Barb Lyon
Voice Artist

After taking Labor Day weekend off it was a little hard to get back in the groove. Tuesday morning came, I sat in my booth and felt thoroughly unmotivated. So I did what I sometimes do before I hit record: I went surfing around, listening to other people's demos looking for a little inspiration. I pulled up Talent A first. Big name. Touted as a high-booking pro. An expert people turn to. I listened through a few clips and thought, huh. I wasn't feeling it. Not bad, just...

Mid-August handed me a two-for-one on rejection. I lost a booking to another voice talent that week that sounded really promising, and a few days later I took Friday — my dog, not the day off — to a rally obedience trial hoping to knock out two more legs toward her Rally Master title. Normally, failing either one of those would've been enough to wreck my mood for a day. Somehow, together, they didn't. Bouncing back from rejection was something I did without thinking.

There’s a moment most people don’t talk about in voice over motivation. It’s not booking the job. It’s not the callback. It’s not the email that starts with “We loved your read…” It’s the Tuesday morning when you step into the booth and think,“Alright… let’s see what happens today.”

If you can overthink the worst, why can’t you overthink the best? We are fantastic at imagining the worst case scenario. It's just easier to envision disaster. We send a cold email and immediately assume we’ve annoyed someone. We reach out to a new agent and picture them rolling their eyes. We send a recording to a brand-new client and wait for the email that says, “This isn’t what we had in mind.” Our brains run straight to the worst-case scenario.