Every now and then, we hear on the announcements that a motivational speaker will be coming to the school to talk with the entire student body. Almost every time, there are groans of annoyance; my peers can’t help but think: “Seriously, another one?” We’re told not to skip them because there could be something we learn from them, but in reality, they’re all the same. Motivational speakers aren’t helpful to the student body when they’re the way they are now: Too often and pertaining to one audience.
After hearing that our motivational speaker on Dec. 21 would be a football player who was in a tragic accident, I remarked that every single motivational speaker seemed to be a football player who was injured. I was exaggerating at the time, but a lot of my classmates agreed that it’s a lot of the same kinds of people that come in, give their life story, and talk about how anyone could be struggling. This isn’t a bad talk to give kids once or maybe twice, but it’s been getting excessive at this point. I can’t even count how many motivational speakers we’ve had in my 3 and a half years of high school and I couldn’t recall what any of them talked about in the slightest.
There are a few points I’d like to bring up about this, one being that the kinds of speakers we have are all the same. They pertain to one type of student usually, but try (and fail) to be inclusive. For instance, our Dec. 21 speaker; he said he was in multiple sports, but was also in band, speech, and what have you, but after telling us that he could “relate to every one of us,” he spent the entire time talking about sports and how his life events affected that and only that. Not once did I hear him mention his other school activities again.
This is a problem for people like me who are passionate about writing, journalism, and orchestra. I haven’t done a sport since sixth grade and generally dislike them. I don’t even step near our sports section of The Scroll. Although a large number of our student body is in one or multiple sports, there are students like me who are not and completely scrap what the speaker has to say once they realize that he’s only going to be talking about sports.
Not only this, but a lot of them somehow incorporate religion into what they’re talking about. It’s not noticeable if you’re a Christian, but when you do notice, you can’t help it. Usually they’ll mention that in the moment they prayed and it helped, or they looked up to God when accident X was happening, which also fails to connect with a lot of the student body. Although a large portion of North Dakota residents are Christian, not all of them are. That also creates a sense of disconnection with the audience the speakers are trying to reach.
Ask anyone, almost no one wants to be there. Although I’m not too social, I have not heard one person say “I really love all of these motivational speakers and I’m getting so much from their speeches!” My friend told me she sleeps through all of them. We’re just flocked to the Spartan Dome to sit for an hour or so while a random man tells us something we’ve already heard countless times.
An example of this is that almost every single motivational speaker is a man. I can’t remember the last time we had a woman give a motivational speech to us, which also narrows the audience. The men usually try to convey their speech to everyone, but when I hear about another man coming to talk to us about the same thing, it puts me off. If a woman was coming to speak to us about something other than sports, I would be a lot more interested in what she has to say.
As I said, motivational speakers aren’t bad per se, they’re just incredibly excessive and only cater to a small group of kids. If we limited them to once a year at the most, I think people would take a lot more from them than they are now. Maybe people wouldn’t be falling asleep, zoning out, or on their phone the entire time. Maybe the administrators should reach out to more diverse motivational speakers and not just ex-athletes who can’t play anymore.