Motivational Speech On Leadership
It is not often that you hear news which bring you close to tears. It is even rarer to hear of people sacrificing their own interests and time to raise awareness for something of a greater cause for the entire community of people living in this world.
Terry Fox was born in Manitoba, Canada and raised in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, a community near Vancouver in Canada. He was an active teenager who loved sports. At the age of 18, Fox was diagnosed with a type of bone cancer. As a result, he had to have his leg amputated six inches above his knee.
While he was in the hospital, he was moved by the suffering of other cancer patients, many of them children younger than himself. Thus he decided to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research. He called his run the marathon of hope. He kept this plan a secret from his family. For 18 months he trained and trained, telling his family that he was running to join a marathon. As he was about to start his run, he announced his plan to his family. He told them that his dream was to collect $1 from everyone in the country. At the time, Canada had a population of 24 million.
After running for about five months, covering over 5,000 kilometres (roughly about 42 kilometres daily), he was forced to stop running because his cancer had spread to his lungs. Terry Fox passed away after several months in the hospital. His legacy was just about to begin. During that duration, he managed to raise $24.17 million, surpassing his initial target.
His mum said that Terry Fox was just an ordinary young man. Well this "ordinary young man" had a heart of gold. To many Canadians, he became a national hero when he ran across the country to raise money for cancer research, all the more so when he himself was a cancer sufferer. He represented everything that was good, inspiring, generous, selfless and decent. He was indeed an altruist. To date, the Terry Fox foundation has managed to raise $400 million.
When you set your goals, do you want your goals to be just for the moment, or do you want them to live on after you have moved on to other goals? Or maybe after you have died? Legacy is something that you build, which will continue to move on even after you are long gone, and there are people who continue what you have started, and maybe even improve on whatever you have helped initiate. If you want that to happen you need to leave a good, lasting impression on the projects that you start. When Terry Fox started his marathon of hope, indeed all he had was the hope that one day enough money would be allocated to help cancer research.
Without hope, there is nothing humans can accomplish. With a ray of hope, no matter how impossible the task may seem, it can spur the human spirit to a greater cause many may think impossible. Hope is powerful when used with proper planning and initiated with action.
The reason I included inspiration in this blog is because I strongly believe and know from the bottom of my heart, through experience and trial and error, that inspiration and motivation are interrelated, if not similar. Without inspiration, there can be no motivation. The two words are inseparable. But how do we deduce inspiration? Is it something tangible? Is it something we can measure? If so, how? How do I feel inspired? Before you can feel inspired, first you need to know what inspiration is.
Now according to the Oxford Dictionary, inspiration is a process, an event, a person, a song; be it tangible or not, that causes someone or a group of people to have exciting new ideas, or makes them want to create something new, something exciting, whether for themselves or for others. It is something to make people feel they want to improve for the better. It can be as simple as a powerful quote from someone whom you look up to, to something complicated like the ability to solve a difficult geometry problem.
If you are a person that gets your daily dose of inspiration from people, you will get inspired by people you look up to, people that act in accordance to the belief systems that you hold up to; people who do things that relate to what you agree with, to what you believe in. Think about it. Have you ever followed or felt inspired by someone who has the totally opposite point of view, or someone whom you despise? I doubt it,
If you go to church or Sunday class, you are probably used to hearing the pastor or the Sunday class teacher preach about lessons in life, what to do and what not to do. You probably listen to them, as they are people of influence.
Let me share this short story with you. A new pastor moved into a new neighborhood and was finding his way around the small town. He wanted to know where the post office was. While he was strolling around, he stopped and asked an 11-year-old boy, "Good evening son, would you be kind enough to show me where the post office is located?" The boy replied, "Just walk straight and you will be able to see it on the next block". The pastor thanked the boy and before he headed to the post office, asked him, "Since you showed me how to get to the post office, why don't you come to church this Sunday? I will show you the way to heaven" The boy looked at the pastor and bluntly replied, "Thanks, but I don't think I will be there. You do not even know your way to the post office".
To inspire someone, one must know what that person is motivated by. If you want to motivate yourself, you need to visualize a target to achieve, set the desired outcome, and have visual indicators along the way to monitor your progress so that you can keep track of it. Find out what inspires you to do certain things that you do. They can be events on a daily basis that make you wonder: What motivates you to go look for lunch? What inspires you to go to the gym to work out? What inspires you to go to the office on time?
Respectively, it can be hunger, the desire to look good or the fear that you will lose your job should you arrive late. It is just as an archer requires a target before he can fire that arrow, you need a target before you can be motivated and inspired. And that target needs to be empowering, a target that you are passionate about; a target that you think about every single day; a target that excites you; a target that gives you the reason to wake up with enthusiasm every single morning! Yes, those kinds of targets! To find out more, you can check out Motivational Speech On Leadership.
No related posts.