How to be brave
Transcriber: Anna Sobota
Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Have you ever thought
if I just had the guts,
I’d speak up?
I’d make that change?
I’d take that chance?
Have you ever wished
for more courage?
If it were easy to defy
the gravitational pull of the status quo,
more people would.
But I’m here to tell you
that all the courage
you have ever admired in others,
lives in you.
And I’m going to help you find it,
beginning with a horse riding lesson.
Growing up on a small dairy farm
in the Aussie Bush, I was horse crazy.
But prolonged drought
left little money to buy a horse,
so my dad did the next best thing.
He went into a horse raffle:
20 cents a ticket, six for a dollar.
For weeks leading up to that ravel raffle,
I was on my knees:
“Dear God, please let us win that horse.
Please, God.”
Well, it’s true,
“be careful what you pray for,”
because we won a wild brumby
from Australia’s rugged Snowy Mountains,
who went from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds flat.
Often, leaving me on the ground,
behind him.
But my mission to master that horse,
was greater than my fear of
him throwing me off.
And so every day,
I would go out to the paddock
and I would settle up my horse.
Day after day, week after week,
my confidence grew and my fear waned,
and within a year,
I was winning local barrel races.
The lesson?
Courage and comfort
can’t ride the same horse.
Courage is being defined in lots of ways,
but my favorite is
John Wayne’s definition,
“courage is being scared to death
and settling up anyway”.
I’m guessing that you’ve had times
when you’ve settled up anyway,
but I’m guessing there’s also been times
when you haven’t.
When fear of what you didn’t want
kept you taking the very actions
to go after what you did want.
Fear does that.
Fears wired into our psychological DNA
to keep us safe,
to protect us from pain.
If our brains weren’t exquisitely wired
to alert us to potential dangers,
to protect us, we wouldn’t be here now.
In fact, MRI scans of our brains
in the process of decision making,
and we make
about 35,000 decisions a day,
give or take two or three.
Show that our brains
are twice as sensitive
to potential losses
as they are to potential gains.
We are wired to focus on
all the things that could go wrong
far more than what could go right.
We tend to overestimate the risks.
We tend to underestimate ourselves,
particularly we women.
[We tend] to catastrophize outcomes,
to rationalize the status quo
and to discount the cost of inaction.
You know, if it were easy
to do those things that scared you,
so many people wouldn’t spend
so much of their life
inside their comfort zone.
The truth is,
it’s uncomfortable to live the life
that you’re capable of living.
It’s why courage is what it takes
to bridge the gap
between who you are
and who you could be,
between the life you have
and the life you most want.
The latest research on leadership by
Korn Ferry aligns with ancient wisdom
that courage is
a force multiplier of our gifts.
It helps us grow into who we can be,
to live and lead,
with all that it takes
to achieve what it is
that we really want in our lives.
As Aristotle said,
courage is the first of all virtues
because it makes all others possible.
The bad news:
there is no shortcut to courage.
There is no magic bullet to bravery.
The good news, well, courage is a skill.
And like all skills, it can be
learnt and mastered with practice.
Just like you would go to the gym
to build your muscles,
you can exit your comfort zone
to train the brave.
And every time you do,
every time you take action
in the presence of your fears;
often disguised as mild-mannered doubt;
you reclaim the power
that your fears have had over you.
And as you do you,
you develop new neural pathways
in your brain.
And not only that.
You develop what
psychologists call “affect tolerance,”
that is, you get more comfortable
being uncomfortable.
You train the brave
and you expand your confidence
for bigger goals
and greater challenges
and broaden your horizons.
Growing up, the big sister of seven,
my own horizons didn’t extend much further
than our back paddock.
But those years of settling up anyway,
they emboldened me,
first, to go to university
in the big city;
I was the first-generation
college student;
and then, after graduating,
to buy a backpack and head off
with a round-the-world ticket
for a year-long adventure.
That experience,
combined with many I’ve had
over the last 30 years,
have taught me that all of us,
universally,
regardless of the culture or country
we have grown up in,
we all struggle with
an internal tug of war
between the short term desire
for comfort, certainty, control
and looking good
and our deepest desire
for learning, growth and doing good.
It’s just that for most of human history,
we didn’t live in a digital fear economy
glued to devices pummeling us 24/7
with reasons to feel afraid,
magnifying our sense of the dangers,
stocking our doubts,
driving us to turn our forecasts
into fear casts.
And to quote Eleanor Roosevelt,
“tiptoeing gently through life
only to make it safely to death.”
You see, it’s not the risks that we take
that we tend to regret most.
It’s the ones that we didn’t take.
It’s why at the end of life,
the biggest regrets people have,
aren´t the chances they took
that didn’t pay off.
It’s the chances they didn’t take.
It’s that they settled too fast,
for too little.
Not just shortchanging themselves,
but shortchanging the world
of all that they could be.
And it’s why in the long arch
of our lives,
we fail so much more from timidity
than we ever do from over daring.
Research shows that we humans
flourish and thrive the most
when we’re working hard
toward meaningful goals,
ones that give us a sense of purpose,
but ones that also, by default,
invite challenges into our lives
and put us at risk of feeling
the very emotions
that we most want to avoid:
rejection, disappointment,
hurt, heartache.
But here’s the deal,
if all you do is trying to protect
yourself from those emotions,
you ultimately make yourself
more vulnerable, not less so.
And less secure, not more so.
It’s by opening your heart and arms wide
to the full, wild and sometimes messy
adventure that is life
that you ultimately spare yourself
the biggest risk of all
and that’s looking back one day
and wondering, what if?
“Life is a daring adventure
or nothing at all,” said Helen Keller.
And yet all of us treat life, sometimes,
as though it is a dress rehearsal.
The fact is, while life is –
you are on the adventure of a lifetime.
And the truth is,
none of us get out of it alive.
Early on in my marriage to my husband,
Andrew, we decided to pursue adventure.
We were living in Melbourne, Australia,
and we made a competition who could land
the first job outside Australia.
We were thinking New York, London,
Paris, maybe Shanghai, Singapore.
He came home one day and said,
“I think I’ve got an opportunity,
Papua New Guinea.”
It wasn’t really on my mind,
Papua New Guinea.
In fact, a lot of people don’t even know
where Papua New Guinea is.
But we were ready for adventure.
So we packed up our life
and off we moved to Port Moresby.
I quickly landed work
and we had some incredible adventures.
Two years along,
I was 18 weeks pregnant
with our first child,
the first grandchild,
the first niece or nephew.
And I was sitting at work one day
in my office
when three men stormed in
with sawn-off shotguns.
One step forward and putting it
to my forehead, he said: “Open the safe.”
“I don’t know how,” I said.
He thrust the gun barrel
further into my forehead
[and said again:] “Open the safe.”
Again, I said, “I don’t know how.”
After a minute or so,
they decided that
I was telling the truth, and I was.
They told me
to lay face down on the ground,
leaving one man to stand over me.
I felt his hands go up my skirt
between my thighs.
And in that moment,
I was more terrified
of being taken back to their village
and gang raped,
which was not an uncommon occurrence
in Port Moresby
than I was of being killed.
Minutes passed. It felt like hours.
The men found the cash elsewhere
and they left.
Ten days later,
I went for the 19 week scan.
I guess I should have been able to
see it in the technician´s eyes,
but it had never occurred to me,
not once, that I might lose my baby.
But I had.
The timing, they said,
was purely coincidental,
that those two traumatic experiences
would happen just 10 days apart.
It rocked my world.
And in the weeks and months that followed,
I journaled daily
as I regained my footing.
And one day I arrived at the decision,
I will not be defined by this experience,
I will not be its victim.
And I will not let my fear
shrink my future.
It was one of those life defining moments
as I got clarity about what I wanted
and what I didn’t want.
You could argue
that moving to PNG was too risky
and that my sense of adventure
had worked against me.
But my three years,
living in PNG in my 20s,
were incredibly formative.
They nurtured in me resilience, courage
and the capacity for dealing
with the challenges
and the heartaches
that have come my way since.
And there’s been a few.
You see, heartache is part and parcel of
what it is to be human.
It is part of
the human condition at times
to feel like the rug has been pulled out
from underneath us.
But when all we do is play it safe,
we actually shrink our ability to deal
with the challenges life brings our way.
Of course, turning fear into your ally
is a key way to unlock your courage
that is asking yourself,
what do I need to be afraid of
if I don’t take the risk?
And then making the decision
to step forward
and do whatever it is
that most inspires you.
But of course, courage
isn’t just an intellectual exercise.
Fear isn’t known for its logic.
I learned this lesson when I went off
to circus school for the day.
It sounded like fun, kind of did.
But then, I climbed the rope ladder,
Up and up, and then,
looking down and down.
It was a bad decision.
My body froze.
My fear screamed at me,
“Climb back down!”
Intellectually, I knew
I could not fall to my death,
but my fear screamed otherwise.
Fear does that.
It lives in our tissues.
A racing heart, shaking hands,
shaking knees, a dry throat:
I felt them all 20 minutes ago.
I’m feeling them now.
But my friends being highly supportive,
as they were,
started yelling out to me my book titles:
“Find your courage,” “Stop playing safe.”
Fear of professional humiliation
won out over fear of falling to my death.
So defying my inner chicken little
I reached out, grabbed that bar
and let out an almighty scream;
I will spare you the sound effects.
That day in circus school
taught me two really valuable lessons.
Number one, I had not missed my calling
to run away and join the circus.
Number two,
the only way to conquer our fear,
is to first dare and then believe.
History has taught us
that we fail so much more
from playing it safe
and being overcautious
than being over daring.
And right now,
it is a time for us to be daring,
to reimagine a future
that is not defined by our past.
And so for you.
Before you make one more decision,
I invite you to consult
your inner brave heart.
Put your hand on your chest
breathe in courage, breathe out fear.
And ask yourself,
where do you need to be braver
in your one and only precious life?
To take a chance, to settle up anyway.
Whatever the answer, take one step,
however small, however uncomfortable,
choose courage over comfort.
And then, tomorrow, repeat.
A year from now,
you will be so glad you did.
Thank you.