In the years since the publication of Courage: The Backbone of Leadership,¹ we as a country have seen our levels of conflict, fears, and anxieties soar like an Elon Musk rocket. The first casualties? Our already questionable abilities to respect all people and to actually listen to each other.

The Playbook challenges us to do the highest moral action in the routines of everyday life. It's not about the rarely needed physical bravery of running into burning buildings. It's really about authentically respecting others in the here and now to instill a strong and meaningful rhythm in our daily lives. When do we need courage? Every time we interact with someone or face any manner of decision. Where does this need arise? At home, in families, during commutes, at work, in relationships, in the gym, and out with friends—whenever moments quietly call upon our actual ability to be courageous. Often, we don't even notice or, fearing discomfort, we look the other way. Every day, we lose opportunities to become our best selves. Based on my own history of weakness, I know we can do better. I train people to overcome their fears. Long experience with diverse clients has taught me to focus on two principles:

• First, as individuals and as a people, we need to use UPR, Unconditional Positive Respect.
• Second, UPR is achieved by practice. Practicing UPR takes courage.

What's courage? It's the deep, mystic chord with which we can lead our lives and inspire others to become their best selves. It seamlessly equips us to improve who we are. It optimizes how we use the time given us. Courage fuels our brave adventuring into a life of deeper meaning, of helping others, of serving a higher, unselfish cause in a grand narrative, of becoming who we always wished to be. It is doing that liberating right thing which at first seems undoable.

Courage counts because we often allow our anxieties, fears, and doubts to play with us like a kitten with ball of yarn. We sweat out energy worrying about the external and forget that we were internally wired to practice courage so that we can lead and live with this great, unflinching, untapped, life‐uplifting source of strength. Courage, like a world‐class runner in the blocks, merely awaits our decision to run the race of life with a stronger purpose.

Courage is many things. For starters, courage is more an action than an abstraction, and is more behavioral than theoretical. Courage is doing the highest and grandest right thing.

As a child, I had many disadvantages with the special decision‐making ability of a defective video game character. This led to a life of fear and flight, of dwindling in the face of challenges. I let myself slide into cowardice. But courage was chasing me. I knew it was there, just beyond reach. I couldn't see it and I couldn't name it—but I could sense it. Later, being coached by selfless men and women forced me to accept that even I could become courageous.

“Life,” wrote Anais Nin, “expands or shrinks in proportion to one's courage.”² Gaining courage stopped my shrinkage. It changed everything, like Peanuts’ Charlie Brown, the hapless cartoon character never again losing the kite and now always getting to kick the football.

“The Y,” said Coach Tony, “ain't a boxing factory. None o’ you are likely to go pro. The Y's here for you to get inner courage. Build your character. Uh, 'specially you, kid.”

Can anyone acquire courage? Certainly. But today, many can only sense courage the way I did as a child. We know in a vague way that courage is there. But we see it incompletely and understand it imperfectly, with an ancient fear that courage is full of promise but in reality is an unwinnable lottery ticket.

Critically, we forget that courage is a set of practiced behaviors, a way of life, and a fundamental form of human identity.

Courage recruited me, an All‐American Chicken Little. I feared everything, ran from my own fears, and couldn't find “courage” in the dictionary. It methodically equipped me to obey my coaches, practice doing the right thing, train others to beat their fears, and to care for those whom I could reach. Courage gave me life. Because it can be acquired by anyone, never again would I find myself running on empty and fleeing discomfort on the fumes of my fears.

A result is The Courage Playbook, your personal invitation to flex your essential courage muscles before they atrophy from unthinking neglect. Here, intellect, emotions, actions, and inner spirit unite in a principled way so you can become who you were always supposed to be.

This differs from other books on leading your life and the like. It departs from the popular, mainstream leader and self‐development efforts that rely on listening to speakers rather than actually acquiring practical on‐the‐ground skills and focusing on self‐gain rather than on helping others. Per professor‐psychologist‐aviator‐humorist‐writer‐and‐boxer Dr. James P. Sullivan, we win greatness of ability by practicing the skills of courage instead of listening to people talk about them. Crucially, we gain courage for the common good.

The difference is captured in a simple axiom: We get courage by doing courage.

How do we do courage? By practicing its now‐forgotten behaviors.

The Courage Playbook walks you through those actions in five basic Steps.

The ideas and exercises in The Playbook come from a revolutionary courage training program that has equipped individuals and organizations to overcome their fears so they can act with unfettered freedom, resolute confidence, and a sense of humor, all for the right reasons.

It's not how I used to do it. For decades, working for top global and national leader development institutions and business schools, we taught leadership knowledge as if it were an academic subject like English or math. Thousands of smart, experienced, and educated participants took notes, enjoyed personality insights, simulation games, camaraderie, and meals and gave us 4.5 stars. They left emotionally refreshed. But their behaviors hadn't changed. Our binders sat brightly on the shelf, but the learning hadn't installed practical interpersonal abilities. They knew more than before, yet the fears they had on arrival were waiting for them when they returned. The glow lasted about a week. Yet they had not functionally improved as leaders or individuals. We'd taught intellectual theory; we hadn't trained in actual courage and skills.

The participants’ organizations continued to practice denial and blame, avoid glaring problems, tolerate toxic managers and be stymied by poor performance, disrespect, turnover, dishonesty, and divided cultures. They drove for profits instead of quality; picked on others for not improving while refusing to change themselves; didn't want to hear the truth; chose short‐term results over sustainability and became bad companies—sadly, the very issues that had brought them to us for training. In business and in personal lives, they knew more about why they struggled, but didn't know how to implement courageous actions for authentic improvement, to become who they were supposed to be. Courage had been left out of the training schedule. It's as if they had attended a running clinic without stepping outside the classroom; they hadn't learned and then conscientiously practiced the fundamental plays, leaving them to hesitate once the starter gun sounded.

In the language of the earlier book on courage, they had read about crossing the River of Fear—the barrier between us and our best selves—but they hadn't practiced doing it and hence didn't know how to pull it off.

I realized that leadership shouldn't be only for those with rank, and courage can't be only for those who can afford an executive coach. The very definition of courage requires that it be available to everyone and that it not be for you alone; when you gain it by practice, you'll then generously share it.

Courage is essential in leadership—it's impossible to lead and inspire others to be their best selves while being anxious about approval, constantly fearing failure, or avoiding difficulties. But courage is rarely presented as central to human effort and is almost never the subject of actual, practical behavioral training. Research into our national efforts to develop positive work, family, and community cultures through leadership training has confirmed what I'd observed and learned through decades of experience.

Acutely lacking leaders, the United States spends $170 billion every year ($520 per capita) to develop them—without producing effective leaders.³ We've tried agility, change theory, conceptualization, do what you feel, emotional intelligence, execution, fishbones, going to Gemba, pursuing Kaizen, chasing habits, laws, Lean Six Sigma, rules, break the rules, forget the rules, no rules, perseverance, positivity, quality programs, Root Cause Analysis, scrums, speed, sprints, strengths, transparency, trust, and vision.

The results? Per John Kotter of Harvard, we suffer a 400 percent deficit in leaders at every level.⁴ Dr. Paul Brand, an international medical missionary, noted that Americans, who live with greater physical comforts than most in the world, are unequipped to cope with simple discomfort and are especially vulnerable to sharp disappointments.⁵

Brimming with good ideas, we have found ourselves back where we began.

We are missing something, and it's big.

What happened? I'll tell you what happened: we lost our courage, and watching endless PowerPoint presentations and taking personality assessments and doing simulations have sadly failed to bring it back. With brains, universities, and a big economy, we sit on the fence of positive action, suffer great falls, and can't put Humpy Dumpty together again.

We've created and then fallen face‐first into a yawning Courage Gap.

But when I was engaged in one‐on‐one executive and private coaching, I did things differently. By guiding clients to courageously stop basic and common negative habits, practice key courageous behaviors, and to be actually accountable, the coaching became personal, relational, and impactful. They became dramatically stronger as listeners, communicators, teambuilders, and effective solvers of tough, recurring problems at work. But beyond that, more importantly, they were able to repeat the same behaviors in their private lives, the place that counts the most. By changing themselves, they inspired change in others. We laughed, not at preplanned jokes to warm up participants, but from experiencing the spontaneous and deeper mirth from the lost art of courageously realizing our foibles. And they then practiced the behaviors of courage, which locked key skills into mind‐muscle‐heart memory, and shared their courage with others. The results were often life‐changing.

I found myself looking more carefully at the goals of leader development and at how to create a training model for real results.

Pitching thought‐based education from a platform or stage, I'd let the university habit of only gathering knowledge to override the practice of courage to equip us to rightly live and lead so we could then actually apply cognitive data.

The first courage book was written for that simpler time and I used boxing examples to illustrate an approach for facing fear. But to train people to actually overcome fear, I had to rely on deeper matters of moral instruction, core identity, family repair, relationship reconciliation, marriage, and parenting.

Half of us are football fans, so half of us aren't,⁶ but the sport is instructive regardless of what we like. So I studied the training methods of a once‐obscure college football coach named Bill Walsh. Walsh then took over the worst franchise in sports history—the San Francisco 49ers—and transformed the organization, improved the game, and saw his teams win five Super Bowls. It's helpful to know the answer to: How'd he do it?

First, to form a selfless and unified team structure, he picked morally courageous players instead of egotistical superstars. His prime example was Jack “Hacksaw” Reynolds, a tough, old, slow, over‐the‐hill linebacker. Jack was the “most telling personnel move I ever made,” said Walsh. “He set an example for everybody… that single addition was the key to our success.”⁷

Many heard the word—a failing organization was saved by hiring a humble, nondescript, overlooked leader of character—and preferred to focus on the players that Reynolds led to greatness.

Walsh also picked Joe Montana (“too skinny”) and Steve Young (“too reckless”) because he needed smart and studious (vs. big, huge‐armed) quarterbacks who knew his playbook to fluently call, “Green RT Slot Z Opp Fake 98 Toss Z and watch that safety,”⁸ and had the mental calmness to make off‐schedule plays. Second, and most importantly, Walsh coached his players to acquire mastery by practice, practice, practice. His coaches identified the skills required for each position. They memorized and practiced hundreds of plays from a huge playbook. Offensive linemen had to personally master 38 specific skills in realistic drills that required more brains than mass. Bobb McKittrick, the bald, well‐read, world‐traveling offensive line coach, turned Walsh's high‐character, undersized, low‐draft picks into 19 Pro Bowl selections.⁹

“That's the essence,” said Walsh, “repetition developing skills and then under pressure, being able to perform.”¹⁰

The Playbook does the same, without the bruising or the need for ice baths and physical therapy. And without the weight of Walsh's Oxford English Dictionary–sized game manual.

How many plays do most of us know, and how many of us get coached in courage?

Only a precious few. Thus, The Playbook.

Courage is not a life panacea but it comes awfully close. In the steps of this playbook, you'll see courage acted out by parents and teens, managers, firefighters, nurses, doctors, teachers, C‐levels, and the jobless. People of every background who saw themselves as good but never brave, and then found their courage because they practiced it. They became effective leaders as courage countered individual fears, natural disrespect, bias and discrimination.

Aristotle was the great thinker who invented useful things like empirical research, character training, and the happiness formula. Despite being the scorned alien, he persisted in earnestly training Athenians because they needed his wisdom. He remains fresh for reminding us that courage is the single virtue that helps us navigate hard times of fear and stress in order to achieve our best personhood.

Aristotle also saw that sadness, difficulty, and struggle—the hard signs of our times—can help us break unhealthy habits, inspire us to gain what we're missing and to prep moral meals from disregarded ingredients. Professor Brené Brown found strength in our vulnerabilities. Researcher Dr. Angela Duckworth discovered that low points can lead to high ones.

The data tells us that we can leverage sadness and dismay to defuse old habits of fear, find our forgotten courage, reframe poorly defined mindsets, and even overwrite sad pasts.

Courage, unlike avoidance, is a positive, heroic verb. Unlike utopia, it's not a fictional notion. Like sports, it becomes real with practice. Courage is the unique virtue that gives us deep values like self‐control, integrity, respect, generosity, love, justice, trust, and an authentic caring for others—the sweet higher order goods that represent our deepest, heartfelt desires.

J.M. Barrie, polymath educator and creator of Peter Pan, recognized courage as a life goal. He bluntly warned college graduates: “If courage goes, then all goes.”¹¹

We no longer speak or act courageously at work, in our families, or in the public square. We privately say totally wrong things to ourselves that deepen our fears and separate us from our courage. We seek comfort by hopefully reciting that we're special while not remembering that courage calls us to see what is unique in others.

Despite a deep inner need, courage has few followers, fewer advocates, and no network. It lacks a central, unified curriculum and has no cultural platform and few champions. It faces powerful and corrupt foes in business, government, and society. Once the path of the good life and the renewable fuel for human thriving, courage is now a boutique answer to an arcane trivia question and a distant theory. It seems to be a pleasant thought without boots on the ground.

We think we're okay without it. We think practicing it is unnecessary.

This is a huge mistake.

It's unwise to unfriend courage, gaslight ourselves with barrages of bad news, and nurture our fears as if they were household pets. It's wrong to ignore the practice of courage to be captives of our anxieties.

Global poverty experts Brian Corbett and Steve Fikkert find there is little courage left in the world.¹² Courage has been asked to leave our cultural stage. But all has not yet gone. It remains the approved solution to undo our impulsive reliance on negativity, criticism, bias, and self‐harm. Long before handheld screens and the discovery of the coffee bean, we were prewired to be courageous and thereby free of self‐perpetuating fears.

But how do we go from a capacity for courage to becoming courageous?

We practice its behaviors.

Those who practice sing better than those who do not. If you exercise, you tend to be more fit and will feel and function better than when you only sit. When we practice honoring all persons we chip away at the monoliths of self‐centeredness and racism.

“String Bean,” said Coach Bonifacio, his nickname for my less than impressive physique. Coach B was a wing chun gong‐fu si fu, a martial arts master on a work visa from Manila.

“You think courage out of reach. You think you can't punch your way out of a wet paper bag. But courage made just for you, the weak of heart.”

Practicing courage with others makes us courageous leaders for others.

Singing well, boxing, acting rightly, reconciling conflicts, solving moral problems, and leading courageously when stressed are not inborn gifts or accidents of nature. They directly result from behavioral practice. Thus, the need for a courage playbook.

Living in our shape‐shifting, conflicted culture, we forget that we own a very real personal capacity for courage.

Courage is race and gender neutral, honors all faiths, and favors no party. It requires neither unique powers nor specific intelligence, unusual gifts, or a generation with a special name.

“Cowardice,” said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “seeks to suppress fear and is mastered by it. Courage faces fear and thereby masters it.”¹³

How can you be like Dr. King? You practice the behaviors of courage, which you will soon own. The Playbook trains you to face fear and master it, to ascend the five practical and logical steps to courage.

Gangly and socially awkward, Sir Edmund Hillary was the first to reach the peak of Mount Everest. Suddenly a world sensation, he was asked about reaching that deadly summit.

“It is not the mountain we conquer,” he said, “but ourselves.” Conquering our fears is Tolkien's and Lucas's classic moral struggle. Can Frodo find the courage to give up the ring? Will Aragorn overcome the terrors of his painful past? Can Solo defeat his smugness, Leia her sarcasm, and C3PO his nervous frights? The great saga turns on the single, eternal issue of our heroic identity: Can Luke master his anger? Can you?

Our battle isn't against Sauron, Vader, or a virus. It's against fear and our worst reactions in an epic, personal struggle against our own weaknesses.

After 10 years of tutelage by my YMCA coaches, I lucked into West Point despite scoliosis, flat feet, and visual and pulmonary disqualifiers. In the Infantry and in Asia, with people of all colors, I worked to improve my Courage Quotient,¹⁴ learn new tongues, and lead others while my knees knocked together. Many colleagues had also been poor, unfed, and unwanted by their families of origin. But we practiced and overcame our worst poverty—the lack of courage—to selflessly work toward what we can call the heroic moral ideal.¹⁵ We were able to experience a new freedom by serving something greater than ourselves without hungering for personal honors or recognition. Those days of trust, camaraderie, and low pay remain the happiest among my many jobs.

In the earlier book, I described the importance of behaviors of courage. I got feedback asking for a practical step‐by‐step playbook to make acting courageously and defeating our fears as spontaneous as smiling at a beautiful sunset.

The Courage Playbook is that solution. It trains you in the key behaviors that we individually and collectively need most. Emerson might say that it gives you a plan, a goal, and a dominating thought process to possess the courage to do the right thing. The Playbook lets you move from the unseen to the seen, from the passive to the active, from the ordinary to the courageous. It is a precise distillate of our best understanding of behavioral courage, integrity, character, and courageous, effective leadership. It has three parts.

Part I is about you—the equipping of The Courageous Self. Here you'll friend courage and paint a personal courage‐colored portrait. You'll stop your worst fearful reactions to create space for the behaviors of courage.

Part II is about relationships—Courage with Others. There you will deploy¹⁶ basic courage plays and behaviors while interacting with others in communication, teamwork, leadership, management, and personal relationships. You'll learn the central, radiating power of courageously respecting all persons to consistently do the Highest Moral Action.

Finally, in Part III, Choosing Your Core, you'll select your personal identity—your operating principles—draft your Individual Courage Advancement Plan for continued assessment and forward navigation, and then Cross the River of Fear.

You need an Executive Courage Coach to guide you through each step, to equip you to own the courage to live intentionally, robustly, and even happily. For the short span of this shared journey, I would like to be that coach.

I equip people to face fear and to find, build, forge, and share their courage in a process older than Exodus, The Iliad, and The Analects. The best of Greek and Eastern wisdom literature was created during plagues, crises of fear, ethnic wars, and conflict.

Take this opportunity to play in a different realm in which no one is denied the right to personal courage. With it, you will enter a deeper country of brave lions and fearless leaders in which you can take extraordinary and unprecedented actions. Those actions—our key verbs—equip you to become who you were always supposed to be.

Acquiring courage is one of the greatest human adventures.

The risks lie not on the journey, but in avoiding it. For who among us has already conquered fear, mastered courage, perfected one's true core identity, and achieved a complete firmness of character? Who doesn't want better plays on the great and exciting field of life?

Will you join me on this courageous journey?