Gail Force Productions

It has been a while since I have had the chance to get on here but it is a beautiful chilly Saturday morning and the house is empty.  I am enjoying sitting on the couch with sun pouring in the window warming me with its winter time gentleness.  I have an empty coffee cup and a mind that is full of ideas that are in need of being let loose.

Since October all my energy and time has been spent finding another full time job. I spent a lot of time on the job boards and doing voice work auditions. God was very good to me and provided quite a bit of income during that month strictly from those auditions. He really saw me through that upheaval. You say it is because I was devoting more time to auditions therefore the odds were that I would get more work. I say I got more work during that time because I was sending more prayers upward asking for help.  I think I am right.

I started working for Commercials on Hold full time in December. I really am so grateful to Allen and Barbara for creating the position for me. Commercials on Hold was one, if not the first, on hold message provider in the country. They have been around since 1982 and currently serve thousands of clients with professionally customized on hold messages. (www.commercialsonhold.com) I have been a voice-talent for them since about 1995. I have voiced for hundreds of clients from car dealers, to banks, to HVAC dealers and everything in between. A few years ago I went to work part-time for COH doing production. Meaning I edited and mixed the voice sessions that were produced by not only me but by the other voice talents as well. I had talked to Allen during that time about possibly working full time but I wasn’t ready to leave radio even though I new the day was coming when I would either leave on my own or be forced out.

Then the economy did a nose dive, I lost my job and nobody was hiring for any position unless you were in in the medical field.  I was thisclose to going to work for a collection agency doing telephone collection calls when Allen and Barbara took pity on me and created a position for me full time. So now I would be doing all of the above and customer service/sales too.

I have never done sales before so this was a pretty big risk.  Well I did a short stint while working at WSTR in Sturgis, Michigan.  The air talent was given a chance to make some extra cash and try sales. Since I was making pretty much zilch as an air talent I thought I would give it a try. I think I went to 3 businesses and was basically turned away at the door so I went home and took a nap.  This went on for about a week when I realized that doing cold call sales was not for me. I never tried it again because I limited myself by what happened when I was 19 years old. There is a lesson here.

Why do we put up walls and tell ourselves we can’t do something because we tried it once and it didn’t work out? Why don’t we take into consideration the fact that time passes, we learn new skills, we become different people and what was once true 20 years ago is no longer true? I am not the same person I was at 19 years old. Thank God.  Life has forced me to grow and change. I was like a little sappling back then just trying to avoid being mown over by the big lawnmower of life. But as time passed I grew stronger and taller and learned to sway and bend when the winds of adversity tried to knock me down. It’s funny how we still equate ourselves to what were, not what we have become.

I think back to all the things I walked away from because of fear. One evening I was working on the air at WNWN in Coldwater Michigan and I got a call from some guy. He asked me to say “W” four times quickly. I laughed and said wwww not having a clue as to what was going on. He then informed me that he was the Program Director at WWWW in Detroit. A huge radio station. I was just a 21 year old with a new baby and really had no clue about anything but my own little world.  He told me he liked the way I said “W” and that he also liked my show. He then told me he was interested in hiring me and wanted me to send an air check to him. He was traveling to Florida at the time and was listening to me on the radio. I was pretty excited about it. Detroit! The Big City! This was huge. But the days passed and the more I thought about the more I let my insecurity get the best of me. I kept telling myself that I couldn’t do it. That I had only been in radio full time a few years. That I wasn’t good enough. Before I knew it my window of opportunity had passed and I had talked myself out of what could have been the start of a whole new path for me. I don’t look back on it with regret only the curiosity of what might have been.

There was one other opportunity I walked away from because I let fear and insecurity get in my way. I had been working in Cincinnati for WUBE. I had been working there as an evening air talent and also assistant program director. I was expected to be there at 9 or 10 in the morning and then take a dinner break and do my air shift. Being a single mom with a 12 year old at home and expected to work from 9am til 1am was not working out for me or for the station. So they released me. (Which is really a nicer way to say Fired”!)  I went to work for a trucking company doing data entry. I had a good friend who worked there and she pulled some strings to get me hired so I would have some income coming in until I found a “real” job. I sent out tons of air checks to radio stations all over the country. I had determined that I was not going to work evenings anymore. That I needed to be home at night to keep my son out of trouble. My roommate was doing a good job but he needed a firmer hand.

I was getting some pretty good job offers but I was holding out for what I wanted. Then I got a call from a friend who wanted me to become the sation manager for a small radio station in the south. I don’t remember where it was now I just remember the paralyzing fear of taking such a big step! I gave him every excuse I could think of why I couldn’t take this job. I wasn’t experienced enough, I didn’t know how to read and interpret Arbitron data, I didn’t have management skills, blah, blah, blah. He did his best to assauge all those fears and told me it was a small station, that I would learn on the job that I had great people skills but I wasn’t hearing any of it. All I heard was “huge responsiblity, huge leap of faith, huge step away from my comfort zone” and I turned it down.

Looking back now all those things I said were true. It was a big responsiblity. I was a huge step away from my comfort zone and it would have been big a big leap of faith but so what? I had had responsibilty before and I had been away from my comfort zone before and I had taken huge leaps of faith before and I didn’t fold up and die. I made mistakes, I learned and I excelled. Why was this so different? But I let those walls stop me from taking a path that I couldn’t see clearly down. True, I might have failed but so what? Would it have meant the end of the world? Why am I so afraid of failing? And that is the crux of the matter. Fear of Failure.

For most of us, failure does not mean that the world will stop turning. That CNN is going to have a special news story about my colossal misstep. We aren’t going to see our fall from grace on E’s True Hollywood Story or in People magazines year end special of the Worst of the Worst. Most people will forget about you after your gone. Unless you are some Wall Street muckety muck, who’s greed and megalomania caused the collapse of civilization as we know it, most people don’t care that you “failed” and they are just waiting for the next guy or gal to fill your shoes. And that would have been the case if I took that job and failed. But the memory would have stayed with me and I have hard time dealing with failure. 

I set high goals for myself.  I expect to be perfect. When I mess up it bothers me for days on end. That is one thing I won’t miss about being on the radio. If I made a huge blunder or I had a bad day I would start the negative patter in my head. “Why are you on the raido? You suck! Nobody listens to you why do you bother? You are horrible!” I am pretty sure that most listeners didn’t notice that I didn’t sound as good Tuesday as I did Monday or that my pronunciation of that word wasn’t quite right. Heck, 3/4 of them probably didn’t even remember my name. All they cared about was when the next Taylor Swift song was coming up. So why beat myself up daily for something that, in the great scheme of things, wasn’t really all that important? I wasn’t curing cancer, teaching children, fighting fires or protecting the citzens from thugs or terrorists. I was a DJ, an air talent, a personality. I was just the spicy mustard in between the good stuff on my listeners radio sandwich.

The Point is that I was now back to where I was at 19 and I couldn’t let the girl I was then influence the adult I am now. I have some 20 years of experience in life that I didn’t have then. She is gone and I am here. The old fear demons that I allowed to perch in my head have been banished and  I have new found confidence.  After I lost my job with Cumulus I actually had someone call me and ask me if I would be interested in being a station manager for a Cumulus radio station elsewhere. I felt those old fears rising but I was able to quash them down. Fear is not what stopped me. I knew that radio no longer held my heart. That it was time to try new things. I would have loved to stay in radio tfor the rest of my life but just like me radio changed. Like lovers we started off shy together. Testing the waters to see how far we could go together. Then a commitment was made and we grew together and I remained true when the times got tough.  As time went on I could see changes on the horizon. Radio was turning fickle, the things that once pleased her no longer did and I started to drift away but never fully cut the bond. Eventually I decided it was easier to stay than to start over with someone new. But I had lost the excitement. The little fire in my belly everytime I turned on the mic had cooled. So when the time finally came that I packed my things and walked out the door it was more a feeling of relief than greif. I was given the push I needed to walk away from a lover that no longer loved me.

Ok so it sounds sappy but it fits.  

And here I am testing the waters again. But I have confidence in myself and there is no fear. I am not allowing myself to have doubts. I am allowing myself to have freedom. The freedom that comes with belief in myself and confidence in knowing that I can do anything that I put my mind to. That and lots of prayers are what will make me successful in this new phase of my life.

What fears have you placed in your path that that have held you back? How do you overcome them in order to move forward?

Oh. I am still doing voice-work. Just because I am no longer on the air doesn’t mean that using my voice creatively isn’t important to me. I have always considered my voice a tool given to me by God. To not use it as such would be unthinkable. So if you are here on this site looking for a voice talent here I am!