In general, I don't like a lot of motivational speakers I hear I find them cheesy, trite, and frankly, most of them say the same old thing. But there is one motivational speaker I'll never forget. It was my first motivational speaker I ever heard and I still think she's the best one I ever heard. It was my mother. Now my mother was not in any traditional sense a motivational speaker. She was trained as a schoolteacher, but was mostly a mom and a full time homemaker the whole time.
I was a kid. But she did speak to me every day. And I remember from the earliest days, and I had to be two or three years old, and she did this for years, holding me telling me, you are the smartest boy in the whole world. You are the smartest boy in the whole universe. And I would say what about the world? She'd say?
You're the smartest boy in the whole world. That's it. What about the universe? You Say you're the smartest boy in the whole universe now. Chances are she wasn't factually correct. Chances are she wasn't accurate.
But it did give me tremendous confidence. When I went to first grade and second grade, Junior High School, Columbia, at a certain level, it does stick I do think of myself as I'm not the smartest boy in the whole world. But I do think of myself as smart, as capable, as intelligent. And it was just a very, very positive, nurturing environment, and she definitely was sincere. She definitely believed that she was definitely my greatest champion ever. And later, it's an L and she passed away handful of years ago, but she did come to work for me and promoted me in my own business and did my bookkeeping And was very much an important part of my life until she passed away at age of 75.
So thank you, Mom, there is a role for motivational speakers, especially when they're sincere and specific. And there's some connection to you. So why do I tell that story? I don't tell that story very often. But I am asked from time to time, you know, what's difference of a good motivational speaker and a bad one? There's some lessons there.
The main reason I tell that is I do think that human beings are much more open to learning with positive reinforcement. So when I'm doing immediate training, public speaking, training and presentation skills training, I'm trying to overwhelm people with positive reinforcement on what they're doing well, I'm trying to push out the weaknesses, what's bad, but I found the problem with traditional presentation. Skills courses is the all knowing extra word comes in, capture some on video once and just says, Here's 27 things you're doing wrong. And they may be accurate. But emotionally it's so overwhelming to people. They just sort of give up.
And so I'm not a speaker. This is an interesting course today, teachers great, but I shouldn't speak. That's not a good training. That's why I do believe in the positive reinforcement method. And to some extent, I give credit to that any success I have is from that first motivational speaker I ever heard my own mom