What is a Transformational Speaker?

There are many reasons we might find ourselves listening to a public speaker, just as there are many ‘types’ of public speakers. As a member of the audience, I can be affected by a public speaker in a wide spectrum of ways. From bored and bewildered to amused and confused, to energetically enlivened to heart opening inspired to self-shatteringly transformed. So too can a public speaker intend to affect their audience in a wide spectrum of ways. The 5 most common intended effects are:

1. Providing Entertainment

2. Sharing of Information

3. Eliciting a Motivational experience

4. Eliciting an Inspirational experience

5. Eliciting a Transformational experience

 As conference budgets tighten and workplaces become more discriminating with their money, everyone is wanting more. More for their money and more for their time and more for their attention. They want value, and one way to measure value is by looking at the depth of the services. I am using the word ’depth’ specifically to represent four areas:

1. how profoundly affected the listener is likely to be

2. how enduring those affects are likely to be

3. how important is the message

4. how engaging is the messenger

Entertainment is a pleasant but usually temporary and therefore shallow experience. Information may or may not be forgotten depending on it’s relevancy to the listener and speed of its implementation and therefore, ‘information sharing’ is often only slightly deeper than entertainment. Motivation and Inspiration may or may not endure depending on how deeply the listener was effected. As well, if motivation and inspiration is not immediately acted upon there will be no momentum and therefore there will be no lasting effect. In determining the depth of potential experience while listening to a speaker (myself included), I look at several questions:

• What’s in it for me? Is the message relevant to myself and others, and how great is the potential impact if I/we fully ‘get it’? 
• Have they been affected? How deeply has the speaker been moved by their own message, and is that apparent? How?
• Are they knowledgeable? Can they convey their understanding with precision and passion?
• Are they deep? Can the speaker plumb their own depths to access perspectives that are embracive, compassionate and wise?
• Are they genuine? Does the speaker speak from their present experience, or are the simply regurgitating facts and theories?
• Are they humble? Is the speaker able to see beyond themselves, or are they lost in their own point of view?
• Are they present?  Is the speaker really here with the audience, or are they ‘Sleep-Speaking’?

 If the message is important and the messenger has been transformed by their own understanding, their message will be transmitted with conviction, passion and credibility, obvious to one and all. 

 A Transformational Speaker aims to touch the audience in the deepest and most enduring way.

A Transformational Speaker will connect with each listener to remind them of their own magnificence.

A Transformational Speaker has groped in the crevices and caverns of Life and returned to speak about it with gifts in hand.

A Transformational Speaker has had a diversity of Life experience and has become tenderized and transformed, not jaded and closed.

A Transformational Speaker demonstrates openness and clarity through the use of Awakened Attention, Presence and Perspective.

 Words, when arising from clarity, presence and spaciousness, have the power to transform the listener. Words, when arising from clarity, presence and spaciousness have the power to awaken new perspectives, as well as remind of ones own deepest but forgotten wisdom. A Transformational Speaker will elicit a change from deep within by reminding the listener that they are alive now and that their own greatest gifts are found by being awake and attentive to Life as it unfolds moment by moment by ...

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