5 Precise Ways to Reach Your Audience - Tragedies

Part Three - Ennoble with Tragedies

We didn’t particularly like tragedies until we learned the Story Code, now we love them. Tragedies are all about a noble cause and a person with so much integrity that they are willing to die for it. We like to talk about footprints—the person in the story that lives to tell the tale, that often picks up the cause and carries on. With a tragedy, the audience is always the footprint too. Hopefully, we have picked up that cause and will carry it in our hearts.

Tragedies are important for another reason—their cathartic properties. When we experience a tragic story, it cracks our hearts open and gives us an emotional release. Catharsis is cleansing, purifying and healthy. We humans tend to avoid our feelings, especially negative ones, and we often cause a lot of trouble for ourselves and those around us as we employ our avoidance strategies. Tragedies invite us to feel and in feeling we can grow a little braver.

Use a Tragedy to purify your audience—
to ennoble them to follow the bravest and best that is in them.

“The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all.”
~Fa Zhou in Mulan

“This above all, to thine own self be true.”
~Polonius in Hamlet

Our lives are not fully lived if we’re not willing to die for those we love, for what we believe”
~Martin Luther King Jr., Selma