After speaking for nearly three hours, Youth Motivational Speaker Scott Backovich leaves the Carlmont High School gymnasium only to enter the ASB room.
Backovich isn’t the first, and certainly isn’t the last, motivational speaker to step foot on the Carlmont campus.
Every year, the ASB invites a motivational speaker on campus. The speaker’s job is to inspire Carlmont students to spread positivity around the campus and their community.
“Since it’s the beginning of the year, we want the students to have a good mindset about the upcoming year and to have their goals set out,” said Olive Peschel, a senior.
Although the speeches focus on various topics, they all have one common theme — positivity. Whether the speech is about self-motivation or anti-bullying, the overall message usually calls for students to be positive and to treat each other with respect and kindness.
“We try not to have the same speaker within the same four years, so that you never have to hear the same speaker twice,” Peschel said. “We think out what we want to convey to the student body, and then we find someone who specializes in it.”
In order to further spread the message around campus, ASB does various things to make the assembly more memorable.
“We usually put up posters around campus with quotes by the speaker just to really get the message through,” Peschel said. “We do random acts of kindness and put up positive or inspirational messages around campus.”
After giving his motivational speech about kindness to Carlmont students, Bakovich went to the ASB room to train the leadership members.
“It’s important to make sure that the message doesn’t just stay in the assembly, and that we take further steps to spread the love, the kindness, and the compassion,” Backovich said.
The training that the ASB students participated in required them to work in teams and find effective ways to collaborate with each other.
“This training allows them to practice important skills such as trust and teamwork,” said Jim Kelly, the ASB Coordinator. “Trust is especially important. When they learn how to trust each other they can also improve their collaborative skills. Trust is the glue that puts everything together.”
At the end of the day, Backovich asked the ASB students to perform a simple, yet somewhat challenging task: to write a letter to someone who could use a little bit of encouragement.
“I think that a day like this truly goes to waste if we don’t take these last few minutes to figure out how we can take that kindness, that compassion, that challenge of giving 10 seconds of courage to somebody and applying it to your own school,” Backovich said. “Often the simplest things in the world are most impactful.”
