Special Speeches: Motivational Speeches

00:00 In a sense, giving a good motivational speech is one of the hardest things you can do because people feel jaded.

00:06 Most people have heard so many motivational speakers over the years, and after a while they all start to sound the same.

00:12 And if they haven't seen them in person, they've seen their infomercials.

00:17 The messages that come from most motivational speeches are the same.

00:21 Work hard.

00:22 Set your goals.

00:23 Overcome adversity.

00:25 Work every day on something you really believe in.

00:29 Pick something you have a passion for.

00:33 Associate with people who are already successful doing what? All of those are perfectly good rules, perfectly good axioms, but frankly don't mean much to people who've heard them ten or 1000 times.

00:45 So if you want to stand out as an effective motivational speaker, all comes down to your story. You've got to talk about how you personally did this.

00:55 You have to reveal things that involve pain for you.

00:59 You have to talk about how low you were before you overcame in, and you have to give people a sense of how what you did is transferable to them.

01:11 It can't simply be.

01:12 I was having a tough day and had a hard time with my business and I couldn't raise capital. But oh, my daddy's a billionaire.

01:19 So I got him to give me a check for $1,000,000.

01:21 That's not motivational.

01:23 That just creates envy.

01:25 Now, I don't want you and some people are guilty of this.

01:28 I don't want you to fabricate your biography and make yourself seem lower or more desperate than you actually were, but paint an accurate picture of where you were, what your problem was, how you overcame it, and then tie it together to how other people can do that as well.

01:50 Now, this isn't my own situation, but I do know other public speakers and speaking experts who started off stuttering in life.

01:59 So they went from speaking way, way below average to way above average.

02:06 And many prominent speakers in the world, Jesse Jackson, Joe Biden, the vice president, spent years of their lives as stutterers.

02:15 So that's highly motivational when people hear that they can go to such high levels as speakers, knowing they started so far below.

02:24 So. Figure out what your story.

02:26 What if you truly overcome, that motivates people.

02:30 If you are born with some rare gift and everything came easily to you might be interesting.

02:36 It's not particularly motivational.

02:38 People want to know how you overcame something adverse and how they can do the same thing.

02:46 What is your secret? What's your unique twist? Beyond simply hard work and focus?