“The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
– Vince Lombardi, Hall of Fame NFL Coach
Vince is right. But to do that hard work and to succeed, you need motivation. Earlier this week, I was researching psychological motivation theories. I wanted to see if I could help voice over talent apply these motivational theories to their careers so they could stay motivated to keep working hard and to find continued success.
Easier said than done…
There are a HELLUVA (yes, that’s a word) lot of psychological theories on motivation, many of which are only effective with specific subsets of the population or of the workforce. Certain theories work for motivating creativity and inventiveness in product designers, others only work for trying to get kids to do their homework.
How do you motivate someone who does everything?
As a full-time voice over talent, you are a full-time solopreneur: someone who runs his or her own small business alone. As a solopreneur in the voice over world, you wear every hat in your business. You do everything. (We sure are ambitious.)
Here’s what I mean by everything:
After looking at all of my tasks and duties as a voice over talent and talking it over with other voice over talent, I’ve come up with a list of 8 different voice over identities that (hopefully) covers everything we do:
- Voice Over Talent
- Audio Engineer
- Marketing Executive
- Salesperson
- Customer Service Representative
- Executive Assistant
- Accountant/Bill Collector
- CEO
Would you fire any of your identities?
Again, as a professional voice over talent, you need to remember that you are a solopreneur. You are all things to your company and brand. If you slack off as one of these identities, you are truly hurting your business and probably losing money. Exam your own 8 identities. If there truly were 8 different people in your company, would you fire any of your (identities) employees?
So, how do you motivate your 8 (identities) employees?
With so many identities, I’ve realized that it would be difficult to give you an effective, generic blanket statement about how to get motivated to work hard in your career. (Heck, I’ve tried to before.) Yes, there are many effective, general methods to help you get motivated (like making money), and lots of them work. In fact, you probably have your own ways of motivating yourself that work wonders.
However, research shows that certain members (even divisions) of a business are motivated differently than others. As 8 people in 1, you need to be 100% motivated to work hard and do well in each identity of your voice over business. I will do my best to help you do that with this 8-part blog series. Each Friday, I will cover 1 of your 8 voice over identities and show you how you can motivate that identity to work hard and succeed using research-based evidence. Wish me luck!
Tomorrow, I show you how to motivate your “Voice Over Talent” identity.
Subscribe on the upper right hand side of this page to be sure you don’t miss any of this 8-part series.