MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER FATIGUE?

By Stephanie Moss, GM of Stephanie Moss Solutions,
Events & Incentive Solutions, South Africa

Stephanie Moss – Managing Director Stephanie Moss Solutions
Stephanie’s passion for travel, business, marketing and eventing is constantly evident in the day to day managing of her succesful Bryanston based business, in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, South Africa. The company is responsible for managing the conferences, events and incentives for several large blue chip companies and Stephanie’s constant personal input to each portfolio ensures all clients remain at the forefront of industry trends and benefit from the best possible practice and pricing methods.

Some motivational speakers make more money per hour than a brain surgeon. When you’ve been under the surgeon’s knife you know that eventually the success or failure of the effort will become apparent. The same can, however, not be said about motivational speakers.

All too often, the effort can be monumental waste of money, with nothing more than the vague memory of a 45 minute motivational high to show for it. You may argue that I have ‘motivational speaker fatigue’ – and rightly so.

The fatique is, however, as a result of experience, as I have found that, try as you might, it is just about impossible to recapture the high of a motivational talk once the talk is over, the event has passed and the audience members are back at work in their usual environment.

Regardless of what you do to follow through on a motivational talk, it is practically impossible to sustain that moment of inspiration so that it impacts on your bottom line. If that is what you are after, rather invest in training or a workshop aimed at achieving behavioral change and implement a rock-solid follow-on programme to ensure you sustain this change over time. I am by no means suggesting that there are no good motivational speakers with great

presentations. However, while some manage to captivate and inspire their audiences, this is usually for a moment and that’s the rub for me – 400 euro an hour is a very high price to pay for a moment of motivation and precious little take-home value.

Apart from everything else, the modern audience just does not respond to Buscaglia-style motivational talks as in days gone by. Make no mistake, Leo Buscaglia was a revolutionary in his time and richly deserved his title and reputation as the ‘granddaddy of motivational speakers’. However, what worked in the ‘60’s, ‘70’s and ‘80’s (he had very good innings, you’ll agree) just does not work the same way anymore. The world has changed. People have changed and so too should motivational speakers. You cannot hope to motivate modern audiences with impassioned pleas for them to treat themselves better, to treat others better and to embrace the world with love – which path has been very well trodden and I now declare it unsafe and closed.

You also cannot sell them a few minutes of rah-rah and hype them up with tales of how you overcome your addiction to sugar-coated jellies to scale Kilimanjaro, plant a flag for the Paperclip Society and go on to write a best-seller about your experiences. If you did all of that, good for you, you deserve to be proud of your achievements.

By all means write a memoir or a blog, but I beg you, stay off the speaking circuit. So why don’t these approaches work anymore? In my opinion it is because people are not the spectators of days gone by. The noughties are the age of participation. In other words, passivism has given way to activism.

Third-party accounts of experiences, challenges and achievements are no longer capable of motivating people the way they used to. It is not that we are less sympathetic, empathetic or care less than we did before. We may care deeply and be genuinely moved by such accounts, but they cannot motivate us and they certainly cannot have any long-term impact on behavior, because they just do not affect us personally.

To light a fire under modern audience members, you need to engage them on an intellectual level, challenge what they know, push the boundaries of their comfort zones and illustrate to them (with no holds barred) what they need to do to make sure they remain productive, competitive and in demand for the future.

Contacts of the author:
stephanie@solutionsgroup.co.za
http://www.solutionsgroup.co.za/About/about.htm