John Levesque’s Final Analysis: Got Courage?

Got courage?

You probably do, even if you think otherwise. Its just not the sort of thing youd wear like a milk moustache. Its invisible, like the Seattle Seahawks offensive strategy.

Courage is particularly hard to find in a lousy economy. As the Dow gets flipped like a cheese omelet and our retirement stash becomes petty cash, we behave like toddlers who think theres a killer in the closet and a monster under the bed. Accordingly, our paralysis makes usand our businessesweak, vulnerable.

Leadership consultant Cindy Solomon believes courage can be acquired, that its not necessarily something youre born with. She has interviewed about 5,000 people of all ages, across all socioeconomic backgrounds, in all sorts of industries around the world. She was in Seattle recently to bring her Courage Challenge to several hundred businesswomen at a Key4Women event, and to spread her message that, based on her findings, we are all capable of acting courageously.

Solomons traveling courage show evolved from the interviews she has conducted. She asked people, from CEOs to assembly line workers, to talk about what held them back, to talk about risk. The answers were all over the place: fear of being wrong, of looking stupid, of posting a bad quarterly result, of losing a client, of standing up in front of a group.

Courage was the missing piece [I noticed] in organizations, Solomon says, and it holds true across the board. The higher up they went, the more conservative they became in decision making. When we need bold thinking the most, the human side of us continues to be fearful.

In her interviews, Solomon has discovered four truths about courage.

Courage is personal. In other words, just as you arent likely to talk someone into enjoying something he or she fears more than death, like, say, public speaking, no one can tell you what youre courageous in.

Courage is not what you think. Only about 50 percent of us are willing to admit publicly that we are courageous, says Solomon. Whats fascinating about this fact is that men, who are taught that its manly to be courageous, are likely to say theyre courageous even if they dont believe it themselves. Women, on the other hand, tend to do the opposite. Regardless, Solomon insists most people, male and female, dont take credit for their courageous actions. And thats what holds us back, she says.

Courage is not a super power. Only a fraction of the instances we think of as requiring courage actually involve physical endangerment, Solomon says. More likely, courage is about the seemingly mundane decisions, such as launching a new business venture or dealing with a difficult employee, making an ethical decision or deciding to spend more time with the kids.

Courage can be learned. Solomon says we are all born with the capacity to be courageous. She sees courage as another skill we can learn to develop and place in our tool kits, like speaking another language or operating a new computer program.

The key, obviously, is practice. If we get into the habit of acting courageously, it becomes second nature. Theres a great quote by [the psychologist] Rollo May, Solomon says, the gist of it being that courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to move ahead in spite of your fear. The economy is defining how we react. People who are proactively seeking courageous action and bold action are going to be the winners. And there will be winners.

So next time you say to yourself, I wish I had the courage to …, please stop wishing and do something. Imagine what might happen if a few CEOs did that.

JOHN LEVESQUE is the managing editor of Seattle Business magazine.