#seniors #personalgrowth #health —- As part of my own speaker identity, all of my talks whether in motivational personal growth or in diversity, have some martial arts component to them. The motivational talk I did for the Probus club last week was no different. Probus as many of you know by now is a network of community clubs where the vast majority of members are retired seniors.
One of the parts of my motivational talk utilizes a martial arts karate weapon called a bo staff which is more or less a long stick. At one point of the talk, I recruit one or two volunteers, usually women, to join me up onstage to do some moves with the bo staff. I make sure that they have never, ever used a bo staff before. In all my talks so far, all volunteers except for one person, had never used a bo staff in his or her life. The one exception was this lady who did train in karate before but she was disqualified from this activity during my presentation. Of course, she understood completely why I wanted to use sheer beginners for this so there wasn’t any problems at all.
Now back to this Probus talk. In front of their colleagues and fellow Probus members, I had these two ladies up front with me and taught them some basic bo staff moves. Everybody was thoroughly entertained as both the audience and these two ladies had fun.
More important is the lesson behind this activity during my motivational talk. Since these two senior ladies have never used bo staffs in their lives before and I got them doing some basic moves in a few minutes, in front of their peers, a wonderful thing happened before their very eyes.
These two volunteers demonstrated that personal growth was indeed possible for any age group including the seniors. This was an ‘ah-ha’ moment for the Probus audience for sure.
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