Motivational Speaker for Teachers & Educators | Professional Development speaker Testimonial | Victor Valley

Brad was recently working with Victor Valley Union High School district in Victor Valley California. He did a professional development speaker for the inservice, and his client gave this fantastic testimonial for his abilities to present professional development as a speaker for educators and teachers.

It was a really fun job. The basic Takeaway for me was just a reminder of how important it is to not just support our students, but offer emotional and social support to our teachers, classified as non-classified staff, educators of all types, and even administrators.   These are difficult jobs in a normal year. They are exhausting and overwhelming. It’s difficult to serve everybody and make everyone happy. And generally speaking I have found the educators, even though they are rockstars, or just plain pooped.

But in this complicated year where we are coming out of the pandemic, and languishing with concerns over the Delta variant and whatever is coming after Delta… That uncertainty just makes a difficult job worse. And then knowing that we as educators will have to make decisions on mask mandates, critical race theory, and a bunch of other stuff that is never going to be fully popular? Oh my gosh it’s just exhausting thinking about it.

So my job was to come into this school district and help them build back their resilience, and to fill their gas tanks back up so that they can not only stay sane through this year, but maybe even thrive. This year is going to be difficult; how can we make the best out of it not just for our students but for each other and ourselves?

The answer that I talk about is offering social and emotional support in order to build resilience, build retention and recruitment, and even increase our own measurable level of scientific happiness. This just means we need to be encouragers. We need to acknowledge people and make them feel needed and important. And we need to let everybody know we care.

It’s such a basic message but studies tell us that even though all of us mostly agree that being supportive is a great idea, we don’t do it enough and we aren’t as good at it as we should be. Those same studies tell us that if we increase the amount of social and emotional support we deliver every measurable educational and business outcome increases. It’s the low hanging fruit of productivity, performance and education. And best of all? It just feels really good.

This group of educators was ripe.  This just means they were ready for a message of hope and encouragement. They were quick to laugh in a way that betrayed the fact that they needed to laugh. They are constantly giving and giving and giving and really appreciated somebody taking the time to invest in and believe in them.

We laughed.  We thought.  We even got emotional.  But best of all,we were there to support each other.

Thanks Victor Valley!  It was an absolute treat being a funny motivational speaker for all of your teachers, administrators, educators of all types, nutrition, athletics, facilities and transportation. We had a blast. It was an honor being part of your team… Even if it was only for the day.