Youth Motivational Speaker On Middle School Students
Last Friday I did back to back motivational presentations to a local middle school. It was one of the earliest speaking engagements I’ve ever done with the start time at 8:15 am for the grades 7/8 followed by the grade 6s. The grade 6s would be the youngest audience I’ve ever spoken to as I’ve always set my youngest audience that I’ll ever do presentations to at high school level (grade 9 and up).
For this younger audience, I modified my ‘Creating Awesome Futures‘ talk but replaced the communication skills section with a new one on bullying. I was afraid that the communication skills on leadership content would be above the grade 6s heads. But a bullying section would be totally relevant for their age levels.
My presentations to these 1,100 students and their teachers went over really well. The only things which I found that were typical of these younger audiences that could have been controlled better were that some of them were too soft spoken when asking me questions as I could barely hear them and that at times there were a bit too much chatter going on among them. But now that I can expect these to happen with such younger audiences, we’ll just build better ways to control these next time.
Here’s what the Tanmay Dave, the teacher whom was my main contact from this middle school had to say about my presentations to their students.
“On behalf of myself, my principal, and all the staff at David Leeder Middle school, thank you for taking the time to come in to share your message. The staff were very appreciative of your presentation and I think the students really gained a great deal of motivation from your talk on expanding their comfort zones, developing people skills, multi-culturalism, and leaders bringing out the best in others.”
So now that I know for sure that a modified version of my youth talk called ‘Creating Awesome Futures‘ would work nicely with this age group, I’ll expand my audience age range a bit further down as the minimum age audience I’ll be willing to speak to.
