You meet the nicest people at momondays!
Put story-telling into a blender. Add a dash of personal growth & transformation. Then drop in a load of laughs. Mix in real, live music, and great conversation with some of the nicest people on the planet, then push the ‘high’ setting… and out comes momondays!
Think of momondays® as a variety show bouncing off the walls of personal storytelling...
momondays is for all kinds of people like you with a great story and life lessons to share, from people who have never set foot on stage, to professional speakers and everyone in-between!
Each show, you experience five to seven speakers and performers sharing a few personal stories. Some are funny, some are thought-provoking, all are motivating. What’s more, you get to socialize with all kinds of wonderful people in a fun, positive environment.
The momondays moStory!
momondays was started in 2012 by Michel Neray, a professional speaker who got involved in stand-up comedy, along with other things like improv and acting. For him, it was like 'cross-training' – a way to improve his platform skills and keynote speaking. At one of the open mics he went to, another speaker leaned over to him and said, ‘hey, it would be great if we could do this kind of thing, but for speakers.’
And that's how the idea for momondays was born.
Michel Neray - Founder of moMondays
The first momondays was held in February 2012 on the second floor of a little tea house with no stage, no audio, no music and just tea and 18 people in the room – half of whom were either the speakers or the servers. Within a few months Michel started encouraging the speakers who took the stage to tell authentic stories that were more personally significant and meaningful. He then started to invite non-speakers to share their stories too.
And that’s really when it started to spread. Stephanie in Winnipeg was the first person to call Michel up and say, ‘hey, I’d like to start a momondays here.’ And pretty much every location was added because someone went to a momondays or heard about it and said, ‘we need to do this in this city!’ momondays has since spread to 13 cities (at last count) in Canada and the U.S. with some locations attracting over 100 people each month. We are also in talks with people outside of North Americas who are interested in bringing momondays to their part of the world.
The world needs momondays.
The moWhy and the moVision!
OK, you’ve seen the momondays logo and maybe read a bit of the website, so you already know we’re all about change minds. change hearts. change the world.
If you’ve been to a momondays, you know that you really do ‘meet the nicest people at momondays’. And it’s true, momondays is first and foremost all about having fun and being truly social in the real sense (not the pretend, online sense.) That’s why so many people come to momondays month after month for their fix of heart, humour and happiness.
But momondays is about so much more than that.
In our heart of hearts, we believe that inside-out storytelling is one of the most powerful — and one of the most positive — things we can do for ourselves, our communities and the world.
Humans are literally hard-wired to tell and listen to stories. From the beginning of time, stories are how we have passed on our values and beliefs, made sense of the world and effected change.
For the courageous people who step on the momondays stage, sharing a personal story is a way to re-frame the events and experiences of their lives — and possibly dig deeper they have ever dug into the stories they tell themselves — to crystallize for themselves the positive insights they’ve learned and how they’ve grown.
That’s why inside-out storytelling is so powerfully, personally transformative.
For us in the audience, we get to share in each speaker’s experience, learning and life lessons. There’s always something we take away from each momondays that helps us make our own lives a little bit better. (That’s one reason why moHosts become moHosts — we get the best seat in the house!)
And as you listen to a speaker who shares a personal story from the heart, all the labels fall away. Black, white, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, gay, straight, transgender… it doesn’t matter; all we see is ‘human’.
That’s how momondays breaks down the barriers of intolerance, bias, judgment and difference. That’s how it strengthens the teams we work with and the communities we live in. And in some, not-so-small way, that’s how momondays contributes to world peace.
Now more than ever, perhaps, we need this. That’s why our mission is to spread momondays around the world.
But it has to be fun. (If it isn’t fun, it would be like flossing your teeth — no matter how good it might be for you, most people won’t do it.) That's why we ramp up the laugh factor and entertainment value of each and every night.
So put in your speaker application to speak… or grab some friends and get your fix of heart, humour and happiness. You'll wish every day were a momondays!
