Motivational speaker

What is motivation? Is it something that comes externally? Or is it something inbuilt with your objective? Something to reach is being called your target or goal… then where does motivation fit in? If determination is not violated by mental pollution, obviously the question of lost motivation does not arrive. Then where does it come from? Is it a catalyst? Is it something like a success “Middleman”? is it something that helps like a drug? I am not an expert in that to judge. But I am a person who can raise these questions for a valid reason as a normal guy who requires a lot of “motivation” in life to cross a small milestone.

The very common context of motivational speech is a generic term that defines a successful person walking from left to right (and vice versa) on a stage with his/her hands shooting in different postures while speaking of personal success story with examples of real life case scenarios mixed with few nutty spices. The whole thing is called a session or seminar where people can also interactively participate in the “session” with the speaker and thus making the entire “thing” more attractive. Normally this successful person (who is a big shot!) also explains few scenarios of other influences and the journey of how s/he overcame the whole hard rough (offroad!)times and became such a “Big shot” successful person in life.

So very simply, when someone is moving towards a target, if the person is getting slow, fatigue stricken or leaning back; this boost up through a session is what a motivational session is and the person conducting such session is a motivational speaker – so the tipping point identifier and kick starter is a motivational speaker. Now here comes the twist, the people who attend such “sessions” are not with similar back ground or economical demography neither social nor mental state. So when the speech is un-tailored and generic the backfire rate is something sky high and that means the misinterpretation of the entire delivery as well. Thank goodness the audiences of our country do not take these speeches that seriously otherwise we would have been a zombie nation with burnt out brain cells and “kaput” mental navigations. From ancient times it is said “the one thing you can get free in this country is ADVICE” and now this advice thing is being given in a package called “motivational speech”. Advice is something that needs to be precisely designed for the person to get benefitted, otherwise there are chances it might go in a very wrong way. So when the honorable motivational speakers “broadcast” their mind waves in these sessions with most precious advices, do you really think that has a double figure ratio to get positively vibrant? Let me give you an example to clarify a bit more, do you have any idea of how many people take medical consultancy per day? Around 9 lac. Then do you know how many people actually take medical consultancy from an authentic medical facility? Around 30%-33%. The remaining percentages fall in the categories of “self treatment”, asking FnF, trying to go with it, going to quacks and frauds. Yes, you can point out different reasons for this phenomena like unavailability of proper facility, financial condition, scarcity of particular specialist, transport system hassle etc. But if we count the literacy rate of Bangladesh and look at this ratio we already know roughly around 50% people are out of the basket. So give or take 50% people are knowingly doing wrong (my personal opinion, these are “fatal wrongs” that leads to death!) and now you expect a nutty spicy personal case scenario filled juicy story telling guy’s session to be followed and tried by heart? A pretty far stretch that might have something else as an agenda (sounds highly like a conspiracy theory but it is as it is…) that are hidden from the naked eyes. That agenda is not related to the audience’s success or the motivational speaker’s capability of making things go north by any means, its linked with a fat paycheck, nothing else.

Let’s get one square back. Change the side of the speaker. Who is the person that is delivering the success story? What has this guy proved? Per minutes of this session is his success story actually. s/he is earning a quite handsome fat bill for this session. The fame through audience word-through-mouth is a topping. This person is saying what you already know since your childhood days from your FnF, teachers and well-wishers. The person who is this motivational guy, he seeks fame and fortune through this session itself, so it’s another feather in his hat rather trying to make you recover from what sh*t you are in. In fact s/he doesn’t even care what you need, it’s not in the to-do-list s/he will do in this session. It’s a scripted speech play he is performing on the stage for you. It is precisely designed for you to be confused and while your brain takes up the time to recalculate where the confusion is the topic moves to another such topic. While all these things are mostly associated with figures and thus you get attacked by “numeric confusion-bombs” over and over before you try to figure out where you stand in this entire flow of confusions, your brain’s initial feedback being prompted by the “motivational speaker” again- thus you surrender in the session to the “Hero speaker” who already showed the sign that he knows how you think, what you think and when you think (“Holy MS”, not “man-sh*t”, holy motivational speaker I meant)!!! Let’s say this guy said in his session, “During school life, I used to study in late nights and slept till 8AM.” Fair enough! His brain was capable of doing that. But it might be that your brain can understand stuffs in early morning. This ability of the brain is unique and varies from person to person. So even trying what you learnt in the session will ruin 2/3 mornings for you. Is that worth? Who has authenticated this person to become a motivational speaker? Yeah yeah, it doesn’t require any certificates to become a motivational speaker, but do you have the example that s/he actually has walked the beds of thrones to understand the real experience to share and tell you how to overcome? Or do you have a solid testimonial or real person who’s life turned downside up (as these speaker’s are portrayed) after this person’s motivational speech or simply, a person who stopped or started doing something after a session? Now-a-days a so called motivational speaker who claims to earn “Six figure” handsome salary is being “idol”-ed by many. Alas, this particular guy was hired by a leading mobile handset company to set up the brand and thus the business model altogether (as this guy was the CMO!!!). You know what, that brand is now counting time to get extinct dumping a hefty amount of money and getting almost nothing in return. Well, for that company I understand they took marketing gimmick too far by trying celebrity endorsement into some sort of “celebrity” recruitment to “do-nothing-to-enhance sales & distribution network-except-FB-posting-motivational pumps-and-ajaira unrelated-bungee” and paid the price. But yet, brand-wise speaking, this motivational speaker person earned already what he aimed for using this company as a ladder and gateway to corporate identity, God bless the person who recommended and selected this guy at the first place. Unfortunately now people take this guy as a motivational guru and wait to listen to him. The cliché is his success story has evolved once he became a “motivational speaker” not as a corporate person or a proven change maker in his professional trend yet this person is seen in corporate events delivering “know-how’s” on things he failed miserably …so it stands he was no successful person until he became a motivational speaker. For the sake of equation it stands, this guy is a good “speaker” and motivation is a topic that chooses. For a better understanding, if a satellite TV channel owner owns 2 channels at the same time, one broadcasting 24/7 fashion shows and music videos and the other one 24/7 Islamic religious talk shows and awareness programs does not make this owner a religious person neither a fashion icon rather a core business man who has no connection between personal ethics and business. 

Hardly will you find a real successful person conducting motivational sessions on a mass or commercial level. Because the real successful person knows the value of becoming “Successful” s/he has earned through his/her hardships and also knows this intrinsic experience that will change the course for another person is far too diversified with separate external factors involved which might be beyond the capacity of even understanding in an open mass session. The real successful persons also try to avoid such motivational experience sharing because they never think they are successful enough to be in a position to share their experience at all. Even when they are asked and requested, they are always interested to attend an open discussion session rather speech delivery session, because they think open discussions make minds open and new ideas float around which will help them as well.

We have been carried away by the savage hype of “motivational speaker” syndrome but have we looked just over our shoulders to find the utmost motivation of our life for all times there. The powers are within us. It’s not someone else who will wave the magic wand saying the spells on the stage with bogus stories making faces and suddenly everything will ease up for us. The miracles are around you, the motivations are all inside these miracles…Look at your mother’s satisfying face after you finish drinking the glass of water finishing all the food of your plate, look at the wrinkles vanish on your father’s forehead after your return home ending a hard day’s toil, see the million stars playing inside your child’s eyes when they find you to wrap around their tiny hands around with, see the supportive guardian smile in your spouse’s lips after you share a story of the day in your regular monotonous mechanical life, search for the slightest happy tears at the corners of your teacher’s eyes when you tell her/him about you being you today after bumping into each other in the street years apart, feel the pain inside your eardrums due to the scream and the heartbeats near your heart when your friend hugs you sharing the happiest moment of his/her life with you, shout with fake agony when your sibling beats you on your back for you being the most irritating sibling to him/her or simply in the raised thankful weak wrinkled hand after you help an old man cross the road in a mid day traffic…  How much more motivation does it take to make a miracle happen?