Do Motivational Youth Speakers Make a Difference?
I began my career as a youth speaker. While I do many programs now for professionals, I still enjoy presenting motivational school assemblies and keynotes at student leadership conferences. Youth speakers aren’t cheap, however, and I’m often asked if it’s really worth the money and class time to bring in a motivational speaker for teens. I understand why some would ask. So many motivational speakers spend too much time entertaining and not enough on substance. The reality is that anybody can be a speaker. And many people who really want to be entertainers use motivational speaking as their outlet. They throw in a perfunctory message to justify an hour of jokes. To connect with teenagers, a youth speaker does have to be animated and funny. This is especially true at the beginning of the presentation when the young audience is still sizing up the speaker. They assume they’re being pulled out of class to listen to some yahoo telling them to just say no. They must be won over quickly, and
