Who has helped change your life in a positive direction? Often people give the name of a motivational speaker such as Wayne Dyer, Marianne Williamson, Tony Robbins, Oprah Winfrey or Deepak Chopra.
They have perhaps touched, moved and inspired you to be a bigger version of yourself. If you are attracted to being a motivational speaker yourself be aware that it comes with great responsibility. If you give the audience wrong information it can be harmful.
What does it actually mean to give motivation to another person? Let’s use the analogy of a long car ride. The car is the person, the destination is the goal, and fuel is the motivation. Here are the 4 C’s on how to become help fuel others to change in positive ways.
- Connection
Who you are BEING trumps any of your content. You need to have a connection to a source of vitality within yourself. An exhausted motivational speaker is an oxymoron. And by the way, exhaustion doesn’t necessarily mean you need more rest. It might mean you need more soul nourishment. You might need more of your heart in the process. Setbacks on your journey can make your heart shut down. Then your ability to motivate diminishes. Opening your heart back up and reconnecting to your true self often requires quiet, reflection time such as through journaling, meditation, contemplation, or being in nature. Yet, too often motivational speakers are on the road racing from one engagement to another getting exhausted.
2. Committment
It takes a big commitment to heal from setbacks and over exertion on a regular basis. Often a conscious or unconscious reason people choose to be a motivational speaker is that it forces them to do this for themselves. Being an accountant may not inspire continual self growth in the same way. It takes brave commitment to keep transforming the negatives in your life to a positive outcome. Often a motivational speaker becomes their own laboratory for what they are teaching others.
3. Congruence
To continually be a source of vitality for others makes you congruent as a motivational speaker. Your audience needs to feel you’re somebody they can trust to help them reconnect to themselves. That’s why you can’t really slack off on this and expect to stay at the top of your game. You may have seen a speaker on how to choose happiness while frowning the whole time. Or, a speaker on the power of focus who keeps getting distracted and going off topic. It’s not just you alone in your office or with a few co-workers being incongruent, it’s now you in the public eye. The stakes are high to walk the talk when you choose to be a motivational speaker. Yet, that brings us to the fourth “C”.
4. Compassion
There are days you will not be walking your talk, because you are human. That’s the time to be honest about that with yourself and your audience. Have compassion for yourself in the journey and even make fun of the irony of it all. That will endear you to your audience. And compassion itself is the first step in healing the heart–the first step back to wholeness.
These are 4 steps to the inner game of becoming an effective motivational speaker. What helps you reconnect when you stop walking your talk?
If you’d like more background on this, as well as more support and powerful, daily processes to keep you congruent—check out Confidence Gold: The Inner Game of Speaking. It is like installing anti-virus software in your inner computer. You discover how to uninstall limiting beliefs that might be sabotaging your success and install supportive beliefs to give you the rock solid confidence you need to succeed.