Does Motivational Speaking Work?
As part of my ongoing research into what works in the field of personal development and transformation, I’ve recently revisited a number of programs I listened to before becoming a coach.
From my late 20’s onwards, I became increasingly fascinated by the field of personal development and while I was often inspired, I found that after a while I found myself drifting off back into my old habits and thought patterns.
Listening to some of these programs, it because increasingly apparent that even though the very best of the motivational speakers admit that they often struggle to make a long-term impact on people.
In one great example Jim Rohn, one of America’s most well known and successful business speakers, relate a story that in a speaking engagement to 1000’s he encouraged everyone to read a little book which cost less than $10. A year later when he revisited and asked who had bought and read the book only a handful had actually done so. [Incidentally its great little read for anyone interested in mastering his or her finances - title at the end of the mail if you're interested]
Now, Jim is a great speaker and has a fantastic philosophy on life and you can bet that the majority of people who left his seminar were pumped to make changes in their life when they left the auditorium. Then I suspect that life got in the way, they got distracted and that was that!
Another similar story comes from Dan Kennedy, in which he tells of someone coming up raving with excitement as he bought an audio product after Jim’s speech - a week later the program was returned with a sheepish letter asking for a refund, explaining that the person had already bought the program a year earlier and it was still on his bookshelf unopened!
The same is often true of training courses; research shows that the vast majority of money spent of training in industry is wasted as many people simply forget almost everything they were taught after just 8 weeks!
Having said all of this, I am in fact a great fan of motivational speakers and personal development courses - they really do have the power to inspire and change people’s lives, the problems come for many when they are distracted by everyday life.
In my own life I became increasingly frustrated with my cyclical motivation and habitual procrastination, until I got to the point where enough was enough.
Standing in front of the mirror one morning, I said to myself:
‘It’s time to take your life seriously’
I began to search the Internet and came across coaching, which then was still in its infancy. Curious and willing to give something new a go I set up a trial session and my life was quite simply never the same again.
The ongoing support from a trained professional, combined with my own willingness to experiment transformed my life, and after the second session I just knew that I was going to become a great coach myself, it was just a case of how?
In the next email I’ll explain how I learned that our perceived limitations, could actually be the key to your creativity and how this realisation led to my developing the international coaching practice I run to this day.
If you’re curious enough, then maybe you’re also ready to stop believing your old excuses and begin to take your dreams seriously?
Simply click below
http://www.empiricalcoaching.com/exploratory.htm [no longer available]
Anth.
PPS: The book is called ‘Richest Man in Babylon’ by George S. Clason
