Why majority of motivational speakers are a waste of time
Good motivation is peer based, it’s incremental and it is effortless. It can be found within teams and nurtured over time with proper leadership and team building. PHOTO | FILE
What you need to know:
True motivation comes from within and the best a speaker can do is educate his audience.
Public speaking assignments are an occupational hazard you have to contend with. For my case, they are limited to my area of expertise. They are also limited to intimate boardroom affairs with groups of not more than 30 people at a time.
There is a huge demand for motivational speakers. I’ve resisted the attempts to cash into this “lucrative” industry since I am painfully aware that it obviously doesn’t fall within my range of expertise.
I am usually asked whether I know any “good” motivational speaker I could recommend, a task I find myself equally unable to execute.
That request is tricky because of the added weight of the qualifier “good”, which means that the recommendation I give ceases to be simply a neutral guide to a pool of available choices.
I know many so-called motivational speakers but my knowledge of effective ones sadly draws a blank list. The reason is simple – I do not think there exists a single public speaker anywhere in the world who has the capacity to motivate anyone, not in the sense that motivation is defined.
The motivational stories that are clustered out there follow the same predictable storylines and at times may end up drawing more yawns than awwws.
There is the rags-to-riches story that goes along the lines of: “I was poor, I came from nothing; I have pulled myself up by my own bootstraps and here I am, outrageously successful.”
This storyline is heavily American because in the developed world, struggle is the exception rather than the norm. Any association with struggle is likely to win one a lot of sympathy and will apparently work as motivation to other children born in privilege who will realise just how lucky they are.
No wonder Barack Obama’s speech during the Democratic Convention in 2004, while was still the senator for Illinois, was such a hit.
“My father was a foreign student, born and raised in a small village in Kenya. He grew up herding goats, went to a school in a tin-roof shack. His father, my grandfather, was a cook, a domestic servant to the British.”
In America, coming from such a background and making it to the top seems such a feat. Coming down to Kenya, the story loses its lustre as it is simply too ubiquitous.
Pick any random 40-year plus Kamau, Otieno or Nafula and chances are that the storyline will be similar if theirs is not worse. The second popular line is abstract correlations. A charismatic speaker talks down an audience and pulls what seems to be relevant case studies to support his hypothesis.
Problem is, these case studies make no sense whatsoever though they sound good. In a listening mood, most audience are not at their analytical best hence any speaker will find it easy to get away with pointless abstract claims without being put to task to defend them.
I love it especially when speakers fall down to pulling scripture verses from thin air and using them to defend what seems to be preposterous claims. At the risk of starting a religious debate, I insist that religious talk should be best handled in places of worship.
When having discussions in secular places of work where there are varied beliefs among your audience, taking this line is likely to throw many of your listeners off balance and probably not achieve your motivational objective.
The third line is what I refer to as over-use of comedy. You get a clever talking chap, preferably with a foreign accent (Nigerian accent is the vogue now), add in loads of charisma and a tickling sense of humour that would put most stand-up comedians to shame, give them 30 minutes before an audience and in no time they will have the whole space roaring with laughter. Your audience shall be entertained no doubt, but are they motivated? Rarely.
Many in the audience will not even remember whatever it is that was said an hour later.
I could list countless of such motivational trajectories that have ended up being motivational tragedies given their nil value.
But we keep accepting such mediocrity on offer as our version of motivation, each time expecting different results. Albert Einstein had a beautiful term to define such pointless efforts – he called it foolishness.
Motivation is important but we are seeking it the wrong way. Motivation is not to be found from someone on a podium regurgitating crammed or plagiarised stories of wisdom to you. In fact, I find the statement “motivational speaker” in itself an oxymoron. While speaking is an extrinsic activity, motivation is an intrinsic faculty, to be found from within.
Good motivation is peer based, it’s incremental and it is effortless. It is to be found within teams and nurtured over time with proper leadership and team building.
It is to be found at the level of the soul and will require silence, not speech, to bring it out. Motivation is a product of intrinsic meditation.
A good motivator does not seek to draw a comparison with themselves as the standard unit of measurement of what success is about.
A good motivator knows that we each have our own unique brands of success and your mission in life is to discover yours, then go ahead and fulfil it.
If you are one of these motivational speakers, you may use clever phrases, mentioning how we humans are not vessels to be filled but fires to be ignited and in your charm you may ignite and excite us to the point of emotion.
But unless you strive to ignite us at the level of thought and seek to reason with us at the level of consciousness and logic, then soon your triggered emotions will serve but a temporary reprieve and leave us unchallenged, leave alone motivated.
Next time you are invited to motivate people, start with the understanding that the task you have been accorded is an impossible one. You have no capacity to motivate anyone other than yourself.
The best you can do is attempt to teach people how to seek motivation from within themselves. The idea is not to motivate them but to educate them.
Education is key to discovering your purpose. Otherwise, when you go ahead and motivate an idiot, all you end up with is a motivated idiot – of which I couldn’t think of a bigger danger to society.
