On Feb 19, a motivational speaker came to our school to impart his own advice on loving and accepting ourselves.

He first introduced his three motivational sayings. The first was the simple instruction: “Love you”.

He spoke about his time as a high-schooler and his struggle with self-image and bulimia. He reminded us that we are enough as we are and that we don’t have to change ourselves to fit any “ideal.”

The second of his sayings was “push through.” His advice here was that life gives us great opportunities after we get punched in the face. He regaled the audience with a story of his childhood when he got a stress break in his back and wasn’t able to play sports for two years. It was only because of that experience that he auditioned for a theater production. He eventually decided to stick with theater and ended up becoming a motivational speaker because of it.

Beckman pushed through this hard time in his life, when he was questioning everything, and found a whole new world had opened up for him.

His final piece of advice was to “just look up” from our phones and focus on human-to-human connections without our phones to distract us.

Sophomore Ashley Edington commented on Beckman’s talk.

“It was really generic, like he took inspirational quotes from [social media] and made up a speech around it.”

What separates him from other motivational speakers, however, was his periodic guitar playing and encouragement of audience participation.

For more information on Beckman, check out his website at www.threephrases.com.