Closing the Courage Gap: Strategies for Building Resilience and Strength

I’ve been called courageous for leaving behind a secure job with a great title, benefits and pension to pursue my passion. However, some decisions get really easy very quickly when the stakes are high. Personal crises can inspire courage.?

One of our kids was being so tragically bullied that, let’s just say, we were worried if we didn’t do something drastic, we weren’t sure what would happen. So, ten years ago, I went to the senior leadership team I was on at the time, opened up in a way that was totally out of character for our tenuous group dynamics, and shared that I needed to put my family first.

Personal Stories of Embracing Courage

I wish my family’s journey were an anomaly. Unfortunately, bullying is all too common—just turn on the news or talk to a few friends. Some argue that, in today’s political climate, bullying is being reinforced and normalized. I won’t weigh in on that, but I will say this: no one is saying, “This world is too darn kind!” If only.

Nor is my circumstance of taking bolder action than we normally might unique. Several years ago, I decided to write a book interviewing notable Canadians about greatness. The single most profound gift of that book is what took me this: how we handle failure is how we handle everything.?

Failure and struggle are when what matters becomes clear to us.?

We can use failure for us or let it crush us. When you use it as your comeback story, your thrival roadmap, your flashlight through the dark, you have a reference point to come back to.

That doesn’t mean you don’t stumble around in the dark. We humans are terrible at perspective. If we were totally rational beings, we’d say, “Why are you worried about paying the mortgage? You’ve never missed a payment and have a job/plan/friend to ensure the next payment gets made!”?

Fear Can Be Irrational to Courage: Practice is Essential

If I were a totally rational human, I’d tell myself something like, “My marriage has survived losing parents, postpartum, a child’s mental health crisis, debt, renovations, and COVID; we’ve got this!” But I do worry about my marriage from time to time, just like I do fret about paying the bills, hope I’m available enough to my kids, wonder if my clients are satisfied with my work, hope that my team feels fulfilled and satisfied (and will never ever leave me!).?

It’s when I have the least to worry about that I might worry the most.

When I haven’t had to practice courage as much, I get a little courage rusty.

Yes, ironically, it’s in less dire circumstances that fear, worry, and uncertainty are most likely to hold me back.?

To put it in no uncertain terms: If we didn’t have a family crisis, it’s unlikely I’d have had the courage or conviction to hand in my notice, never look back, and hustle as I’ve never hustled in my life (and I’m a pretty scrappy hard worker) to ensure I had a business that could give me the freedom to ensure I’d always be available for my family, no matter what happened.

I likely would’ve kept with the plan: to do training, facilitation, and coaching when I retired. I never even imagined myself as a speaker. Not even one solitary thought that I would ever be a paid professional speaker in a million years.?

I would have stayed stuck, yet I didn’t even know I was. I would have kept my dreams realistic, yet I thought I was ambitious. I would have lived small, yet I thought I was reaching huge.

Sometimes, you can’t see the label from inside the jar. That comfortable lid can be tight and nicely snug.

How Do You Know You’re Stuck?

I’ve done some of the hardest work of my life—ensuring my family’s mental health, launching a business, authoring books, and speaking in front of thousands of strangers, sharing a message some still consider ‘fluffy.’ Yet, I still get hung up on details and decisions that areinconsequential in the grand scheme of things.?

How many of us have that kind of grip on reality every minute of every day that we can see the forest from the trees unequivocally??

One of my grounding forces is a book I read in those dark, uncertain days 10 years ago, “Stop Playing Safe,” by Dr Margie Warrell . She has a new book called “The Courage Gap,” I interviewed her on Simonne’s and my podcast, The Greatness Together Podcast (or that’s right, I launched a podcast, too).?

Is Stress Always Fight or Flight?

We talk about avoiding stress and the much-feared fight or flight response. But what about apathy? What about settling? What about coasting? Aren’t those also unhealthy for us??

My biggest internal battles and self-doubt seem to arise when the stakes aren’t so high.

It’s when I can easily squeeze in some rumination time. It’s when I can play a game of mental tennis, flip-flopping between all the things I “should” be doing.

Here’s what helps me: anchoring.

If you look up anchoring, you’ll see it’s a cognitive bias. Given the fact that it’s a bias, and specifically that we tend to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the “anchor”) when making decisions, it seems like it’s not such a great way to get yourself out of a mental rut. However, what if you could control the anchor? What if I didn’t let myself compare the latest decision that requires much stretch or courage to be what I held up against the newest challenge and instead came back to my anchor of leaving my job to start a new business to help my family?

With the right anchor, everything is pulled back into perspective.?

With a courage anchor, you remember how courageous you are and how what you’re fixating on doesn’t require that much toughness, time, or resources. You don’t say, “You shouldn’t feel that way” to yourself. You say, “Actually, you are forgetting how resilient you are! You’ve got experience! You’ve done this other really tough thing, and if you can get through that, you can definitely handle it.”

Knowing your anchor in advance is like packing the snowbrush before the first blizzard. (A very Canadian example!) You must put it in the car at some point, so you might as well do it before you’re in a rush to get to work or get the kids!

Who is truly ready for a crisis? Courage doesn’t just hang around waiting for its number to be called. So we have to be prepared for it when life inconveniently bulldozes its way into our lives or when tragedy throws us off our axis. Failure, struggle, strain, and pain are part of our shared human experience. No one can avoid them. Yet, how different people cope varies.

As Margie shares: “Courage isn’t about feeling ready. It’s about taking action even when you don’t feel ready.”

How to Be Courageous Every Day

I have heard speakers suggest that we take cold showers daily to show us we can endure unpleasant things. Call me a princess (and Sarah is ‘princess’ in Hebrew, so you technically would be correct), but I don’t really want to start my day this way. Perhaps it’s more about the importance of challenging comfort zones in tiny ways every day for no reason other than personal growth.

As Margie shares in “Stop Playing Safe”:

“Action is the most potent antidote to fear. By doing the things you think you can’t do, you realize how much more you can do.”

So that got me wondering, what all the myriad of tiny little actions we could take to prove, as Margie points out, just how much you can do? We asked our friendly neighbour ChatGPT to give us some, and I think you’ll find there’s a whole bunch of things you’re already doing and a bunch more you could do to prove to your past and future self that you’ve got this!

Grab that list here. Why not share this article or the list with someone you want to remember how strong they are or that you need to have them as Team You to remind you that you’ve got this!

If you want more courageous suggestions to snack on, check out these other articles:

• How Our Biggest Crisis Led to Our Juiciest Possibility
• Getting Over Fear to Realize Your Greatness Vision
• 8 Ways to Shift From Survival to Thrival

Disclaimer/Humble Brag Moment: 90% of this content was human-generated (by us folks here at Greatness Magnified). We used AI to help create the Tiny Brave Actions that Reinforce Your Greatness document. We are committed to authorship integrity and will inform you what percent, if any, is AI-generated.