What is Your Story

Now we gotta to get to the meat of you being a motivational speaker and that is your story because let’s face it most messages are motivational speakers are roughly the same.

The messages typically look at me.

I was way down here.

I had all this adversity I had all these things going against me but through hard work determination being lucky smart finding a good team.

Belief in God belief and atheist whatever it is I was able to overcome that challenge.

And now I’ve become really successful.

And if I can do it with all this adversity around me not having my arms being labeled mentally deficient.

Having a reading disability.

I could do it with all these things and those are common things.

Most famous motivational speakers mentioned if I can overcome my challenges it’s can be pretty easy for you because you don’t have those and hence the person in the audience feels wow he’s right.

If I just do this a little better this I can accomplish my dream.

That’s I don’t mean to sound condescending towards motivational speakers.

There’s a need at certain conferences conventions moments in life for motivational speakers with that message.

But when you say motivational speaker in general that’s what people means someone who can do that and make people feel good about it.

And it’s all about the context.

If you’re the motivational speaker at an annual sales convention of software sales salespeople then you’re being hired to motivate these people to sell 10 times as much software as usual not necessarily motivating them to lose weight.

So what you got to focus on now is what is your story.

I want to know what the problem was in your life.

How did you overcome it.

How did you feel about it.

Who were the other people.

Bring in some actual dialogue.

Describe the setting.

There are a lot of different types of motivational speakers in the world but the one thing they all have in common is they have their story and you’ve got to even Donald Trump now I mentioned in an earlier lecture if you’re just born rich and now you’re rich.

That’s not that motivational.

Donald Trump has motivational speeches he gives and he talks about how at one point earlier in his career his net worth was minus a billion dollars and how he came back so everybody faces some adversity in life.

You’ve got to figure out what is your story.

It’s the fundamental building block of any motivational speech because motivational speeches are not primarily about lots and lots of concepts lots of numbers lots of new information you’re trying to connect with people intellectually but also emotionally in fact more emotionally than intellectually.

And that’s the power of the story.

I want to know exactly what your story was because everybody has a story.

Every successful person has a story on how they got there.

I want to know exactly what yours is.