How To Motivate During Lunch

Last week I was asked to attend a retreat that celebrated the success of a group of top performing salespeople.  The group couldn't afford a motivational speaker so I was asked to fill in (I didn't take that as a slam).

Here are the details.

Audience: Top Performers
Time: 90 Minutes during lunch
Topic: Anything - Motivational in nature

This was a bit of a challenge, so let me walk you though my thinking.

First, I spent some time thinking about the audience.  If they are all top performing sales folks then as soon as I start speaking they are going to take what I am talking about and compare it to what they think and believe creates success.  If what I tell them veers off that line, or takes to long, or is deemed "squishy" then they will tune out.

The problem with them tuning out is that I will never know it.  They will look at me and smile, they will shake my hand at the end and tell me I did great.  They aren't being fake as this is what we do in a corporate environment.

Second, I looked at the time:  Having the lunch slot is really tough.  People are eating, talking and generally doing anything but paying attention.  It isn't there fault, but the slot can be difficult.

Third: The Topic.  "Anything motivational" is about as broad as you can get.

After thinking about this for an hour I did the following.

Pulled out my personal book reviews for Rapt, Drive, and Talent is Overrated.  I glanced through them and pulled out one idea from Drive (2nd page of book summary point #9).

I went and pulled the book off my shelf.


Daniel Pink has a section that starts on page 169 where he talks about a "FedEx" day.  This is where an employee would get some time to create something outside of their normal duties (i.e. Google).  This sounded like a catchy name for the exercise I was going to do.  That's all I got from that section...just the name.


The next idea came as I skimmed pages 154 and 155.  These pages talked about summing up your life in a sentence and then asking yourself if you got a little better each day.  These two things caught my eye for a number of reasons.

1. It seems like it would be a challenge to sum up your life in a single sentence.  Especially if the example sentence is "Lincoln: He preserved the Union and freed the slaves".
2. It puts everyone to work thinking about their favorite subject...themselves.
3. The focus then becomes the individuals not the speaker.  I have gone from being the main event to facilitating a discussion around the group.  This is much easier

The final idea is a foundational item.  Asking the group to reveal 1-2 secrets around how they got successful.

Now I had to take these items and combine them into an activity.  I wanted to do an activity because it would get the group moving, talking, laughing and thinking.  After about 20 minutes I would then get each person to share their thinking with the group.  That would go well because each person would have the spotlight for a bit, and share a bit of themselves with the group.  That knowledge would help someone in the group at some point in the future.

Finally, I created an activity sheet that would provide the details and instructions of my activity.  I choose to have the individuals draw, color, glue or cut out their secrets of success.  At first this seems like a bad, squishy idea, but it isn't.  I did this once before with a group of professionals and they loved it.  It is so nontraditional that it is reasonably fun for a short time.  You have to make sure that the directions are clear, that they don't "play" for too long, and that they have a purpose for their play.

Here it is...The FedEx Lunch