Sometimes peer pressure can be a good thing.
My accountability group means so much to me for many different reasons; one of these being the opportunity to offer up or accept a challenge. Which is exactly what one member did recently. She said that she wanted to be added to a new roster, as in either a production house or a talent agency, within the coming month. Her 'challenge' was against herself. We currently meet every-other week, so that means that she would have two times to report in to the group about whether or not she made her goal.
That sounded like a reasonable target, so I took it a step further, and said that I would 'match' her goal and also take on the challenge.
Be open to opportunity.
A few months ago I took a four-day, online course as an introduction to Audio Description. Even though I had sat in on a couple of presentations about AD in the past, I wasn't really sure what all was entailed by the term 'Audio Description', so I signed up figuring I would come out at the end of the four days knowing everything that I needed to know to go off and start working as an Audio Describer. WRONG!! It was basically an introduction to Audio Description and pretty much the more I learned, the more I realized how much more I needed to learn. So a few months later, when I saw that the 'father' of Audio Description was teaching a week long seminar, I signed up and was accepted.
On the first day of the course, it just so happened that I received an email from the person who led my previous AD course, about a non-profit organization who is producing picture audiobooks for children, wanting to expand their talent roster. I wasn't sure if that meant they were looking for narrators, audio describers or audio description writers. I 'assumed' it was probably writers. I made a mental note of the main people involved and who to contact and figured that I might contact them some day down the road once I had gotten in lots of practice in AD writing.
It ended up that one of those people was in my current class as an advisor! And he seemed, really, really nice.
Reach out.
For the past three weeks I had been thinking about the challenge that I had taken up in my Accountability Group. Time had just gotten by me, as I had been focusing on other aspects of my business, so I hadn't made any current effort to try to get on a roster.
So with that in mind, after our second day of the week-long class, I decided to go ahead and send an email to that nonprofit producing the children's audiobooks. My email included links to my children's eLearning and commercial demos and my website, and a note about my past and current training in Audio Description.
I was so excited to read a quickly returned email about how they loved my sound, were so pleased to have me work with them and here was how to proceed! I had mentioned how I would love to help with the writing as well some day after I had been able to practice, and they even said that they would help me with that.
Go For It!
What struck me about all of this was that without having taken the challenge in my accountability group, I doubt that I would have reached out in the middle of the AD training to ask to be added to a roster. I would have figured that I would do it later. But often later has a way of getting pushed to the side, and the day-to-day activities take over and consume much of each day.
I knew that my accountability group would be getting together in a few days and since I hadn't applied to any other rosters over the past month, that my opportunityto do that was staring me straight in the eye. I felt like I had to do it, even though I wasn't sure that I was quite ready.
I'm glad I went with my thought to just 'go for it'. I really had nothing to lose but I'm pretty sure that I would have thought it over and over and put it off until I felt ready. But knowing that I had accepted a challenge, it pushed me to take the leap. I'm glad I did, because it looks like it paid off, not only in lining up a new client, but by giving me the confidence to reach out more often. Even before I think I'm ready.
Now, on to the next challenge!
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