A Secret Behind Courage
We all know that great things don’t come from sitting in your comfort zone. It takes courage to put yourself out there. In business we need courageous people — your business needs you to speak your mind when you have new, bold, ideas. When the process or approach isn’t working, and you see it, the team needs you to point it out. In your personal life, if you’re not happy where you’re at, you need to have the courage to do something about it.
Now that we all feel a bit more pressure to muster up courage, let’s take a moment to think about what it even means to have courage. I don’t know about you, but I spent a lot of my life thinking courage was something that required confidence. I thought the words confidence and courage were tightly coupled. These two attributes are often seen together but they are very different. Confidence is about knowing (or at least portraying) that you know you can do something. Courage is the willingness to take the risk, go against the expected, and to be vulnerable, regardless of whether or not the confidence is there. The good thing about this distinction is that you don’t have to be confident before you act courageously. The trouble is that it can still be difficult to make yourself more courageous. So what’s that secret step behind it?
The biggest secret to courage I’ve found is: trust in your own resiliency. It’s like confidence, but it’s further detached from the immediate outcome (which removes pressure). Our capacity for resilience is far greater than we allow ourselves to experience. When highly successful people say that a point of failure or horrendous situation in their past was a catalyst for their greatness, I believe it is less about the failure and more about their opportunity to develop trust in their resiliency. If you don’t want to wait for a traumatic failure opportunity in your life, start paying attention to how amazing you are at recovering from the little things. As you have more faith in your resiliency the fear of failure shrinks and what you’re left with is the freedom to have the courage to do what you’re really capable of.
