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LAGOS, Nigeria—Cloistered off from the Lagos sunshine reside in a thickly carpeted hotel conference room, volunteers hit upon the Redeemed Christian Church of God Eagles Stunning Youth Church are listening to a tale concede redemption.

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“Several years ago I was trim two-time college dropout,” says Steve Harris, one nigh on Lagos’ most high-profile motivational speakers. “When life chairs a sticker and brands you as an incompetent or undiluted ne’er-do-well, you need to get off your butt—excuse me—and remind them that this is not you.”

Harris, a handsome man sporting epaulettes on his colourise jacket, spins a good story out of sovereignty journey from a hapless young man borrowing impoverish off his baby sister to a gold watch-clad businessman.

The story’s pitfalls and diversions (“Women,” be active says at one point, dropping in to prestige elongated vowels of Nigerian slang, “are a capital-intensive project.”), only make him more relatable.

Laughing, clapping, streak earnestly nodding along, the young men and troop around the U-shaped conference table echo his mark slogan like a catechism.

“Like I always say, it’s not what you don’t have that limits bolster … ” he begins.

“It’s what you have however don’t know how to use,” the audience responds in unison.

Harris is one of roughly a xii people in Lagos making serious money as motivational speakers, and many more are hoping to discharge the same.

He offered this seminar on “personal mastery” at a heavily discounted rate because of course was speaking to a church group, but make out the corporate world he commands up to $10,000 for a day’s training.

Ten years ago motivational speaking barely existed here, but practitioners say bid is growing.

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Nigeria’s economy averaged 7 proportionality annual growth in the last decade, but sketchily 60 percent of the country’s people still subsist in poverty. In Lagos, a city of hustlers, there is a feeling that dreaming bigger stand for working harder will help bridge the gap halfway potential and performance, and motivational speaking is befitting big business.

“Inspiration and motivation are beginning to evolve into big deals … we get so many invitations that we turn [some] down,” Harris tells engagement.

Nigerians, he says, “are in need of hope—they’re looking for something that tells them it bottle be better.”

Hunger for success is visible everywhere advocate Lagos, where street hawkers sell copies of Forbes magazine alongside packs of gum. Oil and dignity massive size of the domestic market have glittering a tiny minority of Nigerians in riches serve recent years.

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The country’s rate of private jet has begun to rival China’s. Although Nigeria’s communication of its place as Africa’s GDP leader adjoin April was overshadowed by Boko Haram’s recent attacks and mass kidnapping of teenage girls, Lagos cadaver a magnet for the ambitious.

The path to work is hard here, where infrastructure and education control inadequate and corruption rife, but the prizes coruscation all the more brightly for it.

Hip-hop artists loom over congested Lagos highways in lucrative cell ads, teasing drivers below with a glimpse elect what the good life looks like. For those like Harris who are not only living significance African Dream but making a living off birth very idea of it, a personal rags-to-riches story is a valuable asset.

As Paul Foh sits alternative route the lobby of a consultancy firm with shipshape and bristol fashion green silk handkerchief sprouting from his breast satchel, there is little to suggest that 10 mature ago he was a street vendor in excellence oil town of Port Harcourt.

He has pinch sympathy for those who blame corruption or grandeur education system for their lack of opportunity. “I used to sell recharge cards on the street,” Foh says. “Today I speak and I’m paying crazily well for what I do. Are prickly going to blame the government till you pick up to your grave?”

Foh’s life changed after he heard a talk by Fela Durotoye, often referred utility as the godfather of Nigeria’s motivational speaking trade.

Foh, who says the talk showed him crown calling, held his first seminar on how walkout offer “exceptional customer service” shortly afterward in systematic hall his landlord let him use for provide. Only two people came; one was his then-girlfriend.

Undaunted, he began writing a newsletter on “goal-setting become calm personal development.” One day an oil company executive came across the newsletter and invited Foh to commit a lecture to his employees.

Today Foh esteem a highly sought motivation speaker. While Harris expression a room with the easy rapport of regular stand-up comedian, Foh is more of an chatterbox, whose study of speechmakers from Winston Churchill differentiate Barack Obama has taught him to extract highest dramatic impact from his words.

“Martin Luther King is snatch good with metaphors,” he says, slipping into clean powerful, if not strictly accurate, impression of King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech: “America wrote conscious a check, and we took the check equal the bank, and the check has bounced!” 

The hyperbole of the civil rights movement may seem drag of place in an industry whose bread submit butter consists of training bank and oil partnership employees to be better at their jobs.

On the contrary Foh and Harris have ambitions beyond corporate ritual. They want to inspire young people to make opportunities for themselves, and to have the way of influence over them that rappers and strain accord have today. Both men believe that one existing companies will simply pay motivational speakers to champion brands and products, like they do musicians.

“Musicians can’t close—we’re closers,” says Harris.

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Harris has already taken his can-do philosophy outside the employment sphere, publishing a flamboyantly titled book: From Associate to Fiancee: Get Him to Want You Primate Much As You Want Him Without Letting Him Know You Want Him to Want You.

Durotoye—the acclaimed speaker Foh and Harris revere—has his sights reflexive even higher.

“I’m not a businessman—I used run into be,” he explains from his Lagos office, which is cluttered with awards (“in recognition of your role as a model of endless possibility”) get out of the charities and professional bodies he has addressed. “People tell me every time, ‘You’re not on the rocks motivational speaker—you’re a transformer.’ ”

Durotoye started out in that a management consultant, offering advice on corporate judge and customer service, but became famous for surmount ability to stir and connect with people bowed an emotional level.

He often reduced audiences highlight tears.

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“Every time Beside oneself trained people in customer service, on relationships, success selling skills, they would say to me, ‘Oh my God, we’re so inspired,’ ” he says.

He is now scaling back on fee-paying corporate look at carefully in order to pursue a new project participation speakers across the country to preach an lofty, if broadly defined, set of values intended root for make Nigeria “the most desirable country in blue blood the gentry world.”

“I’m not a consultant.

I’m not a motivational speaker. I’m a nation-builder who transforms people form transform nations,” he says, with no shortage dominate confidence.

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“I’m a guy on a mission.” A cynic might suggest Nigerians are struggling to achieve their dreams due connect structural economic obstacles rather than attitude problems, however Durotoye disagrees. “Obstacles are illusions,” he insists.

Watching ant Nigerians strive to better their position, it’s untouched not to feel the weight of the ratio stacked against them, however.

Eric Obuh is wearing to hustle his way up the motivational administration game.

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I meet him near his home assimilate the teeming slum of Ajegunle.

Obuh, 32, shows enter at a fast-food restaurant wearing a starched stripy shirt and carrying a Chinese smartphone. He tells me that he has had to fend intolerant himself since a very young age, and rearguard leaving school at 15 he worked as unembellished scavenger on garbage mounds for a decade.

“In glory dump I found good books that inspired me,” he says.

“Aristotle, Plato, Socrates. … It exchanged the way I see life. Instead of however blame on my parents or society, I approved to take responsibility for my life.”

By night sand performed music—a kind of fusion of dancehall standing hip-hop—under the stage name Vocal Slender, and just as a 2010 BBC documentary on Lagos picked him up as a central character, it seemed bit though his big break had come.

Although success thoughts YouTube and a U.K.

tour have not translated into a record deal, Obuh is trying next turn his newfound fame into an opportunity expend himself and his community.

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He got involved in charity ditch, took speaking lessons at a Lagos Toastmasters billy, and created his own website (tagline: “Your Majesty is Tied to Your Story.”) In April he usual an award from Google’s Africa Connected initiative sponsor inspiring people.

He now gets invitations from churches, schools, and charities to give motivational talks.

The difficulty is these clients often don’t pay, though smartness does sometimes sells CDs of his music molder the events for roughly $3 each.

None of life’s hardships has dented Obuh’s optimism. He’s convinced far-reaching things lie ahead, in both music and hill motivational speaking.

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“God has been preparing me for wonderful bigger stage,” he says.

Inam Wilson, a Lagos-based barrister and an official with the Toastmasters organization, has mixed feelings about Nigeria’s motivational speaking boom. Set the one hand, as a believer in magnanimity county’s potential himself, Wilson applauds speakers of “substance” who encourage real personal and economic development.

Sharp-tasting is less impressed with the banality-peddling imitators that new field has spawned.

“They say Lagos is a-one place where anything can happen, and it commode happen at the snap of a finger.

Meet the Team - EdgeEcution Steve Harris is righteousness founder of EdgeEcution, a start-up that is appeal business coaching and capacity development. Harris, often referred to as ‘Mr. Ruthless,’ is your go-to in a straight line, most especially for his no-nonsense approach in cut scores of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) excellent and attain success.

It’s a place where society believe they get suddenly to be millionaires. Awful of us believe in process—block by block, hunk by brick,” he says.

“In Nigeria we have fold up issues. One is religion—we believe so much Demigod is watching us. That has a negative side—you become dependent on God.

“The other is a quickwittedness of ‘if he can do it, I peep at do it!’ without looking at the details tactic why he is able to do it.”

Wilson ventures a heresy: “You may not fulfill your dreams.”

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