Funny Motivational Speaker: Respond to “Ding Moments” in 9 Simple Steps!

As a funny motivational speaker, I speak to groups about how to use ideas from improv comedy to quickly and effectively respond to the unexpected. I call these moments the “Dings” of life (to see why, check out this video)

Things will go wrong. Anyone can do well when everything goes exactly as planned. The real test of you and your organization is how well you deal with these Ding moments when they happen – because they will! The following 9 ideas will show you how to not only react to the Dings of life, but also how to find opportunities within them and to be a leader of change, not just a victim of it.

Do You Need a Funny Motivational Speaker for Your Next Conference or Event?

If so, Avish can help! Check out his demo video and TEDx talk to see him in action or read about his keynote presentations. Better yet, contact him now to see how one of his funny keynote speeches can help make your next event a success!

Improvise: React to Dings!

When Ding Happens, the first step is to simply react to it, quickly and effectively. To do that:

1. Focus on What You Can Control, Let Go of the Rest. Putting time and energy on things you can’t control is like standing in a storm, yelling at the wind to stop. It accomplishes nothing and tires you out. Great improvisers put their attention on one thing: what they can do right here, right now, only with what they have.
2. Have Fun. Having fun, laughing, and staying positive reduces stress, increases creativity, and makes you more able to stay calm and take logical action. Find a way to stay up, even when things are down. Trust me on this – when you make your living as a funny motivational speaker, you have to keep having fun no matter what goes wrong around you. This one technique alone has helped me survive many potentially disastrous situations.
3. Be Willing to Fail. Failure isn’t ok; it usually has serious consequences. However, focusing on the fear of failure achieves nothing but taking our focus off of the only things that matter: the activities that ensure we won’t fail!

Adapt: Take Advantage of Dings!

Every Ding has an opportunity hidden inside of it. If you want to move from merely putting out fires to truly making progress, then use these three techniques to starting finding those opportunities:

4. Improve the Status Quo. When Ding Happens, your first response may be to try to get back to where you were before things went haywire. However, that just keeps you at the “treading water” place. To take advantage of Dings, start asking yourself, “How can I get to a place that is better than where I was before?”
5. Act with Gusto.Great improvisation is about taking action; improv comedy is not a tentative person’s art form. Don’t do something foolish (like gambling away your savings) but don’t let opportunities pass you by because you are afraid to take action.
6. Say, “Yes, And!” Simply put, when Ding Happens, stop saying “yes, but” and start saying “Yes, And!” (A principle so important I wrote a whole book on it: “Say ‘Yes, And!’”). This may sound simplistic, but in 13+ years of being a funny motivational speaker, this is the one point that always has the biggest impact on my audiences.

Innovate: Create Your Own Dings!

If you want to be a leader in your industry or organization, or if you simply want to break out of a rut, get past a plateau, or achieve a goal you have been struggling with, then you may need to start creating some Dings of your own. Here are three ways to help you do that:

7. Add Constraints.Constraints are generally seen as a bad thing. However, adding constraints (trying to do things with less time, money, energy, etc.) is one of the best ways to increase creativity and force productivity.
8. Increase Complexity.I know, I know: We all want our lives to be simpler, not more complex. But the simplicity you seek may very well be on the other side of greater complexity. For example, if you want to make more money, you may need more education. More education means spending money, juggling schedules, filling out applications, and adding more work to a full calendar. That’s more complex. And yet, beyond that complexity are the results you want. For me, the big breakthrough in my business came when I focused on how to add challenging improv games to my funny motivational speaker business. This wasn’t easy, but once I pushed past that complexity, things got much, much better for my business.
9. Apply Creativity.Creativity is a big topic. In this context, it comes down to doing one of two things: doing something that hasn’t been done before, or doing something that has been done before in a different way. Start asking yourself, “what if?” “Why not?” and “what I am afraid of doing?” Those questions will open your creative mind and help you become a Ding Maker!

The next time Ding Happens to you, apply some (or all) of these nine steps and you will respond like a true improviser!

Do You Need a Funny Motivational Speaker for Your Next Conference or Event?

If so, Avish can help! Check out his demo video and TEDx talk to see him in action or read about his keynote presentations. Better yet, contact him now to see how one of his funny keynote speeches can help make your next event a success!