Moral courage. Emotional courage. Physical courage. I need it all, but find one easier to act on than the others.
Moral courage is the courage to act according to one’s own ethical values and principles even at the risk of negative consequences for the individual. This one to me is easy. Now that I’m older anyway. When I was younger I struggled with this, allowing others to make decisions for me. I let my desire to be accepted and my desire to avoid ridicule control my decisions. This led to, let’s just say, not good situations. Those decisions, I suppose, ultimately led me to go to college when and where I did and led me to my wife, but I bet there was a better way to get there.
Now, though, I have no issues standing up for what is right in the face of ridicule or rejection. I don’t encounter this much, though. I suppose it’s because the people I am around are behaving in line with my beliefs and are not encouraging me to step outside of my values. And this is what you should look for. Jim Rohn said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” So I surround myself with people who encourage moral behavior.
Emotional courage is the willingness to feel – to open yourself up to experience the unpleasant emotions. You want me to cry? I’ll cry when my leg’s off. So, I do cry sometimes. It’s not often. The last time I remember crying was about 9 months ago when a young husband and father I knew was murdered in his bed while his wife and children slept nearby. Gret Glyer was doing great things for the world. I’m not exactly sure what my tears were for. The knowledge of the pain that his wife and children were feeling and would continue to feel? The thought that life is short and my end could be soon and unexpected too? The feeling that he was doing such good for the world while I was floundering in my work life, seemingly squandering the opportunities that God had given me to make a difference. Saying that I wanted to do more and telling myself that I was trying really hard and that effort counts, but that that was all a watered down assessment of where I really was. And that Gret was taken and not me. And why?
These things are just occurring to me now as I type this out. I don’t know what’s true or what my feelings truly were at the time. I do know that I have not made much change in my assessments of myself and, in fact, just had a discussion with my wife about my promises and efforts and my failing to follow through, regardless of what I have been telling myself. And I know that I cried profusely at the time of his passing and the subsequent days.
Physical courage is probably the easiest one to define and the one that most people think of when the word courage is mentioned. It has to do with taking action even when there is risk of bodily harm or death or maybe even emotional harm, aka rejection. Most recently I have been dealing with this when it comes to prospecting in my work. At work we are told that in order to help people and make sales you have to talk to seven people, make three appointments and with that you’ll make one sale. The problem has been that I have been seeing many people, more than enough, and telling them what I do, but I have not been asking all of them for an appointment. And very few people are going to set an appointment unless I ask. The issue has been that I have been afraid of the rejection (even though I have had thousands of people tell me they weren’t interested in whatever it was I was offering at the time) so I haven’t been asking the appropriate number of people for appointments that I need to in order to earn the income that we want.
So I have changed the metric by which I will determine my daily success. It is no longer about how many people I talk to, it is about how many people I ask for an appointment. And then as time goes on and I get better, it will be about how many appointments I set and then how many appointments stick and then how many sales I make. I plan to make that final transition by one month from now. That will give me time to get better and gather the data that will help me fix the issues that come up in my presentations.
But this post is about courage in the face of the elderly. The majority of the people I work with are older than 65 years and are highly unlikely to be able to harm me physically or emotionally. What I found yesterday when I started my new process of asking everyone for an appointment is that it was almost just as easy to ask for the appointment as it was to initiate the conversation. So I don’t have that big of a hurdle to cross.
What have you experienced with courage or fear and how have you dealt with it? Let me know in the comments section.