Motivational speakers have a gift for using words to paint incredible pictures of the possibilities of the future 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 present their retreats, annual conferences, and convention events. And the best motivational speakers don’t come cheap. The top one percent get paid up to $20,000 per 90-minute engagement, with all expenses paid, including limousine services, first-class airfare, and a five-star hotel suite.
Such is the appeal of motivational speaking that every coach, teacher, comedian, consultant, and coach 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 watch out for, 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, like any course, clearly overlap, but taken together, they form a powerful yardstick for measuring your progress toward mastery of your game. Here we go:
1. Follow a guru formula
Peter Drucker once said that the word quack 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 plumb. Remove the grain 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 not one of those icons. The only reason anyone will come to hear you speak is because of your uniqueness. Trying to mimic platform gestures, voice, and anything else others do will only dilute your authenticity. Be unapologetically yourself and the whole world will find its 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 don’t be mistaken in thinking 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, delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech? The motivational speech is about making your audience go from a state of despair to a state of euphoria, so be careful with jokes. Trying to be funny when you don’t have to and using irrelevant jokes is the hallmark of the fan.
4. Use the same speech for different audiences
This is one of the trickiest aspects of a motivational speech: 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 achieve the desired impact, you cannot give 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 the nurses’ vocation, for the soldier all that matters is courage, so your speech needs to be crafted accordingly, with careful variation on what to accentuate and where to emphasize.
5. Act and don’t 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 ambiance, 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 definitely leave the 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
The message you send to the audience when you dress poorly is simply that you shouldn’t be taken seriously. In some cultures, dressing carelessly 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 hypnotize and magnetize your audience. While you should match your dress sense to the audience, a good rule of thumb is to dress a little smarter or more formal than the audience. In shorts, never let your guard down, dress appropriately. Err on the side of impeccably smart tailoring at all times, as you never get a second chance to make a great impression.
7. Not preparing well
I deliberately left this point for last. By logic, 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 audience research, venue, previous speakers on the topic, and microphone, they leave nothing to chance. Darren Hardy, editor and publisher of Success Magazine, once commented that most audience members don’t understand why motivational speakers are paid up to $10,000 for an hour of speech. He then went on to say, “That one hour 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 hours of work (about 10 years) of preparation to reach the tipping point. Having got 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 preparation to catechism status, it will be a matter of time before you reach the top ranks commanding luscious fees. like some of the greatest orators of antiquity.