Brain Snack: How to Choose Courage

Speaker A: Welcome to Brain Snacks, Bite Sized Learning moments from Live and Work More Human. To learn more, check out the full conversation at the link in our show notes or Visit us@liveandworkmorehuman.com. for now, enjoy. Before we dive into the full episode, here's a quick message from our podcast partners. AI sped things up, but it also made work harder to see. There's an invisible workload, hidden friction and capability gaps that show up until it's too late. And when you can't see it, you can't manage or fix it. Humanico gives you a live organization wide view of how work is actually happening, connecting skills, strengths and real team dynamics in one place so you can spot risk earlier, unlock performance faster, and make decisions that actually hold up in the real world. Humanico Clarity that Drives performance. Visit www.humanico.co that's H U M A N I C O.co liveandworkmorehuman going back

Speaker B: to the early research around what courage was, um, I quickly discovered that it wasn't just this one phenomenon, this one moment in time that determined whether you were courageous or not. I quickly realized that there were a number of constituent elements that together, you know, built one's quality of courage. And as I looked to them, I didn't also want to say they're all prescriptive, where you need 10% of each one. That felt too contrived. But I felt, and I discovered that they are all present in some way, shape or form in our lives. And part of the journey of courage is developing and working with some intentionality on all of them and then leaving serendipity and I think, and circumstance to really bring them together in ways that are powerful and impactful. And so the first one is just having moral compass, and I use moral here very intentionally because I don't want to justify every crazy person who does bad things that people don't like and put them in the whole conversation of courage. Uh, I think Aristotle talked about morality being a big part of it. I think it's also important part of it because of this element of selflessness that comes into play not all the time, but much of the time. So number one is just having a sense of purpose. And sometimes we get worried about what that means. It doesn't mean you have to go through this massive scripted exercise of finding a purpose. I think on the very basic level, it's just having something that you care about. Um, because ultimately you need something for courage to work for. You need something that counterbalances fear and all the Other um, um, ways that we discover on our own to, to smother courage. So you need something that you truly believe in. So that's one. So that's the seeds of commit um, to a purpose and then always on your potential. We can have a sense of what we want to do, but we still struggle with our own, with self doubt. We still struggle with self confidence. And that is something that I wanted to cover specifically. Having purpose doesn't automatically mean that you have self confidence. I think we have to work on self confidence. We have to work on a sense of. It's not a popular word now, but sense of our own entitlement. I think we're entitled to our own potential. Um, you know, hopefully not at the expense of others, but we are entitled to be the best people that we can be. And so we have to work on that and significantly focus time on building that sense of confidence. And um, you is unmasked fear. And um, you know, this is where a lot of the, this is where a lot of the opposition comes from. And fear comes from different places. Sometimes it comes from within us, sometimes it comes from external to us. And it doesn't matter. I think it has to be interrogated. Um, it could come from our own sense of self doubt. It could come from a physiological predisposition to fearing things that are strange and new. But the advice I give is to interrogate it, is to stop and really challenge it and understand where does the fear come from? Have you done this thing before? Have you seen other people do this thing before? What's the worst that could happen? And can you live with that? So even if the bad things happen, but is that the end of the world? So there are different ways that I try to coach, um, readers to unmask fear. R is the idea of rejecting and rejecting distracting voices. The first time I wrote the book, the first chapter, I think I call that chapter ignore the mob. The mob, you know, so the voices, you know, all the. And some of them are well intentioned, quite honestly, but. And they are seeking your best interests and they are cautioning you, which is again, you have to listen to them. I'm not saying ignore everyone. You gotta listen and process. But sometimes you're ready for change. Maybe more so than people around you think you're ready and you know that you're ready for that change. And so they are asking uh, you to be cautious, but you know that you need to make that move. And I always say that people who are not, well meaning, who don't like the Fact that you're growing and want you to be in the happy space that you guys cohabited before and be. Stay with the tribe, come on and hang out with us, you know, and you're like, no, I want to grow. I want to go somewhere else. And you should be able to walk away from those tribes too, um, if that's what it takes. And then a. Is acting. Because all this really matters if you don't act, you know. And the one, um, advice I give is just take the first step, you know, just get in the game. Because sometimes we just take the first step and get into the fray. You know, you get pulled in now because now you're committed and then all the things happen and then you, you become part of it. And, and, and you realize that, wow, okay, I'm actually enjoying this journey or I can, I can back out now. I have to keep on going. And, and so those decisive first steps are really helpful to indicate to even yourself that you actually making real moves to practice courage and, um, then grow from failure. We talked about earlier. M. Failure will happen. And the idea is not to think of failure as a death knell, as, uh, a death sentence. You have to see it as part of the growth process. Um, I talk about kids who are learning to walk. They stumble and fall and get up and keep on going. And they don't have any shame about that. They just try and walk. So we have to be kid, like in that way. We have to be childlike in understanding that these mistakes and these small mishaps are just part of the process. And then, um, the last is endurance or resilience, embody, you know, resilience. And that's an interesting one because there's the idea of. I'm just going to keep on striving this idea of toxic resilience. And that's not what this is about. This is really about just, you know, understanding. It's a long journey, pacing yourself, taking your time. Don't take every mishap as a major, uh, issue at the end of the world. Understand that to some degree it might be incremental and maintaining and preserving your own mental health, your mind, your space, your. Your emotional health, and really just not feeling like every battle needs to be won. You know, sometimes you, you have to lose some battles because you prepare yourself for bigger ones ahead. Um, and we have, in my last write of a rewrite of the book, there are many rewrites. I added a body resilience and joy. Because what I found from meeting and speaking with different people is that this is not a heavy, somber process or journey. It could be quite fun and interesting. The promise of finding your own path and world. For me, that's an interesting adventure to go on that I think is very positive and could be and should be joyful. And the other thing I also found is that people who I thought were most courageous had this calm about them, and they exuded a calm because they put everything in this timeframe, which they were in control of, not in terms of them knowing what they would do each time, but they knew that it wasn't gonna happen overnight, and they're comfortable with that. And they have this sort of this expansive horizon, you know, to work with, and so they can take things more easily and calmly. And that calm, you know, was infective. It was infectious with. With others. It made a calm around them, and it created of, wow. I enjoy talking to Sally, because when I leave, I'm always so inspired, you know, uh, and she's so positive and, you know, and so this idea of really intentionally picking joy, the glass is half full and looking for positivity because it begets the same. It begets qualities in others that is helpful to you and helpful to them, and then it lowers the risk of. Because if people are, uh, thinking of you in positive terms, they are helping and rooting for you to do well. So your risk or your sense of stress is lower, and, uh, you can take more risk.

Speaker A: We hope you enjoyed this Brain Snack from Live and Work More human. Learn more at liveandworkmorehuman.com we'll see you next time.

Speaker B: Ra.