Customer Reviews

Yes You Can!: Behind the Hype and Hustle of the Motivation Biz

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The title of Yes You Can suggests a hard-hitting exposure of the motivation biz, but in fact Black delivers a well-researched description of a number of players in the motivation game.

What amazed me was Black's detailed history of the way Thomas Leonard, founder of CoachU and the coaching revolution that followed, came directly from Landmark. Few people (and fewer authors) recognize that coaching transformed group programs to one-to-one, in the process creating a marketing bonanza.

Black stops short of articulating how coaches work to transform lives - mostly by creating "accountability" and encouraging clients to lose self-limiting beliefs. Some find the system amazingly helpful for productivity; others come to resent the coach as an intrusive nanny.

In his last chapters, Black questions how motivational speakers get booked, going down a depressing trail of audition tapes and rejections. Speaking, he is told, starts with Toastmasters.

Frankly, I think professional speakers send everyone to Toastmasters just to get them out of their way. It is important to emphasize that chapters vary enormously and your own chapter may differ greatly from the one Black joined. My chapter holds several experienced speakers, including professional speakers. I do share some of Black's frustrations. It's fun to create and deliver a 7-minute speech, but this experience doesn't really prepare you for delivering a half-hour dinner talk or a 90-minute workshop. And there's no natural progression from Toastmasters to professional speaking. The happiest Toastmasters are those who seek nothing more than a pleasant meeting experience and those who begin with fear of speaking and enjoy their new-found confidence.

I'm definitely recommending this book to anyone who seeks a deeper understanding of the group of phenomena loosely classified as the motivation biz. I'm especially impressed by the way Black unifies a group of seemingly diverse phenomena: coaching, motivational speaking, even the popular TV show Wife Swap.

My only suggestion would be to contrast these motivation hustlers to the mainstream therapy field. Legally and socially, we give preference to "licensed therapists." But should we?

Dr. Ruth (the sex therapist) used to acknowledge her lack of credentials, saying clients tended to overrate the advice received from licensed, white-coated "professionals." They'd be more likely to question an unlicensed source and therefore less likely to trust someone who turned out to be incompetent. She had a point.

In her book, Cult of Personality, Annie Paul demonstrates that tests administered by licensed mental health professionals have no basis in science. Myers Briggs has gained widespread mainstream acceptance. Rorschach tests can be used by the courts to make life-changing decisions. Accredited universities often include these tests in the counseling curriculum prescribed for students who want to be licensed.

A number of models held by mental health professionals have been discredited. A New Yorker article noted that the received wisdom of trauma counseling -- get victims to relive their pain -- has no scientific basis. Indeed, academic studies have had difficulty finding evidence of success for conventional therapy. Studies comparing trained therapists with briefly-oriented graduate students find little difference in outcomes.

I believe we should be concerned about the hype and hustle Black describes so well. But to be fair, we shouldn't compare these trends to some imaginary scientific gold standard that prevails in mainstream therapies. Rather we should recognize they're meeting a need of many contemporary citizens of the western world: a desire for help to navigate an increasingly complex world with a wide array of options, combined with a refusal to accept a one-down position and mental illness "diagnosis." They want to be clients, not patients, and with good reason.

Jonathan Black managed to draw me into a world that prior to this did not pique my curiousity. The world of motivational speakers and their drive to feed the need for self improvement was entirely unknown territory, and territory of which I thought best to steer cleer. However, Black's considerable and subtle skills as storyteller, and his growing tone of honest and sincere inquiry, respectful inquiry, into our all too human need to "be ourselves" made this book captiviating, amusing, moving, a great read. It ranks up there with some of the great early Tom Wolfe writing on America's off the beaten track sub-cultures, those milieus with their own rules, superstars and markers of success. Terrific stuff.

It's hard to know at first just where author Jonathan Black is going with this book. I began it with the expectation that he was going to do an exposé of the motivational speaking business. Although there are elements of that in the book, Black gives a fairly evenhanded and sympathetic portrayal of those who make a living at motivational speaking.

This includes a spectrum of those who barely scrape by at one end and others who are multimillionaires at the other. He portrays how difficult it is for meeting planners or corporate management to prove a definite return on investment (ROI). Nevertheless, there are probably dozens of other corporate activities where return on investment is either not measured were impossible to quantify, yet these practices persist.

What makes the book also absorbing is the concluding section, where Black joins a Toastmasters group and becomes an apprentice at motivational speaker himself. He does not expose the speakers as charlatans, nor does he deify them. He does seem to indicate that, in order to be a sought-after motivational speaker, you must have some kind of "hook" as well is fairly polished communication skills.

An entertaining read about self-help gurus, corporate coaches, and wannabe motivational speakers.

Several years ago I attended one of those daylong dog and pony shows. It featured BIG BIG names in the motivation/speaker field. It started at 8 a.m. and ended at (who knows, we had to leave at 6--not just because our brains and butts were dead!). Brian Tracy actually gave some take-home value. Dan Kennedy, who I really wanted to see, came on after we had to leave. Most gave some rah-rah for several minutes, then proceeded with "buy my book/tapes/programs" hard sell.

This experience turned me off on motivational speakers.

Then I heard the author Jonathan Black talking about his book on NPR--and I was curious about the "hype" stuff. Yes You Can! is about speakers--and the companies who pay them big bucks.

Black gave some fascinating history of the well-known speakers, the business of speaking and how certain people got involved. Some became speakers because they were Olympians (some won, some lost)--and many others who were able to turn personal experience into a talk that inspired people.

Entire chapters were devoted to each of these groups Black experienced:

-- Coaching (Thomas Leonard started coaching in 1992).

-- Landmark Forum (3-day week and ongoing events).

-- Toastmasters (and his visits to various groups and his own quest to be a speaker) Women joined in 1973--now 10,000 clubs and 200,000 members worldwide.

-- National Speakers Association's (NSA) big meeting in Phoenix as well as other training and evaluation events.

A lot of the book is about RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI) for the company who paid $15,000 for a keynote, the employees who attended--and for the bottom line. Did that speaker's message motivate the employee and company to change? How do you measure that? How long did the inspiration last? Would they hire that speaker again?

Motivational speeches are all about the idea of change--the great American addiction.

Armchair Interviews says: If you have ever wanted to be a speaker, this book gives a lot of very interesting information and insight into that business and the opportunities--and your competition for the corporate dollar.

When I learned about the topic of this book my first thought was, Why hasn't this been done before? With all the self-help books spilling off the book shelves and tons more queued up for publication at a staggering pace, surely someone would have already stepped up to ride the speaker circuit to decode and demystify the motivators' motivation for being and to reassure and reaffirm for us that our appetite to triumph and transcend our circumstances is, if wrong-headed, than at least totally human.

I'm glad it was Jonathan Black who finally wrote it. Black not only introduces us to some of the giants on the speaker circuit, he even takes us back in time for some informative context and perspective. And he does so with an inquisitive journalistic eye and a lot of heart. No doubt this journalistic background gives the book balance (no mudslinging here). It also makes him a worthy guide -- our sort of universal proxy who hits all the right notes and doesn't miss a detail. At moments I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

So will this book help you next time you find yourself in a bookstore staring bug-eyed at a new self-help book and claiming to be THE book that, unlike all those other books, will finally make your star rise, think of Yes You Can! It'll remind you that, thanks to Black, you now know more than you think you do.

I thought this book was a hard look at the hype around motivational speakers.

Turns out it is the musings of the author around the motivation business.

I keep reading and reading waiting for the point.

This book was recomended by Lil' Jimmy Norden, and his line of the day. It motivated me to rent a bunny costume during one of my business trips.

I found this a quick and entertaining read on how the motivational business works. I've always been curious about some of the background on public speakers and Black fills in a lot of the blanks, from how someone can take up speaking, how much money some speakers earn, the history of motivational speaking and also about other motivational products, like books and tapes. He is a journalist and his writing style is captivating and smooth. I would have liked, however, to have seen some more hard, comparative or longitudinal data, like charts showing how much the average speaker earns and maybe a distribution table. You get the impression that some speakers make it really, really big and others do very well. There is no sense, however, how the bulk of people venturing into this business fare.

What makes the book a little more intriguing is that Black himself embarks on some of the steps towards public speaking by enrolling in a Toastmasters group and them giving a free speech to a fraternal group. He also took classes with the Landmark Forum, and his experience with that group is interesting. He makes a revelation late in the book which, rather than accentuate and crystallize his presentation, distracts from the whole of the book. Overall, however, I recommend the book for anyone who wants a closer look at what goes on in the motivational world.

Black, a former Playboy editor, approaches his subject with skepticism and a bit of attitude, but he turns out to be too generous and open-minded to do the easy hatchet job, and by the end of the book he is joining Toastmasters and stepping up to the podium himself. Along the way he offers up numerous choice tidbits - for example, German audiences prefer gloomy endings - and introduces his readers to such colorful characters as Ronan Tynan, a double amputee, award-winning horseman, physician, and Irish tenor; George O'Hare, a 78-year-old former Sears refrigerator salesman who sings and flaps his arms and wins audiences over by not having a heart attack during his exhausting speeches; and a whole host of survivors who transformed the most horrible circumstances imaginable into wealth and fame by appealing to two of the most powerful elements of the American psyche: our belief that we can change and reinvent ourselves, and our restless conviction that life could be better. This is a lively book, entertaining and informative. I'm looking forward to Black's next one.

Jonathan Black has delivered a home run: he has not only researched the topic, met the motivational speakers and commented on their lives, he has experienced what it would be like to become a speaker. I LOVED this book: funny, insightful, informative. In addition, Mr. Black appeared on my talk radio show, where he was a wonderful guest: to other talk show hosts -- this guy can create a winning program.
Norman Mark, KNWZ Palm Springs & nationally syndicated.