Supporting role in the mental movies of colleagues

For reasons that presumably make sense to someone in Hollywood, cameras have just started rolling on a new movie entitled Adam Jones .

Bradley Cooper (the heartthrob in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle) is playing the title role: a bad-boy chef loosely modelled on Marco Pierre White, who "only ever cared about the thrill of creating explosions of taste".

After losing everything, my namesake tries to bounce back to win “that third elusive Michelin star”.

When news of the film emerged a few days ago, it inevitably caused much snorting among my FT colleagues and a certain wistfulness on the part of my wife, who could get used to the idea of a Bradley Cooper upgrade, shall we say.

The producers might yet come to their senses and give the film a more memorable name before its release, denying me a moment of tenuous fame alongside real-life Michael Claytons, Billy Elliots and Jerry Maguires.

But it has been fun visualising myself as a combustible chef succeeding against the odds. And it appears that such cinematic daydreams can even be good for your career.

Mental movie

A recent

Harvard Business Review

blog post entitled “To reach your goals, make a mental movie” makes exactly this point. The piece, by executive coach and neuroscientist

Srini Pillay

, suggests that it is not just enough to tell yourself where you want to get to, you actually need to visualise yourself achieving that goal.

Marshalling your imagination in this manner helps your brain find ways of arriving at that destination, he argues, adding that it can help to see yourself "coming from behind" – conjuring images of Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire in my head.

“Many people and teams I have coached use this method to guide their paths to success. Rather than simply having a business plan, they make a mental movie of a business plan,” Dr Pillay writes.

The plot of Adam Jones would appear to be a handy template for a mental movie to further my own career, with its comforting story arc of setback then success. I should stick it on my daydream playlist, suitably adapted for the world of journalism.

But there is also something unsettling about the idea that your colleagues might be quietly enjoying their own mental movies in glorious 3D when it is your turn to blather on in a meeting. And I shudder to think how many of the films playing in the heads of middle-aged male executives are just thinly disguised versions of the Rocky series. Pummel competition; retain belt; rinse; and repeat.

The attraction of visualisation is understandable. Perhaps acting out the things to which we aspire does indeed help us stretch towards them. But I wonder whether there are better lessons to learn from film and television – ones that are less egocentric. I can think of at least one from my own brief experience of being in front of a camera.

Joyless perfectionism

As an undergraduate I was once an extra in

Inspector Morse

, a crime drama that ran for many years on British television. On one level it was an early introduction to the joyless perfectionism that infests many workplaces. I lost track of the number of times I had to walk down a flight of stairs carrying a stack of textbooks before the director was happy, even though the footage in each banal take must have been almost identical.

There was lots of waiting around, of course, and I have a suspicion that my contribution ended up on the cutting room floor, although I can’t be sure, given how difficult it was to distinguish one whey-faced swot from another in the background blur of the finished product.

But those two days on set were memorable for positive reasons too. There was the generous catering and daily rate for a start, but also the thrilling feeling of being a cog in a big machine whose inner workings were intimidatingly mysterious yet enviably smooth.

The filming was driven ever onwards by a succession of gruffly efficient crew members whose roles were hard to pinpoint but who kept the whole opaque show on the road in spite of the director’s fussiness.

The experience impressed upon me how big endeavours need all sorts of minor roles that are not always well understood – gaffers, key grips, best boys – but which are essential to the success of a team.

After all, no matter how much we cast ourselves in lead roles in our heads, we are only ever supporting characters in our colleagues' mental movies. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014

Adam Jones is FT Business Life Editor. Lucy Kellaway is away