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

Ian, appreciate you joining us today. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?

I am definitely happier now that I’ve made the switch from the life I lived before to my creative life. Some of that is because of my new life but I think a lot of it is because I chose to bet on myself instead of sticking with the path I was on. It was a path that I wasn’t enjoying and at that time the future I saw ahead of myself wasn’t one that I wanted. My creative life has had plenty of challenges though, so it’s sometimes hard to say if I’m happier because of my creative life or in spite of it, though I think it’s really because I decided to make the change. I took the risk, and I made the right choice for me. I needed to make that change to put myself on a path towards a life that I really enjoy. I’ve kept on that path to continually keep working to turn my life into the life I want to be living. It’s been quite challenging, both for my creative career and life in general, but I’m happy I’ve kept going, because whatever I do from here, I feel the choices will be made to bring myself towards what I want in my life, rather than feeling stuck the way I have at times in the past. There have been plenty of times that I’ve questioned whether I should stick with the career. Especially through the past few years since the pandemic I’ve thought about life elsewhere and whether there’s somewhere else or something else that I would enjoy more, but I’m glad that I’ve continued to stick with it. The industry recently has been quite challenging, between the pandemic and all of the other events and changes over the past few years and a general slowdown in the amount of content being made. A lot of change is happening, and it makes it challenging, but it also sparks a lot of possibility. When I’ve thought about leaving it has often been because of other challenges in my life that were weighing me down, related to quality of community and especially related to physical and mental health. All things that were making everything harder than I thought they should be, but because I’ve stuck with it, I’ve found solutions to those challenges that now put a lot of possibility before me. I’m excited to see what happens next and having solved these challenges, many of which took years, what else can I do from here?

Ian, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m an actor and voiceover artist and also really need to call myself a health and fitness enthusiast. I’ve had a love of the creative arts since I was little, so I think it was inevitable that I end up working as an actor. Acting always called to me until I decided to act professionally. I also grew up on an organic farm with parents who believe deeply in food and health both seeking in their way to provide better food and better health for themselves and for their communities. All of this is part of me and part of what my life has become. I love acting and the creative side and I want the stories that I tell, whether as an actor, writer or filmmaker to do something good for the people that watch and hopefully enjoy them. I’ve also had to solve a number of challenges for myself as far as mental health, physical health and injuries and I want what I’ve learned for myself to be able to help others. I have a lot of interests, always have and I’m sure I always will, and whatever I dig into I dig into deeply continually learning more and more. My life and my endeavors are multifaceted, somewhat because they’ve had to be and somewhat because I love learning and digging into a lot of different subjects. My life before becoming an actor was working fulltime in IT and I still do some consulting in IT to help make ends meet. It’s a part of me too because I’ve always been fascinated with technology. It’s taken a lot of work and learning to get where I am now. In everything I do it’s all about how I can make my life and other peoples lives better. I’ve learned over time that many things work similarly in different industries, and I approach acting the same way I approach other things. How can I make this project better? What can I contribute? What skills do I need to be able to contribute more? What skills do I want to develop? And the often more challenging one, how do I market my product?

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

A lot of my journey has been one of resilience, from my mother dying of a rare degenerative disease, a very difficult five or so years that left me with debilitating insomnia, to deciding despite my challenges to pursue an acting career. Along the way my mental health and sleep challenges would plague me, though I’d keep going and also make progress, earn some awards, keep working, fighting through it all. My career has been a challenge, I’ve continued to make progress and had success, but it’s sometimes felt that true success was out of reach, and I often felt dragged down by sleep issues, mental health and injuries. Sometimes I felt that I wouldn’t find solutions to many of my challenges, that I would be stuck with them and just have to figure out how to keep going, and that is how it has been for many years, but over the past few years I’ve really made a lot of progress and growth. I’ve managed to learn so much about anxiety, depression, sleep, diet, health and happiness. I made small progress for a long time, slowly improving my sleep, digestion and other aspects of my life until I finally started to make leaps and bounds and finally find myself feeling possibly the best I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s been a hard road from feeling like I might never be able to really feel good again, and that everything just seemed harder than it should be, to finding myself feeling better and better every day. I’m at a place now that not long ago didn’t seem possible, and when I look at other challenges now, it’s really only about what’s possible, because if I could come through what I’ve already been through and find solutions to what I worried might be unsolvable, I can keep creating the impossible.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Over the years I’ve ended up with a variety of physical injuries that led to me shifting away from certain aspects of my career and focusing on others. I love studying martial arts, stage combat, weapons, stunts, dance and movement and training for health, fitness and mobility. I’ve wanted to build a Hollywood body and a lot of skills to use throughout my career, but this has also been one of the more challenging areas. I can say that I’ve been lucky so far that I’ve never broken anything that I’m aware of and never torn anything either, but soft tissue and overuse injuries I now know quite a lot about. From initially injuring my shoulder through my variety of training, to my knee and ankle while training for and running the New York Marathon for charity to later injuring my elbows while weight training, I’ve run across a number of issues that have caused me to pivot away from some of my athletic goals and focus more on voiceover and acting. I’ve managed to remain reasonably fit but each of these injuries I developed took a long time to heal, changed my routines and created challenges in their own ways. Some like the knee and ankle I started to wonder if they would ever fully heal. They were both luckily reasonable intermittent but would come back to plague me again and again. Seeking advice from friends, personal trainers, doctors, chiropractors, masseuses and whatever sources I could I wasn’t really finding the answers I needed, but because I stuck with the search and never gave up, in the past few years I’ve managed to correct all of these issues, allowing me to venture back into these training areas again. It’s required learning a lot about the body and nutrition and a lot of elbow grease and a Theragun, but I’ve been amazed at what I’ve been able to repair and strengthen back to a place where I don’t worry about these issues anymore. I continue to be amazed at what is possible when we don’t give up.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ianrosscoleman.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/ianrosscoleman
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ianrosscoleman
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianrosscoleman
• Twitter: https://x.com/ianrosscoleman

Image Credits

David Carlson, Jonathan Stoddard, Hoots Headshots, Matthew James Photos, Matthew James Photos, David Carlson