Meet Billie Jo Konze

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Billie Jo Konze. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Billie Jo below.

Billie Jo, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
My family are pretty resilient people. My parents are both from poor Wisconsin farm families, and grew up taking care of animals, farming the land, and hunting. While my dad has always been in the picture, my parents split when I was two and my mom raised me as a single parent while she went to college and got her teaching degree. During that time, she worked multiple part time jobs and still managed to graduate with honors from college when I was ten. I think I had good examples from both of my parents about the value of hard work and also taking care of things. And we always had the support of our extended family and neighbors, so I’ve always believed in the power of community to take care of each other.

I’m pretty prone to letting minor obstacles get in my way at times, but then I let the emotion of sadness, anger, or defeat energize me to keep going toward my goal. Especially if that obstacle is another person telling me why I can’t do what I want to do. That usually fires me up!

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
Over the past seven years, I took a step back from acting on camera and on stage to focus on voiceover. I still love to perform on stage, and want to go back to it, but it’s disheartening to barely scrape by trying to do what you love. Sometimes you have to find a niche where you can support yourself and then go back to your art out of love.

I do love voiceover as well, but it’s a much more solitary pursuit. I miss the community and collaboration of working in the theatre and film.

In addition to voiceover, I recently launched the podcast Scratch Claw Push with my friend Brandon Duke. We interview creatives of all kinds who are clawing out a place for their art in the world. People who face obstacles to creating but are driven and keep pushing forward in spite of it all.

I love to write, though I took a step back from blogging temporarily this year, and I’ve got some screenplay and book ideas I’ve started on.

After struggling with motivation when I was younger, I started an accountability group about seven years ago to help myself and fellow actors make progress toward our goals. That grew into a love of helping others learn to motivate themselves as well. While my website is still in the works, I’m planning to launch a coaching business to help others become more self-sufficient and proactive in their own careers. As creatives, it’s easy to feel at the mercy of the universe, and like you’re always waiting to be chosen. I believe creatives must empower themselves in order to get out of that scarcity mindset.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
Persistence, positivity, and openness.

I learned persistence early on in grade school. As I mentioned before, I never let others define me and what I was capable of, and if I hit an obstacle, I’d find a way around it.

Positivity is important because if you don’t believe something is possible, you just won’t try hard enough to make it possible.

Openness is important because the path to your goals won’t always be clear. Sometimes we have trouble seeing more than one way to get to where we want to be, and there are an infinite number of ways something can happen. They might be unlikely, but miracles happen. You can’t force things to happen. But if you keep your eyes and heart open to chance opportunities, believe that something can come of them, and persist until they do, amazing things will occur.

How to develop these? The same way you develop any skill: practice.

If you find yourself thinking negative thoughts, practice asking yourself “What if the opposite were true?” Practice rephrasing things you say in a positive way (even going as far as to try to take negating words out of our everyday speech). Our brains don’t understand negating words, so we may be programming our brains with the wrong ideas if we state what we don’t want instead of what we do.

Practice being open to experiences and novelty. Getting outside our routines is how new and interesting opportunities tend to arise.

And practice being okay with discomfort. It’s uncomfortable to keep trying and failing, but that is what is necessary to become truly great at anything.

Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?
The book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield was mindblowing to me. It’s a very short and powerful book, but every other paragraph felt like a good slap in the face. The book will call you on your BS like no other.

The main thing Pressfield talks about is Resistance, and the many forms it takes. Resistance is that force that makes us watch TV instead of working on that 20 page essay we have to write for finals. Or scroll through Facebook instead of going to the gym. Resistance is also the same force that stops us from ever getting started on our dream of writing a novel.

Once I heard someone put it like that, I could see all of the behaviors I had that were actively putting friction between myself and the things I said I most wanted in life.

Even if you’re not a creative, I think this book is valuable. There’s probably something you’ve always dreamed of doing that you find yourself avoiding for some reason. The ideas in this book will help.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Headshot courtesy of Kelsey Edwards Photography Peeking around the corner photo credit goes to Marcus Anthony Downs

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