Building Your Courage Ladder
If you’ve come this far, and you accept that we need more courageous acts, including from people like you and me, and you’ve done some initial self-assessment, it’s time to start thinking seriously about your own next steps.
Critical to this journey is your acceptance of the fact that skilled action in stressful situations requires practice—lots of it. You’re going to have to expose yourself to the risks you’ve been avoiding, because the only way I know to the other side of your fears is straight through them.
To start making this tangible and concrete, I’ll encourage you to build your own courage ladder—a personal road map of sorts that helps you think about where you want to start and get to on this journey. I’ll talk about setting an initial goal for starting at the bottom of your ladder so your first steps are more likely to happen, and more likely to lead to increased self-efficacy and the motivation to keep climbing.
Habituation through Planned Exposure
I’ve noted that the ability to act courageously doesn’t come from an exceptional trait that only a few possess. It’s a capacity we can all develop by committing to learn and practice relevant skills. Your first courageous step might be to choose to make that commitment now.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Aristotle argued that courage is a moral virtue developed through habit, and psychologist Stanley Rachman’s careful research in military settings nearly two thousand years later proved him right. Rachman and his colleagues demonstrated that aspiring paratroopers learn both to act with less fear and to act successfully despite their fear through repeated practice under skilled instruction in a supportive environment. In a nutshell, said Rachman, his studies “point to the powerful influence of adequate training.”1 That’s similar to the conclusion subsequently reached by moral psychologist Kurt Gray in describing those who do extraordinary things in the service of others: the very act of doing good is self-reinforcing because it helps us feel more willing and able to withstand discomfort along the way.2
On the one hand, this is hopeful news; on the other, it means none of us is off the hook. We can’t claim we lost some genetic lottery and leave it to others to stand up and speak out. In fact, even when someone’s courage appears to be innate, it’s probably not. For example, as told by historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, when (future US president) Teddy Roosevelt first spent time in the untamed West of the late 1800s, he was afraid of all sorts of things, from wild animals to gunfighters. Only by “forcing himself to do the most difficult or even dangerous thing” was he able to cultivate courage in himself “as a matter of habit, in the sense of repeated effort and repeated exercise of will-power.”3 Later observers referred to his “indomitable courage” as apparently “ingrained in his being,” clearly not understanding how hard he had worked to “become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness.”4 Roosevelt’s own goal had not been to deceive others about his own character; indeed, he hoped to inspire others to practice being courageous by his own example of facing his fears head-on.
It’s easier, though, to simply put people like that on a pedestal as a way of excusing our own inaction. This tendency to underestimate how hard people have worked to achieve their competence in any domain is quite general. Psychologist Anders Ericsson and colleagues have studied “peak performers” for decades, finding that what actually differentiates them is their years of practice. The mental representations and associated skills of experts aren’t developed by thinking about doing something, explain Ericsson and science writer Robert Pool, but rather “by trying to do something, failing, revising, and trying again, over and over.”5 Justin Stone, the great American tai chi instructor, likewise used the Chinese saying “You cannot appease the hunger by reading a menu” to remind followers that they couldn’t improve their own relaxation skills by thinking or reading about doing so.6 You have to practice, he said. Every day.
Practice Requires Exposure
The late John Lewis and his colleagues weren’t born ready to demonstrate nonviolent resistance to hate and discrimination. Long before their marches, sit-ins, and freedom walks, they started practicing, over and over, the nonviolent techniques they wanted to employ in response to the verbal and physical assaults they knew would come their way. Their desired responses had to be learned and internalized. “We were taught not to strike back,” recalled Lewis. “We studied. We had role playing. We had social drama. We were committed to the philosophy and the discipline of nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living.”7 So they practiced.
What John Lewis and his colleagues did is consistent with decades of “exposure therapy” research. The concept (if not the practice itself!) is simple: the way to reduce the emotional hold of something frightening is to gradually expose ourselves to that same threat, over and over, so that we can practice handling it and thereby reduce its power over us. Exposure therapy is the most widely used and effective treatment in psychologists’ toolkit for treating fear and anxiety across a host of different domains.8 It’s been shown to be helpful in reducing all sorts of persistent, crippling fears—from fear of snakes to fear of public speaking.
The ultimate purpose of exposure is habituation—a decreased physiological or emotional response to the situation that was once highly arousing. For example, imagine that you’re terrified of speaking up to your boss. Maybe your father was a yeller, and you’ve seen leaders at your organization tear into people who challenge them. Your current boss hasn’t been nasty to you, but you just can’t shake the fear that grips you when you contemplate disagreeing with him. Your brain currently associates “being honest with powerful people” with “danger,” and unless you manage to be honest with those above you in ways that lessen that automatic physiological fear response, or show you that you can survive just fine despite them, it’s not going to get easier for you. To repeat an uncomfortable but important truth: there’s no way it will get easier to speak truth to power unless you start doing it and prove to yourself that it’s not as awful as you feared.
Of course, if you have a terrible experience when you do speak up, that’s only going to reinforce your fear. That’s why it’s important to take small, controlled steps to reduce physiological and psychological arousal. You don’t just charge into a room and pick up the snake you fear. Your first step might be only to enter the room and do some deep breathing from ten feet away from the caged snake. Fairly soon that would become downright boring, and you’d be ready to get a bit closer. Before doing so, you might learn some cognitive techniques to further help you beat back the fear that threatens to overtake the rest of your brain.
The same is true with overcoming fear of speaking up or screwing it up when you do: you start very small and work your way toward more challenging situations. Since it wouldn’t be productive to keep moving to those more challenging situations if you didn’t add new skills along the way, we’ll focus extensively on those in the coming chapters. Some of these are methods for managing your automatic physiological responses, some involve how you think about stressful situations, and many involve your behavioral repertoire. The latter—your behavior toolkit—is particularly important because skillfully handling difficult conversations or decisions at work usually requires a broader range of behaviors than approaching a snake does (stepping forward; putting your hand in the cage; and so on). As we’ll see, many of the behaviors you’ll want to learn and practice are those we don’t even know how to do skillfully in lower-stress situations.
While simply avoiding something is just fine when we don’t care about its outcomes (for example, nothing I care about rests on me overcoming my fear of bats), purposefully “escaping” situations with consequences we do care about is actually worse than we already intuitively know. It’s not just that we allow the problem to persist and that we feel disappointment or shame for again avoiding an important action. It’s also that we are actually reinforcing our fear. Why? Because the good feeling we get from avoidance may only strengthen our belief that the situation we avoided was indeed too terrible to approach. Though we don’t usually consciously note it when it happens, our sense of “I feel calm now” can heighten the contrast with “that terrible, scary situation” we just avoided. Explains psychiatrist Joseph Strayhorn, “Escape from a feared situation tends to reinforce fear, whereas prolonged exposure (especially with the practice of handling the situation courageously) tends to reduce fear.”9
So, imagine that you sit in your boss’s office wanting to tell her something but then are so scared that you don’t. Instead, you end the meeting quickly, return to your office, and do something that relaxes you. What you’ve done is further strengthen two associations in your brain: (1) my boss in her office = scary; (2) alone in my office = safe. Sadly, you’ve reinforced your belief that you aren’t able to handle an honest conversation with your boss and your tendency to retreat.
Build Your Courage Ladder
I suggest you start by building a courage ladder like the one shown in figure 4-1. On the bottom rungs, put things that currently feel somewhat risky and difficult but that you can imagine starting to practice in at least some small way relatively soon. At the higher rungs, put things that you’d love to be able to do more frequently or skillfully, but that feel really risky or beyond you right now.
This exercise is for all of us, because every normal person feels afraid or intimidated by the prospect of doing some things some of the time. I think M. Scott Peck said it perfectly: “The absence of fear is not courage; the absence of fear is some kind of brain damage. Courage is the capacity to go ahead in spite of the fear, or in spite of the pain.”10 So let go of any negative self-judgment, put aside your worry that you’re uniquely vulnerable (you’re not!), and get started.
Don’t worry about how easy or hard the steps on your ladder might be for anyone else. It’s your ladder. Feeling ashamed or embarrassed because you think what feels hard for you might be easier for others isn’t going to help you move forward. There’s a reasonable chance you’re wrong about your assumptions anyway. If there’s anything I’ve learned about the fears and lack of skills that inhibit the behaviors discussed in this book, it’s that they’re pretty widely shared. For any behavior you might put on your ladder, I can assure you there are tons of other people who have it on theirs too.
It’s also true that except for a couple of extremely difficult behaviors—like putting ourselves at major physical risk or publicly revealing the illegal or unethical behavior of higher-power individuals—the order of the things on people’s ladders varies quite a lot. A few years ago, I asked a group of business school students at Cornell to rate the level of courage for a series of work-related behaviors. The responses for every single behavior (there were about twenty of them) ranged from “no courage” to “extreme courage.” That’s why you’ve got to build a personal courage ladder. While I can assert that you have one, I can’t possibly tell you what’s on which of the rungs for you.
The two courage ladders shown in figure 4-2 provide a more tangible illustration of this. Adam has had very competent, supportive bosses and he’s relatively young, so his fears about authority are more about doing things that show disrespect for their seniority and expertise than about challenging them for doing things that are wrong or inappropriate. Thus, for him, it feels a little courageous to step beyond the technical boundaries of his role. It feels a bit more courageous for Adam to challenge his boss about operating policies or practices because his assumption is that he probably doesn’t have the same breadth or depth of expertise as his boss does. Similarly, it feels even more difficult for Adam to have to admit he’s made a mistake to someone above him, because he’s a perfectionist who hates to disappoint others and can’t stand the thought of looking stupid. But because Adam has a strong need to be liked—and because he considers his colleagues the best and most important part of his work environment—the thought of having to confront peers about something they’re doing wrong terrifies him. It’s at the top of the ladder he’s made for himself.
In contrast, confronting peers is at the lowest rung of Marty’s courage ladder. He doesn’t relish the idea, and he knows that without being careful in how he approaches peers (who can easily say “You’re not the boss of me” in less nice terms), it can easily go badly. Still, he thinks of peer confrontations as mildly unsettling, not terrifying. In contrast, Marty dreads difficult interactions with his boss and others above him. He knows that these fears started in childhood; he can’t remember a time that his father took a confrontation in stride. And he’s had enough self-serving and insecure bosses that his body screams “danger” when he thinks of almost any type of challenging interaction with higher-ups. He thinks his current boss might be able to handle a conversation about strategy or operating policies because those things aren’t so personal. But when he thinks about confronting his boss about the inappropriate things she sometimes says or does, especially the couple of things Marty thinks cross ethical or possibly even legal lines, the immediate physiological signs of fear that appear make those behaviors feel out of reach.
To stimulate your thinking about what belongs on your ladder, you might go back to your results from the Workplace Courage Acts Index. What items—for you personally—would take a lot of courage? Or simply take some time to recall the last few irritations or complaints you’ve had at work that you talked about with peers or family members, but not the person involved or others who could actually help. Our “talked behind their back” list usually has good material for our courage ladder.
To be actionable, the final version of your courage ladder needs to be specific, because we don’t take action on a type of behavior, but on specific instances of it. For example, if you feel that “confronting peers about inadequate work” is courageous, jot down both the name of a specific peer and the specific type or instance of his inadequate work. For example, to guide actual next steps, Marty’s initial courage ladder has to be converted to one like that shown in figure 4-3.
To be sure you’ve got the behaviors in the right order and, more importantly, that you’ve got some things toward the bottom of the ladder that you can really imagine yourself doing in the near term, it can be helpful to give each behavior on your ladder a number indicating how hard it would be for you right now. You might use what psychiatrist Joseph Strayhorn calls a “SUD score”—that is, a rating from 1 to 10 of the “subjective units of distress” you currently associate with each act.11 Don’t worry about precision here—these are just your estimates and are for your use only.
Marty, for example, might consider talking to his peer John about shoddy reports to have a SUD score of 4, and those involving his bosses a 7, 9, and 10, respectively. This may lead Marty to add a few others to the list—perhaps a behavior even lower than a 4 so he’s willing to commit to doing it soon and perhaps something between the 4 and 7 so he can work his way up his ladder without taking such a leap after talking to his peer. He might ask himself “What is the easiest conversation I can think of having with Janice that is still intimidating for me?” to generate a boss-directed behavior that has lower than a 7 SUD score.
Assigning SUD scores to these behaviors now also allows you to track progress. In a few months, for example, with the experience of talking to John about the shoddy reports and a few others like this under his belt, Marty might decide this behavior now only feels like a 2. And maybe the ones involving his boss that he initially put on his ladder have come to feel less difficult for him, too.
You’ve got your ladder. Now what? My advice is to start climbing from the bottom, just as you would on a real ladder. It’s worth remembering that just like in physical training the most effective long-term strategy is to start with small, manageable steps.12 Start with very short “courage workouts” and slowly build your capacity. Of course, you want the first steps to involve some (di)stress or they’re not even courageous acts and you won’t be practicing under conditions that sufficiently mimic the stresses involved with the things higher on your ladder. If your starting point is too easy, you might also have picked battles that, in the words of education activist Jonathan Kozol, are small enough to win but not big enough to matter.13 You want activities with SUD scores of 2 or 3, not 0.
Say, for example, that you want to stop being a silent bystander when one of your colleagues gossips about the appearance of another coworker. Taking a forceful, public stand to rebuke this behavior the next time it occurs might feel like a very big deal. But, as Sharyn Potter (the codirector of the Prevention Innovations Research Center at the University of New Hampshire) reminds us, you don’t need to “fly in with [your] Superman cape.”14 As a first step, you could commit to yourself to saying something in private next time it happens. Advises Linda Tropp, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, it could be as simple as “I don’t appreciate that comment” or “That’s not cool,” said in a calm manner that doesn’t demonize the speaker.15 You don’t need to give him a lecture about why you don’t appreciate it, or why it’s not cool. Just make the simple statement. Your colleague may not like it and may let you know that. But you’ll survive, and he might be more careful about what he says going forward.
There are at multiple reasons to start at the bottom and take small steps when you first start climbing your courage ladder. For one, you’re more likely to have some success—to get some “small wins” that help you begin to build self-efficacy (that sense that “I can do this”). You’re trying to change your “can do” beliefs about the behaviors on your ladder, and the way to do that is to have some things go well (or at least OK) so you begin to lessen the association in your head between “behavior X” and “bad outcomes.” You are trying, as Bryan said long ago (and as psychologists have confirmed), to develop self-confidence by doing the things you fear and getting a record of successful experiences behind you.16
Practice also helps you get comfortable with the discomfort that accompanies courageous actions. Small steps teach us that we can survive and move on, even if we’re miserable in the moment. In recent decades, much has been written about “resilience,” and the simple message is this: difficult experiences don’t automatically doom us; they present opportunities to emerge on the other side even stronger and more capable of handling what life throws our way.17
For example, say you speak up with a new idea in a staff meeting and the boss shoots it down. You feel terrible that night, telling whomever will listen what a jerk your boss is, how you’re never listened to or respected, etc. The next morning, you’re still stewing over it. It stinks, for sure. But what we often forget when recalling experiences like this is that we got past them. We didn’t suffer irreparable harm, and the pain wasn’t so intense we couldn’t move forward. In fact, viewed as a learning experience, we now know two things more clearly: (1) what doesn’t work as well as we’d like it to in that kind of situation and, (2) that we are capable of living with and moving past some degree of emotional pain. So pat yourself on the back for speaking up, and choose to imprint this as a moment of strength and growth, not as a failure. Remind yourself that the differences we see between people who went through the same setback or hardship often has more to do with the post hoc story they told themselves than what they both objectively experienced.
Taking a small step now also reduces the chance that you’ll have to take a much bigger step later because the situation has escalated due to your earlier inaction. For example, auditors routinely find relatively small deviations from accepted accounting practice. If they don’t speak up about these minor indiscretions because it’s uncomfortable, they might later need to be truly heroic in the face of what has become a much larger problem.18
Letting problems get bigger before taking action makes it harder to succeed for two reasons. First, having to confront, report, or admit something that is now much more serious increases the likelihood that others will react negatively. If you think someone won’t like being told that they’ve just started to do something outside accepted accounting standards that could cause a problem if not stopped now, think how they’re going to react if you wait six months and then have to tell them that they’ve got a major accounting problem that puts the organization at significant financial, legal, or reputational risk.
Second, when we don’t take smaller steps earlier, our emotions often build up in ways that limit our ability to behave skillfully when we finally act. We’ve all seen people (and probably done it ourselves—I certainly have) who tell themselves “It’s no big deal” or “It’s fine” the first, second, and third time something problematic happens, and then later overreact unproductively when that same thing happens yet again. The truth is, it never really was OK to us, but we told ourselves that story to avoid doing something about it. Now, when we simply can’t tolerate it anymore, we’re stuck trying to confront the issue skillfully with our emotions at a 10 rather than the 2 or 3 they started at.
Small steps and small wins. They increase our confidence to take bigger steps. They show us it is possible to act where we used to think it was too hard or too dangerous. They reveal that we’re not as incompetent or impotent as we thought we were.
And here’s one more thing—what starts small can become something bigger. As organizational theorist Kark Weick has written, your small wins might start drawing others to your position, and openness to a bigger change might increase.19 You might also see that what appeared to be little or no change was actually change happening out of sight. Many years ago, I was feeling frustrated that the changes I’d been working to make didn’t appear to be bearing any fruit. A wise counselor suggested more was likely happening than I realized. “Imagine you’re trying to knock down a cinder block wall,” he said, “and you’re swinging at the wall with a sledgehammer. Day after day, you hit the wall, and nothing appears to be happening. You’re just about to give up, when suddenly the entire wall crumbles. Turns out, for quite some time small pieces were cracking off the back of the wall, hit after hit. You were making progress, but you couldn’t see it until you literally broke through.”
Remember
- You develop the skills to act competently in courageous situations by practicing those skills regularly, not by reading or thinking about them.
- Regular practice—with small increases in the level of difficulty in actions—can help you habituate to the situations you fear, thereby reducing their emotional grip and increasing your ability to act in desired ways.
- Everyone’s courage ladder is different because the specific situations we fear and skills we need to develop to tackle them successfully vary significantly across individuals. But all of us have things we can identify and order by degree of risk and difficulty on a courage ladder. Pretending this isn’t the case is only an excuse to keep from getting started.
- Taking small steps from the bottom rungs of your courage ladder increases the odds you’ll have some success, thereby building self-efficacy and sustaining your motivation to keep tackling tougher situations. Even if things don’t go well, you’ll learn, you’ll get more comfortable with discomfort, and you’ll increase your resilience.