WHY I HATE MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKERS

Some motivational speakers have a hidden agenda – read on to find out about their technique.

WHY I HATE MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKERS

Selected Posts from Brad’s Past

We found a few posts, videos and stories from Brad’s past, and thought it would be fun to re-publish them here.  So pour yourself a cup of coffee, put on some classic rock, and check out this classic blog post from a decade (ish) ago.  

Looking for a motivational speaker for your event? Contact me here.

Yours,
Brad Montgomery
Motivational Speaker, Humorist, Seminar Leader

For you folks who prefer to read, here’s the transcript to the video:

Hey, it’s Brad Montgomery and I’ve got something to tell you about what I hate about motivational speakers. Alright, what I hate about motivational speakers doesn’t apply to all speakers. It applies to some of them and when you’re picking a speaker, you might as well know ahead of time what to look for.

One of the things I hate about some motivational speakers is their whole game, their whole plan during that entire keynote speech is to pry your wallet out of your pants or your purse, to pry it open and to pry out that credit card so you can sign up for their coaching or their seminar or their boot camp or whatever. I don’t have any problem, by the way, with seminars and boot camps and all that stuff. What I do have a problem with is motivational speakers who don’t motivate you to do anything other than give them money.

Well, they have a lot of techniques. These are really bright people. Some of them are my good friends. I don’t mind telling you. They’re really good people, but they just have a crazy business model and their business model involves this technique.

The technique is don’t tell you what you need to know. Don’t give you the answers to the questions you have. Don’t help you with your concerns and your problems. Instead, they kind of label your pain and they dig at it a little bit and they say, wouldn’t it be great if you had relief from this pain and then they say, and you can. You can buy this product. You can buy this service. Right?

So in other words, they don’t help you. All they do is they’ll help you label the problem, they tell you how great you would feel, how much better off you would be, how much richer you would be, how much healthier you would be, how much happier you would be if you didn’t have that problem and then they tell you the answer to that problem is in their product.

Alright, to me, that’s just crap. Here’s why. My clients hire me to deliver value for their audiences. They want me to come and create lasting behavior change for their organization, their people, their company, whatever. And that means that my job is to come in and give it to them.

My job is not to hold back, whereas these other motivational speakers’ job is to sell. Their job isn’t to create lasting change, their job is to sell crap that may or may not create lasting change. That means, they come in there and all they do is they get you excited and you feel great and you, oh my gosh and really in the end, you realize, I didn’t get anything. I didn’t get anything.

What I got was these unbelievably talented speakers who use very clever, honed techniques to make me feel like what I got and really all you got was motivated to buy the next thing, the next package, the next service, the next DVD series, whatever. That makes me crazy.

Alright, just a pet peeve. I just happened to be invited to work for a seminar and that was their business model. It was a weird deal. They are bringing in speakers who are getting paid zippo, but they’re happy to be paid zippo because they are going to be selling from the platform. They’re going to be selling their coaching and their whatever, but they wanted me to come and master of ceremonies, to emcee the whole thing and also to motivate them generally.

So it was a weird thing. They wanted me to actually give value and set them up for these other speakers who were not going to give value, they were going to give a sales pitch. They were going to give motivation to spend and in the end, I just didn’t feel like that was a good fit for me because it just felt icky. It just felt icky.

Hire A Motivational Speaker That Delivers Real Value

Alright, if you want to go to a boot camp, go to a boot camp. You want to buy a training series from people that you think can teach you, do it. But when you’re booking a speaker, what I want you to do is really consider whether or not that speaker is going to give you value and help move your people to where they need to be moved and to where you want them to be moved or if that speaker is going to motivate them to get out their credit card and sign up for some crazy stuff.

Alright, it’s Brad Montgomery at bradmontgomery.com. Are you looking for a motivational speaker who delivers real value? I don’t even offer a boot camp. I don’t even have a DVD training series because I believe I give it to you on the platform. Alright, love to be your guy. Call us today.