Gus Lee

How to get your courage, Part 2. Get a piece of paper. Write down your two biggest fears; it takes guts to admit them. Say to your fears something like, “Worry reduces my inner self and spreads fear to my friends. Leave my mind and my heart.” Tape the paper to monitor or mirror. For one take, retake control over anxiety. Don’t quit.

Not letting fear control our thinking, dialogs, meals, and life, is a superior human achievement. Naming, facing, and banning them — that’s key to Courage 101.

Fear has 2 moving parts. First, it’s a huge primitive emotional reaction to a lethal threat; it triggers more than 26 involuntary physiological reactions (heart races, mouth goes dry). The biggest is that fear drains blood from our brains to arouse our major muscle groups for a life-and-death struggle against saber-tooth tigers. Filled with stress hormones, we lose logic and become freaked out Neanderthals on crack. We act badly; we become our worst selves.

We counter fear’s first moving part with BICBOF: BREATH IN COURAGE, BLOW OUT FEAR. Take slow, deep, diaphragmatic breaths, 5 seconds in 5 long, slow seconds out. This dissipates our home-made street drugs and frees us from looking like stunned mullets. (Read James Nestor’s Breath to learn why slow nasal breathing is essential to your health and weight, as well.)

Part 3: how to beat fear’s second moving part. Check out THE COURAGE PLAYBOOK: 5 STEPS TO OVERCOME YOUR FEARS AND BECOME YOUR BEST SELF at Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You can also read this on guslee.net or LEADERS OF CHARACTER, LLC, on fb.

Make it a courageous day by how you treat non-friends.

Did you know that courage is our one, key human ability? Courage lets us do what we value most: love others and unconditionally respect all persons. We can gently retire those crazy forms of bias that feed on our imperfections. Courage lets us genuinely care for others when we’re tired, cranky, and sliding into unhealthy interior spaces. It frees us from self-doubt and sad regrets. It equips us to do the right thing, especially when we’ve told ourselves that we can’t. It grows us to make wise and celebration-worthy decisions in relationships, life, and work.

Courage promotes hope and health. It mitigates angst re: texting drivers, loud neighbors, and dental care. It gives hope for the future. Life teaches us that without courage, even love gets totally messed up. Then anxiety wrecks the delicate eco-cultures of identity, of families, organizations, and communities. Peter Pan creator J.J. Barrie told college graduates: If courage goes, then all goes.

Many of us see courage as a nice, abstract idea without boots on the ground, unrelated to being able to love, to be loved, and to find meaning. But research reveals that courage is that one intensely vital, tangible, practical, operational, and often, life-giving and lifesaving, human ability, that we all need just to get through the day, and to then thrive, despite unknowns, into many tomorrows.

Okay, Gus, say you’re right. So how do we find and get our courage? Turn on your sweet, essential Courage Mindset app (John Whitcomb, a genius colleague, is creating this). Virtually admit that feeding your anxieties and fears like they were household pets is a fake and even a bad form of living. Take a deep cleansing breath, dump self-critical mindsets and believe that you need courage to truly love, to live rightly, and to handle chunk servings of contentment and happiness. Practice this twice. In the next blog, I’ll provide the next step to courage.

Breaking news: what if there were already a user’s manual that laid out how to become personally courageous — and to become an effective, courageous leader regardless of station or history? The Courage Playbook just came out. https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Playbook-Steps-Overcome-Become/dp/1119848903?asin=1119848903&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-courage-playbook-gus-lee/1140119834

Until next time, per Nelson Mandela, play life large by helping another person in the moral frame. Make it a courageous day.