Motivational Speaker in Vancouver

When you’re looking for a motivational speaker in Vancouver, you want someone who will actually motivate your audience to do something different when they leave the room. I’ve watched many motivational speakers in Vancouver and have been truly inspired….but the inspiration quickly evaporates. I can say that listening to Bill Clinton motivated me to actually take action on a project, but other than him, I can’t remember any others who lead me to take action of some kind. (There must have been others, but truthfully, others don’t come to mind)

What does it take to motivate people in Vancouver or any other city in Canada to actually do something different? Here are reasons I can think of:

Great content
You might expect great speaker to be the first on this list. While you have to be careful, you can have a lousy motivational speaker – and I mean lousy – but if her content is what your audience wants to hear, that person can keep people on the edge of their seats. On the other hand, you can have a great speaker, but his message might be same ol’, same ol’ or it might just be fluff.

Relevance
The great content will be lost if the message isn’t relevant to the people in the audience. We automatically think this means customizing. Sure, speakers want to customize a motivational speech to at least get the company name and the city right, but I have watched many speakers where I truly felt their content was relevant to me even though I know they give the exact same speech regardless of where they are and who they speak to. As long as the meeting planner does the job right, the speaker will be relevant to the audience.

Engaging
This is about involving your audience in the presentation. There are some who tire of asking people to raise their hands, but sometimes we want to show that, “yes, that too has happened to me.” Now some people won’t raise their hands, just because they don’t feel like it, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to give their input. There are a wide-variety of ways to let your audience give electronic feedback, and don’t let anyone tell you a keynote or motivational speaker has to be a one-way conversation. People want to give their thoughts, so find a way and a speaker who will allow that to happen.

Entertaining
Are we talking bells and whistles? Sometimes. After all, there’s lots of fascinating technology and it would be a shame to deprive an audience of the latest stuff, just because we think we must have our audience hanging on our every word. Variety is the spice of life and in every audience, attention spans and interests will vary. And speaking of technology, the argument of to-PowerPoint or not-to-PowerPoint is over. I mean, forget about debating the issue and just decide when it’s good and when it’s not. It all depends. If a picture paints a thousand words, why listen to a thousand words? It goes without saying that a speaker who reads his PowerPoint slides is not really speaking at all. We can read just as well as he can. An audience can be entertained to drive the learning home and help motivate them to take action.

Humour…and other emotions
“I laughed. I cried. I bought the t-shirt.” Laughter might be part of the entertainment, but not necessarily. People want humour and even in the strangest and most serious topics, we can usually find a way of laughing. No, not knock-knock jokes. Life if full of all kinds of situational comedy and it just takes the right speaker to bring it out. But humour is not the only emotion that will motivate people. In fact, humour might not do that at all, but it’s the icing on the cake and it simply adds. Lots of times, it will take fear or tears to truly motivate others to take action. The fear is not about terrorizing the audience, but perhaps the fear that if they don’t do something, they may end up in a bad situation, or (even worse) the same situation day after day after day. And tears don’t have to make people wail, but they can strike an emotion in which people in the audience are moved enough to want to do something.

If you want to round out this list, to help out the meeting planner, you’ll also want to look for someone who is easy to work with. There’s a big difference between a detailed-oriented motivational speaker and a prima donna (or primo uomo for a man). Avoid the latter. Life’s too short and there are plenty of engaging motivational speakers who are easy to work with.

Whether your event is in Burnaby, Coquitlam, West Vancouver, or Vancouver itself, you want a motivational speaker who will touch enough of your audience in a way that he or she will motivate them to make positive change, long after the lights are off and everyone has gone home.

After Speaking Resources

How many times does your audience leave a motivational speech and have nothing else to fall back on? With the right speaker, you can have plenty of training resources available after the speech is finished. At Stephen Hammond’s Human Rights Training Store you’ll find:

Managing Human Rights at Work: 101 practical tips to prevent human rights disasters – in paperback, on-line .pdf, and podcast. This book has sold more than 12,000 copies in Canada, with some people saying, “I had to force myself to put it down to go to sleep.”

PowerPoint Recordings – There are a wide-variety of recordings Stephen has created for your training sessions. They can be stand-alone for short sessions or parts of a longer training session with good bits of information. The Canadian court cases recordings are very valuable. All the research is done for you.

52 Tips for Supervisors and Managers – When the training is done and a week later, people are scratching their heads, wondering what they learned, these weekly tips, sent over a year, give great information and remind supervisors what they have to do.

Hire an Expert
If you would like to bring in an expert, see what Stephen has to offer for motivating audiences to create more respectful workplaces:

Keynote presentation : Cut it Out!
Keynote presentation : As the Pendulum Swings

Here’s one recent testimonial, yet feel free to read others:

"Stephen is one of the most engaging and natural speakers we have ever had speak to us. His enthusiasm for and knowledge of his subject matter made him interesting, but it was his humour and openness that drew the audience in. People felt free to express their opinions in a safe, non-judgmental environment."

Susan Wong
Regional Manager, Team Leader
Department of Justice Canada
Vancouver, B.C.