Never Give Up!

Do you ever feel like a situation prevented you from being successful (no matter what you did)?

My advice is that if you find yourself in that predicament, don’t ever give up. Mark Jeffries, “soft skills” communications expert and motivational speaker, proved that persistence makes the difference in a speech he did last week. Speaking for an association in San Francisco last Friday, Mark was delayed from beginning his speech, had his speech time shortened, and had an extremely stoic audience. However, he didn’t stop trying. Finally, after 20 minutes of motivating, he captured the audience’s attention, and they were involved in his presentation.

Just then, the most amazingly horrible thing occurred. A person, who appeared to have importance and influence, blasted into the room, and screamed, “C’mon people we are trying to start another meeting and we are waiting for this group, what’s going on!?” Within minutes much of the room was scattering, leaving poor Mark Jeffries standing in the middle of the room, with 5 minutes still left of his shortened presentation.

This couldn’t have turned out good, could it?

Believe it or not, it did. The audience members, who were still left, came up to Mark and apologized for the outburst and said that not only was his speech a great one, but they wanted him to come back and do it again. In fact, he will probably get a number of spinoff bookings from this speech. Most surprising though was the comment that Mark was the best speaker at the event by far, which included author extraordanaire Marcus Buckingham.

Just remember. No situation is hopeless.