Do motivational speeches really make a difference?

When Dr Hamisi Kigwangalla, Nzega Rural Member of Parliament and Deputy Minister for Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children, decided to take it to twitter to offer some entrepreneurial advice to the country’s youth, he was probably unaware of the reactions his advice would stir.

In goodwill, Dr Kigwangalla wrote on his twitter account that he was surprised at how young Tanzanian graduates sit and wait to be employed by the government.

He wrote; “How is it possible for a person with a university degree to be unable to employ themselves? You need to think out of the box, open up your mind and show your potentiality.”

Unfortunately, the tweet, that perhaps the doctor thought was simple advice received a lot of backlash. More condemnation than appreciation was directed to the minister such that it was even reported in the mainstream media.

While there were those who acknowledged Dr Kigwangalla’s concern, others criticised him saying his advice lacked authenticity given that he himself is a government employee. One twitter user, Barurt Junior wrote, “You advise me to employ myself while you are employed, it is very difficult to understand you Sir.”

Another tweet from Jacob Laizer read, “you and your degree failed to employ yourself and decided to turn to politics for the wananchi to employ you,” finishing with a question, “…and you still want us to employ ourselves?”

One might wonder what really was wrong with the minister’s ‘good advice’ to his people. Was the advice irrelevant or was it too weak to attract attention from the audience? Was the audience concerned with the message or the sender who they thought does not have the authority to make such a statement? Again, did the minister really mean what he said?

These questions are the pathways toward a hotly debated topic involving motivational speakers and the relevance of who they are, what they say and whether or not they are frauds.

Some of these speakers are accused of pretending to be rich while they are not. It is also said that they like to be seen as successful yet most of them are said to have been in dead-end jobs before they started giving talks.

They are at times criticised of using very superficial answers for some really complex questions, a charade about the old dream that doesn’t fit in society’s current reality.

“The so called ‘motivational speakers’ don’t motivate people to change their behaviour,” says communication and employee engagement expert, Shawn Callahan, in his essay titled the problem with ‘motivational speakers’ published in the anecdote website.

“…there is too much of a gap between the sender and the listener. Winning Olympic gold, being a world class dancer, or being a renowned businessman are just too far from the understanding and realities of most of the people they will share their stories with,” says Callahan.

According to him, it is too easy for the audience to sit back and say; “that’s great, fantastic, but I’m not like them, and they don’t know what it’s like for me.”

In some ways, he notes, it almost does the opposite because it doesn’t build a key element of personal behavioural change – self efficacy.

Self-efficacy that Callahan talks about is a term coined by renowned psychologist Albert Bandura and relates to a person’s belief in their own competence and ability to undertake a task.

“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” notes the writer and business consultant.

“I have been to so much inspirational and motivational kind of events. I have paid so much money only to find out that they don’t work out, at least for me,” says Yunus Mwarabu, 25, a Mzumbe university graduate.

Commenting on self-motivational books, Mwarabu says, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad is one of the dumbest financial advice books I have ever read. It contains many factual errors and numerous extremely unlikely accounts of events that supposedly occurred.”

According to Mwarabu, the author of the book, is a salesman and a motivational speaker with no financial expertise and won’t disclose his supposed real estate or other investment success.

“Rich Dad, Poor Dad contains much wrong advice, much bad advice, some dangerous advice, and virtually no good advice,” he says.

Jovin Johansen, 26, is a university graduate who says that despite the inspirational part they play, the so called motivational speakers have little to do with his life accomplishment though he has been listening to them while at college.

“I remember one time I posed a question to a speaker at our college during a talk prepared by our students’ government. I wanted to know how possible it was for him to be who he was (at that time) if he had been born in a poor family, since everybody knew that he came from a well to do family.

All the answers he gave were not real. They were like a series of drama… even more than the drama we watch on TV.”

Johansen is skeptical that the hundreds of thousands of shillings that the youth pay to attend these talks are worth the returns. According to him, as a keen christian, someone’s success is not guaranteed by following what others who made it tell them.

“Everyone has their own pathways to success and no one will be willing to share them with others. By our very nature, human beings are selfish beings who wish others to fail,” so he believes.

While acknowledging their importance in helping young entrepreneurs to turn their dreams into realities, Mr Murtaza Ebrahim, Founder and CEO of Imperial Marketing & Communication Limited, still notes a problem with many so-called inspirational and motivational speakers.

Mr Ebrahim says that the problem with many motivational and inspirational speakers is that they think after reading a book or two then they have qualified to stand before people and share apprenticeship tips that they have even never tried.

“What you have done successfully is that you can share the tactics and strategies with others so that they can also adopt them in their endeavours to bring about their personal growth and development,” says the author of Yes! Even You Can Sell.

Commenting about the reaction of people to Dr Kigwangalla’s advice, Mr Ebrahim says it is not right to tell someone that he does not have the authority to counsel people just because he is a politician, saying that, “no one just woke up in the morning and found themselves a vibrant politician and a deputy minister. There must be something that he personally did to bring him where he is now that does suffice to share,” he reasons.

However, Dr Robert Platt, an independent consultant on management and growth based in Mikocheni, Dar es Salaam, argues that neither organisation nor an individual person can be successful merely by wishing to be so, as motivational speakers claim. Speaking on a company and business perspective, he says; “…a company does not only squander the funds necessary to hire motivational speakers, but also wastes vast amounts of human talent by forcing people to attend to these mindless rallies.”

So why do people follow motivational speakers? Why do some companies hire them? Dr Platt says motivational speakers basically are the descendants of “old P.T. Barnum - selling people what they want to hear.”

He says, their mantra is that you can get what you want, merely by desiring it - by having the right attitude - and that other things, like talent, education, quality, and cost control, are less relevant.

“Any company that follows the formula of the motivational speaker is driving the bus off the cliff,” says Dr Platt.

Jonathan Ndali is a business consultant at Pacific Frase and a fulltime inspirational and motivational speaker who urgues that anybody can be a motivational and inspirational speaker.

“It is something which comes from the heart of a person,” adding that a person may come across a certain life experience enough to make them give up but remain courageous to fight off the situation,” he says.

According to him, this experience might be “worth sharing with others so they can learn that they are not alone in their current situations and hence make them energetic to move forward.”

However, Mr Ndali says that many of the country’s speakers are frauds and this is caused by their behaviour of not, “walking the talk.”

He says that many speakers are not willing and decline to talk about their life experiences and instead, “talk about experiences that are totally crooked to the extent that make people who know them to even get surprised when they hear them sharing their ‘success tips’,” says Mr Ndali, the author of The Diplomat in You.

Dr Isaack Mambo, a lecturer of business administration at Zanzibar University, offers some advice, saying that success in anything is only brought about by embracing their very basic principles and disciplines.

“You see, if you are in business selling widgets, what will make your company more successful is to have better widgets at a lower cost. Once you do that, all the “motivation” in the world won’t make an ounce of difference.”

According to Dr Mambo, the company selling crappy, overpriced widgets will fail in the marketplace, “no matter how many motivational speakers they hire,” he warns.