-: If you are a student watching this and you're interested
in motivational speaking the easiest way is to join
a student organization or a club.
For me it was Hokie Ambassadors, you know,
the campus tour guide group on campus,
because, you know we during the school year as tour guides,
we worked completely for free.
You know, they didn't, there was no paycheck,
there was no hourly wage or anything like that.
So, no one was paying me to hone my public speaking skills
while again, also rolling backwards in a wheelchair
trying to make sure I'm not gonna fall.
You know, trying to you know, say greet friends that are
walking by while I'm on tour, but also delivering
a good, positive you know, beautiful representation
of the university.
But even in other ways there's no crowd that is too small
to hear a public message.
So, whether it's giving a speech at a club meeting
or even just thinking of how you can prepare
for a presentation for a class project, you know,
and really honing your style through that.
So, saying okay, I have this presentation I'm about
to give in front of this entire class.
How can I deliver this in a really fun, different,
energetic way?
I'll tell you I was most inspired by tech talks.
They really kind of hit critical mass and started
to become popular around the time that I was
transitioning from high school into college
and tech talks are fantastic because anybody can give one.
Also, some of my favorite authors of books have given
really empowering talks or they have great podcasts.
For me one of those is a guy named Keith Ferrazzi.
He wrote a book called Never Eat Alone.
It's one of my favorite books.
It has everything to do with he's on wheels and my ethos
of being around other people and engaging with them
and connecting, not just networking but also connecting
with them and I saw him speak at a conference and from there
I went on YouTube and just started looking at past
different talks that he's done and I've actually
incorporated some of the things that I gathered
from his style into my communication style
when I'm doing public speaking.
So yeah, I would always encourage people if they were
looking for a way to kind of gain that motivation
or inspiration or to find a model is to look for people
who are interested in the same things that you're
interested in and see how they deliver their information
and how they communicate things to other people
because that's probably you know, gonna be in line
with what you would wanna do.