The Case For Courage In Your Daily Life: Part 2
In Part 1 of "The Case For Courage In Your Daily Life" we found a reliable recipe to connect to the courage that we all instinctively crave because that connection to courage allows us to thrive. The recipe is: align your decisions and actions with hope and wonder so that you never surrender to fear or self-doubt.
Answering the Essential Questions allows you to align your life with hope and wonder.
"Who am I? And what am I going to do about it?"
"What is the biggest, most important problem I can solve with my gifts and skills? And what is my plan to solve it?"
Finding your own personal answers to those questions puts you on a path to creating positive change. We need to find courage in order to create positive change, because all change involves uncertainty, and uncertainty is scary. The act of creating positive change is the what defines the human experience for all of human history. That's how we went from the middle of the food chain to the top of the food chain. Since positive change is as essential to the human experience as courage, we need to know if there is a reliable recipe for creating that change. And if so, what is it?
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
This insight from Maya Angelou simply sums up the dynamics of creating change through what behavioral psychologists call "insight learning." Those dynamics are as follows: more desirable results require more effective behaviors, more effective behaviors require deeper understanding, and deeper levels of understanding are revealed by insights and experiences. The Senn Delaney Consulting Group represents these dynamics with their Results Cone.
Results
Behaviors
Understanding
Insight
This is the recipe for creating positive change. This is the process through which the Wright Brothers Flyer evolved into the Space Shuttle. This is what Thomas Edison meant when he said "I have not failed, I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." He only needed to get the light bulb right once to change the world. Every attempt that didn't work provided an insight that deepened his understanding until he finally found a way that worked.
This is the process through which I developed a deeper understanding of nutrition, exercise, and wellness that allowed me to lose 75 pounds and control my autoimmune disease. This is the process I apply to the practice of my craft as a writer.
These dynamics govern positive change for athletes, artisans, and master craftspeople everywhere. Once you know and understand these dynamics, you know everything you need to know in order to create positive change in your life.
How do you practice yoga? "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." How do you practice the violin? How do you practice archery? How do you practice strength training? How do you practice any craft that you wish to master? How did Michael Jordan practice basketball? "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." Seek out the experiences and insights that will deepen your understanding and allow you to find more effective behaviors. Leverage those increasingly effective behaviors to deliver increasingly desirable results.
The process of creating positive change starts with hope; the hope for improvement from the status quo. A fundamental characteristic of human psychology is that the moment you take a step in the direction of hope by envisioning your plan for positive change, fear and self-doubt immediately flood into the mind. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, and fear of embarrassment all pounce at this moment of peak vulnerability, and surrendering to those fears is how most dreams die, but it doesn't need to be that way.
We need to understand and accept that the flood fear and self-doubt that appear the moment we cross the threshold on our journey of hope is necessary because it serves our success in the long-term. We need a plan. The initial plan isn't going to be perfect, but it doesn't need to be. It just needs to be as good as we can make it at that moment, and fear of failure, rejection, and embarrassment force us to sharpen up our plan. Those fears serve to reduce the probability of actual failure, rejection, and embarrassment. They don't reduce the probabilities to zero, and that's why some of us quit on our dreams. Failure, rejection, and embarrassment are still going to happen on the journey to success, but visualizing them before they happen allows us to develop strategies to reduce the likelihood that they will happen catastrophically, so those fears are actually adaptively advantageous. We need that discomfort to help us do our best. That is all that is happening. Feeling the fear and self-doubt doesn't make you a coward. Allowing fear and self-doubt to dictate your decisions and actions does. Never surrender to fear and self-doubt. Pick yourself up, and walk toward hope and wonder.
“Can a man be still be brave if he’s afraid? That is the only time a man can be brave.”
Use the recipe for courage. Align your decisions and your actions with hope and wonder so that you never surrender to fear and self-doubt. You may experience failure, rejection, and embarrassment. You make experience defeat. You may need to retreat and regroup, but never surrender.
Use the recipe for creating positive change. "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." You will make mistakes along the way. Mistakes are invaluable conduits of insight, because "We win or we learn." Insights that lead to deeper understanding lead to more effective behaviors, and more effective behaviors lead to positive change in your results. Remember that "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results."
Equipped with the Essential Questions, the recipe for courage, and the recipe for change, you can begin making a plan to relentlessly pursue your potential so that you can live the life you were born to live.
“Start with hope”
“Start with what’s possible, then reverse engineer your plan from there, because if you do anything less, you’re dreaming too small.”
What do you hope to do with your life? What problem can you solve, what positive change can you create with your gifts and skills? How do you want your results to change? What can you change in order to get the results you desire? How do you need to deepen your understanding in order to develop your gifts and skills to the necessary level?
“It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?”
“L’chaim.”