It’s been said that you can learn a lot about life by watching movies. I agree. I’m a big fan of Bollywood movies and I’ve learned a lot about life and leadership from watching my favorites.

My daughter would tell you I’m a “walking Bollywood plotline.” Maybe so — I love them and I grew up on them. In fact, the cornier the movie, the better. My favorite is one that’s about 15 years old, called Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, which roughly translates to “Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sadness.”

The great thing about Bollywood movies is that, just like life, they are full of emotion and drama. No matter how much the drama and how bad the situation, though, things always work out in the end, somehow. Everybody lives happily ever after.

These movies can be larger than life with big bright spectacles, color explosions, lot of singing and dancing, focused on relationships, and corny dialog. I like to think a song and dance could fix any situation in real life, no matter how bad it has been.

Bollywood in Silicon Valley?

If you think about how our daily lives work in Silicon Valley — and my own life here — we’re in a pressure cooker situation a lot of the time. At work there are complex projects, looming deadlines, intense interactions and collaboration with people. Traffic is frustrating. You need to keep time for your family, for all those school events, games, music lessons, cooking with your daughter and everything else. It’s never easy.

But I for one try to live life with that Bollywood idea that, despite all the challenges and stresses in life — despite the “sometimes sadness” — we can get past them in the end. Things work out. It’s about breaking into a song and dance when things look grim, because that will bring positive energy and tide you over the rough time.

It’s also important to me that, like Bollywood, we don’t overlook the role of our emotions in how we do our work. Leaders need to recognize that their people have emotions, and emotional reactions to the ordinary stresses of the job — and realize that as leaders, they have the same human emotions.

There’s this stereotype about the stoic leader, the one that keeps every emotion locked up and makes dispassionate decisions all based on logic. The leader who doesn’t put any feelings out there for people to react to, connect with, to guide them.

Emotions are good, always

That’s not how it works for me. As a leader, I embrace the emotions of my team. And they get to embrace mine, because I put them all out there. If you work with me, you really don’t have a choice about seeing the emotional me. But that is me — and as far as I’m concerned if you’re not authentic, you can’t be a good leader. The fact is that we all bring our real selves to work every day — we don’t, we can’t, leave ourselves at home.

So at work, I put my heart into what I do and I put that out there for my team to see. They can see that and they know they need to put their hearts into it, to push ahead and get things done. And, yes, like a Bollywood film it can be a bit of a roller-coaster ride, but like almost every Bollywood plot, I’ll realize the folly of my ways when I make a mistake, and I make amends. If we all keep that in mind, everything will work out — maybe even with a little song and dance.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.