I became a motivational speaker before I knew there was such a thing as a motivational speaker.
I was in third-year high school. It was Easter Sunday, and students from different schools had gathered for a large celebration. I no longer remember how many were there. Perhaps two thousand. Perhaps three thousand. What I remember is that the place was filled with young people.
Instead of the priest giving the usual homily, three students were asked to share our stories.
I was one of them.
A week earlier, I had attended a leadership workshop. Some seminarians heard me tell my story there and said they were inspired by it. I think that was why they chose me to speak on Easter Sunday.
I was not trained in public speaking. I did not know about gestures, stage presence, storytelling techniques, or how to structure an inspirational speech. I was not even comfortable with language. I was born Visayan, and neither English nor Tagalog came naturally to me.
But I had a story.
And that day, I told it.
It Was a Story I Was Not Proud to Tell
My story was about my family, my schooling, and the difficulties I had experienced growing up.
These were not stories I enjoyed telling people.
For much of my young life, I looked at those experiences as reasons someone might pity me. There were parts that embarrassed me. When your life does not look beautiful, you do not necessarily imagine that other people will want to hear about it.
Sometimes you would rather hide it.
But I stood in front of those students and told them anyway.
As I spoke about my family, school, teachers, and the struggles I had gone through, people began to cry.
I did not know any storytelling formula. I was not consciously trying to create an emotional response. I was simply telling them what had happened to me.
And because it was Easter, the story eventually led me to resurrection.
I cannot remember the exact Filipino words I used. I remember the meaning.
I said that suffering can defeat us. Maaaring magpatalo tayo sa paghihirap. But if we truly believe in Christ, then like Christ, we too can rise.
Whatever we have.
Wherever we are now.
Whatever difficulty we are going through.
This does not have to be the end of our story.
We can rise.
I do not remember planning that line. It seemed to come out while I was speaking.
But something happened in that room.
After the Mass, People Came Looking for Me
Students approached me after the Mass.
They told me they were inspired by my story. Some said it had helped them. They told me they saw themselves in what I had shared.
That surprised me.
I had thought my story made me someone to be pitied.
They saw something else.
They saw courage.
They saw someone who did not have many resources but kept finding ways. They saw a young person who could experience difficulty without allowing difficulty to have the final word.
Some of them looked up to me for the very experiences I had been embarrassed to reveal.
That Easter Sunday changed something in me.
I realized:
I am not pitiful.
My difficulties were real. But they did not make me less than everyone else.
In fact, the story I wanted to hide had become useful to someone else.
That discovery changed the way I saw my own life.
My Story Began Traveling Before I Did
Something else happened after that Easter Sunday.
People started hearing about the story.
I would attend leadership seminars and meet someone who would say, “Somebody told me about your story. I want to hear it too.”
So I told it again.
Then I was invited to speak somewhere else.
And again.
I must have delivered dozens of speeches during those years, although I never called them motivational speeches. I did not think of myself as a motivational speaker.
I was simply a young man telling people what I had lived through and what I had learned from it.
But the speeches motivated people just the same.
Looking back, I learned something important before I learned anything about the speaking profession:
You do not have to be a great speaker to say something worth hearing.
I certainly wasn’t a great speaker.
I did not know the techniques.
I was uncomfortable speaking.
I was still figuring out the languages I was using.
But I had something true to say.
And somehow, people could find themselves inside my story.
That became more important than eloquence.
Actually, I Had Been Practicing Even Earlier
If I wanted to trace the story even farther back, I would have to return to Grade Six.
I joined a patronato, a kind of Sunday school. I became one of the young leaders there, and whenever the nun was absent, there were occasions when I was asked to teach the younger children.
I did not think of that as public speaking either.
I was teaching.
But those small opportunities were training me without my knowing it. I learned to stand in front of other people. I learned to explain something. I learned what it felt like when people were listening to me and I had some responsibility for what happened next.
None of these experiences looked like the beginning of a speaking career.
There was no career.
There were simply opportunities to speak, teach, lead, and tell stories.
I kept saying yes.
The Seminary Was a Continuation, Not the Beginning
Eventually, I entered the seminary.
In some ways, seminary life felt like an extension of what had happened that Easter Sunday.
We conducted retreats. We spoke about life, family, faith, gratitude, choices, and hope. Again, our purpose was not simply to transfer information.
We wanted people to see.
We hoped someone would look at his parents differently. Someone would become grateful for what she had taken for granted. Someone carrying disappointment would realize that the present situation was not the whole story.
And sometimes we saw people make commitments to change their lives.
I still did not call what I was doing motivational speaking.
But I was learning what motivation meant to me.
It was not about making people excited.
It was about helping someone see another possibility.
Years later, I would find the words for it:
A motivational speaker invites you to see a different world and live in it today.
I first experienced the power of that invitation as a high school student.
The seminary allowed me to keep practicing it.
Activism Added Another Piece: Move
Then came activism.
Activism taught me that seeing differently is not enough.
You have to move.
It is possible to understand a problem and do nothing about it. It is possible to agree with a cause, applaud a speech, nod at all the right places, and return to the same behavior.
I wanted something to happen.
That instinct remains with me today. In fact, I have come to think of motivational speaking as an act of activism.
I do not mean that every motivational speech must be political.
I mean something more basic.
The activist refuses to believe that the world must remain exactly as it is.
Something can change.
A situation can change. A workplace can change. A relationship can change. A person can change the way he sees himself.
And sometimes changing the world begins with helping one person see that the world he is living in is not the only world available to him.
That was the second half of my education.
The seminary helped me understand the power of seeing.
Activism taught me the importance of moving.
Teaching Made It Personal
I later became a teacher, and the classroom gave these ideas another form.
Of course, I wanted my students to learn the subject. I wanted them to do well. I wanted them to get perfect scores if they could.
But I never thought teaching ended with the subject.
I felt it was also the teacher’s responsibility to open students’ eyes.
A lesson could teach them what was in the syllabus. But an encounter with a teacher might help a student see his own life differently.
That mattered more to me.
If I could teach the subject well, good.
If I could help a student who was ready to give up continue going to school and eventually finish, even better.
Again, I did not separate this from the rest of my life.
Teaching, retreat work, activism, leadership, and speaking seemed to be different activities.
Looking back, I can see the same impulse running through all of them.
Help people see. Help people move.
Les Brown Helped Me Name What I Was Becoming
Much later, I encountered Les Brown.
That was when the idea of the professional motivational speaker became clearer to me.
What fascinated me was not merely his ability to speak. It was what he did with his life story.
His struggles became part of his message.
His mess became a message.
I understood that immediately because I had experienced something similar years before, although on a much smaller scale.
The story I had once been ashamed to tell was the story other young people wanted to hear.
The things that had made me feel pitiful were the same things that helped somebody else feel courageous.
That is one of the great powers of storytelling.
A truthful story gives another person a vicarious experience.
For a few minutes, you walk through somebody else’s struggle. You experience something of the fear, uncertainty, rejection, persistence, and discovery.
Then you return to your own life.
But you do not always return as the same person.
The details of my story do not need to be the details of yours.
You do not need my life.
You need to see what might be possible in yours.
Other Speakers Showed Me What the Craft Could Become
I began paying more attention to people who could move audiences.
Some were preachers and pastors. I did not call them motivational speakers, but I studied what they could do. A good preacher could take an old idea and make it feel immediate. A story could suddenly make someone examine his own life.
Later I encountered professional Filipino speakers such as Anthony Pangilinan, Francis Kong, and Chinkee Tan.
And then there was Onofre Pagsanghan.
When Onofre Pagsanghan spoke, we laughed. We cried. We stood. I remember an extraordinary standing ovation.
But what impressed me most was not that he could make us admire him.
He made us think about ourselves.
I remember feeling that there were things perhaps we could have done but had not done.
Then another possibility appeared:
We can still do something.
I experienced something similar listening to Dick Santiago. He could speak for only a couple of minutes and leave a room silent.
It was not simply because we thought he was great.
He made us feel that we could be great too.
That distinction eventually became central to the kind of motivational speaker I wanted to become.
The Best Speakers Eventually Disappear
The speakers I admire can hold everyone’s attention without making the entire experience about themselves.
Something curious happens while they are speaking.
They begin to disappear.
You start by listening to their story. Then their story makes you think about your story. Their question becomes your question. Their voice becomes part of a conversation happening inside your head.
You are still listening.
But you are also talking to yourself.
It reminds me of watching a great movie. You know there are actors, cameras, scripts, lights, directors, rehearsals, and editing. Yet when the movie works, you stop noticing the machinery.
You enter the story.
You laugh.
You cry.
You hope.
Something happening to a character becomes strangely connected to something happening inside you.
That is the kind of speaking I began wanting to learn.
Not speaking that makes the audience say:
“What a great speaker.”
Speaking that makes someone say:
“I see my life differently now.”
This Is Why I Rehearse
As speaking eventually became professional work, I had to learn the craft I did not know on that Easter Sunday.
I learned to study audiences.
To structure speeches.
To choose stories.
To pay attention to words, timing, questions, silence, humor, transitions, and endings.
I rehearse.
I study.
I revise.
But I do not do all that because I want to manufacture the greatest possible impression of Jef Menguin.
I prepare so the machinery can disappear.
Just like a good movie.
I want the audience to enter the experience deeply enough that they stop being spectators.
Because the audience should eventually become the hero.
I Am Not the Hero of the Speech
This changed the way I understood storytelling.
If I tell you about something difficult I survived and the speech ends with you admiring me, the story has not gone far enough.
At some point, my struggle should help you see yours.
If I tell a story about courage, eventually I want you thinking about the moment in your own life where courage is required.
If I speak about creating opportunities, I want you to begin seeing the stage you could create.
My story should become a mirror.
Perhaps the motivational speaker is better understood as the mentor.
The mentor enters the hero’s story for a while. The mentor asks a question, provides a tool, offers courage, challenges an assumption, or points toward another road.
But the mentor cannot complete the journey.
Eventually, the mentor has to disappear.
The Microphone Always Goes Silent
Every speech ends.
The lights go down. The microphone is returned. The audience leaves. I go home.
And that is when the part I care about most begins.
The manager returns to the office.
The teacher enters another classroom.
The recruiter opens another application.
The salesperson meets another customer.
The student wakes up the following morning.
Their lives continue without me.
That is how it should be.
I do not want people to believe they need Jef Menguin in order to move.
I want them to discover:
I can move.
The speaker should eventually become unnecessary.
The audience continues the story.
I Became a Motivational Speaker by Becoming More of Myself
For years, I could have told this story as a career progression.
First I did this. Then I became that. Then people hired me. Then speaking became a profession.
Those things happened.
But they are not really the origin.
The origin is a Grade Six boy teaching younger children when the nun was absent.
It is a third-year high school student standing in front of thousands of other students on Easter Sunday, telling a story he was embarrassed to tell.
It is the moment those students came to him afterward and said:
Your story helped me.
It is the young man who discovered that what he considered evidence of his brokenness looked like courage to somebody else.
It is the seminarian hoping a retreat might help someone see life differently.
The activist insisting that seeing must eventually become movement.
The teacher who believed the subject mattered, but the student’s life mattered more.
And eventually, the professional speaker learning the craft well enough to get himself out of the way.
I did not become a motivational speaker because I learned how to perform motivation.
I became one because, again and again, life put me in situations where I discovered the same thing:
A story can help someone see another world.
And when people see another world, sometimes they find the courage to enter it.
Today.
The Story I Once Wanted to Hide Became the Beginning
When I think back to that Easter Sunday, I am struck by the irony.
I thought parts of my life made me pitiful.
I did not want people to know them.
Then I stood in front of a crowd and told the truth about them.
And people did not pity me.
They saw courage.
They saw resourcefulness.
They saw someone who would keep looking for a way even when other people had already decided there was no way left.
More importantly, they saw themselves.
That may have been the first great lesson of my speaking life.
The speaker’s story matters most when the listener finds himself inside it.
I did not know that phrase then.
I did not know about motivational speaking.
I certainly did not know that speaking would eventually become part of my life’s work.
I was just a high school student telling the truth about his life on Easter Sunday.
But perhaps Easter was the right day for the story to begin.
Because underneath everything I have said on stages since then is still that old conviction:
Suffering does not have to have the final word.
Wherever you are now does not have to be where your story ends.
You can rise.
You can see another world.
And you can begin living in it today.
That is how I became a motivational speaker.
If you’re tired of knowing but not doing…
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