Motivational speakers don’t change your life.

"Motivational speeches are like drugs. We listen and get intoxicated in the atmosphere and illusion created for a few hours." 

Long back, one of the friends took me to the event citing that there is a great motivational speaker who is going to change our life. When I asked him how exactly he will do that? He told me that it is good to listen to the speaker. Of course, there was a ticket.

Those days were very hard, struggle was immense. What I wanted was good advice to do something different in life. So, I decided to join. The event was organised in a big hotel. When we entered the hall, the atmosphere was energetic and everybody was excited to listen to the speaker. Few people were roaming around and cheering the audience. They were asking to clap, to cheer. Yes, it was exciting. After half an hour, the anchor announced that the speaker was entering on the stage. He requested to stand up and clap for the speaker. It was a mesmerizing atmosphere there.

Speaker arrived on the stage. He shouted, “Hey guys, do you want to make the change in your life?

Audience responded, “Yesssssssssss”

Speaker started the speech. It was like one act play, moving and running from one corner of the stage to another corner. He was jumping and hollering while telling a few known stories. In between asking the response from the audience. Speech was full of inspirational stories, citations, Hindi Shayari, jokes and a lot of words like, extra mile, discipline, focus, conviction and so on.  No doubt, it was a great speech.

Eventually, when we came out of the session, we were happy and everybody was speaking about the speaker, his style, his stories. After 2-3 days, my friend and I totally forgot his speech. For us, it was another entertaining event. I had attended a few more sessions of few more motivational speakers and it was not different from what I attended the earlier one.

There are 4 types of motivational speakers,

• Speakers who have achieved something in their life and they become motivational speakers, like Arunima Sinha or similar.
• Some CEOs, CXOs or great business leaders who are invited regularly on different forums after their retirement.  
• Professionals who practiced hard to become speaker and became motivational speakers
• Professionals who were in sales of some insurance, FMCG or some multi-level marketing (MLM) company.  

I like listening to the first 2 categories. They are authentic, genuine and they have their own experience to share.

However, we should understand that motivational speakers don’t change our life. It is upto us what message we take from them. If you follow everything they speak, you may get in trouble. Most of the time, they don’t motivate people to change the behaviour. Otherwise the world would have been different. We have a lot of speakers, spiritual leaders, mentors who deliver messages and still people have their own issues. It is pertinent to note that you have to fight your battles and face your own struggles. What others say may not be relevant to you. Inspirational speeches did not equal motivation to create real change for the audience hearing.  It did not mean that three days after the event, when people were back in the office, that it had any impact on their behaviour one little bit. 

Motivational speeches are like drugs. We listen and get intoxicated in the atmosphere and illusion created for a few hours. After that we are back to the normal and forget everything. 

I am not against listening to motivational speakers; however, it is important to believe in your own competencies and ability to undertake tasks and achieve your goals. This is also called “Self-Efficacy”. Hearing one of these speakers does not build self-efficacy and belief that you can achieve something more – it may in fact do the opposite. Same is applicable to LinkedIn stories.   

Please read the print replica of my latest book written for leaders on amazon kindle, Vitality in Human Resource: Adding human dimensions in HR processes

(Opinions are purely personal & does not represent my organization)

Human being & Self Esteem

Karan joined the MNC in finance to head one of the departments. He was doing good and his boss was happy with him. He was confident but always blamed others. After a few months he started crying on his status & salary. He started comparing himself with others. According to him he was great and indispensable.  His manager increased his salary but again he started crying on his grade. His grade was also upgraded after 2 years. Now he was positioned decently in the organization, however he again started crying for the new role. His manager recommended him for a new role and he also got that. However, after 1 year he was asked to resign. His new manager, who was also a solid leader, had high expectations from him as his earlier manager had given solid feedback about him. Somehow Karan could not cope with the expectations and finally he was put on PIP. The issue was the inflated self-esteem of Karan. His earlier manager nurtured his inflated esteem and never gave the right feedback to Karan.

You must have seen a lot of such Karan who do great with one manager but not with another. One reason is the esteem of the person. Karan applied to a lot of companies, but he could not get the job which he was enjoying in earlier company. His inflated self-esteem ruined his career.    

Sandesh is another employee who was promoted after Karan moved into another role. However, Sandesh was always doubtful about everything. He was not confident about himself. He thought that he was not ready for the role. He was sceptical about taking such large responsibilities. He wanted to go slow. According to his manager Sandesh has that functional skills and he could develop on his other behavioural skills. Sandesh took the role but could not perform. He always used to struggle while communicating with seniors. He was always undervaluing himself. 

Sandesh was exactly opposite Karan who was not confident, didn't want to take decisions. Such people don’t trust their other possibilities. They get carried away by every situation. If something goes wrong their self-esteem drops.

Sandesh was the victim of low self-esteem. Over a period of time with proper coaching, Sandesh improved drastically. He became a performing employee. 

“What is right self-esteem is the question and if you want to enjoy life, your esteem is the key. You should have a high self-esteem.”

Let’s understand about self -esteem.

Self-esteem is a way of thinking and feeling about self. You can’t see it, you can’t hear it, you can’t touch it, but you can feel it and it is there when you speak about yourself. It is a self -worth or your personal value. 

Your potential to achieve something totally depends upon your self-esteem. If it is inflated or low chances of failure are more compared to high self- esteem.  When people experience positive self-esteem, they feel & look good.

When a child is born, s/he doesn’t see himself good or bad. People around her help her to develop self-esteem as she grows. Sometimes continuous failures and situations affect your self-esteem and you think yourself useless.

It is possible that during covid19 situation, people may have lost their job, they must be disappointed because of the uncertain future. Few must be depressed, and it is vital to understand how to overcome the low self-esteem.

Following are a few tips to keep your self-esteem high.

Don’t compare: Don’t compare yourself with others. Life is not the race. You need the right time to achieve something. Somebody may achieve something at an early age however somebody takes time. Wait for that right moment and right time.

Take pride: Feel proud about yourself. Recollect those moments when you do something different and achieve something, small or big doesn’t matter. Feel proud about others who are close to you.

Take interest: Think, how can you make your day interesting? Follow your hobbies, speak with inspiring people, listen to their lectures, read books.

Think positive: What is that one thing positive you saw daily? Feel good about that positive experience.

Control feeling: Acknowledge the situation and don’t react. Situation triggers the thought but before reacting, take a pause, think and then respond. You can control your thoughts and behaviours by doing this.

Giving something: Have you done something for somebody? Try to give something, support, help, anything. What you give, it comes back with abundance.

Fun: Enjoy life. You only go through life once, so make the best of it. Love yourself.  Do the fun.

Keep in mind that it is difficult to escape from inflated or low self-esteem, but if you are among the people who have high self-esteem, even if you occasionally give in to the instability of certain situations, you are much closer to achieving the happiness and satisfaction in life that will make you feel blessed.

Remember that famous quote,” Your biggest enemy is yourself, so be your best friend”.  

Wish you all a happy Teachers Day!

(Opinions are purely personal & does not represent my organization)

Please read the print replica of my latest book written for leaders on amazon kindle; Vitality in Human Resource  

How people are motivated....

Every day, in the life, you face the motivational issue. There are lot of discussion on how to motivate people. Common complaint is people are not motivated to do something, People are self-centered, they are not proactive, they have to be pushed. When you try to motivate that doesn't always work. The question is how to motivate? How to make them to do the job which you want. I think, this is the fundamental question in life of parents, teachers, managers…  

How people are motivated???

People are motivated for two reasons,

•        To get the pleasure…
•        To avoid the pain…

When you project the pleasure in the task, they probably will work hardly to achieve the task.  You can also project the pain, in case the task is not completed and they will still work. People who are motivated to get the pleasure are “towards” people and people who are motivated to avoid the pain can be called “away from” people.

You have to give an appealing emotional reason to feel emotionally good. If the person compete the task, he will fill  better and his boss as well and perhaps he may get the good feedback during annual performance review. This is associated with the pride. “I did this because, I am proud to do this” should be the feeling.

You need to find in the people what makes them feel good. You have to care and be interested in them. Think of the benefits, to yourself or another of doing something and use benefits rather than obligation to motivate the people.

“Away from people” or pain avoiding people will have different strategy. You have to use the different strategy while dealing with them. They are motivated by avoiding pain. You can motivate them by telling about the pain, they will avoid by doing it. It’s like the same proverb which says, “one man’s meat is the poison for another.”

Here, you have to give an appealing statement, where if the person performs the task, he will avoid lot of problems and pains in life.    

You can use both pleasure and pain statements to motivate the people. Most of us are motivated to pleasure self or others, however sometimes, avoid pain/problem is also required.

Choose the appropriate statements to motivate the people based on these two strategies. By the way, how are you motivated? Motivate to pleasure or motivate to avoid the pain? 

Self Motivation

Nobody can motivate you, yes it comes internal

There is a long debate on motivation. Managers, leaders are expected to motivate their employees. Companies introduce Rewards and Recognization schemes to motivate their employees. People are definitely motivated and such schemes also shows good results for time being. But still most of the times people are not enough motivated, they further expect something different.

Motivation is an urge to do soemthing. Self-Motivation is an urge to drive oneself, which pushes him up towards his needs, wants and desires. Nobody can’t motivate you, you yourself has to motivate you. There are lot of theories on motivation. Lot of reaserch on motivation is avaliable on google, but still people are not motivated. People are still not 100% happy. Orgnizations will ensure the motivation of people, but why people expect extranal motivation. I do agree that people should be motivated, but where their self motivation goes?

The main problem is they are not aware what they want in their life. So eveybody should ask the question, why I need to be motivated..

Why Self Motivation?

Self- Motivation is needed for following purpose in life.

 We need to be self-Motivated because

a)    We have our goals in life and our goals have to be achieved by ourselves only.

b)   We have our dreams in life and our dreams have to be fulfilled by ourselves only.

c)     We have to make things happen and we ourselves has to do something to make it happened.

d)     To do all in life, we should know how our life going? Nobody will keep a track of our life; we ourselves have to keep the right track of our goals dreams and efforts.

If we are responsible for our actions and our life, the question is how external factors will keep us motivated?