Top 7 Mistakes Hobbyist Motivational Speakers Make
Motivational speakers have a gift for using words to paint incredible pictures of future possibilities and make you want to take action. The best motivational speakers will wake you up, make you want to aspire to climb Mount Everest and dig tunnels to overcome gigantic obstacles. Such is the power of motivational speaking that the best organizations would move mountains to get the best of the best to host their retreats, annual conferences, and conventions. And the best motivational speakers don’t come cheap. The top one percent are paid up to $20,000 per 90-minute engagement, all expenses paid, including limo services, first-class airfare, and five-star hotel suite.
Such is the allure of motivational speaking that every coach, teacher, comedian, consultant, and trainer today lists motivational speaking as their forte. There’s nothing wrong with someone aspiring to become a motivational speaker, but don’t let the top seven mistakes trip you up. With all the wars, suicide bombings, kidnappings, and other atrocities plaguing our world, we need motivational speakers galore. This article banner posts the key mistakes to beware of, and also serves as a guide that anyone aspiring to jump on the motivational speaking bandwagon can use to navigate their way to safe harbors. The bugs are in no particular order and, as in any field, they clearly overlap, but taken together, they form a powerful yardstick for measuring your progress toward mastering your game. Here we go:
1. Follow a guru formula
Peter Drucker once said that the word charlatan was too hard to pronounce and that’s why someone invented the word guru. You have gurus in every sphere of human endeavor, they come in various shapes and sizes. Next to the spiritual world there is no other sphere of human life where you will find more gurus than in the world of training, but be careful. The guru’s world may be different from your world, so don’t take what you heard the guru say as hook, nail, and sinker. Remove the wheat from the chaff. Understand the guru’s “must do” context before you open your mouth.
2. Not being authentic
Every actor wants to be like Roger Moore, every footballer wants to be like Pele, every boxer wants to be like Muhammad Ali, and of course every motivational speaker wants to be like Orson Swett Marden, Zig Ziglar, and Og Mandino all rolled into one. We admire these legends, in fact, we revere them. But keep in mind that you are none of those icons. The only reason someone will come to hear you speak is because of your uniqueness. Trying to imitate platform gestures, voice, and anything else others are doing will only dilute your authenticity. Be unapologetically yourself and the whole world will make their way to hear you speak.
3. Using jokes not suitable for your audience
While the mantra in real estate investing is location, location, location, in motivational speaking the only mantra is audience, audience, audience! Consequently, your jokes, if you need to use them as part of your repertoire, must be specific to your audience. And make no mistake that audience laughter is a key attribute of a good speech. How many people laughed when Martin Luther King Jr., the greatest motivational speaker of all time, gave his “I Have a Dream” speech? Motivational speaking is all about moving your audience from a state of despair to a state of euphoria, so be careful with jokes. Trying to be funny when it’s not necessary and using irrelevant jokes is the hallmark of the hobbyist.
4. Using the same speech for different audiences
This is one of the trickier aspects of motivational speaking: matching the speech to the audience. Point three above about matching jokes to the audience is only a small part of this larger problem. While your message to different audiences may be the same, your speech needs to be delivered differently. If you want to have the desired impact, you can’t deliver the same speech in the same way to nurses and soldiers, for example, about the need to be human in the service. While being human is central to a nurse’s vocation, for the soldier the only thing that matters is courage, so your speech should be designed accordingly, with careful variation on what to emphasize and where to emphasize it.
5. Act and not talk
I recently experienced this first hand at a very high level conference. If the offender had been an upcoming speaker, he wouldn’t have paid much attention to it, but the culprit was an industry veteran. He spent most of the time rolling on the ground to emphasize a point. When speaking, he must use the power of the word to persuade, motivate and inspire. Whether he’s talking about, say, color, scent, or scenery, he should use words to capture vibrancy, pungency, and vibe, while he uses body language to drive the message home. Rolling on the floor, crying, and fighting with audience members may feel good, but it will certainly leave audience members sad that you’ve wasted their time. In motivational speaking, you only have one tool: your voice, to get the job done. Body language is the icing on the cake.
6. Casual dressing room
The message you send to the audience when you dress badly is simply not to be taken seriously. In some cultures, dressing sloppily is considered an insult to the public. While your voice is the primary tool you need as a motivational speaker, the most important secondary tool you need is your dress sense. Your dress sense is part of your body language and sets the tone for you to mesmerize and mesmerize your audience. While you should match your dress sense to the audience, a good rule of thumb is to dress slightly better or more formal than the audience. In shorts, never let your guard down, dress appropriately. Err on the side of impeccable smart tailoring at all times, as you never get a second chance to create a great impression.
7. Not preparing well
I deliberately left this point for last. Logically, it should be point number one. The best motivational speakers prepare for each task as if their life depended on the task at hand. From researching the audience, the venue, previous speakers on the subject, and the microphone, they leave nothing to chance. Darren Hardy, publisher and publisher of Success Magazine, once commented that most audience members don’t understand why motivational speakers get paid up to $10,000 for an hour of speaking. He then went on to say, “That hour-long speech may have taken three or six months to prepare.” As with any other serious line of business, preparation is the key to success. As Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Blink and many other iconic bestsellers, pointed out, it takes 10,000 man hours (about 10 years) of preparation to reach the tipping point. Having gotten there, you cannot rest on your laurels but must continue to perfect your act. Prepare thoroughly before mounting the platform.
Having read to the end, I want you to renumber these points in reverse order, with number seven being number one and number one being seven, in that order. If you guard against these mistakes and continue to hone your style, dress sense, elocution, diction, platform manners, and elevate prep to catechism status, it will be a matter of time before you hit the top ranks and make your mouth pop. water. some of the greatest orators of antiquity.