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The Wall Street Journal says being a motivational speaker is a high-paying gig. Actually what they say is it one of the five most overpaid jobs in the country.

Apparently that’s a bad thing.

For some of us, overpaid is ample motivation. But you really can’t make a name for yourself on the lecture circuit until you write a book.

And if you’re going to write a non-fiction book, quite often you need a novel thesis or - barring that - a gimmick.

Alas, cleverness is a technique which some authors push too far. Take, for example, a book that arrived in my mailbox called Release Your Brilliance. The book promises to deliver “4 steps to transforming your life and revealing your genius to the world.” And I thought that’s what blogs were here for.

Previously unknown to me, the author Simon T. Bailey once worked as a Disney executive but left it all behind to become a motivational speaker. I have no idea how well Bailey motivates people, but he sure has a way with conceits and affirmations.

I am skeptical of affirmations. Oh sure, sometimes I give myself a pep talk, but usually it’s on the tennis court where respectability is my aspiration, rather than say brilliance. But I digress. Bailey’s book offers an exercise he calls The Brilliance Continuum. Let me know if this works for you.

“Dazzling of course is what you’re striving for,” he writes. “Draw a vertical line to indicate where you believe you are right now on the Brilliance Continuum.”

< --------------------------------|--------------->

Dull                                                          Dazzling

I’m going to place a vertical line where I think I fall on this continuum today. You’ll see that I’m slightly more dazzling than dull, but that’s because I haven’t finished reading this motivational book yet.

Bailey includes helpful sidebar comments, which he calls Gems. I’ll share one with you now. “Everything you need to be brilliant is already inside you,” writes Bailey. If that’s the case, you need to choose wisely about whether a book will help you unlock your inner brilliance. It stands to reason that people who don’t take this advice to heart run the risk of having their brilliance bottled up so tightly they will never find it again.

Bailey is a busy guy, but he takes time each morning to “guard his energy and protect his spirit” with a “personal Hour of Power … twenty minutes of meditation, twenty minutes of exercise and twenty minutes of reading out loud.”

Hard to knock that advice, although I’m unclear on the reading aloud thing when you’re alone. Should you read aloud with inflection, you know, expressively, or just in a flat ‘let’s get through this’ kind of tone?  Maybe it depends upon what you’re reading. For a motivational book I suggest you read it as loud as possible - it’s therapeutic. 

I leave you today with one final Bailey gem: “If you want to expand your brilliance, expand your thinking.”