We all want to lead a more courageous life. After all, courage is not just about physical bravery, but it’s also about the way you face your fears; how you choose to cope with the risk and uncertainty in your life. So how can we build our courage? Here are four ways to think differently so you can become more courageous.
Have Clear Core Values
Core values are what we strongly believe. Values such as love, honesty, integrity, and respect to name just a few, guide the way we approach our lives, careers, and relationships. When your values ground your life, and you feel so passionately about them to the point that they inspire you when you think about what you believe, then you will act with courage when your core values are challenged. Most people though have no clear sense of who they are. They instead allow the opinions of other people, and the expectations of everyone else around them to dictate the way they live and lead their life.
Whether it’s your parents, family, friends, or anyone else in your life, many of us just allow the values of those around us to drown out what we believe and feel. If you think about it, notice that we refer to it as “living up to expectations” that others have of us, as though their expectations are higher or should be higher than the ones we have of ourselves.
Take Action
Some people resist taking any action because they feel fear. Courage is feeling the fear but choosing to act in spite of what you feel. One way you typically talk yourself out of acting is by continually saying that you’re not prepared, not ready, you don’t know enough, have enough, or simply not enough. You’re stuck in paralysis by analysis, and you hope that all of the books you read, all the courses you take, all the seminars you attend, will at some point lead you to feel ready. The truth is, you just need to start before you feel ready because “everything you need you already have.” What you don’t know, you will figure out along the way. Starting, all by itself, is what is essential to build your courage and get the momentum going. It doesn’t matter how off course the first step is, it just matters that you start.
Step Out of Your Comfort Zone
Even though we call it our comfort zone, this place of comfort is the reason so many of us are living lives that are smaller than what we had hoped for ourselves. It’s keeping you from finding a career we love and pursuing our lifelong dreams. There’s no way around it; growth comes with change, so if you want to expand your life, you’ve got to be willing to step out of the zone of what is familiar to you and stretch yourself in a way that at times is uncomfortable. Many of us though, are so resistant to change that we will cling for dear life to what we know, even if it not good for us. Think of it this way if it makes it easier: start with small, low-risk ways of stretching yourself. Can you, for example, practice giving speeches at Toastmasters before you have to give a big presentation if public speaking is hard for you? Can you change your routine, like the way you drive home or the foods you eat if change is tough for you? Again, small steps with lots of successes can build your courage for the bigger challenges later on.
Stop Fearing Failure
I remember several years ago being asked to give a guest lecture for a graduate MBA class on leadership development. Instead of focusing my talk on what we have all come to expect—a great, glossy story of leadership success that highlights all of my triumphs along the way, I took a risk and did something very different. I focused my talk on my failures along the way to success, and what I learned from those failures. I talked about how I feared failure for so long, and that was one of the biggest barriers that held me back. I talked about how I remember the first time in a job that I had, how I had failed to reach a big goal that I had set for myself and my team and how devastating that was to me. I talked about the fact that my life has been a series of twists and turns, and even though it looked well put together from the outside, on the inside, I didn’t always know where the road was going to lead. At the end of the class, many of the students lined up to tell me how important it was to them finally talk about risk, and failure, and how important that is on the way to success. The talk, while about leadership development, was about life—real life, because above all else, here is what I know to be true. When I look back at my own journey so far, I know that I am most defined by those moments when I took a discontinuous turn from my straight and narrow course. What has defined me most are the moments that I was afraid, the moments that I failed, the moments that I had to preserve in spite of failure, and the moments that called on me to dig a bit deeper within myself so that I could lift higher. These are the moments that taught me one of the greatest lessons in courage—how to get back up, how to try again, and how to carry on.
