VAMFR 025 | Maintaining Good Psychological Health as a Voice Actor, Part 2
VAMFR 025 | Maintaining Good Psychological Health as a Voice Actor, Part 2
Welcome to episode 25 of the Voice Acting Mastery: Field Report podcast!
You can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.vamfieldreport.com/podcast
Welcome to the second part of a special report on maintaining good psychological health as a voice actor by our special correspondent, Maureen Price!
For those of you who have already checked out part one, you’ll remember that Maureen explored how to deal with rejection in healthy and productive ways. Her guests shared their approaches for grappling with one of the most inevitable and universal experiences of being a voice actor and she’s so grateful to each of them for their honesty and vulnerability in addressing that subject.
In this episode, Maureen will be discussing how to overcome self-doubt and build more confidence. One useful strategy for achieving this goal is to develop healthy tactics for dealing with one’s internal critic: that nagging voice in our head that wants to belittle our accomplishments and dismiss our feelings. Managing one’s internal critic is a challenge that we all face as actors. If you’ve ever experienced that little gremlin of self-doubt creeping onto you shoulder while you’re working and felt yourself spiraling out of control into anxiety and fear then this episode is for you. Or if you’ve simply felt like you weren’t “enough” or that you don’t deserve to be where you are, well, we’ll explore that too. While self-doubt and issues with confidence are universal experiences, Maureen feels that they can be especially pernicious for voice actors as we frequently find ourselves alone in a recording booth with plenty of time and space to get stuck in our heads. Being in a booth means that we’re separated from the director, producer, and/or clients by a huge pane of glass. Through that glass we can see them talking about us and our work, even if we can’t hear them. If they neglect to turn on their talkback microphone, we have to stand there in the booth waiting in silence, unsure of what they are saying. Such a situation can be nerve-wracking, especially if we’re feeling less than stellar about ourselves or our performance.
Maureen is very fortunate to have her four wonderful guests from the previous episode back to dive into these tricky topics with her. They’ll be sharing personal anecdotes from the booth as well as their approaches to dealing with self-doubt and that nagging internal critic. First up, she sat down with Keith Silverstein, an industry veteran whose work includes Torbjörn in Overwatch, Hisoka in HunterxHunter, and Hawk Moth in Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir amongst many, many more. She then spoke with Laura Post, voice actor and now voice director for the anime series Little Witch Academia. Laura’s voice acting work includes Big Barda in Justice League Action, Ragyō in Kill la Kill, Ahri in League of Legends, and Nozomi Tojo in Love Live! School Idol Project. Maureen also spoke with Ray Chase. Ray voices Prince Noctis in Final Fantasy XV, Master of Masters in Kingdom Hearts 2.8 and Puri-puri Prisoner in One Punch Man. Finally, she sat down with Valerie Arem. Valerie is a voice actor, voice director, and educator. Her directing work includes Persona 4 and Persona 5. She voices Francine in The Walking Dead video game, Naoto Shirogane in Persona 4, and Kyra Mosley in Call of Duty: Ghosts. Valerie and her husband Keith Arem run PCB Productions, a studio in Los Angeles specializing in video game recording. They also teach workshops that focus on voice acting for a variety of video game genres. Maureen was especially interested to talk to Valerie given her wealth of experience as an actor, director, casting director, and educator.
The VAM Field Report will be released on the 1st Wednesday of every month so stay on the look out for it!
Download VAM Field Report Episode #25 Here (MP3)
I actually just finished the latest book written by one of my personal heroes, Chris Jericho. It’s called “NO is a Four Letter Word: How I Failed at Spelling but Succeeded in Life.” In it there are twenty principles that I think would help anybody, especially voice actors. I’m not going to run through the whole book here, but a lot of the advice and stories told in this podcast episode can fit into one of those principles.
I think and daydream a lot, so trying to keep out of my own head is a huge problem I’ve had my entire life. Sometimes my internal critic and my imagination go crazy and crash my train of thought. There are two things that I find help me in those situations.
First is a Bruce Lee quote (another personal hero of mine). It’s, “Don’t think, feel. It’s like a finger pointing a way to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”
The second is something I learned from my DDPYoga and that is to breathe. If you can control your breath, you can control your body. It calms you.
Thank you and your guests for your time and wisdom.