Public Speaking Tips for Motivation
During his presentations the American speaker Charlie ‘Tremendous’ Jones would surprise his audience with an observation that on first hearing might have sounded a bit negative or discouraging; especially considering it was addressed to an audience that had come to be ‘motivated’.
He would then continue as if reacting from the audience’s point of view (I paraphrase slightly as it was a long time ago when I heard the exact words):
‘But Charlie, you are supposed to be motivating us!’
And then he would reply as himself:
‘If that was what you were told, you have been misled!’
And he would continue:
‘I cannot motivate you. No one can. I can only motivate myself.
And you, by seeing me becoming motivated, will learn how to motivate yourself.’
Horace, the Roman poet said:
‘if you want me to cry, you must first feel sadness for yourself’
And then there is the leadership maxim:
‘You cannot teach what you don’t know
And you cannot lead where you won’t go.’
All of the above teach us that you cannot transmit an emotion unless you feel it yourself.
I have worked with organisations where a presenter would talk to the group about developing new business or ‘how to make things happen’. However, they had either not done what they were suggesting themselves or if they had it was a long time ago – and so the talk could never have the desired effect because the speaker lacked the essential living spark to ignite their audience’s fire.
Motivation is like an infection.
The more infectious you are, the more chance people will catch what you have!
10 tips on how to motivate your audience
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Motivate yourself
If you have ever experienced a stage presentation from the former head of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, it has probably stayed in the memory. It is an energetic, rampaging, and often very sweaty business.
I remember one presentation where he works himself up, childlike, into such a state of wild enthusiasm, that he dances across the stage screaming:
‘I love this company.’
I am sure this did not happen purely spontaneously. Part of his backstage preparation was surely to ramp up this state of euphoria before he went on.
In many ways, Steve Ballmer exhibits the key elements of the best presentation:
ee radiates pure emotion, so that rather than accompanying his presentation with a well-set-out PowerPoint slide bullet- pointing ‘6 top reasons why Microsoft is such a great company to work for’, he jumps straight over that step to:
‘How do I want my audience to respond?’
Answer:
‘With enthusiasm and excitement.’
‘How do I best convey that?’
Answer:
‘By dancing across the stage like a six-year-old.’
He does not get bogged down in the jungle of the content he might want to cover.
He focuses fully on what he wants to achieve.
And once he can do that, his mind can open up to different, maybe outlandish, ways of achieving that.
But first and foremost he knows that before he can motivate them, he needs to motivate himself and then show them him being motivated.
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If I can, you can
This is the basis of most motivational talks.
Many motivational speakers are people with profound physical, social or mental challenges and the chief purpose of the presentation is to help strip away the ‘excuses’ that each of us have holding us back and therefore the take-away message is always a variation on a theme of:
‘If I can succeed with everything that I have had holding me back, your obstacles should pale into insignificance in comparison.’
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Share: don’t tell
No one wants to be told, but many of us want to learn.
The best way to teach therefore is to share experiences.
This can often cause problems with many speakers because it requires them to question their own motives for standing up in front of their audiences.
Are you speaking so that your audience can walk away thinking:
‘Aren’t you great!’
or are you speaking so that your audience can think:
‘Aren’t I great!’
Most speakers will claim the latter, but their attitude on stage and maybe their motivation is more of the former.
Therefore…
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Show humility
Again this can be a challenge for many speakers.
The very act of standing up in front of an audience is laced with the potential for arrogance.
After all – what makes you think that what you have to say is so worth listening to?
And if it is – what makes you the best person to say it?
Alfred Adler, an Austrian psychologist from the early twentieth century, would talk of vertical and horizontal relationships:
‘vertical’ is when you talk ‘down’ or ‘up’ to someone – i.e. it is a relationship of master – servant, or parent – child;
‘horizontal’ is when you are both on the same level – i.e. two equals sharing ‘I may have experience to share that you do not have, but I am not implying that I am ‘better’ than you. So always stay humble.
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I am just like you
If I cannot relate to you, I am less likely to listen to you.
The reason we might need to motivate an audience is because they are not already motivated.
(If they were – you do not need to motivate them!)
Therefore the purpose of the presentation is to move them from where they are now to where we want them to be.
The best way to do that is to show empathy for their situation.
If I am sitting in the audience and you are showing how excited and how motivated you are, but I cannot relate to you I will not be infected:
‘It is OK for you. I am not like you. You don’t understand my situation.’
How often has a manager tried to motivate his team with how much their extra commitment will help the company and make the brand successful and the team are thinking:
‘I see how that will be good for you and good for the company, but how will it help me?’
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Paint a picture
If extra work will make the company successful, what will that look like?
How will that benefit each individual in the team?
If you know what they want – talk about what they want.
If they are motivated by rewards - talk about recognition.
Talk about how they would feel when they got their reward.
Talk about how proud they would feel.
Describe the expressions on the faces of the important people in their lives who are there with them.
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Choose your words
..which really means ‘Know your audience’
The politician Peter Mandelson was quoted as saying that the New Labour government was
‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’
Some people in his audience might love that sentiment, others might find the term ‘filthy rich’ vulgar or even immoral.
Peter Mandelson was a very shrewd politician and so I am sure he made the calculation that reaching those who would love the sentiment was more important than alienating the ones that would be turned away.
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Keep it positive
Unless you want to start a war or a rebellion it will always be more uplifting to motivate an audience towards something positive than to stir them up against something negative. The temptation is that negative is often easier and more powerful.
The French President Emmanuel Macron said in 2022
‘Emotion is always stronger than argumentation.
And negative emotion is stronger than positive emotion.’
Today we seem to be surrounded by ever more politicians whose main tool to power is to stir up hate and resentment in others – and we do not need to look too far back in history to see the immense damage that can wreak.
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Sometimes the emotion is already there.
Picture a speaker stirring up the audience, excited, animated, employing emotive vocabulary like ‘brilliant’, ‘proud’, ‘delighted’ or if stirring emotions against a situation, with words like ‘shameful’, ‘humiliating’, ‘disgraceful’.
You can imagine the voice the words and the gestures all coming together to create a level of passion that can ‘infect’ the audience.
However, sometimes there is already so much emotion in the content of the speech that the speaker can consciously move in the opposite direction and simply state the facts, paint the picture using matter-of-fact language expressed with restraint because there is no more the speaker needs to add:
For instance...
‘…I saw children, naked, dirty, abandoned in the charred rubble that was once their home.’
- delivered in a flat matter-of-fact tone of voice.
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Set yourself alight and people will come from miles around to see you burn
Your role as the speaker is to move your audience in a certain direction and part of the preparation is to gauge how much force to use and where to apply that force. If they are hard to motivate then you may have to expend much energy and passion yourself before a spark will jump over for them to carry a flame themselves. Steve Ballmer realised that he needed to set himself ablaze to light a small flame in his corporate audience.
In the hypothetical example (although unfortunately often too real) from #9 above the speaker calculates that his audience is ready to ignite and so he need only offer the smallest spark.
Words have meaning: words are powerful; words can magnify.
Positive motivation: your passion may be so great that your audience is inspired to do even more than you had hoped.
Negative motivation: your passion may be so great that your audience in taking revenge on their enemy ends up burning down the whole village and everyone in it.
