Making Good Sense
By Star Online (www.thestar.com.my) : MAJORIE CHIEW
WHILE most of us have enough problems of our own without having to listen to the woes of others, Asia’s No.1 motivational speaker Dr Mel Gill joked that he is all ears.
“Why not?” he asked, with a grin. It is only after hearing him out that you know why it is worthwhile for him to listen to people pouring out their problems.
“I get paid to listen to problems,” he said of his profession as a psychologist. But that is only one of the occupational hats he wears.
Singapore’s Business Times rated him Asia’s top motivational speaker based on the regularity of his talks and audience countdown. Dr Gill’s largest crowd may be 3,500 people but he gives talks regularly in Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. So it’s not surprising if he’s counted “in the league of Og Mandino, Napoleon Hill and Earl Nightingale.”
A speaker with stature, Dr Gill has no airs. He talks to you and does not talk down to you. And, he seems to bellow when he talks. That’s sure to grab your attention. He was born in Singapore (to parents who were teachers) and moved to the United States some 25 years ago. A father of two children, aged 10 and 13, he lives in New York but travels frequently to Asia to work.
With a name like his, people expect to see a Causacian but he’s not – he’s Asian American.
And he does joke about his size – he’s “larger” than life.
He admitted that he does look different from the photograph of himself in his book, Uncommon Sense. Someone who bought his book even asked: “How many dozen years ago did you take that picture!” He has a hearty laugh and made the audience laugh twice as hard when he related this ego-denting episode. However, he’s “not revealing” when the photograph of his slimmer and younger self was taken. But he has no qualms about his age – he’s 45.
About 200 people attended his free talk on 30 Ways to Find Happiness, organised by Ti-Ratana Community Centre at the Buddhist Maha Vihara in Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur, recently.
“We cause our own miseries and problems. We give self-labels that are derogatory and bad,” he told me over a lunch interview a few days before the talk. He was taking a break from Train the Trainer course, a Master Trainer programme.
“Parents unwittingly put bad programming in their child’s head when they give them shaming labels – lazy, good-for-nothing, et cetera.”
The idea is to get us to buck up but this strategy can backfire.
“They’re imprinting in our brains about who we are. They’re changing our psychology. Thus, one needs to de-programme negativism and re-energise our thinking!”
Dr Gill is a great inspiration to hundreds of thousands of participants and listeners worldwide. Dubbed as the “Man With A Billion Dollar Voice”, he is the producer and presenter of the Radio Corporation of Singapore’s first and only motivational talk show also entitled Uncommon Sense on Newsradio 93.8FM. This show can be heard “live” on the Internet at www.Newsradio.com. sg and is said to have over five million listeners worldwide.
However, he plans to end the show in June next year and begin similar radio programmes in Malaysia and Indonesia. By discontinuing the show, he hopes to free himself to give more motivational talks all over the world.
I asked him if he could remember the weirdest call he ever received on his talk show.
“It came from a man who called himself Fido,” say Dr Gill. “He told me that he had listened to my show for quite a while and found that I made a lot of sense that he contemplated leaving his mistress to spend more time with his wife. He asked, ‘How to get rid of the other six mistresses?’ “
Dr Gill advised Fido to set his priorities right. He had to choose between his marriage and sex and the other women.
“If marriage is more important, then you have to say goodbye to sexual romps with mistresses. However, I salute you for your organisational skills with your mistresses. Two mistresses make you a genius. Three mistresses means that you’re far beyond a genius and six mistresses is spellbinding. Your schedule must be amazing,” he told Fido.
He describes his role as a motivational master as akin to that of a teacher in the Zen tradition.
“Like a coach, I guide individuals to the goals that they want to achieve. I turn their lives around. They will walk away with something,” he said.
He is also happy with a leadership-training course for about 400 to 500 staff from an airline company which he conducted sometime back.
“All of them have transformed themselves and changed for the better,” he said. Despite the recession and cutbacks , Dr Gill said they have survived emotionally.
One changed his behaviour and felt more empowered and planned to give his wife the divorce she wanted. but ironically, she wanted him back! “Probably, the man’s wife has a temporary infatuation with the new power he has acquired. Anyway, the man feels that with his new freedom, he’s happier than he ever was. To him, water seems to taste sweeter too,” he said.
Dr Gill’s motivation did not only work on adults but with children too. He once worked with two children who had low grades and self-esteem.
“They were sent to super camps but their grades did not improve. After two two-hour sessions with me, they were transformed. They used to get Ds in their grades and after seeing me, they were scoring Bs and As. The children told their mother that ‘Uncle Mel did it.’ ’’
But how does a motivator motivates himself?
“I wake up every day with a strong sense of mortality that I don’t have a lot of time. I meet many people every day and I feel that I may not meet them again. I take every opportunity to live as if it’s the last day,” he said.
He adopted this odd attitude after a near-death accident some 17 years ago. “I fell off Gunung Tahan while trying to climb it. Despite the accident, I still dream of conquering Mt Everest one day,” said Dr Gill, who counts mountain climbing as a hobby. His other leisurely pursuits include reading, swimming and writing books.
Moving closer to his dream, he plans to lead an expedition on a seven-day walk from Katmandu to Lhasa in June. “It is an expedition to build one’s discipline, to clear one’s brain and to take these men to another level in a Master Training programme,” Dr Gill said.
Next year, he plans to motivate more people through his talk. In February or March, he wants to hold a motivational talk in Singapore to a record-breaking audience. In April, he plans to do the same for about 10,000 people in an indoor stadium in Malaysia.
Of the many people he has met, Dr Gill can’t forget the street busker he met 15 years ago. He made pretty music and left him an indelible message.
As he stooped to drop money into the busker’s guitar case, he read a Thank You for Your Support placard with a run-on message: “My advice is that you sing as if no one listens, dance as if no one’s looking and love as if you’ve never been hurt before.”
Notes: MAJORIE CHIEW meets a motivational guru of happiness and goes home feeling rather positive.