Everyone hates their job sometimes.

Even if you LOVE your job, there will ALWAYS be parts of your job that you don’t love.

(If you are a parent, there will definitely be parts of THAT that you don’t love, and that is totally okay no matter what society tells you. You might love your screaming toddler, but you don’t have to love dealing with a screaming toddler.)

Author Liz Gilbert said (paraphrased): “Every job is a shit sandwich”

There just isn’t a job out there that you’re never going to come home and vent about to your spouse, roommate or your Golden Retriever, Bob.

(Bob has a message, btw, and it’s that your boss is never going to stop setting the thermostat at 60 degrees, so you should probably keep a sweater there and get a USB hand warmer and stop complaining about it while he's trying to nap.)

Given that you have probably chosen your profession, you have made the choice to take the good with the bad.

For me, as a voice actor, the list of good includes:

I get to work from home.
I get to make my own schedule.
I get to experience a lot of variety in my work.
I am my own boss and get to make my own decisions.
I can keep the thermostat at a reasonable temperature and don't have to freeze my butt off in an office where the CFO controls it and leaves for the day (every day) at 11am.

And on my shitlist:

Home is full of distractions (like the kitten currently perched on my shoulder like a rainbow macaw).
My schedule can be infinite if I allow it to be.
It's hard to decide what niches to focus on to get ahead.
Being my own boss is a LOT of responsibility, and means I have to wear ALL the hats.
When things go wrong, there is no team to consult with to come up with viable solutions, so it's fully my responsibility to create a community so I don't feel alone in what I'm trying to achieve.

Other things I frequently hear voice actors complain about:

P2P algorithms
Technical difficulties
Social media marketing
Just marketing in general
Remembering to send invoices
Communication with their agents
Rates or usage negotiation with clients
Finding a quiet space to set up a studio where your recordings aren’t disturbed by traffic, airplanes, your pets, your kids, your spouse, lawnmowers, snowblowers, power tools, your mother’s extremely loud refrigerator (seriouslywhywon’titjustdiealready???), passing trains, the bird pecking at the rotting wood on your house, etc.

It’s important to reframe the narrative.

In college, I took a “Business of Acting” class, and one of my biggest takeaways was from a day where we had a psychologist come into class.

He asked us to write a list of everything we had to do that week.

Mine probably included rehearsals, write a 20 page paper in Spanish, learn my lines before Friday, meet for a group project for Women in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, study for the test in Biogeography of the Global Garden (yes, that was a real class I took), etc.

Then he had us return to our list, and before each one of those, he had us write: “I get to”

A small reframe, but a powerful one.

Because YOU chose this path.

You are always choosing, whether or not you choose differently. Not making a choice IS a choice. Staying the course is a choice.

(Allowing the kitten to stay on your shoulder even though you are developing a crick in your neck IS a choice)

When any of the things that you are complaining about start to get you down, remember that this is the life you chose. And YOU choose your attitude toward the pieces of that life.

Which way will it be? You have a choice.

For anything you are unhappy with, your options are:

Stop doing that thing, and forget about it
Keep doing that thing, but develop a better attitude
Learn to do that thing better so that it isn’t as stressful
Keep doing that thing in the exact same way, but continue to complain about it constantly, stressing yourself and others out
Stop doing that thing, but continue to complain about it until your spouse dies naturally of old age and you continue to complain about it to birds in the park.

The first three are what I’d recommend, but sometimes we don’t always have an option to just STOP doing an aspect of our job.

And even if we do have the option, sometimes not doing that thing is going to severely limit our opportunities to the point that our business model might not be viable. (Good luck only getting work that you never have to audition for!)

When I was a stage actor, I had to learn to love (or at least tolerate) auditioning, memorizing lines, and rehearsing in order to get to the part I liked: performing in front of an audience. Because ALL OF THOSE THINGS are the job!

How can you make that 💩 sandwich palatable?

In the immortal words of Mary Poppins, “just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

So, either add more bread to that sandwich, focus on how sweet dessert will be, or learn to develop a taste for 💩.

Some questions to ask yourself:

Can I put my focus on what I enjoy about my work?
How can I make the shitty parts of my job less shitty? (get better tools, learn new skills, delegate certain tasks, etc)
Might the bad even be necessary to get to the good parts? (Like you can’t gain muscle without lifting something heavy)
Will the bad make the good even more sweet in the end? (Rewards easily gotten don’t tend to hold as much value for us)
Will the “bad” or uncomfortable thing make me stronger and more capable? (We need to remember that discomfort isn’t always bad. Discomfort is how we learn and grow.)

Hope this helps!

Peace, love, and getting 💩 done,

🌈🦋 Billie Jo

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For When You Hate Your Job