Share with a friend:
Joan Baker
(shown with
husband, Rudy)
New York, USA
See what other graduates are up to:
Read about Grads' Breakthrough Stories
See profiles of Grads Making a Difference
Featured Grad Site:
Visit a site created by
graduates*:
ILovePossibility.info
*Landmark may link to sites that graduates have and will rotate the sites that we link to from time to time.
Life Ain't What It Seems
Joan Baker, USAWhen I chose to participate in the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, the thing I was most interested in was the opportunity to “empower” my self expression. The leadership aspect came as a great surprise - I had not focused at all on that part of the program title. A second surprise was realizing that I had not fully distinguished the concept of self expression - For me, self expression had been about speaking up for myself. As an actress, it was about improving my odds in the auditioning process. In the Self-Expression and Leadership Program I became aware that self expression is not just about expressing your feelings and emotions.
I always said I wanted to deal head-on with the issues that stop me in life and the Self-Expression and Leadership Program was perfect in this regard. The course had me powerfully examine my impact on the communities in my life and create a project.
I'm a voice-over actor and I teach voice-over skills to novices and professionals. Voice-over actors are the people you hear but don't see on radio and TV commercials, cartoons, video games, and even phone answering systems. I've been doing voice-over work for fourteen years; my clients include major television networks, a presidential library, and many others. The project I took on was writing and publishing a book about how one can break into and sustain a career in the voice-over industry.
The project - Room with a Voice - was also inspired by the parallel between voice-over work, where an actor is alone in a small room speaking into a microphone (just the actor and their voice) and the impact of Alzheimer's disease, which often leaves its victims seemingly alone in a room with no voice. My father had recently passed away from complications of Alzheimer's. Although he had lost the ability to speak or understand speech, it occurred to me that he did indeed have a voice: it was the voice of his teachings and stand in life that would forever be with me.
In honor of my father, I declared that the book project would aid the Alzheimer's research for a cure. By the end of the program, I said I would have a completed manuscript with an offer of contract from a literary agent and publisher. I didn't know anything at the time about the inner workings of the publishing world.
I asked 18 other nationally successful voice-over actors to write the stories of their individual career journeys for the book. Each of us wrote our stories based on specific questions I created so that readers could clearly pick up the practical lessons necessary to create successful careers of their own. But this wasn't going to be just a how-to book - critical to its success would be that readers capture the emotional and psychological courage one must summon to create a career. I wanted the book to call forth the unspoken intangible skills no one ever teaches you - how to deal powerfully with the obstacles each of us throws in our own way whenever we try to achieve anything in life.
Through the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, I learned that “transforming” my self-expression was about generating my creativity from nothing - manifesting my word and vision in the world by speaking it and being in action to have it be so. And with the persuasive support of course leader Carla Satoff, my coach Barbara Storey, and my loving husband, Rudy Gaskins, I chose to get into action, calling and emailing literary agents and publishers, reaching out to voice-over actors, agents, managers, celebrities, and organizations. Rudy was instrumental in creating a compelling query letter to literary agents, an influential letter of request to attract potential celebrities for writing a foreword to the book and partnering with me in writing a stand out book proposal to book publishers.
In this process, I was enlisting the leadership of various people, asking them to take on different aspects of the project. I found that I didn't have to know everything or even anything about publishing. All I had to know was that I had the power to speak my vision into existence and make powerful requests of others to fulfill the vision through having them see the opportunity that was present.
Now I am a published author! I have a publisher, a literary agent, and a major financial institution as a sponsor, and a publicist for the book. Four-time Emmy Award-winning actor David Hyde-Pearce (Alzheimer's spokesperson) wrote the book's foreword, the president of the Alzheimer's Association wrote the afterword, and the industry's top voice-over agent wrote the introduction.
The book is called Secrets of Voice-Over: Top Voice-over Actors Reveal How They Did It. The publisher changed the book's title, and that was yet another lesson of the program: you make plans and plans change. What there is to do is make adjustments to continue forwarding the plan. Regardless of the change in title, the book's essence and connection to Alzheimer's is that a community of voice-over actors who depend on being self-expressed for their very livelihood would in turn honor those who no longer can. I wouldn't want to forget that aspect of the project.
All of the book's royalties are going to the Alzheimer's Association, earmarked for supporting finding a cure. I also dedicated the book to my Dad and to those that have suffered from and continue to live with Alzheimer's.
This is an enormous accomplishment for me personally, and for several larger communities as well. I wouldn't have done it, couldn't have done it, without many very special people, but most certainly not without the extraordinary experience I had in the Landmark Education and the Self Expression and Leadership Program.
For me, the Self-Expression and Leadership Program was an elaborately crafted social masterpiece calling me into the realm of my greatest dreams and desires and greatest fears. Like all of Landmark's extraordinary classes, it offers an opportunity for you to remove the barriers that normally stop you in life.
