Hey Marianne DeNovellis here and today, we're going to discuss one of my
favorite topics, how to become a motivational speaker. If you've ever
wondered what it takes, stay tuned, you're going to find out exactly
what you need.
Hey everyone, Marianne DeNovellis here and the question today, is how do you become
a motivational speaker? Now I've had the opportunity to grow and progress over
the years to the point where every single month, I get to get up onstage in
front of hundreds of people and share my message but you know what? It didn't
start that way. It started with a big mess, it started with a mess in my
finances, it started with a mess in my health, it started with a mess in my
personal power to the point where I was like, "Personal power what? I don't even
know have a concept of what that is." Started with a mess in my relationships, it
started with this total underdog story and if you had asked me five years ago,
do you see yourself on stage? Do you see yourself being a motivational speaker?
Do you see yourself changing lives and using your modality to bless others and
being a best-selling author? I would have said, "No way, that is not even in the
realm of possibility. There's no way that could possibly happen." Yet, here it is,
I've become a number one best-selling author,
I have retreats with couples where we teach marriage intensity, we teach how to
create mentors and we teach how to create coaches so not only have I
crossed that bridge from the mess to the message and now I get to reach out my
hand and help anyone that wants to go across it do the same thing. So the
question is, how do we do it? There's three key points that I want to share
with you so take some notes, grab out your notebooks and write these down.
The first one is, allow your mess to become your message. Now when I say your mess
becomes your message, what does that really even mean? I'm going to ask you to
do something that may not be fun or easy in the moment but has big connection and
payoff in the end. I'm going to ask you to take the number one thing that you
struggled with most in your life and tell everyone about it.
Crazy, right? Who does that? But you listen to any motivational
speaker out there, you listen to Tony Robbins,
you listen to Kirk Duncan, you listen to Kris Krohn, you listen to anyone,
Marianne Williamson, all of these people have some kind of trauma, tragedy or hurdle that
they have overcome, that's what motivates. People want to know what you have in
your world that has blocked you because that's why they're coming to you, they
have a block, they have a hurdle, they have a big scary thing that's in their
way and that's why they're listening to the motivational speaker, they want to
break through it, they want to move past it and they want to know how you did it.
We got to find out what your mess is and how it's going to become your message.
Now be careful with this, if you haven't come through the mess yet, if your story
or your chapter isn't complete yet, if you haven't figured out the key ways to
get from one point to another, then your message isn't quite yet ready.
There's still some lessons to be learned, there's still some points to find out,
there's still some value that you get to glean from this experience that says, "You know
what? I'm not there yet but I'm on my way." When you step into the realm of becoming
a motivational speaker, you have got to have that point nailed down so much that
you can take someone by the hand and walk them through it and you got to do
it with a big dose of vulnerability because here's the thing, when someone
comes to listen to you speak, when they come to your stage, to your arena, to your
platform, to your social media, to whatever it is and they're asking for
help, they are in the lowest of the low, you cannot reach someone who is in the
lowest of the low unless you are willing to reach down deep and go there yourself,
you've got to be able to go down and reach up that hand that's reaching out
and bring them up with you, that's why it's so important for you to have the
tools necessary to have overcome whatever the challenges because you've
now got to hand the life vest over to someone else. Which brings me to
my second point, your message has to have key specific features. When I say key
specific features, here's what I really mean by that, you've got to have the ABC
outline to how you did, what you did. Maybe you overcame
huge obstacle in your health like me, I used to be 174 pounds and for a little
five-foot-three girl like me, that's saying a lot and I released 60 of it,
I had to do some quick math just now. I released 60 of it to where I'm now a
114 pounds and what I did along that way, people want to know.
I got to teach them how I ate, I got to teach them how I exercise, I got to teach them
what was going on in this mind of mine that created the mess in the first place
and what shifted in order to get out of it.
I've got to create simple follow ball steps. I used to have a relationship that
was a mess, it was awful, just horrible and I've got to teach
people how I became what I call unconditional. I have the three keys to
unconditional, I have the ABC's of getting your healthy body back, I have the A to Z
outline on how to do what you do and how to become a motivational speaker.
When we teach in our mentoring program within Limitless, we teach you the A to Z
principles, not only how to become a motivational speaker but how to speak on
stage, wear it up stand, how to do your body language, how to create all the
positive effect that you're trying to have on your audience. So when you're
creating your content, it needs to be easy to follow,
relatable, and simple. Break it down into small steps and small pieces because
even though you've done this in your world over and over and over again,
the people that you're talking to, they haven't, the people that are looking for
your motivation, they're taking baby steps, think that for a moment. When you
are in elementary school, maybe you're learning to write for the
first time, maybe for some of you that was kindergarten or first grade or
before kindergarten, do you remember what it was like to write for the first time?
Do you remember the little dotted lines that formed together to create a letter
that you had to trace and outline? Do you remember how much concentration that
took to follow all of those dotted lines and to make the letters and then
remember what it was like when they took the dotted lines away and just left you
with the lined paper to write on, your letters may have gotten a little more
squiggly, maybe they lost some of their traction,
maybe some of them they were just plain unrecognizable and then once you finally
get that down, guess what you had to do? In third grade, it made you learn cursive.
Now what you thought you knew, it's out the door. Now you need to find a new way
to write your own language with curls and twists and connections and turns and
some of those letters don't even look the same. Why is the Q and number two?
Nobody knows that but there it is and you have to learn all over again.
Practicing single letters one at a time before you can even write a simple
message, that's what I'm asking you to give your clients. You get to reach out
your hand and allow them to hold it and take the steps step by step by step by
step, over and over and over and over again. As a motivational speaker, you're
going to need another simple tool, we call it the signature presentation.
The signature presentation is what it sounds like, it's your signature. I can remember
being a young child and my family, we did a lot of genealogy work, my parents
actually owned a business that brought, genealogical records, we copied them
condensed them and made them searchable. I'll always remember, we got this really
old stack of books over from Massachusetts, they mail them to us that
we could take the books apart, copy all the pages and make them word
searchable by keywords, this is back probably 15 years ago before all the
technology existed, we had to do it all by hand, we had to start somewhere.
We got this book on my table and it was falling apart, it was very very old, it was
from probably about 200 years ago, give or take a few decades. We opened up this
book, on the inside we see all of these vital records of all of these people, we
see their birth dates, their marriage dates ,their death dates and there's a
lot of different notes in there. The mayor of the city was always the one to
sign off on the vital records and these are all handwritten, you guys, there were
no computers back in the day. As the mayor is signing these off, we flip a
couple pages in the book and we look down and on that page, sitting on our
kitchen table at my house, was the signature of John Hancock.
I just about threw my hands behind my back, I couldn't believe
I wasn't wearing gloves in this document and we turn more pages and there's his
signature again and we turn more pages and there's his signature again, raw and
real and right there on my kitchen table, not inside the museum case where I felt
it should be. Now immediately, I recognized his signature and so did the
king for that matter but why? Why was that signature so recognizable? I'll tell
you. I had two reasons. One, it was his name, it was easy weak and to easily
identify it with him. Two, that signature didn't change, it was his signature all
the way through. If you're watching this and if you were to put your signature
down, your signature over and over again and may have little quirks here and
there but it may look pretty much the same all the way through, that's why we
sign legal documents with it, that's why I had to sign it back your credit card
with it, that's why you endorse your checks with it, it's because it's your
unique signature, it's as unique as your fingerprint. Now when we say signature
presentation, what does that mean? It means you've got a signature
presentation with nine different steps that say, I know how to introduce myself,
I know how to ask enrolling questions, I know how to participate with the
audience, I know how to tell my story, I know how to deliver my promise, I know
how to deliver my content chunks and I know how to wrap it up and close from
the front of the room. That signature presentation is going to evolve over
time but one basic thing will stay the same, it will always be yours, it will
always be your story and you will sign it over and over and over and over again.
Now think about this, if you've heard any motivational speakers get up on stage
and share their story, you've probably heard it more than once. Some people that
I know will slam on the brakes when it comes to that and say, "How is it good
for even me to deliver my signature presentation over and over and isn't it
just the same old song over and over?" Have you ever listened to a song more
than once? Have you ever listened to the radio more than once? Have you ever heard
a presentation more than once? Think about it. What happens?
You think about it over and over and over again. When you hear a song on the
radio more than once, you can probably subconsciously sing the
words right along with it without even having to deliberately memorize it.
When your signature presentation happens and you share with the world what you're
doing is giving a piece of yourself and when person in the audience hears
that piece of you, they will come up to you and say, "I loved your presentation.
When are you doing it again? I have some people I want to bring." That signature
presentation is one of the most fundamental pieces if not the most
fundamental piece and becoming your motivational speaker and here's the
third piece becoming a motivational speaker, get started now. Get started.
You could think of many of different excuses why you shouldn't get started.
I don't have enough time, I don't have enough space, I don't have the venue.
Man, you can make a whole laundry list of what could get in your way and for most
people, not getting started is what stops them from being a motivational speaker.
I know it makes total and complete sense. If you're not going to get started, you're
stopped but that's what I mean. A lot of people will let the fear of speaking get
in their way, they'll let the fear inviting people get in their way, they'll
let the fear of not being able to share their story and whatever imperfect way
it happens to come out, they will allow that to stop them and completely cut off
every dream of being a motivational speaker. When you're first getting
started, it's going to look messy, you got to be okay with that. In order to be an
expert at something, you have to be willing to be bad at it first and that's
totally fine, you got to learn to be okay with that.
I'm going to share something with you. Yeah, I spend every single month, I get up in
front of hundreds of people and share my story onstage over and over and over
again but it wasn't always that way.. Rewind in my life 3 or 4 years ago when
I first started to want to do this and I was just figuring things out, I would
start to hold meetings in my home because my mentor told me to and I was
like, "Oh, my home isn't big enough, it's not clean enough, it's not perfect enough."
I had every reason in the book not to do it until I finally
buckles down and held my first event in my home, it didn't even really feel like
an event, it was just, I cleaned up my house really fast and I'm going to invited
a bunch of people over. Do you know how many people came to that first meeting?
Zero. Nobody showed up so I had a choice to make, I could either go on into my
presentation in front of a zero show rate or I could say, "Oh, I guess I'm just
not cut out for this. See, nobody came, nobody cares. My message
isn't good enough." And I could go on a whole rampage of these ideas that are
just blocking everything I wanted to create. Here's what I'm going to suggest to
you.. When you get started, maybe you rent out a room and of an
event center or maybe you're just starting in your home, go a hundred
percent, invite all of the people that will be there to be there and when you
do, here's the linchpin, regardless of how many people show up, you show up.
When zero people came to my home, do you know what I did? I gave my presentation anyway,
I shared anyway, I even got some recordings of it so I
could give myself feedback on how to do better, I actually got a free
presentation as it were with all of the mistakes I could possibly make and
nobody had to see it because I was had a zero population, it was just me, just me
in the room but I gave my presentation anyway
and here's another thing that I learned, aside from being able to make all of my
mistakes and totally watching all of my presentation, I got to learn that I
showed up even when the universe didn't, that means I did my part,
that means if someone said, "Oh I missed your presentation." I could say,
"That's alright, it was amazing." And I still gave it. I couldn't say to them, "Oh it's okay,
no one showed up so that you know I just didn't have to do it and it was no big
deal and nobody cared anyway." No, I said I gave my presentation anyway and it was
awesome. Here's the next one come to it on this date. When you show up,
you create this vacuum in the universe that says, "I'm creating an empty space
for people to come in and play however they want to."
So get started. Put two dates on your calendar right now, I don't care if you
don't think you have the content, I don't care if you don't think you have your
message ready, I don't the care if you think you're not prepared or you to
have a venue or any of the excuses, all I'm asking you to do right now, before
this video is over, pause it if you have to, put two dates on your calendar right now
for your message to be shared with the world. You have just stepped into the
world of becoming a motivational speaker and there's no going back. So now you've
got your next steps in becoming a motivational speaker. I want you to go
out there and start inviting people to your events right now. If you've ever
wondered what it take to get on a massive stage, I'm going to invite you to
come to one of our next events, go to the link below, hit the subscribe button and
we will see you there.