Why I Became a Motivational Speaker for Mental Health

I’m a motivational speaker for mental health who is busy delivering live and virtual presentations to a variety of events and organizations. One question I often get asked is, why did you become a motivational speaker for mental health?

Since 2011, I’ve been a motivational speaker for mental health. It started as part-time work and quickly became full-time work. Here’s why I got started on this wild journey.

First, you should know this about me. I don’t like motivational speakers. Often to me, they feel very fake. I’m a child of the eighties, and I would watch late-night infomercials with motivational speakers saying, “You can do it,” blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff. And I just don’t resonate with that.

I think it’s fake. So often, people use the term “motivational speaker,” but you can’t really motivate someone. Motivation, in my opinion, is a byproduct of action. All a motivational speaker can do is inspire. So, that’s where I start my career. I don’t like motivational speakers. My career began as a professional drummer. 

But the second thing you should know about me is that I’m very spiritual. I don’t talk about this a lot, but one of the spiritual laws that I believe in is The Law of Dharma. This is an Eastern spiritual law, and there are two questions that I’ve been asking myself every day since I was 17:

• How can I help? 
• How can I serve? 

The whole purpose of asking these questions was to figure out my purpose. I would wait for a bill billboard or email to come in to give me an answer. Nothing ever came, but by asking these questions, I think I got myself into this space of helping and serving others. Looking back over time, the answer revealed itself to me. 

Another question I ask myself often is, what are my natural gifts? If you ask people what they want to do in life, they can tell you, I dream of doing this, or I’m passionate about that. But if you ask people what their natural gifts are, many people don’t know. I realized for me early on that one of my natural gifts was playing the drums. Another natural gift of mine was speaking. 

By asking those questions, I started to figure out my purpose. Now, you should know that I have struggled with mental illness for my entire life, and it’s been difficult. It’s been very, very difficult. Mental illness doesn’t look like anything. People think you’re supposed to talk a certain way, show up in the world a certain way, or have a certain financial situation. But that’s not the case. Anyone can experience mental illness, and that’s on a spectrum in and of itself. 

For me, it’s a major depressive disorder that is debilitating and causes physical pain, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder that paralyzes my body. Fortunately, at the time of writing this, I’m doing okay.  

But in 2011, I had a breakdown. I was that person on the streets. I was disassociating, didn’t know what was happening, and was having panic attacks. I was spiraling and losing touch with reality. And I’ll admit, I wanted to die by suicide. 

I reached out to this woman named Cheryl, who I knew worked in mental health because I needed help. So I said, “Can you help me?”

And she was happy to hear from me. She said, “Mike, it’s nice to hear your voice.” I remember thinking, “This is not that kind of conversation. I’m really in a bad place.” I can’t even imitate how bad it was, and I didn’t like her response. She asked if she could hire me to be a mental health speaker at her event. 

I thought, “No, absolutely not. You’re not listening to me. I need help.”

So, the next day she emailed me, CC’d some other people I knew, and asked me again to be a mental health speaker at her event. So, I figured, why not? Maybe it’ll prevent me from harming myself in some way if I have something to look forward to. So I did it very reluctantly. 

I spoke at the event. I sat at the podium with a piece of paper in my hand and shared my story. And I started crying for the first time as an adult. That was weird. And at the end of the presentation, I got a standing ovation. People came up to me, asking me if they could hire me. 

I’m like, “What the heck is going on? I’m a drummer. I’m not a speaker. I don’t like speakers.”

And you know, that’s really how the journey began.

But the hedgehog concept is one of the most important reasons why I became a mental health speaker. Jim Collins introduced this concept in his book “Good to Great,” where he argues that truly great companies are oriented around a hedgehog concept. 

It’s basically three questions: 

1. What are you deeply passionate about?
2. What drives your economic engine?
3. What can you be the best at in the world?

So, I was driving in the car one day, and I asked myself those questions and allowed myself to answer them honestly. So the first one, what are you deeply passionate about at the time, was mental health. I wanted to stay well, and things were so bad. I was suffering and thought, “No one should have to suffer like this.” So that was my answer—I was deeply passionate about mental health. 

Then the next question, what drives your economic engine? At the time, it was drumming, teaching, private lessons, and workshops. I was also a performer, and I ran a business. So I realized that that was driving my economic engine. 

Then I asked myself the last question, what can you be the best at in the world? This was tough. I had to go back to my gifts. I’m not the best drummer in the world or the best speaker, but what if I put them together? And, what if we put my mental illness in there?

So I combined my mental illness with speaking and drumming and had a unique product. And that’s why I became a motivational speaker for mental health. 

And also, I did it as a promise to myself, to hold myself accountable for my own mental health. Because often, when you are on this mental illness journey, it’s easy to slip. Maybe it’s going off your medication, or something significant happens in life that triggers you, and you spiral. So I said to myself, this is going to be a hack. I’m going to become a speaker professionally for the rest of my life, or as long as I can do it, I should say, because this will hold me accountable to myself. 

Now I’m busy delivering live and virtual presentations with a very full schedule. So, if you’re interested in learning more about my presentations, I invite you to contact me here. You can also check out my video on how I became a motivational speaker on mental health on my YouTube channel.