Post-pandemic, D.C. motivational speaker focuses on coming back
Feeling rather uninspired lately, I went to hear Willie Jolley, a D.C. native who has made it big as a professional motivational speaker. He’ll be at Emory Fellowship in Northwest Washington for the next two Saturday nights, fine-tuning his newI found the theme intriguing: “A setback is just a setup for a comeback.”
“I said something needs to be done, and what I can do is to encourage and inspire people,” Jolley told the audience. “My goal for you today is for you to smile. You will leave here smiling.”I had no idea how a motivational speech works. Or whether this one would work at all. I had met Jolley back in the early 1990s, when he was employed by D.C. Public Schools as a drug-prevention counselor. He would travel from school to school giving pep talks about staying in school and away from drugs.
As a nightclub singer in the 1980s and early ’90s, Jolley worked out of a hotel in D.C. and won the Washington Area Music Awards, also known as “The Wammies,” five years in a row. “I didn’t get out of bed for a week,” Jolley continued. “I didn’t want to eat. I was depressed, despondent. I wasn’t quite suicidal but not far from it. Then, one Sunday morning, my wife said, ‘Let’s go to church,’ the one that I attended growing up in D.C.” He reluctantly went. And when the pastor saw Jolley, he called him down front and asked him to sing a song like he used to do when he attended church more frequently.
“Speaking did not come easily,” he hastened to add. “One day, a guy who attended junior high with me said: ‘Willie, how did you get smart? Because you were in the dummy part of the class when we were in school.’ I made a decision to work on myself. I realized that I had a desire to inspire. So, I read books. I took classes in communication. I’d ride around in my car listening to grammar audio cassette tapes, working on eliminating the ‘ahhs,’ ‘umms’ and ‘you knows’ from my speech.
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