Motivating Your Audience

Motivating Your Audience - Hanoch McCarty

The book promises to talk about how it is we can speak to people and communicate with them in a way that motivates them. Causes them to take action and feel great about themselves. I read it recently and here is what I thought. Remember of course that all of this is only my own opinion, and counts for nothing more, or less.

It's a paperback with a terrible front cover. Should we judge a book by it's cover I am not sure, but when the author is talking about the importance of presentation you might think he'd have considered the first impression his book makes. But let us delve inside.

The first thing that struck me was the nice font size. It's readable and the font itself makes it look interesting and easy on the eye. The binding has been a little clumsy in all honesty as the text goes right in to the centre and you really have to strain the binding of the book to read the end of each line. Now for the content.

McCarty starts off with a really lovely, insightful discussion of how we are all motivated and how we can use those natural motivations in order to motivate people for our own purpose. A great way to start a book and exactly what I expected.

For the remainder of the book however he seems to leave behind the idea of motivating to give an insightful view of how to be a speaker, how to arrange things like introductions and contracts, room layouts and how to be a good speaker. Let me tell you that his ideas are fantastic and obviously learned from working and being a super successful speaker - if the book had been on the subject of how you can be a successful speaker, having an expert like McCarty as your teacher would be a great resource for those starting out and those who already have some experience but want to be more effective.

However that is not the title of the book. I was disapointed by the lack of information on how we can actually structure a speech, how we can literally motivate our audiences. Which in truth is what the title and description promised us.

My Verdict:
If you want to be a better speaker (motivational or not) or want to get in to speaking then this is a great book. If you want to learn the skills that a speaker uses to motivate people and have them wanting to take action then we do need to look elsewhere.

Judge for Yourself
Don't just trust my opinion. It's not exactly a pricey purchase at only £10.99 right now. The book is available from Amazon here: Motivating Your Audience