Introduction

I love being a motivational speaker.

I also happen find it incredibly stressful. I don’t sleep well the night before. I worry about whether I’ve prepared enough. My palms get sweaty.

The other day my friend Brad observed that it is interesting how something I love so much could also cause me such stress. I agreed that yes, that was what you might call a paradox.

But then I got to thinking and noticed a common parallel: Children.

I don’t yet have children of my own (to my mother’s great dismay), nor do I intend to anytime soon (to my mother’s even greater dismay), but from my observation, most children are to their parents both an object of nearly infinite love and a source of equally infinite stress.

Like how I feel about speaking.

Here are some more similarities.

the top ten ways giving motivational speeches is like raising children

10. You are always sharing life lessons and advice, but you can never tell if you’re getting through to them.
9. Occasionally you have to raise your voice for dramatic effect.
8. You are looked up to. Often too much.
7. It would be nearly impossible without coffee.
6. The first time you do it, it’s really scary and you feel totally inadequate.
5. You have to be fully present. They can always tell if your mind is somewhere else.
4. A big part of the job is coordinating rides and transportation.
3. In the early days, you rely mostly on formula. (Get it? Like baby formula?)
2. The goal is to better the world, to leave a legacy.
1. Some of them turn out better than others, and you never quite know why.

1. More interaction

The smaller the audience, the more your speech needs to feel like a normal conversation. In a normal conversation, it would be annoying if someone talked to you for forty-five minutes straight without you saying a single word, right?

Of course it would. (In fact, this is one of the primary reasons I don’t want a girlfriend.) So when you are in front of a smaller group, you need to include frequent audience interaction.

(For more on this subject, read my post about audience interaction.)

2. Less intensity

In front of a smaller crowd, my normal jumping-around, waving-my-arms, kind-of-yelling-but-not-in-an-angry way style can be a bit overwhelming. So with an audience of this size, I start off at a lower energy level (not low, just lower), and then gradually turn up the intensity to full motivational speaker mode over the course of the presentation.

It’s like that thing about boiling a frog. If you throw a frog in boiling water, it will jump out. But if you put it in tepid water and slowly turn up the heat, the frog will just sit there and eventually, well, croak. (This metaphor breaks down on multiple levels, most notably in the implication that my objective is to boil the audience alive, which is rarely the case.)

3. More eye contact

Speaking of near death experiences, when you give a keynote speech at a large convention, all you can see is an incredibly bright spotlight shining in your eyes. A conference of just fifty people, though, tends not to be a large production with those sorts of stage lights, so not only can you see everyone in the room, you can feasibly make eye contact with each individual audience member several times during your presentation.

Eye contact is powerful. It gives audience members direct access to the emotion behind your words. When you’re in front of a small audience, it’s one of your biggest assets.

Testimonial

Now for some self-promotion.

Here’s what Jennifer Carter, Lead21’s meeting planner, had to say about my keynote speech:

• Hand surveys. ”By a show of hands, how many of you have ever raised your hand in response to a question like this?”
• Brief conversations with individual audience members. “Sir, I saw you raised both hands just now. Are you an aspiring football referee or are you just ambidextrous?”
• Shotgun answers. “Here’s a question for everyone. What are a few examples of onomatopoeia? Just call them out.”
• Fill-in-the-blank. “I certainly don’t want this speech to bore you. After all, an idle mind is the devil’s what?”
• Ask for volunteers. “I need to take this call. Could I get a volunteer to come up on stage and give the rest of my speech?”

Photos by Curtis Myers

Send-A-Speaker allows you to send something much more powerful—a live, in-person motivational speaker—to anyone in your life who is facing a difficult challenge or simply needs a motivational jump-start.

For more information, please watch this commercial:

Click here to view more photos from the event!

Signing a book for Mark Andrews, the guy who taught me how to ski right after I lost my leg.

Here I am with Dr. Kimberly Dunsmore, my doctor from fifteen years ago when I had cancer.

Looking over my notes before my speech. That’s my mom and sister Anna sitting beside me.

Photos (from top down): Middle school, high school, Amanda shows off her “Feed Mill” shirt…it’s the closest thing Franklin has to fast food!

Gotta go to Bethel for McDonald’s, right guys?

The hotel in question. (Credit: Christiana L)

“If you ever get kidnapped, make sure you leave your cell phone on,” he said. “That way, we can track you.”

I was having dinner this past Monday with a friend who works for the FBI. He has a trait I’ve observed to be common among members of the law enforcement community. Namely, threads of ordinary conversation will remind him of something that happened on the job, and he’ll immediately interject some loosely related piece of safety advice.

You stop at a red light, maybe, and he starts teaching you evasive driving maneuvers, or you’re at a restaurant and he wants you to identify the patron at the bar most likely to be concealing an unlicensed firearm. The kidnapping advice popped into his mind during my demonstration of the features on my new cell phone. Cell phone, GPS tracking, kidnapping. A reasonably linear thought process, I suppose.

After my FBI friend and I parted ways, I drove two hours north to Pennsylvania, where I’d be speaking the next morning at a nearby high school. My hotel was listed on my travel itinerary as “The Yorktowne Hotel,” which I figured must be a typo since the city itself was simply called “York.” But when I arrived, I discovered a one-hundred-year-old building with “The Yorktowne Hotel” written on the marquee.  Why, I wondered, had the hotel’s original management felt “The York Hotel” to be an inadequate name? Did they think “The Yorktowne Hotel” sounded more expensive due to it’s additional five letters, including the silent “e” tacked gratuitously on the end? Were they perhaps envious of New York City when compared to their more feebly named municipality, York?

It was already close to midnight, but I can never sleep the night before a speech, so after checking into my room I departed for a walk through downtown York. About half an hour later, I found myself in a distinctly different sort of neighborhood than the one where I’d begun. Blades of grass peaked through cracks in the sidewalk and most of the ground floor windows in the row houses lining the street were covered by sheets of naked plywood.

tough guy monologues

I wondered what I’d do if someone tried to mug me. Following one of those reasonably linear thought processes, I started pondering the bravery of action movie heroes, asking myself what such a character might say in a confrontation if that character happened to have one leg.

“You know what these crutches are made out of? Titanium.”

I decided that was a pretty good start.

“And you know what your skull is made out of?”

I was practicing aloud using a put-on deep, gravely voice, but it trailed off as I realized I was unable to answer my own question. What were skulls made of, exactly? One is always taught to drink milk for strong bones, so perhaps calcium?

Realizing I had no idea, I continued my tough-guy monologue with, “I’ll tell you what your skull is made of. Stuff that can get broken by titanium, that’s what.”

A decent line, but hopefully I wouldn’t have to use it. The best way to protect myself from those who would do me harm, I decided, was to simply frown angrily while I walked, as if it had been a bad day so you should avoid messing with me and my already elevated levels of frustration.

I turned up an alley to loop back towards my hotel. It had no street lamps at all. At first I was a bit frightened, but then a smile spread across my face as I remembered that if I got kidnapped, all I had to do was keep my cell phone on.

This was my second school on this one-day whirlwind tour of PA.

The student council members (Jill, Danni, Sam, Rebecca) made shirts to greet me…and the back of the shirts featured my favorite pick up line of all time! Ha!

Thanks Antietam!

My first of two school assemblies today in PA.

Two students here, Anne and Katie, were nice enough to read my recent blog post about my favorite songs and then play them as people walked into the auditorium. Tight!