Motivation, Hollywood style

Lots of my favorite movies illustrate motivation principles. Runaway Jury, A Civil Action, The Insider, The Rainmaker, Quiz Show. Documentaries that fail at motivation include An Inconvenient Truth and Sicko.

How to motivate with video 2: Six ways to inform the mind

Here are 6 tips on keeping our content informative … without preaching: Talk like you’ve been listening. Today we need the audience’s permission to present our movie.  So approach them with a listening attitude — a perceptible sensitivity to why they may be troubled, baffled, or bored. Acknowledge the barriers, their questions. This is really [...]

Appreciating the Audience

The most important part of successful communication is to appreciate the audience. Hillman Curtis styles it, “Eat the Audience”. It means to know, to have empathy for. It also means to honor, or value their perspective, their biases, and their preferences. And it means to understand and have emotional intelligence regarding how our own perspectives [...]

The Three M’s of Motivation – part 1: Cross the Moat

As part of my ICAA presentation on “Using Video: When it’s powerful, when it’s not”, I first talked about how we think and what motivates us. To set it up I used a clip of a little boy who I had interviewed. I asked him, “If you could change the world, what would you change?” [...]