Finding Humorous Motivational Speakers …the meeting planner’s greatest challenge
Motivational speakers are a dime a dozen; an estimated 30,000 Americans bill themselves as such. But truly humorous motivational speakers are rare, indeed. Funny speakers are able to keep the audience riveted on them and their message, and the hilarity opens each person up to content that might otherwise never penetrate the psyche. Better still, humor makes the message stick. Jim Chism, owner of Awesome Speakers Bureau in San Antonio, Texas has booked hundreds of speakers to thousands of clients over the past 20 years, and says, “One thing I’ve learned is that when a client asks for a motivational speaker who’s ‘really good,’ what they really mean is one who’s ‘really funny.’” Long after a conference is over, meeting planners know that the good will engendered by an hour of belly laughs produced by a funny speaker will continue paying dividends in member loyalty and gratitude for months or years to come. Attendees can forgive late starts, crowded hotels and workbooks that were shipped to the wrong city. But they never forget being subjected to a boring speaker.
This is why meeting planners prefer humorous motivational speakers when they want to open or close a convention with a smash hit. The humor creates a “hole” in the brain into which content can be poured. If you think back to the few events you can clearly remember from your childhood and teen years, you’ll find that nearly all of them were anchored in your memory by the powerful emotions you felt that day – the joy of winning the championship, the fear you experienced when you as a toddler wandered away from your mother in the mall, the tingles of your first kiss, the horror of a sudden break-up. Years later the memory is retrieved and relived, spurred by a mere smell, a sound, or a color. This very human trait is a meeting planner’s most valuable weapon – important content can be moved from the frontal lobe (the seat of short term memory) to the hippocampus (critical to long term memory) by associating the content with powerful emotions. Inspirational and humorous motivational speakers are masters of doing just that.
Illusionist and comedian Billy Riggs is just such a speaker. Few entertainers or speakers can so move an audience with the power of oratory, and the few who can are almost never as hilarious along the way. By alternately evoking tender and happy emotions with a rare blend of magic, comedy, inspiration and content he opens the soul of each attendee and plants the seeds of real learning and growth. Months later the message is called to mind each time the emotions of that day are induced by a completely unrelated event.
The magic and comedy hold an incredible mnemonic advantage over a stand-alone speech. As employees retell year after year the story of how "Jim lost both of his shoes, and ended up with a bucket over his head, and has no idea how it happened," or "Billy Riggs put a squashed banana in Mary's purse, and then made it vanish without a trace," or "He took Janet up on the stage, and made her float in the air, and she has no idea how he did it," they also call to mind and reinforce the powerful points those magical moments were designed to illustrate. In other words, when they recall my illusions, they also remember the positive disillusionment (the removal of psychological misconceptions) that went along with them, and again receive the benefit of the presentation. I'll never forget speaking and performing on one occasion in the Great Lakes area. It was, for the most part, a wonderful audience. But one gentleman sat in about the fifth row not even trying to hide his disdain for yet another speaker. When I began my presentation, he was actually reading a fully unfolded newspaper, holding it high in the air, and noisily turning the pages from time to time! I suspect that this was his attempt to make a nonverbal statement to the meeting planner about how boring such conferences had been in the past. But as the presentation progressed, the gales of laughter, the gasps of amazement, and the content slowly began to work on him. He began to occasionally peek over the newspaper; eventually he folded it and laid it in his lap. For the final twenty minutes he sat in rapt attention. Afterwards, he approached me to purchase a recording of my speech and remarked, "You've restored my faith in motivational speakers." Billy will do the same for even your most jaded attendees!
