Before I Step on Stage, Here's What I Won't Be
Over thirty years in corporate life, I sat in a lot of audiences.
Sales conferences, leadership summits, regional kick-offs in hotel ballrooms that all smelled faintly of the same carpet. Every so often a speaker would take the stage and set the room alight. Music, a story about a mountain, a closing line that brought hundreds of us to our feet.
I'd walk out buzzing. By the following Monday I'd be back in the same meetings, carrying the same tensions, making the same compromises I'd been making the week before. The speaker hadn't failed. I simply hadn't changed. I'd visited a different emotional climate for an hour and then gone home.
I'm thinking about those rooms a lot at the moment, because I'm about to stand at the front of them. After years of working one to one with senior leaders as an executive coach, and with my first book coming out in November, speaking is where I'm putting my energy next.
So before I start, I want to say clearly what kind of speaker I won't be. I will not be a motivational speaker.
That isn't snobbery about the craft. It's because I've come to believe that motivation, sold as the answer, doesn't last, and was never designed to.
Motivation is weather
Motivation is a state. A feeling. And feelings are built to pass. Nobody stays furious, euphoric or terrified indefinitely, and nobody stays fired up either.
Look at how motivation gets made in a conference hall: lighting, music, someone else's story, hundreds of people reacting at once. Every ingredient comes from outside you. When you leave the room, the ingredients stay behind, and the feeling follows them out.
Motivation is weather. You can't build a life on weather.
The borrowed chariot
The Greeks understood this long before anyone invented the keynote.
Phaethon, son of the sun god Helios, begged his father to let him drive the chariot of the sun for a single day. He was burning to prove himself. If ever there was a motivated young man, it was Phaethon. Helios reluctantly handed him the reins. The horses knew within minutes that the hands holding them weren't strong enough. They bolted. The earth caught fire. Zeus struck Phaethon from the sky to save the world from him.
He didn't fail for lack of drive. He failed because drive was all he had. The power was borrowed, and borrowed power always finds out who you are underneath. That's what a motivational hour does. It lends you the chariot for an afternoon.
What Odysseus did instead
Odysseus faced the Sirens differently.
He knew their song would destroy him. He didn't trust his resolve in the moment, and he didn't try to psych himself up. He knew himself, including his weakness. So before the island came into view, he had his crew plug their ears with wax and lash him to the mast, with orders to ignore whatever he begged once the singing began. He didn't rely on how he'd feel. He aligned his intentions with his actions in advance. When his feelings betrayed him, which they did, the structure held. That's the difference between motivation and the work I do. Motivation asks, "How do I feel right now?" Alignment asks, "Who am I, and do my actions agree?"
Thoughts, words and deeds
Over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi were carved two words: Know thyself. Pilgrims came from across the ancient world to ask about their future, and the first instruction they met was to look at who they already were.
Aristotle went further. Character, for him, is built by what we repeatedly do, and what we do should flow from what we genuinely value. When the two pull in opposite directions, we are divided against ourselves. A divided person needs constant motivating, because every action is a push against their own grain.
So the question I ask leaders isn't "How do we get you fired up?" It's this. Where are your thoughts, your words and your deeds out of step?
You think your health matters. You tell your team to protect their wellbeing. And you answer emails at midnight.
You believe in developing people. You say it in every town hall. And you haven't had a real career conversation with a direct report in a year.
That gap is where your energy leaks. Close it and something shifts. You stop needing to be motivated, because you're no longer fighting yourself.
That's what I call the Power Within. It isn't a feeling you top up before a big quarter. It's a coherence you build, slowly and often uncomfortably. It's still there on a grey Tuesday in February when nobody's playing music.
Why I'm writing this now?
Before my corporate career, I spent nearly eleven years working nightclub doors in South London. On a door you learn that the man shouting and pumping himself up is rarely the one to worry about. That energy is spent in minutes. The one to watch is the calm one, whose mind, mouth and intentions already agree. He isn't running on a feeling. He's running on a decision.
I've met the same quality since in the best leaders I've coached, without the menace. They don't arrive charged up. They arrive whole.
That's what I want people to leave my talks with. Not a surge, but a question they can't shake about the gap between who they say they are and who their calendar says they are. Fewer standing ovations, perhaps. Something that's still theirs in the morning.
I'm putting this in writing before I've given my first keynote for the same reason Odysseus asked to be tied to the mast. I know the pull is coming. I know how tempting it will be, with the lights down and the music up, to give the room the rush it came for. Now my words are on record, and my deeds will have to keep up. If I ever drift, you have my permission to send me this article.
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