Want to Quit Video Editing? 4 Mindset Shifts That Saved My Career

What should you do when you want to quit video editing?

Keep going, and expect the roadblocks. I've been a broadcast editor for over 22 years, and four mindset shifts saved my career. Stick it out for the long haul, trust effort over talent, celebrate the small wins, and get help when mindset isn't the real problem.

What a long editing career actually looks like

If you watch my YouTube videos, you see my best work and my best teaching. That's not a fair picture of what it's like to be a professional editor over the long haul.

It comes with roadblocks and setbacks, and you might be dealing with some of them right now. Here's what I've been through over 20 years:

• I've massively struggled with confidence, feeling like I'm not good enough and maybe never will be.
• I've lost huge clients. It felt similar to being fired, and I didn't know how I was going to pay my rent.
• I've lost clients when I had a young family, which made it more than triple the stress, because I didn't know where the money was coming from.
• I've had so much anxiety about editing that I thought I needed to switch careers.
• I've taken years off from editing because it was so stressful.

Shift 1: Keep going

There's one thing I did through all of it: I kept going.

The success stories, the work I'm proud of, the clients I love to work with today and the projects I love to work on are all here because I stuck it out.

So wherever you are in your career, think about the long haul. Know the roadblocks are coming, and expect them. Move through them, and it will work out in the end. You'll be glad you stuck it out.

Never giving up is also one of my five lessons for a successful video editing career.

Shift 2: Effort beats talent

One thing that hurt me early in my career was what I told myself when something didn't go right: I don't have the talent.

I'd see other editors around me who went to better film schools. They were better with their music editing. They were better with their pacing. They won awards. And I'd be sitting there, possibly failing at a recent project, thinking I'd never be able to compete or live up to my own expectations.

Then, a little while in, I read a book called Mindset by Carol Dweck. I highly recommend you check it out.

The two swimmers

Imagine two swimmers in their first race. One looks like a swimmer, tall with big broad shoulders. The other lacks some of those genetics. They race, and the swimmer who looks the part crushes the other guy, because he has some talent that gives him a leg up.

Now cut to a year later. The scrawny guy decided to put his best foot forward and train every day. The genetically gifted guy got lazy and didn't put in the training. They meet again, and I can guarantee you the guy who lost the first race but put in the effort wins in the end.

This is what an editing career is like. Effort always beats talent. That's great news for people like me and for you, because there's never a challenge we can't rise up to and beat. We can just put in more effort. Things might take longer for us than for others, but if we're willing to try hard, we can accomplish anything.

So if you ever catch yourself saying you're not talented enough, start rewiring the way you think. Tell yourself: effort beats talent, so I just have to put in more effort.

Set effort goals, not outcome goals

What did the swimmer who came back and won do differently? He set an effort goal. He wanted to win the race, so he decided to put in two hours of swimming practice every day for a year.

What's beautiful about that goal is that he has control over it. You don't have control over whether you win every job, win a festival award with your edit, or have your video do well on YouTube. What you can control is how much effort you put in.

So if you're used to big outcome goals, shift your thinking and make an effort goal for your editing. What if you practiced something that's lacking in your editing for an hour a day for the next year? Where do you think you'd end up? Especially if you're practicing the right things, like emotional storytelling. Here's one way to start: how to practice video editing for emotion.

To make sure that hour goes toward the right stuff, grab my free guide, Think Like A Broadcast Editor. It shows you the 5 criteria top editors use to craft emotionally-impactful edits.

Shift 3: Celebrate the small wins

This one can help if you've had a hard span of editing where you're in the trenches, not feeling good or confident for weeks, months or even years at a time.

One trap we fall into is only celebrating the big wins. Your short film gets into a festival or wins an award. You have a viral hit on YouTube. You book the biggest job of your career. That's great, and you should celebrate it.

But those wins only come in every so often, and I didn't want to be depressed for the six months to a year in between. So I changed my mindset and started having gratitude for the small wins.

Let's say I was bidding on a big job and didn't get it. I would celebrate that I was in the mix, because that meant my career was moving forward. If I was in the mix on enough of those, that was actually a win.

Or let's say I figured out a creative solution to a problem that had been haunting me in one of my edits. I would take a moment to celebrate that too.

Even better, write these down in a gratitude journal. You can also celebrate the small win of hitting your effort goal for the day, like putting in that hour of practice on your sound.

Shift 4: Get help if mindset isn't the real problem

This last shift is for those of you who have tried everything else and still aren't making progress. This happened to me, and unfortunately it wasn't until later in life that I figured out what was going on.

It turns out mindset wasn't my main issue. I had some underlying problems. I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, which was one of the causes making it very hard for me to do my very best work.

It took some great friends and community around me, but I got help. I went to years of therapy, and I still go. I highly recommend it. It helped me break through many things in my life, and that includes my career.

If this sounds like you, and you feel stuck after trying everything, I would recommend seeking out help in therapy. It can help you get unstuck, do your best work, and have an editing career that feels joyful and sustainable.

And if you're looking for what to put your effort into next, Edit Like A Broadcast Pro teaches you how to create emotionally-impactful edits that win serious clients with real budgets.