Abstract.
Courage is not limited to grand acts of heroism but is present in everyday decisions. Fear of failure and rejection often drive our choices, leading to self-preservation at the expense of growth. True courage involves confronting these fears, enduring discomfort, and developing the skills to overcome challenges.
In the summer of 1987, I was eleven years old and the youngest kid on my Little League All-Star team. Alan Slade was the coach, and he terrified me. He had a short fuse and didn’t like to lose. He wore a five-day-old handlebar mustache and a belly like he’d been pounding Budweisers since he was 12.
Coach Slade wasn’t the only one that scared me. The older boys did, too.
We were playing a team from one of the neighboring towns—a rival we don’t like losing to. Their pitcher was two years older than me, was bigger, and threw a hard fastball. Slade asked if I wanted to hit for one of the starting outfielders. I wasn’t confident I could hit the changeup, let alone the fastball. And if I couldn’t, there would be hell to pay with the older boys. I wasn’t afraid to get hit by the pitch. The physical pain didn’t worry me. It would go away. I was afraid of what the older boys would think if I didn’t hit the ball. I was afraid of failure.
I shrunk into the bench and declined—a moment of cowardice in my formative years.
Coach put Myron in to bat instead. The first pitch was a curve ball and Myron hit a slow grounder to the second baseman. The inning was over.
I stayed on the bench and didn’t get another chance to play. Coach Slade didn’t talk to me again. The tournament ended.
On the ride home my dad didn’t say a word either, except some short snark about my decision to be a cheerleader. It embarrassed him.
This is one of my first, and formative experiences with having to choose courage and risk failure, or cower in an attempt at self-preservation.
There would be more.
Most of the challenges we face in life, in one form or another, are like this. They can be reduced to either a fear of failure or a fear of rejection. And one often leads to the other. My fear of failing to hit the ball led to my rejection by the coach and team members. They couldn’t rely on me, not just to hit the ball but even to give it a try. At that point, I had no place in the group because my self-preservation instincts prevented me from contributing.
Often, when we think of courage, we envision heroic acts such as someone jumping in front of a speeding car to save a loved one or rushing into a burning building to rescue a trapped dog. We think of cops, special forces, and firefighters. And certainly, these acts all require courage to perform. But courage is much more than grandiose acts of heroism. Courage is part of almost every decision we make.
We have to meet the risk of failure and rejection with courage. That’s what courage is, actually — the meeting and tolerating the risk of failure and rejection. Risk elicits our fight or flight response in varying levels of intensity depending on the stakes of the challenge. Cortisol and adrenaline flood our system. It makes us feel uncomfortable. We want to get away from what’s making us feel this way. This is the will to self-preserve.
Courage stays in the discomfort of risk long enough to develop the skills necessary to overcome the challenge.
As an adult, what terrifies me more than anything are networking events. I’m an introvert and terribly so (this statement is a self-narrative I’ve created over the years - I’ll be writing about self-narratives more and more in the coming weeks). As an introvert, networking involves massive risk. Every interaction comes with the possibility of saying something awkward or dumb (fear of failure), or being rejected by who I’m trying to engage (fear of failure). My tendency then is to avoid networking events at all costs. This is a form of self-preservation.
But the benefits of staying in the discomfort of the event are massive. Social networks are the key to so many opportunities. Courage is the ability to stay in the discomfort until the challenge no longer feels risky.
In response to risk and fear, we have a choice. We can meet them with courage and a willingness to contribute. Or we can use our fear as a reason to not contribute and not move forward toward what is ultimately best for ourselves and others.
Stay in the discomfort of what challenges you most until you feel at home there. That is acting and living with courage.