The 5 Most Important Lessons from Hollywood

Here are the five most important lessons we can learn from the world of acting about communications:

1. Create an authentic connection with your audience by truly understanding who they are, what they want and where you fit in. Otherwise, your communication will be tone-deaf.
2. Tell stories that resonate. You can find stories everywhere and use them in everything — emails, annual reports, videos, and even case studies. Especially case studies.
3. Showcase the intriguing, relatable characters at the heart of those stories. Your employees, your customers, your public. You, too. You’re a character.
4. Emotion is everything. Tap into its power to humanize yourself, create a connection and establish common ground.
5. Show, don’t tell. Go beyond words with gesture, symbol, images and, especially, action.

Those lessons are captured in this post I wrote for Business Insider, the cheekily titled, What Hollywood Knows About Leadership That You Don’t. It’s basically the heart of the book in about 800 words. And it’s got a pretty lady accompanying it.

Of course, the book has lots of other lessons, like using humor, staying on message, listening, rehearsing, editing, the writer’s process and a bunch of other stuff. But if you want a quick primer, there it is.

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