10 Steps To Becoming An Amazing Motivational Speaker

Public speaking is a difficult art to master. If you have previously achieved success with a presentation, a speech or even a wedding toast and are passionate about it then you may have the potential to become a great motivational speaker.

The job of a life coach has recently gained a lot of popularity and many people are considering a profession in this industry, potentially earning $1,000′s – $100,000′s per seminar.

A number of efficient tips and strategies will help you achieve this goal. Today we share these tips with you.


1. Do You have a Special Message to Deliver?

The greatest life coaches have something special to say, something that is derived from personal experiences. These people are successful because they speak on the basis of personal stories. Personal stories are convincing and easy to relate to.

If you are interested in a life coach career, you should determine the specifics that you want to get across. What does your audience want to hear and can you deliver that kind of message? Being too general or vague will simply minimize your chances of success before you have even gotten started.


2. You May Need a Mentor

You have always been a good public speaker and you believe that a motivational speaking career is right for you. The bad news is that it seems to be much easier said than done. Motivational speakers are a very specific group of orators. They influence the lives of others and as such, they hold tremendous responsibility. Learning from the best life coaches is a good idea.

See what others are doing. Establish connections. Talk to highly professional speakers and find the right mentor who will show you the tricks of this profession. Having a mentor will help you refine your skills.


3. The Target Audience

Decide what your target audience is before you start writing the motivational speeches. Each group of people will have to be approached in a specific way. If you have no idea who will be receiving your speeches, you will fail making those highly specific and relevant.

 4. Work on Your Public Speaking Skills

What Makes Teams Work?

What's the secret to a great team? Think small. Ideally, your team should have 7 to 9 people. If you have more than 15 or 20, you're dead: The connections between team members are too hard to make.

Two and a half years ago, AOL was feeling hamstrung at the technologies level. There was a bottleneck at the top. We decided to make that division team based, and created core teams that were empowered to make decisions about products.

It was the best thing that we could have done. The core teams spun off satellite teams (also made up of small groups of people) that focused on specific projects, with specific goals and expectations.

The management challenge is to understand that the people who report to you may get most of their direction from another person or from several other people: their team leaders. And people can be on more than one team, of course. It's the manager's job to think about whether this person is being stretched too thin, or whether that person needs some special training.

Size is the key. Have the smallest number of people possible on each team. Another rule: no delegates. You don't want people who have to take the team's ideas back to someone else to get authorization. You want the decision makers.

Teams work when they are created for the right reasons, and when they are created in the right way. The organization that I think does the best job of meeting these requirements is the U.S. Marine Corps. Most people think of the USMC as a command-and-control organization. But when they put a team together, it's in the right place for the right reasons. The corps is extremely disciplined about assessing whether it really needs a team for the task at hand. The notion that a team is always better is misleading, yet all too often, that's the path that managers choose.

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How do you keep the motivation needed to start and run a business?

Ask any self-employed person what motivates them, and the answer is likely to be simple: money. But owner managers who think money keeps them motivated may be fooling themselves, say experts. Recognising what motivates you is likely to be rather more complicated.

Being your own boss comes top of the list for most small businesses, says Professor Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick University, followed closely by flexibility and flexible hours. Money comes a poor third for most self-employed people, including those who believe they are driven by the clatter of pound coins and the rustle of large cheques.

"Self-employed people have higher levels of job satisfaction and are happier than most of the population," believes Oswald. A whopping 49% of the thousands of self-employed people he has studied call themselves very satisfied, compared to 29% of employees. And yet the popular view that self-employed people are happier to take risks is unfounded, he argues: "Their gambling behaviour is no different from the rest of the population."

The factors which motivate small businesses are entirely more complicated, argues Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology at UMIST and himself a director of business psychology consultants Robertson Cooper Ltd. "People who start their own businesses have typically worked in a larger organisation and enjoy the amount of control and autonomy that self-employment gives them, when they see the direct rewards for their labour."

But though that autonomy may make most self-employed people happier than the average wage slave, Professor Cooper's studies of top business people has shown that the desire to prove themselves is often drives them.

"Money is not the big motivator. Many top entrepreneurs have had unhappy experiences in childhood, and are motivated by something negative. They want to go on and prove they can succeed, and are driven by control and power."

And while those negative experiences may drive many to set up their own businesses in the first place, motivation grows with the enterprise, argues Professor Cooper. "As the business grows and they employ people, it's like an extended family with everyone depending on your success. The drive that keeps you going then comes from your feelings of responsibility to everyone who depends on you."

The 5 Great Lessons Walt Disney Taught Us

One of the most successful people that we all know and love is none other than Walt Disney. Walt Disney is the famous voice and creator of Mickey Mouse and the founder of Disneyland. His achievements in the world of animation garnered him multiple awards and international fame.

Walt Disney had humble beginnings; he was not born a success, instead he made his own success.

Here are 5 things that you can learn from one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history.

 1. Do What You Love

Walt Disney PassionThe first thing that we can learn from Disney as an entrepreneur is his love for drawing. He loves to draw so much that he draws in his spare time and he even draws while working as an artist. He devoted most of his life to his art that he was even willing to work other jobs just to fund his passion.

Just imagine how fun it would be for him to wake up everyday to go to his studio and do what he loves to do. That scenario is a lot more enticing compared to waking up everyday and going to a job that drains the life out of you.

Disney went through a series of odd jobs and even became an ambulance driver in the army during World War I along with his friend Ray Kroc (the man who made McDonalds what it is today); and throughout this journey, Disney found his love for drawing.

 2. Take What You Do Seriously

Walt Disney MotivationWhenever Walt Disney made his cartoons he always did so with the focus of a lion stalking his prey. He always paid attention to every detail and dealt with things with the utmost care. He never took his art and talent for granted.

Never would you find Walt Disney in his studio just slacking off and procrastinating on his projects; he always took the lead when it came to doing what he loves and he would never put his passion on the back burner.

 3. Do It For Others

Walt Disney FamousWhenever Walt Disney created animated shorts back then he never did it just for himself; he never hid his creations from the world, but instead he would always find ways in which he could share his work with others.

He had a lot of comics back in the day and he would always find ways to share it with the public. He joined his school’s publications as a comic artist, and he even took a job in a local newspaper as none other than a comic artist.

Walt Disney’s works teach us a lot of things, such as the value of love for friends and family, hope for the good and his most important lesson: good will always triumph over evil.

 4. Never Just Settle With Your First Success

Better public speaking: good and bad anxiety

Understanding how much anxiety you grapple with as compared to the experience of others can prove surprisingly useful in dealing with the situation. Here are ways to evaluate your level of anxiety about public speaking.

Anxiety and energy: The same only different.

Anxiety is a form of energy that arises from within. Let’s define energy:

1. The capacity for vigorous activity; available power: “I eat chocolate to get quick energy.”

2. An adequate or abundant amount of such power: “I seem to have no energy these days.” (Maybe your pancreas is on overdrive from all that chocolate …)

It seems that energy’s good if you have it, bad if you don’t. Interestingly, anxiety doesn’t work that way. It’s good if you have some, bad if you have none.

Good and bad anxiety

What’s good anxiety? Good anxiety is a level of alertness that sensitizes you to the available components of success. In other words, it’s motivational, and it’s what prods you to notice the feedback you give yourself. “Am I ready to speak before this audience? Am I fully prepared? Dressed right? Properly rehearsed?” The answer to all these questions needs to be, “yes.”

If one or more of the answers are “no,” you generally ask yourself, “Why not?” And then you fix what’s wrong. If you find you’re starting to over-fix, you get a grip and tell yourself to chill. Because you’re in control of your energy, you’re able to meet the needs of your audience with good grace, and sometimes even with aplomb.

What’s bad anxiety? Bad anxiety is relentless self-pinging. It takes you down, big-time. Your brain goes atavistic, and your amygdala suits up for Armageddon. Bad karma all around.

A frequent cause of bad anxiety is an imagination gone wild. The likelihood of the following imaginary, negative, bad anxiety scenarios actually happening while you are speaking in public is statistically impossible:
 
You will faint. No one will be able to revive you.

How to Motivate Employees With 'Outside the Box' Thinking

In 37 years in the work force, some as an employee, most in management, there’s only one motivator I’ve personally come across that caused large numbers of individuals to immediately improve their job performance.

The Problem: At the time I was a young man loading trucks for a large national trucking company.  Management’s problem was “miss-sorts,” too many packages chronically loaded onto the wrong trucks, resulting in costly delivery delays.  This was the situation:  The section of the plant I worked in had six trucks, all bound for different parts of the U.S., backed up to bays in front of which boxes flowed by on a conveyor belt.  Two people worked each truck:  a “pickoff man” (or woman, we had one in the job in the two years I worked there) who picked the boxes off the conveyor belt, and a loader who stacked the boxes inside the truck.  It was a fast operation and boxes moved quickly.  Try as one might to read all labels carefully, in the sea of boxes up to 50 pounds flowing down the belt a pickoff man generally misread a few labels during each shift.

This problem could be virtually eliminated if the loader also read the labels inside the truck, providing a double check.  This was a union shop, however, so management authority was a somewhat constrained, but the more pressing issue was that loaders strongly disliked double-checking the labels.  In fact (as I well remember), it was a challenging job: The trucks had little light in them, so it was difficult to see, and it was bitter cold in winter and sweltering in summer.  Loading was OK when one was left alone to a continuous rhythm of mindless labor, but straining to read each label in dim light added a markedly stressful element.  For the most part management accepted the situation, occasionally pushing for more diligent inside-the-truck double checking, but generally acknowledging the task’s inherent difficulty.

The creative solution: At one point, however, when miss-sorts became too costly an issue, management devised a new incentive program.  Overnight it changed all of the loaders’ collective behavior and resolved the problem.

What was the motivator?  It was unexpectedly simple: Molson Beer.

How I Use Speakerfile Pre-Gig

Courtesy: Cara Posey, Speakerfile
 
So I haven’t even had the opportunity yet to tell my own team, but I am speaking at an event on October 5th in Pittsburgh, PA.  My alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, is hosting a Symposium on Arts Management and Innovation at the Heinz College.  I have the privilege of joining a select group of alumnae presenting sessions for the event, which is in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Masters of Arts Management at the university.  My session will be on social media and crisis communication, which is something I love talking about–whether it’s in the classes I teach or at conferences.
I’m sure you’ve all seen the infomercials where the host tells you that they not only serve as a spokesperson, but also use the product. That would be me and Speakerfile.  We not only build the platform, but we use it to help expand the visibility of our own experts and share our thought leadership.   Given this carry-over, I thought I’d share with you how I am using Speakerfile prior to CMU’s symposium in October.

1. When I was considering my event submission, I visited my profile to remind myself of my recent speaking topics and synopses. That gave me a base to start writing my new session description.
2. I used my bio on Speakerfile for the submission and included a link to my Speakerfile profile for the committee to review. This included my rich-media assets, such as my photos, slideshare presentations, and vimeo videos.
3. I added my new session on social media and crisis communication as a speaking topic on my Speakerfile profile.
4. My next to-do is to add the upcoming event to my list of speaking engagements so that my list is up-to-date for others that might be evaluating my profile.

These are just a few steps that I have taken this month. I’d love to hear from you: how are you using Speakerfile before, during, and after a speaking engagement?

 

Courtesy: Cara Posey is the Chief Marketing Officer for Speakerfile. She's also the blogger in chief and can be found on Twitter at @Speakerfile or @CaraPosey.

Why is Teamwork Important

You might be wondering why teamwork is important in business and the workplace. This article focuses on the importance of teamwork in the workplace...

One piece of log creates a small fire, adequate to warm you up, add just a few more pieces to blast an immense bonfire, large enough to warm up your entire circle of friends; needless to say that individuality counts, but team work dynamites. - Jin Kwon

Businesses of today are largely concerned about their profits. They are taking every possible step to increase their turnover. The most important aspect that has a very substantial and positive impact on any business is teamwork. Effective teamwork is very significant for a company to use employee potential to the fullest. Teamwork is not only used in the corporate world to achieve targets on time, but also in the world of sports. If a team works towards a goal collectively, no one can stop it from reaching its goal. Due to the importance of teamwork in business, employers prefer to hire employees who are good team players.

Requirements for Being a Good Team Member

For becoming a good and effective team player in your company, you are required to have a particular set of skills and capabilities. You most importantly should have a good listening skill. This surely proves to be useful in listening to ideas, views, suggestions and conceptions of other employees or subordinates. You should be able to discuss the ideas and strategies suggested by your colleagues.

You should encourage the participation of every member in the team for a collective effort to achieve a goal. You also need to be able to share knowledge and understanding among the team members. A not to be missed skill is to give respect to others. If you want to be a good team player, you should learn to respect people and their ideas. These are just a few essentials that are required for becoming a good team member.

Why is Teamwork Important in Business?

Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward.

Motivation for the Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs may have the creative spirit to imagine a business or the education to put a plan into action, but there are times when the energy to get it done may not come. Having a system for motivation can help entrepreneurs get over the hurdles that building a business can bring.

Not getting it done can never be an option for the entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurial businesses run off the individual. Finding ways to stay motivated and encourage are essential to helping the entrepreneur make any business a success.

Some days finding the push to work can be difficult. It makes many entrepreneurs long for the days when someone (a boss) was looking over the shoulder with the reminder that the job had to be done. Instead of giving up a hope, entrepreneurs need to recognize individual strengths and weaknesses when it comes to consistency in work. Then it will be possible to formulate a plan that will keep the business moving along.

Understanding the Entrepreneur

Do you work well without guidance? Many entrepreneurs have the gift of vision but practical application can be a stumbling point. Finding a mentor or other type of support system can keep the entrepreneur motivated and moving towards a successful business.
Do you understand numbers and handle money well? The bottom line will be the bottom line in any business. An entrepreneur that struggles to get the money straight should include financial advice (in the form of an accountant or advisor) in any budget being developed. It might also be a good idea to seek financial guidance while developing the budget just to be safe.

Do you multi-task? Entrepreneurs face the distinction of having to do lots of things and often all at the same time. Individuals that are more focused and have the need to do one thing at a time may want to consider hiring an intern or assistant to help with additional tasks.
Are you easily distracted? Nothing will get done if nothing gets done. Running after one project and then another without completing either will leave an entrepreneur struggling to reach success or sometimes just to stay afloat. It might be more practical to consider hiring a manager for the business that will handle the day to day operations.

Creating a Motivating Atmosphere for Entrepreneurs

Fear or stupidity has always been the basis of most human actions

...or the combination thereof.

How to Become a Great Public Speaker (with No Stress)

We have all heard that famous statistic, the one that claims the number one fear people have is public speaking, number two is death. Seinfeld had a joke about this stat, he said apparently if people are at a funeral they would rather be in the coffin than be giving the eulogy. If that statistic is accepted as fact, Seinfeld’s joke, while ridiculous sounding, would be technically correct. What is wrong with this scenario?

Would people really rather be dead than speak in public? Why? Well I am here to tell you that speaking in public is nothing to be afraid of; I do it all the time. Like most things in life, the more you speak in public, the less nervous you become when you do it. Unfortunately, most people choose to avoid giving speeches so vehemently that they will never do it enough to become comfortable with it.

So for all of those people out there who avoid speaking in public like, well, death, I am here to tell you how to breeze through any public speaking engagement and come out the other end as a hit public speaker, with as little stress as possible.

• Admit You are Nervous
  This is part of connecting with the audience. When you admit to your nervousness you expose your humanity on a personal level to the audience and they will empathize. They are just as afraid of public speaking as you are. When you admit to your nervousness, the elephant in the room has been directly addressed and neutralized.
  
  Admitting that you are nervous also relieves tension within yourself. It allows you to get that obvious impediment out of the way from the start. You could also segue into our next point from admitting you are nervous, which is...


• Tell a Joke
  This seems to be one of the oldest cliches out there, but in my experience it works. I absolutely advocate telling a self-deprecating joke. If you are giving a work presentation, admit how nervous you are as outlined above, then make sure to thank the makers of pepto bismol for helping you settle your stomach before your presentation. “You may be able to see the pink film on my teeth” you could say. That is sure to get a laugh.
  
  Once the joke is told and a laugh is shared between you and the audience, even more tension is released and your confidence will begin to build. You've already scored with your joke, so they are likely to enjoy the rest of your public talk.


• Tell A Personal Story
  This is another key way to connect with the audience. If you are giving a eulogy, tell a story about yourself and the deceased. If you are giving a work presentation, tell a story about when you first started with the company. Personal connection with the audience is essential to maintaining their attention and impacting them with your public speaking engagement.


• Talk to One Person At a Time
  It is much easier to speak to one person than it is to speak to a whole group of people. If that were not true, no one would be afraid of public speaking. You will calm your nerves and be a much more effective speaker if you speak to one person at a time, for a few second each. When you have spoken to a person, making eye contact, you then move to another person, and so on and so on.
  
  By speaking to one person at a time you have neutralized the overwhelming fear of looking out at a see of faces that are trained on you and every word you say. When you narrow that crowd down to one person at a time, all of a sudden your public speaking becomes much more manageable.
  
  Another reason to speak to one person at a time is to connect with the audience and knock your public speaking engagement out of the park. One of the keys to successful public speaking is connecting with the audience. When you make eye contact with individual audience members, you connect with them and make them feel like you are speaking directly to them. For that time period when you are speaking and making eye contact with that person, that is exactly what you are doing, talking to that one person individually.

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