Scamming a living

Sean Bean’s latest advert for Yorkshire Tea is a classic of its genre, a piss-take of the lowest form of life: that of the ‘motivational speaker’.

I’ve not encountered all that many motivational speakers given that the bulk of my career was spent in public service and the rest in the third sector. But late in my civil service ‘career’, our management concluded that the team I was working in, a small but already highly motivated team of benefit fraud investigators, might benefit from a team-building day, including hiring a motivational speaker. We were told that the bloke they’d hired was well known and highly regarded. In practice, it was among the funniest days I ever spent.

In truth, I have no recollection of what our star turn talked about. However, I do remember the steady hubbub of chatter as he prattled on, in an alien language comprising of business speak and general bullshit that had literally nothing to do with my life or my job.

At the interval, one of our managers scuttled around the room, asking us to take the event more seriously and to stop laughing at many of the things the speaker had said. But how could you? If you find something genuinely funny, then now can you not laugh? “Try and be professional,” concluded our manager, whatever that meant.

By the time the speaker finished, there was stunned silence. What were we supposed to do now? I am guessing that his normal audience would have been target driven salesmen. In that case, what use was this nonsense to them?

Our speaker, it transpired, had cost a fortune to hire. He had come along, talked on subjects about which he appeared to have no greater knowledge than me and scammed his way out of, I later discovered, in excess of £500. £500 to talk bollocks.

Sean Bean was good because he was taking the piss. The audience , who as at all such events, are obliged to attend and to generally be on their best behaviour, avoiding be honest about the shit emanating from the top table.

My view is that motivational speaking is a means by which employers tick boxes, in that they are supposedly taking into account the welfare of their employees and helping them do better in the work. In other words, absolute bollocks.

I would need more than motivational speaking to persuade me to consume Yorkshire Tea. And all the tea in China could not persuade me to sit through another afternoon of motivational speaking.