How to Give an Inspirational Speech
Inspiration and motivation are different.
Motivating someone is when you are trying to amp them up.
Inspiring someone is when you are being yourself and amp them up by accident.
Motivating someone is born from intent.
Inspiring someone is born from being authentic.
The subtle difference is huge!
Although the end results are the same for inspirational speakers and motivational speakers, the means to get there are completely different.
If you are an introspective person who doesn’t like yelling much on stage, then the inspiration path is the perfect path for you.
Your goal is to look at your life, rather than the outside world.
How Motivational Speakers Work
A motivational speaker has one goal:
- Motivate the audience to do better.
They will see where the audience is.
The audience is in a dark place in life.
Then the speakers will use their words, stories, and body language to amp up the audience.
If you go on YouTube and type in “motivational videos”, you’ll see a lot of videos where the speaker is yelling with background music.
The speaker is saying:
‘Come on, you can do it!!’
The motivational speaker has one goal. Amp up the audience.
How Inspirational Speakers Work
For inspirational speakers, they are just being authentic.
They are picking a moment from their life and talking about what they learned from that moment.
A bunch of audience members will resonate with the speaker’s story.
When we resonate with someone (see similarities between our experiences and theirs), we immediately feel good.
We feel amped up.
I was once telling a story about how I struggled with shyness for a long time.
Then I talked about what I did to overcome my shyness.
I talked about the value of learning public speaking and how Toastmasters changed my life.
I just talked about my life.
After the talk, a guy came up to me and said he loved my talk.
He said that I inspired him.
‘Inspired you?’ I thought.
I wasn’t trying to inspire him!
But I did inspire him.
Inspiration was just the byproduct of me keeping it real.
He was also a shy guy.
The fact that I overcame shyness gave him the hope that he could overcome shyness too.
The main goal of the inspirational speaker is to keep it real.
How to Create an Inspirational Talk
The 3-step formula to create an inspirational talk is to:
- Spot a dark moment in your life.
- Describe it.
- Share what you learned from it.
Any inspirational talk you hear follows this formula.
Imagine that your dad died from cancer while you were young.
This was a tough moment in your life.
Lock into that moment.
That’s step 1.
Then describe what it was like:
- How was life different without your dad?
- Was it easy for your mom to pick up her new role as a single parent?
- Did the family become closer?
Step 2…
You’re describing the situation.
During this step, plenty of audience members are going to feel inspired.
Because plenty of audience members lost a parent to a sickness.
Plenty of audience members also had parents who got divorced.
It’s not the same experience as your story, but it’s similar.
The cool thing about delivering inspirational talks is that your audience members don’t need the same experiences as you for them to resonate with you.
Similar experiences work wonders too!
Then we transition to step 3.
Share what you learned.
‘I learned that everything can be going well one second… Then out of nowhere, things change. Never go to bed angry. You never know when you’ll see that person for the final time.’
When you extract a lesson from the experience, you extract the signal from the noise.
People love speakers who present the signal in the chaos of life.
The Value of Inspirational Talks
Motivational speakers get a lot of hate online.
Especially from the self-improvement community.
The self-improvement community says:
‘Motivation won’t get you far, but discipline will…’
Many audience members are turned off to motivation.
They view motivational speakers as manipulative.
I don’t.
I think motivational speakers are skilled speakers who can transform lives.
But that’s a talk for another time.
Right now, it pays to be an inspirational speaker because the audience is more receptive to you.
They don’t think:
‘This guy is trying to manipulate me.’
They think:
‘This guy is just sharing his story.’
The fact that they are more receptive to you allows you to transform lives without much tension.
I believe more speakers will begin sharing their stories.
They are going to turn their mess into a message.
It’s awesome when we think we were the only ones who went through a certain experience, for us to see someone else who went through an identical experience!
They didn’t give up, so why should we?
Introspection is the Inspirational Speaker’s #1 Weapon
Quit doing so much market research.
You are the market.
Introspection is your research method.
To be a great inspirational speaker, you need to understand your story.
A lot of people go through experiences but never recall those experiences.
They have no clue what those experiences were trying to tell them.
When you evaluate your experiences with the perspective of:
‘What can I learn from this?’
You’ll be stunned by how many content opportunities you have!
Create an inspirational talk:
- Find a dark moment from your life.
- Describe it.
- Share 1-3 lessons you learned.
At first, the talk will be sloppy.
Keep polishing it up.
The more you polish it up, the more clarity you will get.
Once the talk is done, you won’t view this as a dark moment in your life.
You’ll understand why this moment happened the way it did.
Once you feel comfortable, share this talk with others.
This talk has the power to change people’s lives.
Don’t regret the experiences you went through.
Use every experience to learn.
Extract the signal from the noise…
For more insights into public speaking, check out the Speaking Wizard eBook
– ArmaniTalks 
