It was at this point that 3:00am Sensibility Man gently informed me that I was full of crap.  Grandiose, dramatic, overblown crap.

He kept reminding me that I was sitting up in bed in the middle of the night, 90 minutes away from my alarm clock’s first yelp, giving serious thought to the notion that a Star Wars movie – or any movie, for that matter – could actually help trainers do their jobs better.  This was dumb, he said.  Just fatigue talking.  Your colleagues will think you’re crazy.  Your industry will laugh you out of the room.  Peers will dismiss you and business people will ignore you. 

A movie isn’t the same as a training program, he reasoned.  People come to those experiences with two totally different expectations.  Movies entertain.  Training equips.  Movies are fake.  Training is real.

Sure, write your little reveleation in your cute little bedside notebook, Sensibility Man cooed.  Give yourself genius points for having a BIG IDEA in the wee hours of the morning.  Then bury this notebook, and this idiotic notion, far away from human beings and common sense.

After all, Sensibility Man sniffed dismissively, do you honestly think that a real training professional can actually learn something from the great unwashed of Tinseltown?

Yes, they could.  And I was going to prove it. 

I grabbed my notebook and marched to the bathroom, questions and possibilities swirling in my head (and 64 ounces of movie theater Diet Coke yearning to break free).  I was anxious to flesh out this idea more but I needed to admit that Sensibility Man could be right, and that this whole idea would need to be flushed in a few hours.

With pen poised above the paper, I reminded myself to think like both a training professional and business person.  Be logical and open-minded.  Be willing to admit you’re wrong about this, to let this whole thing go but also be willing to let it grow.  I started with three simple questions:

1. Are movies just entertainment…or do they do more?

2. Which movie characters would be classified as a “trainer?”

3. What, if anything, can we learn from them?

Question 1 was a firecracker.  Huge battles have been fought over the impact of movies – and I had been on the front lines of those wars for a while.

(to be continued…)