Interview with Dennis Health: Executive Coach & Voice Over Actor

From a sales role in a start-up in Singapore to executive coaching for the government, Dennis turned a side hustle of voice-over acting into his main job.

Hey Dennis,

We recently met up and enjoyed a few hours chatting over coffee in our local coffee shop.

I was fascinated by your background and experience in coaching and voice-over work. In fact, this is how we originally connected as I am interested in getting your help with adverts for my supplement brand.

I am excited to understand your journey to Penang where you now lived and how you got into voice-over work.

So, Dennis, let’s jump straight into this with my first question.

It would be great to get a little background information from where you were born to where you live today. What’s your back story?

I was born just West of London but my early teens were spent in a small village near Cambridge, where I started work as a Telecommunications Technician at age 16.

However, by several twists of fate, by age 21 I was traveling across Africa and the Middle East as a Sales Manager for the same company. I also spent 5 years living in Riyadh.

Following many years as an international Sales Manager in radio telecoms and then digital comms, I arrived in Singapore in November 2000 as a regional Business Development Director for a software company, still in the telecoms space.

Within 18 months of arriving, the company went downhill and people worldwide were retrenched, including me as an expensive expat.

Can you tell us a little bit about your career in the executive coaching field?

Having lost my job, I then wondered what to do next. The economy was in the doldrums, especially in my area of expertise. So I thought I would try my hand at training but had no skills as a Trainer.

Fortunately, I had just been granted Permanent Resident status in Singapore and received a substantial subsidy to embark on a Diploma in Training and Development. For the first time in Singapore, there was a module on coaching, for which I found I had an aptitude and enjoyed the process.

At the same time as I was studying part-time, I was offered a job as Business Development Manager for a global outplacement company and joined the Singapore branch.

The company offered coaching in the USA but nowhere else. I asked my boss if he would sponsor my further training as a Coach. He not only agreed but asked me to drive the training of employees from around the Asia Pacific region so that we could offer Executive Coaching across our region.

I successfully achieved the goal, even though there was only one Coach training company in Singapore at the time. Now there are dozens.

I was due to take over as Managing Director of the Singapore branch when the incumbent retired in 12 months' time. However, the company was acquired by a Venture Capital firm and the MD was put under daily, immense pressure. I decided I did not need that in my life, so quit to start out on my own.

The early days were tough.

People in Singapore did not know what coaching was or how and when to use it. I persevered and got my first contract with Barclays Capital to coach the head of their IT department, who was being groomed to take over as regional head. This was a good first reference.

In 2009 I got a tremendous break when the Singapore Civil Service College decided to try coaching for senior civil servants. I was one of three they took on as part of a pilot scheme. It was so popular they immediately started contracting more Coaches and I was asked to sit on the interview panel to assess potential Coach candidates.

I became a well-known part of the faculty and the College asked if I would like to train as a Coach Supervisor and a Facilitator.

I said yes to both offers. From then on, the work just flowed in, facilitating on the College’s leadership coaching programs and coaching Directors and Deputy Permanent Secretaries in the Ministries and Chief Executives of the Statutory Boards. I still do that work remotely on a reduced volume from my Penang home.

One of my goals this year is to be a better listener. You very astutely noticed how I struggle with this, so have you got any tips on how I can become a better listener?

Listening is probably the number one skill missing in leadership today. The key word is “skill”. People talk about ‘listening skills’ without realizing that listening is not natural. Hearing is natural, listening is not.

Learning to really listen takes time and practice. Normally, when we think we are listening, there are a myriad of thoughts going through our minds, often predicting what the speaker is going to say and constructing in advance our reply. So we are ‘hearing’, not listening.

The first step towards being a listener is to recognize when our inner voice is getting in the way of listening and shut it down.

The focus needs to be 100% on the speaker, asking for clarification if you think you don’t quite understand, or paraphrasing to demonstrate you are really listening and qualifying your understanding of what the speaker is saying. Body language is also important if you are practicing listening.

Eye contact should be steadily on the speaker, at the same time being aware of cultural nuances. The moment you glance left or right at something you notice, the speaker knows you are not listening.

A Coach needs to develop a very high level of listening skills, listening not only to words but also for changes in body language, energy, breathing, blinking, anything that betrays a change in emotion that needs to be picked up and explored.

This is the primary reason why coaching is tiring.

High-level listening is a skill that takes effort and a lot of practice. If you master the skill of listening, it’s life-changing.

The worst example of not listening is the person who is fiddling with their phone when you speak to them and they say, “Carry on, I’m listening”. They are not ‘ listening’.

Brain research has shown that there is no such thing as multitasking, just switching of attention.

Whilst living in Singapore you began doing voice-over work and quickly became more than a side-hustle. How did you get into voice-over work?

I got into voice-over work purely by accident when one alcohol-soaked New Year’s Eve in Singapore I was introduced to an Englishman who was a full-time voice-over artist. He commented that he thought my voice might fit some voice-over needs and gave me the number of a recording studio to try out as a VO artist.

I went to the studio and recorded some samples, which the studio put on their website, along with recordings of their other VO talents. As a result, I got some work and other studios got to know me and the rest, as they say, is history.

You now spend most of your time in Penang, Malaysia. What made this island your home?

When I started to think about shifting my work-life balance in retirement to more life than work, I looked at possible countries where I could enjoy a good lifestyle at a lower cost than Singapore.

I had visited Penang on holiday and liked the environment. I started looking for a home here in 2014 and bought an apartment the same year. I moved permanently to Penang under the MM2H scheme in July 2021.

Penang has the added advantage that, under normal circumstances, I am only a one-hour flight away from my Son and Daughter-in-Law, and friends in Singapore.

I am into music and never appreciated the importance of processing audio. What hardware and software do you need?

The scope of what you can do to an audio signal in software these days is immense.

You do not need expensive hardware or software to do some amazing things and produce music. With a laptop, $65 worth of software (I use a DAW [Digital Audio Workstation] called Reaper), and a pair of headphones you can do endless manipulations of a music recording.

If you want to record voiceovers or music yourself, that’s a different story.

You need to add a microphone(s) and an audio interface that sits between your mic(s) and your PC or laptop. The mic and interface do not need to be hugely expensive. You can probably buy a decent budget hardware voice-over set up for less than US$800. By far the biggest expense is acoustically treating your recording room.

I have spent RM60,000 so far and I’m not finished yet.

I know you can do a pretty good Michael Caine impression, what over accents or even impressions can you do?

Well, yes, many studio engineers when doing level checks before a recording will say, “Do you know who you sound like?”

I can confidently predict they are going to say, “Michael Caine”.

I guess it comes from my London roots and the fact that my father was a genuine Cockney. I can do a number of British regional accents as well as some foreign accents.

I was once asked to do a whole voice-over script in a German accent. When I asked the studio manager why they had not asked a German to do it, they said, “Well the client likes your voice”. It was for a Braun Buffel sales conference video. I managed to do it in two takes.

An unusual one I did recently was for someone putting together an audio library of accents for actors. This would enable an actor, asked to reproduce a particular accent, to listen to a sample and practice it.

I was asked to read an extract from an Anton Chekhov novel in a Cockney accent.

Chekhov must be spinning in his grave.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AtMcG0o_jkSFh-slpGJwsqBkZc2l3w?e=fgo9Kv
(link opens in new window)

I enjoy doing documentary narration more than anything else. I have also just been commissioned to turn a 22 chapter book into an audiobook. It’s quite a challenge both in terms of the length of the book and the technical challenges it presents, as I now have to be my own audio engineer. It is something I would like to do more.

What’s been your most memorable voice-over experience?

One that comes to mind is one I did for MediaCorp. It was a promo for a series of British films coming up on Channel 5.

They called it the British invasion. I had to play an upper-class toff and a cheeky Cockney character. They had to sound completely different. It was a challenge but after a few takes, I cracked it.

Here’s an extract from that recording (opens in a new window).

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AtMcG0o_jkSFh49IEMKt9qke3udraA?e=mA11Ab

Has it ever gone horribly wrong with a voice-over contract?

I haven’t yet had a disaster in the actual recording of a voice-over.

However, I did make a business mistake when I first started. A client asked how much I would charge for a re-read because the script had some slight changes.

I replied that it would cost the same as the original recording because it's the same amount of work and time. I later realized that voice-over artists do not charge the full fee for re-reads and may even do one free of charge. I was still learning the business of voice-overs.

I did not hear from that client again. Lesson learned!