If your company has a big event coming up, why not use the occasion for a little staff motivation and drive some enthusiasm into your employees with a professional speaker or keynote speaker. One of the best ways of doing this is to hire a good South-African motivational speaker speaking in London, Dubai, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban or Cape Town as one of the star attractions. There are numerous well-known South African personalities who also turn their hand to become a freelance motivational speaker in their spare time, or "after hours", so to speak. One of the advantages of having a local personality, whether he or she is a sports, a television or a radio celebrity, is that most of your workforce will know of them, and may even admire them. This obviously applies to any popular after dinner speaker, an inspirational speaker at an international conference or a speaker at teamwork team building. People tend to look up to celebrities, and when you engage a South African personality as your instructional motivational speaker half of the battle is already won. Because the speaker is a famous local person, the audience's attention from the first sentence is almost guaranteed. That is not to say that the speaker should not abide by the practices of good public speaking. Any local motivational speaker has to use all of the tricks in the books to keep the audience attentive. He or she must make use of gestures and body language, use eye contact, articulate words properly, make good and effective use of "how to" quotations and keep the voice interesting. To summarise, the good public motivational speaker must show sincerity, confidence, enthusiasm, humour and a good knowledge of his subject. To remain a good and effective speaker it is necessary to practice, practice and practice again. While practising bear this in mind. It is more difficult to be plain in speech than fancy, to be simple than to be artificial and to be what we are than to pretend to be what we are not.