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The subject of our last principle (fear) and the subject of this principle (courage) go hand-in-hand. Fear is the predecessor, and instigator, of courage. Indeed, because courage is a response to fear, you can’t demonstrate courage unless you are afraid. Though people falsely assume that courage is about being fearless, in reality the opposite is true. Courage is completely full of knee-knocking, teeth-chattering fear. So rather than walk with the cocksure swagger of John Wayne, courage shakes with the insecure awkwardness of Barney Fife.

The difference between a coward and a courageous person is not that one is afraid and the other isn’t. To be sure, both are afraid. Rather, the difference is in how each responds to fear. To be a coward is to turn and run from fear when you are fully capable of confronting it, but unwilling to do so. Conversely, to be courageous is to stay and confront fear even though you are afraid, not with Neanderthal bravery, mind you, but by allowing yourself to stay present with all your fearful feelings and then to walk through them. Even though courage is full of fear, it takes the risk anyway. By definition then, courage means acting in the face of fear.

When we demonstrate courage, the best of ourselves emerges, and our character is displayed. Self-satisfaction comes from knowing that we are doing something that is difficult for us. Relishing our risk moment comes naturally when we follow Right Risk principle 7: Have the courage to be courageous.

Courage and Cowardice

Fear is like a schoolyard bully who stands in front of you, shoves your shoulder and says, So what are you going to do about it? In essence, the question is a provocation—a dare— that confronts you with a choice between demonstrating courage or succumbing to cowardice. For this reason, in situations where fear is the only thing standing in the way of getting something you want, dealing with fear should be viewed as an opportunity to strengthen your courage.

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For example, I once coached a professional named Bob who was considering three separate job offers. All were well-known companies, but one was of particular renown. Its name carried a certain pedigree that eclipsed the others. Bob had settled his mind on one of the lesser offers, rationalizing that this particular job most resembled the roles that he had had in the past—roles that no longer challenged him, as he had mentioned in the course of earlier discussions. Sensing there was more to it, I asked him to describe his impressions about the more prominent company. He said that many of the people who worked there had Ivy League degrees (which he didn’t) and/or graduate degrees (which he had). Although they had offered him the job, he said that he was afraid he wouldn’t cut it. I now understood that the issue wasn’t about skill compatibility; it was about Bob’s personal insecurities, it was about his fear. I probed further, “Bob, what exactly are you afraid of?” He thought for a second and said, “I guess I am afraid that everyone will be smarter than me, that my ideas won’t be valued. If that happens, they’ll fire me.” Directed by Bob’s answer, I asked him another, more courage-provoking, question: If fear weren’t an issue, which job would you choose? Without hesitation he selected the one he was most afraid of.

As Bob’s story illustrates, fear often indicates something about yourself that you are avoiding. Left unaddressed, life will bombard you with a litany of opportunities to confront these “issues” until you finally resolve them. Each time you avoid the issue, you stuff it further into your psyche. But knowing that dealing with the issue represents your growth, your psyche throws the issue back up until you finally confront it, as if to say, if you don’t learn the lesson, you have to repeat the class. Through coaching, Bob was able to see that not only did the job he was afraid of represent an opportunity to gain experience working in a world-class organization, but it also represented an ideal opportunity to explore and, more importantly, to overcome his deep-rooted feelings of low self-worth. But to benefit from both opportunities, he would have to muster up the courage to be courageous and to face his fear. Ultimately he did. He chose the opportunity he was most afraid of.

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Courage Capability

Any risk situation has a grand continuum: You are either moving in the direction of your courage or moving in the direction of your cowardice. When you face your fears, your Courage Capability expands, enlarging your capacity for dealing with future fears. In this way, demonstrating courage is itself a form of encouragement in that it fills you with greater levels of courage. Fortified with more courage, you are then capable of facing more fearful situations. For example, as a young professional you might find it petrifying to give a presentation to ten people. However, as you progress in your career and gain more experience with public speaking, you are able to comfortably address larger and larger audiences. In this example, the number of additional audience members reflects the degree of expansion of your Courage Capability.

Of course the opposite is also true. In situations where you allow fear to prevent yourself from having something you want, you enlarge your Cowardice Capability. And the more cowardice you exhibit, the more it grows because cowardice feeds on the diminishment of courage. On a certain level, this is also quantifiable. For example, the person who is afraid to take the risk of asking for a raise can calculate his cowardice as the difference between his current salary and the adjusted salary he feels he deserves but is too afraid to ask for (assuming, of course, that he would have gotten the raise).

People don’t like using the word coward. They look for softer, less offensive terms. But just because we don’t like the word doesn’t mean cowardice isn’t real. Cowardice is as real as courage. One exists in relation to the other. Furthermore, just as there have been times in your life when you’ve been courageous, the chances are, at some point in your life you’ve been a coward as well. Most acts of cowardice, however, go unnoticed and remain concealed within the confines of your heart. Cowardice comes in compromising your principles, in allowing your boundaries to be crossed, in failing to demonstrate personal fidelity, and in not taking a stand for what you believe in. You could spend your whole life being a coward and no one would know it but you.

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Having the courage to be courageous means backing up courageous actions with a courageous attitude. It means holding a clear picture of yourself being courageous and continuously asking yourself, how would the courageous person I want to become act in this fearful situation that I am faced with today? It means first believing in the virtue of courage and then acting in a courageous manner. When it comes to courage, you have to believe it to be it.

The Courage to Confront Yourself

Demonstrating courage often means accepting your limitations. For example, once while performing in a high-diving show at Adventureland in Des Moines, Iowa, I was forced to accept my limitations in front of 2,000 people. With a moderate wind, all high-dive ladders will sway. But as I climbed to the top of the ladder, I noticed that it was swaying with more vigor than usual. It was a balmy August day and winds were gusting out of the Northwest. Just as I let go of the ladder and readied for the dive, a strong burst of wind sideswiped me from the right, shoving me sideways to the left and almost off the platform. Oh my God! I thought as my right hand instinctively reached for the ladder behind me. Had my hand missed, I would have plummeted to the concrete deck ten stories below. Startled, all those gut-curdling fear responses became activated inside me. It took every ounce of composure I had not to have a full-blown panic attack.

Experience had taught me that in moments of panic, the best way to regain composure is to pay attention to my breathing. There is something comforting in the measured rhythms of inhaling and exhaling. However, the combination of the spastic winds, the sway of the ladder, and the urging eyes of the audience were particularly taxing on me. Though at this point in my diving career I had about a thousand high dives under my belt, this was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I was way out of my comfort zone. I was perplexed. Should I try to do the dive between gusts? I thought. If I could time it right, it would be unlikely that the wind would push me off my trajectory once I got in the air. Should I climb back down? It would be pretty embarrassing to have to slither down the ladder in front of a full house of park patrons. Beyond that, I’d have to endure the endless ribbing of my teammates. At the same time, there was something queer about this moment. It just didn’t feel right.

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Of all the things that the discipline of diving gave me, the one thing I am most grateful for is “the voice.” Diving taught me to trust the little voice inside me that, like the Little Engine That Could, says, “I think I can.” I believe it’s the voice of courage. The high-dive platform can be a lonely place, and often the little courageous voice—my inner advocate—was my most loyal companion. I asked myself, What’s the right thing to do? My little internal voice whispered back, What do you want? I answered, I want to be safely on the ground. It was clear, more than anything else I wanted to be safe. And the safe thing to do was obvious. With that, I saluted the audience, gingerly turned around, and started descending back down the ladder. In 7 years performing in front of audiences as large as 50,000 people, no crowd ever roared with approval as much as they did that day. As one relieved audience member told me later, “We were as nervous as you were!”

The Courage to Say No

Risk for risk’s sake is arrogance, not courage. Often the most courageous acts are acts of risk restraint. Restraint doesn’t mean resignation or cowardice. Exercising restraint is not running away from fear. Rather, it means putting your risk motor in neutral and waiting for a better alignment between the risk opportunity and your capabilities. It reflects a poised composure that is capable of idling the lower appetites of hubris and greed. To act with occasional risk restraint is to exhibit risk maturity. Above all, acting with restraint involves accepting and embracing the reality of your limitations. You can only relish your risk moment if you are alive to relish it, and passing on a risk today may better prepare you to engage in a risk tomorrow. Some of your most dignified and edifying risk moments are when you bow gracefully to the risk gods and say, “Today is your day . . . but I will be back tomorrow.”

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In every field or endeavor, the most exceptional risk-takers are those who can resist the lower urges of the moment in order to satisfy the higher aspirations of the future. Few people exemplify this as much as Ed Viesturs. In December 2000, Outside Magazine selected 25 of the best adventure All-Stars. Ed topped the list. According to the article, Ed has summitted eleven of the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks. Moreover, he has made nine attempts at Everest—all without oxygen bottles. His legend has grown in part due to the role he played in the ill-fated 1996 Everest climb, which claimed the lives of 8 people and was immortalized in the IMAX film Everest. In the course of his own successful climb, Viesturs courageously helped rescue climbers who had become stranded near the summit.

Viesturs’s risk maturity is evidenced by his account of his first Everest expedition in 1987, a three-month attempt to climb Everest’s famed North Face. As related to Outside Magazine, Viesturs said, “So here we are, 300 feet from the summit—spitting distance—and we turned around and walked away. It was a very difficult decision. You’ve spent years training, months of preparation, thousands of dollars, and you throw it all away. A lot of people are willing to risk their lives. I’m not. We probably could have made it to the top, but with conditions and our abilities, we weren’t sure we could make it down. And that’s the critical factor. Getting up is optional, getting down is mandatory.”¹ He turned away from the summit the following year too. He finally made the summit in 1990 and has now stood on top of the world’s highest peak five times. Shakespeare was right: Discretion is the better part of valor.

Risk restraint is not always about saying “no” to a risk, it can also be about saying “yes” to safety. This is not always an easy choice because saying yes to safety can tarnish your reputation as a risk-taker. No one likes to look wimpy. On the NASCAR circuit, for example, reputations are made through a mixture of skill and swagger. Few racers embodied this as much as NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt. No one can deny that he was a skilled racer. In the course of his career he won the season-long Winston Cup title seven times. His skill was made all the more potent by the mystique surrounding his reputation as the Intimidator. Earnhardt was a full-throttle risk-taker who wasn’t afraid of mouthing off to the risk gods. “Candy asses” was his label for those racers who supported the push to slow down race cars (which adds to the spectator excitement by bunching up the field). Chiding them, he added, “Get the hell out of the race car if you’ve got feathers on your legs or butt.”²

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But when Earnhardt crashed into the fourth wall at Daytona, his reluctance to say “yes” to safety may have gotten the best of him. He had refused to wear the new Head and Neck Support (HANS) system, a device that curbs whiplash. As of the writing of this book, no NASCAR driver wearing the HANS system has ever died in a crash. Not one.³ While we will never know if Earnhardt would have survived the crash had he worn the device (his death may have been attributable to a failed seat belt), this much is clear: Had he agreed to wear a safety device—an act of risk restraint—he would have significantly increased his chances of surviving a crash. Earnhardt’s fans can take solace in knowing that by losing a racing legend, they gained a risk god.

The Courage to Tell the Truth

Having the courage to be courageous is rarely an easy thing to do; otherwise, there would be more people doing it. Indeed, sometimes the courageous choice, while noble, can exact a toll on your life. Whistleblowers, for example, are among the most courageous Right Risk-takers of all. Why? Because they do something that many other people won’t: They tell the truth. But as truth-tellers, they threaten those who would prefer to keep the truth hidden and often become subject to their scorn. By some estimates, as many as half of all whistleblowers lose their jobs, half of those fired will lose their homes, and many will eventually lose their marriages as well.⁴ Even those who don’t fare as badly can expect some form of reprisal, be it harassment, public humiliation, or even violence. Moreover, because being a whistleblower often carries the stigma of being a snitch or tattletale, even friends and family members may become unsupportive, forcing the whistleblower to go it alone.

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In 2002, three huge media stories revolved around the courageous whistleblowing actions of three Right Risk women. First, Sherron Watkins, an accountant with Enron, sent a memo to her boss’s boss’s boss, warning, “I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals . . . the business world will consider the past successes as nothing but an elaborate accounting hoax.”⁵ Then, Coleen Rowley, a legal counsel in the FBI’s Minneapolis office, sent a scathing 13-page letter to FBI Director Robert Muller (with copies to the Senate Intelligence Committee), expressing disgust at the way intelligence was handled prior to 9/11, intelligence that she believed might have prevented the tragedy. She observed, “I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of the facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring.”⁶ Finally, Cynthia Cooper, an internal auditor at WorldCom, confronted then company CFO Scott Sullivan with evidence of improper accounting practices, practices that when brought to light turned out to be the largest financial fraud in history.⁷ In each case, these women put themselves at considerable risk in order to do what they felt was right. For their heroism, the three women were named Time Magazine’s 2002 Persons of the Year.

Lest you discount the courageousness of these women, consider all the people who might have prevented the tragedies of Enron and WorldCom from happening, had they come forward. There was total silence from the board of directors, the auditing departments, independent accounting firms, and corporate lawyers. In companies as large as these, it would seem highly unlikely that knowledge of these deceptive practices was limited to only one or two key people. More likely, others did know but were either afraid of the consequences of disclosure or had too much of a vested interest in seeing the activities continue. Commenting on the surprising lack of truth-telling, that old iconoclastic whistle-blower himself Ralph Nader said, “Would a despot-dictatorship have been more efficient in silencing them and producing the perverse incentives for all to keep quiet? The system is so efficient that there was total silence. I mean, even the Soviet Union had enough dissidents to fill Gulags.”⁸

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The Battle for Courage

War is perhaps the most terrifying of all human activities. War is a zero-sum contest where the stark consequence of cowardice is death. For this reason and because war is the ultimate fear-inducer, war has been the birthplace of many people’s courage. Take, for example, Joseph Foss, who shot down 26 Japanese planes in the Battle of Guadalcanal, an unsurpassed record during WWII. Such bravery helped him get elected governor of South Dakota. Or how about Jefferson De Blanc, who as a fighter pilot in the Solomon Islands destroyed five enemy aircraft in a matter of minutes before his own plane was sent into a tailspin. After parachuting to the ocean, he swam more than 9 miles to a small Japanese-held island and survived there in secret before being rescued two weeks later.⁹

These are only two examples of the incredible stories of the recipients of the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor, which is bestowed on those individuals who “risk their lives above and beyond the call of duty.” As the highest military decoration, it is presented by the President, more than one of whom has whispered to a proud recipient, “I’d rather have that medal than be President of the United States.”

While war is often the instigator of courage on the front lines, so, too, is it on the protest lines. And in extremely rare instances, one person displays courage on both fronts. Charles Liteky is such a person. As an Army Chaplain in Vietnam, Liteky carried 23 men to safety while facing fierce machine-gun fire—a feat made all the more remarkable considering that he was wounded in both the neck and foot. For his courage, Liteky was awarded the Medal of Honor. But in a later act of protest, Liteky left his medal at the base of the Vietnam Memorial, forgoing a $600 a month lifetime tax-free pension. The reason? Ironically, for the same reason he won the Medal of Honor: to save lives. Liteky was protesting the U.S.’s sponsorship of the Army’s School of the Americas, the controversial school where U.S. officers trained Latin American military personnel. Some, like Liteky, suspected that the school taught torture tactics and trained soldiers in political assassination techniques. In protesting the violent tactics of the school, Liteky was arrested numerous times and, at 70 years old, spent a year in Lompoc federal prison (including a 70-day stint in solitary confinement).¹⁰

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While Liteky’s actions may be off-putting to some, his acts of moral conscience have garnered respect from both demonstrators and Army personnel. Even Paul Buch, himself a Medal of Honor recipient and a past president of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, says, “When I look at Liteky, I have respect for the courage of his views. It is difficult to be an iconoclast. It is much easier to go along. Men like Liteky are people who should cause us to pause and think, they should not be ostracized and criticized. They are entitled to their views, and perhaps if we listened to them we would be better off.”¹¹

In commenting on his own courage, Liteky explains, “For me now, the most courageous thing has been to be nonviolent, to go out and face violence and have the courage not to be violent.”¹²

The National Park Service retrieved Charles Liteky’s medal and now displays it at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

The Fall Hike Effect

It takes courage to live in a courageous way. Doing so means continually allowing yourself to experience fearful situations. But the more you courageously face fear, the less intimidating it becomes. I call this the Fall Hike Effect. My wife, Shannon, and I enjoy hiking in the mountains of North Georgia, especially during Georgia’s short fall season. On these chilly fall days, I’ll often get all bundled up to insulate myself from the frigid air. Early on, all my woolen armor helps me brave the cold. But before long, my physical exertion starts to heat up my internal furnace. After a while I am not cold at all, I am hot, and I have to start peeling off the layers. My condition is now fully reversed from when I started! In the same way, when facing your fear, your early perceptions about the fear are likely to be very intimidating. However, as you begin exercising your courage, the Fall Hike Effect is likely to kick in, and your cold feelings of fear will turn into warm feelings of excitement. And when they do, you won’t fear your risk, you’ll relish it.

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Putting Principle 7 Into Practice

• How do you define courage? What traits make someone courageous?
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• Relative to your big risk, are you moving toward courage or are you moving toward cowardice?

• Identify some things you can do to enlarge your Courage Capability. How would asserting yourself in small situations help you be bolder in more demanding ones?
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• How would the courageous person you want to become face the fears you are challenged with today?
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• Do you consider yourself a truth-teller? What risk have you taken was an act of truth-telling?
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• Think about the bravest thing you’ve ever done. Was it an act of gallantry or an act of protest? In what ways would you like to be braver?
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