We all have our favourite motivational speech. Many look to a particular moment in a TED talk. I am always fascinated by the ‘death crawl scene’ in the film Facing The Giants. And the recent video posting of basketball champs in front of US veterans is incredibly revealing.

This week in Jerusalem, I found myself encouraging several of my clients to move beyond established positions. It was my task as their business coach to show them not just that how progress is attainable. Even more, they can enjoy that change.

At 5.00am this morning, I found myself surfing the net and looking for an additional angle. I choose the first clip that Google found for me. CLICK HERE and watch for nine minutes.

Now I have seen so many of these talks and have become a little ‘acclimitised’ to them . So I was a bit surprised when I heard something that made me stop and think, literally. About half way through James Tarantin, speaking from a lectern, asks:

If competitive challenge is what excites people, why then do we choose the easiest challenges?

OK. That is powerful. It is certainly relevant to many of us and there is certainly a lot of me there. But then I asked myself another question. Why is it that that particular statement in all of the nine minutes that struck a cord with me? And that is when I let out an emotional “OUCH”.

Again, we all listen to or even attend such talks. We nod diligently at the wise comments. However, for the words to have an effect, we have to be honest with ourselves and we have to be prepared to change. We have to allow ourselves to go one step deeper and then ask why a specific phrase or sentence is so desperately pertinent.

It seems that my thought process had taken somewhere I had not wanted to go for a long time. Yes, it was unnerving for a moment, and then very cathartic.

What next? Some of my mentoring clients had better beware over the next few days!