This comment was e-mailed to me by my frequent correspondent, Ann, in response to my previous note to her:
Thanks Bob. The only problem I have is in getting discouraged after doing so many auditions, competing with a ton of other people. It starts to feel like a waste of time.
Are you familiar with Taldia? I came close to getting work with them. I did all these auditions they wanted only later to find that my bid was rejected for being too high! I tried to negotiate at that point. In fact I didn’t even remember my original bid. I do know it had to have been within their budget. It just seemed really unfair that they would expect me to submit all this extra audition work, only to tell me later that my bid was too high!!
And here are my thoughts in response:
Ann,
Your comments underscore one of the most significant attributes required of someone who is going to work in the voice-over business. You have to be able to deal successfully with rejection.
No one (at least no one healthy) likes being rejected. But, as you are learning, being rejected is the single most common experience in this business. And this is the pivot on which it all turns: you can either see each rejection as something happening to you personally. Or you can see each rejection as a way of discovering which opportunities aren’t right for you at this time. In other words, each time you get rejected, you’ve eliminated one more obstacle between you and a paying job. Once you’ve cleared away all of the remaining obstacles, you’ll reach your immediate goal: getting that paying job. That leads to the next quest, which is finding out how many obstacles remain between you and your next paying job. As so on, and so on.
You’ve mentioned that you have a couple of children and a husband. I suspect that means that there are some areas of your life that, no matter how well or how often you do them, still need to be done again and again. Dishes? Laundry? I don’t want to be sexist in my assumptions, but pretty much every mom and wife has some areas of recurring responsibility of one kind or another. Whatever the case, these are simply examples of other areas of your life where this same principle applies.
The challenge, in other words, is to manage one’s expectations. Yes, it’s unfair to ask you to audition multiple times only to reject your bid as too high. But, at the very least, you received several additional opportunities to hone your auditioning skills. You made it through a number of levels of the process. By the way, at least for me, anyone who rejects my bid because it was too high is someone I don’t want to work for anyway. I want to concentrate my efforts on people who value what I have to offer, not on those who are just trying to get something cheap.
I want to be encouraging to you, Ann, not discouraging. I hope that comes through in what I’ve written here. It is tough being rejected again and again and again. But, stick with it and you’ll find some fruit for your labors.
Be well,
Bob Souer
And I hope these thoughts have been encouraging to you, as well.