying all along. So take a marketing and networking lesson from Peter. He knows his stuff. And if you ever have him over to breakfast, give him a cinnamon raisin bagel, not toasted, with butter. Hold the Pepsi. Now, stop reading this post and go read his!!

Why I Don’t Conduct Voice-over Business Over Breakfast Like Peter O’Connell Does.

My friend Peter O’Connell is a voice talent, producer and marketing expert, and he is one of my heroes. He’s full of ideas and of energy that he invests in his business and in his family, friends, and colleagues and he’s always coming up with something new. So, when Peter says that over the years he has conducted a lot of lucrative business at the breakfast place he visits every single morning of the work week, I feel I should be listening, but the fact is I cannot bring myself to do what he does. Why is that?

In science one often speaks in terms of proximate and ultimate explanations. The latter are the “real” ones, the former are the superficial ones that sort of masquerade as explanations. Let me first talk about the proximate explanation for why I breakfast at home. This is best represented by the photograph I took of my breakfast this morning: Grape-nuts and Kefir with flax seed meal, topped with fresh and frozen berries, with a side of Celestial Seasonings Honey Lemon Ginseng green tea.

OMG. So yummy. The only place I know that serves this nutritious repast bursting with beneficial phytochemicals is my own place here by the river with the newly arrived Eastern Phoebes (the first insectivorous migratory birds of the season in this region) buzzing their euphonious song from the leafless branches. So there’s that. Then the fact that I seem to spend my first waking hours in service to the other members of my family – getting the kids to school since invariably they miss their ride these days because they are young teenagers and the school system’s start times are designed to give the most sleep to the kids who need it the least (the elementary schoolers) while those who need it most have to be out the door at an inhumane hour (or maybe it’s because they have a lousy mother who lets them stay up too late). And to save on gas my husband takes public transportation to work, but I drive him to the bus. Three days out of five, I then park the car at the college and spend the morning in my Spanish and German classes (you really don't need to point out that we should be riding our bikes. We already know it and are actually going to do it today). The other two days I get to spend the whole day in the studio and am glad not to have to go anywhere.

So the truth is, fitting a business breakfast into my daily routine is not something I have felt strongly motivated to do – the quarterly Chamber of Commerce breakfasts are a different story entirely – I look forward to those tremendously, as well as the monthly Arrive@5’s and the Chamber’s Tourism Committee meetings. But I often think of Peter’s daily ritual and wonder what I am missing out there. I wonder, does it have to be breakfast? Perhaps this fixation on breakfast is a matter of convenience and economy – breakfast is early and cheap. But what about a mid-morning coffee or tea – we could bring back “elevenses”! And, would it have to be every day? I don’t do well with ritual that requires effort. And finally, where would be the best place in my area for this to occur?

I have thoughts of experimenting with breakfast and elevenses and visiting a different local establishment each week to try to determine where the most interesting people are hanging out, and if it is a regular occurrence for them. But I suspect it’s an experiment that’s doomed to fail. This is because you can’t go out a few times and expect something to happen RIGHT NOW. Business relationships are cultivated over the long term - and many of them, as with Peter's breakfast, probably start out as a social thing, not as an overtly business venture. You meet people and get to know them and trust them and vice versa, and maybe some day one of you can do something for the other in business. And I just know that I don’t have the personality for a daily or even weekly ritual that requires what would be required for me to have what Peter O’Connell has developed over many years. I think you have to LIKE doing it in order for it to work. The closest I have come to ritual is going to karate class several times a week, which I’ve been doing for 7 years – but that is a ritual with infrastructure that makes it easier for me to go (I have friends there, my husband also goes, there are health benefits and a sense of accomplishment as well as spiritual peace). As for voice-over and marketing rituals, though, if it’s daily and it requires going somewhere, it just isn’t going to happen, which is a much simpler explanation and among the penultimate reasons why I don't do it (for clues to the ultimate reason, see yesterday's post on brain chemistry).

But I would love to enjoy these rituals vicariously – and I hope Peter will now oblige me by writing a blog post about the famous Fire-Up-the-Toaster-‘Cause-O’Connell-Just Pulled-Up Daily Breakfast Routine. How about it?

If you have a social/marketing ritual, I’d love to hear about it.

Voice actors and the Edge Effect.

Last week during a vigorous house-cleaning event I unearthed a book I had read so long ago I didn’t even recognise it. Or at least, so much has happened since then that it seemed like a long time ago. The book is The Edge Effect by Eric Braverman, and it is about the influence of brain chemistry on personality, memory, attention and overall health.

Braverman asserts that there are four basic natures among humans, each one dominated by a different neurotransmitter (dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin or GABA). The extensive Nature Assessment questionnaire in the book allows you to determine your nature, and with this information you can learn how to restore your system to balance (since we all seem to be out of whack in this mentally and physically stressful world).

There are many books on the market that claim to hold the key to restoring us to health, and after a while one becomes rather numb to these claims. But I have long felt that brain chemistry is the “final frontier” of medicine, that it truly does hold the key to so much of what can ail the body as well as the mind. I was interested to review my scores on the Nature Assessment and to remember that according to those scores I have an acetylcholine nature, which includes 17% of the population. This is what Dr. Braverman has to say about me and my kind:

A balanced acetylcholine nature is intuitive and innovative. You take pleasure in anything involving words, ideas, and communication, and are able to share your enthusiasm with others. This nature makes for ideal counselors, mediators, think tank members, yoga and meditation instructors, religious leaders, and members of public service organizations. Brain speed impacts the creative function, so artists, writers, advertising professionals and actors are all likely to be acetylcholine dominant. An educator with an acetylcholine nature would gravitate toward teaching art or literature; an accountant would gravitate toward specializing in forecasting and projects, and a plumber might find himself teaching in a trade school.

Well, I didn’t teach art or literature, I taught biology, although I always had the feeling I should have been in the humanities. That may be what made me good at teaching biology though – it was hard for me to understand it, so after I had finally wrestled the subject to the ground, I was able to explain it in a way that a non-scientist could comprehend.

We are in the very early stages of understanding the brain, and I imagine that the information in Braverman's book is going to seem simplistic in a few years, but I find it very intriguing. Fellow voice talent, if you happen upon a copy of Braverman’s book and take the time to answer the questions on the Nature Assessment test, stop back and let me know how it turned out. I’m curious to know if we’re all in that 17% together!

Creating Your Own Voice-over Career.

Among the things I love about a career in voice-over: the endless opportunities to create. But I think life offers opportunities to create no matter what you do. In my previous career as a biologist, I wrote a lot of papers based on rather dry data. When I wasn’t generating dry data and writing about them, I wrote papers that weren’t based on data at all. In a paper on homology and the ontological relationship of parts, I compared historical pathways in evolutionary biology to the transformation of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz from an all-flesh person to an all-tin person, or to the complete turnover of members in a baseball team that nevertheless does not change “the Yankees” into some other, separate historical entity. A paper on phylogenetic constraint was my favorite project ever, because it released me from the bonds of data and let me play with ideas to my heart’s content. Later, as a program director at the National Science Foundation, it was more challenging to find ways to have fun and create, but when I needed to give a presentation to discuss the history of funding in my program and the distribution of dollars across taxonomic groups, I made a huge “tree of life” that filled the conference room, with “apples” on the tree to represent grants awarded (it was quite effective, by the way, and paved the way for a major funding initiative at the foundation).

Tree of Life project, National Science Foundation

And whenever a poster or flyer was needed, I volunteered. So the panelists we invited to help us make the final decisions about funding grant proposals found their way to the conference room with this:

or this:

The point is, you can create your own opportunities for both work and fullfilment no matter what else is going on in your life. Whether your voice-over career is keeping you hopping, or whether you sometimes find yourself with down time, you can be creating something.

Casting director Bonnie Gillespie wrote yet another excellent article this week for The Actor's Voice called Back to Basics, covering the latest thinking on headshots, resumés, and the other tools of the actor’s trade. In it is a section entitled Put Yourself Out There – a call to action if you’re looking for ways to get yourself on the map. How do you get on the map? You put yourself there!! She writes about a talented actor-writer comedy team who produced their own short film, Girl's Night Out, to showcase their skills, which became a featured video on Youtube (thanks to additional legwork on the part of the creators – you don’t have to wait for that to happen either) and has led to some great opportunities for them. Bonnie is so right about the importance of creating your own work.

Ideas and opportunities come when you least expect them. A lot of the auditions and scripts I get are interesting, a lot are, well…. not. Last fall I got an audition script for Ariat boots that I really loved, and although I didn’t expect anything to come of this audition, I wanted to do something with it. I got my friend, voice-over talent & production wizard Ben Wilson to work on it with me and we came up with a piece we’re both very proud of. No, we didn’t get the gig (yes of course they were nuts not to hire us – thanks for mentioning it!) but we got a wonderful showpiece that we thoroughly enjoyed creating, and it has brought us other work. Sometimes I get nutty ideas for commercials. I know nobody is going to produce them, so I do it myself. Or I just stick stuff into projects I’ve been hired to do, just because. A long-standing client wrote me yesterday that he has left AuctionPal, the company he founded three years ago and for which he hired me to create the young and energetic, British-accented Piper as their spokesperson. AuctionPal is doing great, and he's still closely associated with them, but he needs new outlets for his own energy and creativity so he’s starting a new internet marketing company, Double Vision. He’s interested in hiring me to do the telephone answering system and wanted me to try out some voices, so this is what I sent him.

The next time you find work slowing down (not that you would ever admit to anybody that that happens – cuz that would be putting negative energy out there and it gets in your way and trips you), don’t wring your hands over it – do something about it! Send out more postcards, make more calls, write more emails, do more networking – but also, create something. Don’t know how to make Flash animations? Find a friend who does or take a class. Lack production skillz? Collaborate. Get busy. If people aren’t hiring, hire yourself to create a showpiece. It will keep you in tip-top creative shape, you’ll have a blast, and you never know where it might take you.