A motivational speaker or inspirational speaker is a speaker who makes speeches intended to motivate or inspire an audience. Business entities may employ motivational speakers (for example) to communicate company strategy with clarity, to help employees to see the future in a positive light, and to inspire workers to pull together. The talk itself is often known as a pep talk. Motivational speakers are also commonly known as inspirational speakers and/or keynote speakers. Common motivational speaker topics include business, mentoring, team building, sales, inspiration, management and customer service. Popular motivational speakers include Tony Robbins, Les Brown and Naseer Khan. Here are some of the best motivational speakers we have:

1. Les Brown

Leslie Calvin "Les" Brown (born February 17, 1945) is a motivational speaker, former Ohio politician, popular author, radio DJ, and former host of The Les Brown Show. As a politician, he is a former member of the Ohio House of Representatives. As a motivational speaker, he uses the catch phrase, "It's possible," and teaches people to follow their dreams as he learned to do.

Professional life

As derived from many of Brown's speeches, he first decided to get into public radio and kept returning to the same radio station time and time again looking for a break, and it wasn't until the on-air failures of the afternoon DJ that he took his break in radio into his own hands and was hired full-time as on-air talent. Upon his termination from the radio station, he ran for election in the Ohio House of Representatives and won. After leaving the Ohio state legislature, he decided to get into television and eventually ended up on PBS. He also formed Les Brown Enterprises in order to support his newest career as a motivational speaker and is now also on KFWB in California on a daily syndicated radio program. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he also won many local and national awards for excellence and he has an Emmy to his name.

2. Hilary Hinton "Zig" Ziglar

Hilary Hinton "Zig" Ziglar (November 6, 1926 – November 28, 2012) was an American author, salesman, and motivational speaker. Zig Ziglar was born in Coffee County in southeastern Alabama to John Silas Ziglar and Lila Wescott Ziglar. He was the tenth of twelve children. Ziglar served in the United States Navy during World War II, from 1943 to 1945. He was in the Navy V-12 Navy College Training Program and attended the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina.

Ziglar later worked as a salesman in a succession of companies. In 1968, he became a vice president and training director for the Automotive Performance company, moving to Dallas, Texas. By 2010, Ziglar still traveled around taking part in motivational seminars, despite a fall down a flight of stairs in 2007 that left him with short-term memory problems.

Ziglar integrated Christianity into his motivational work. He was also an open Republican who endorsed former Governor Mike Huckabee for his party's presidential nomination in 2008. On November 28, 2012, Ziglar died from pneumonia at a hospital in Plano, Texas.

3. Tony Robbins

Tony Robbins (born Anthony J. Mahavorick; February 29, 1960) is an American life coach and self-help author. He became well known through his infomercials and self-help books, Unlimited Power, Unleash the Power Within and Awaken the Giant Within.

In 2007, he was named in Forbes magazine's "Celebrity 100" list. Forbes estimated that Robbins earned approximately $30 million USD in that year.

Career

Robbins began his career promoting seminars for Jim Rohn. According to Robbins, Rohn taught him that “happiness and success in life are not the result of what we have, but rather of how we live. What we do with the things we have makes the biggest difference in the quality of life.”

Later Robbins began his own work as a self-help coach. He taught neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and Ericksonian Hypnosis after training with NLP co-founder John Grinder. In 1983, Robbins learned to firewalk from Tolly Burkan and began to incorporate it into his seminars.

Robbins promoted his services as a "peak performance coach" through his books and TV infomercials, gaining strong public recognition and lucrative sales. He gained wide exposure through infomercials advertising his Personal Power series of self-help audiotapes.

In 1997, Robbins began the Leadership Academy seminar, in which he said participants learn to "create an identity for them self as someone who can help 'anyone', no matter what his/her challenge may be." Robbins is a featured speaker on the seminar circuit sponsored by Learning Annex. Robbins appeared as a featured speaker at the 2007 Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference. As of August 2012, his talk was the 6th most popular TED talk.

Robbins is involved with the Robbins-Madanes Center for Strategic Intervention, which focuses on personal, family and organizational psychology, and claims to help people "find breakthrough strategies and solutions for overcoming the problems that confront us all.

Throughout his writings, seminars and speeches Robbins espouses viewpoints, techniques and other practices he asserts can help adherents improve their lives. Among these are methods he calls the "controlling state" and "neuro-associative conditioning". He also speaks a great deal about various "human needs, influences that affect people, the power of making decisions" and the need to achieve "emotional mastery". He espouses a concept he calls "Life's Two Master Lessons", which he claims are "The science of achievement" and "The art of fulfillment."

In 1991 Robbins launched a charity, the Anthony Robbins Foundation. It is dedicated to empowering students and prisoners through food drives and learning programs based on his teachings. According to the official website, the foundation has "products and programs in more than 2,000 schools, 700 prisons, and 100,000 health and human service organizations".These programs have been written about and featured in many dozens of articles. They have appeared on various websites, like Cherish Our Children International and Harmony With No Limits. The independent charity watchdog, Charity Navigator, gives the foundation a rating of three out of four stars. The official website says that "the Foundation is committed to make a difference in the quality of life for children, the homeless, the prison population, and the elderly through its various programs". The foundation has subsequently led to the forming of "Basket Brigades" across the world that occur each Thanksgiving. Individuals and groups have joined together to assemble and deliver dinner baskets to needy families.

(Sources: wikipedia)