Motivation Introduction

Creating an interest arousing motivation introduction requires connecting with the audience at some visceral level.

How do you connect with them this way. By using a question, a illustration or story that taps into what they feel and think.

In this lesson, we will consider using an illustration for a motivation introduction to a talk.

The Connection

Introductions that motivate can come from life.

There are a number of experiences in life that people can relate to. Loving someone, the death of a loved one, the birth of a baby, even driving a car. Anything that happens around you is potential fodder.

One of the best ways to love someone is not through changing them, rather, it is through helping them find and become the greatest version of themselves they can be.

What is it about any of these things (death, birth, driving) connects with people? It is not the mundane. It is the exceptional or the annoying.

Within the mundane there is always something that creates emotion.

For instance, when you get onto the highway driving your car. In using the entrance ramp, how do people get on the highway. One of two ways. They start at the beginning and get up to speed and then merge. The vast majority end up driving close to the end and waiting for an opening in the traffic.

The shorter the ramp, the greater the chance someone will be stopped at the end waiting for an opening.

This illustration has two basic scenarios. Each produces a challenge for the drivers. The one driving to the end is frustrated that the speeding highway traffic doesn't let them in.

The one that uses the entire ramp is frustrated that the person at the end waiting impedes their ability to get on by shortening the distance they have to get up to speed.

A Marketing Example of the Mundane Made Exciting

A blender company started blending everything. It not only showed how durable their product was, it also showed how easy it was to work. They blended almost everything, including an I Phone. While they have a premium cost blender, it is so good, it has a life time guarantee.

This is an example of making a boring kitchen appliance into something exciting. Almost anything can be made exciting.

If you do not have something interesting, massage it so that it is interesting. Find an angle. Frame it as something that is interesting.

How Can You Create a Motivational Introduction?

Motivation introductions start with questions.

Quite simply, by asking a question. Do you know what it is like when your trying to get onto a busy highway and the cars don't seem to want to let you get in. How do you feel? Scared sometimes? Frustrated maybe at the least?

Note...This question addresses both groups with out explaining there is a difference.

Next weave motivation introduction into your words so that it is connected at the hip with your most wanted response.

If for instance, you want the audience to accept a new change in procedure, you can say, "Well, once again we are getting on the highway of change. How are some of us going to feel? Scared, frustrated, upset, even mad?"

Weave a different aspect of the illustration into the various parts of the talk from beginning to end.

Motivation Introduction Illustration Basics

Always make the illustration and the point positive.

Avoid the negative. If you tell how some pull to the end of the ramp and stop and potentially cause accidents, although you have stated a true fact, it will do nothing to motivate the most wanted response. People do not do things with out reason.

If you point out the negative, instruct how to attain the positive.

In the merge illustration, if there is resistance to change, it could be beneficial to educate the audience. In the simplest form you could ask the audience if they were in the first lane of a six lane highway and you wanted to get into the second, how would you do it? Would you stop and wait for an opening? Or would you rather speed up or slow down to merge into the nearest opening?

Would you slow to lets say 45 if everyone is doing 65 or faster. No, you would just let off the gas to slow down a bit.

The entrance ramp, if it is of any length, (there are some entrance ramps, such as in New York City that have no merge lanes, they just go right onto the highway) is the way you get up to speed to merge into traffic at the same speed as the traffic. Once there, you may need to slow down or speed up. What happens if you pull onto a highway at 45 miles per hour and everyone is going 75? Someone has to slow down.

Acknowledge the audience feelings...This is not going to be comfortable if you have never done this before. Like the merge ramp...it may be frightening. Once you master it, it will not only be safer, it will make your life more enjoyable.

Using the negative to resonate with the positive can be effective. For instance, only floss the teeth you want to keep. The negative message is if you do not floss your teeth you will lose them. This was a positive statement framed with a negative side effect.

Now armed with your motivation introduction, you are ready for the body. If the moral or motivation is change, then be careful not to make the merge illustration so powerful that they focus on the illustration and not your most wanted response, that change can pose challenges. Change allows us to keep moving down the highway of life.

Some will merge slower, some faster. Some will even have a few accidents. The better we learn how to change, the easier it will be to get moving toward the organizational goals.

Finally, conclude with the illustration as a metaphor for the audience to connect mentally with your most wanted response.

This is where you will repeat your motivation introduction only with slightly different words.

If you connect viscerally, every time the audience is on an entrance ramp, they will be thinking of what you said until it becomes part of the way they think.

May your introductions be motivational.

Motivation Illustrated

Motivation Theory

Public Speaking Motivation Home Page

Speechmastery.come: The Motivation Introduction Speaking Website

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