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7 Effective Ways To Boost Your Courage
Expand your comfort zone
Boosting your courage isn’t something that happens overnight.
It’s a day-by-day process and you’re more likely to experience success in this area if you focus on expanding your comfort zone one step at a time.
For example, if you notice that you feel fear around talking to new people, start small by asking someone for directions or striking up a short conversation with people you encounter in your day-to-day life.
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Your lack of courage may cost you
Our brains are wired to:
- Discount the cost of inaction,
- Overestimate the probability of things going wrong and
- Underestimate ourselves.
Three big obstacles
... help people get unstuck when building their bravery:
- Appreciating why stepping outside their comfort zone is so important to begin with (i.e. No clear or compelling why).
- Setting the intention to consciously and consistently practice acts of courage.
- Knowing which acts of courage to start with – after all, being brave isn’t always predictable or straight forward.
Bravery habits
- Speaking Up: Every act of courage is about laying something you value on the line for something you value even more. Speaking bravely takes no less.
- Making Big Requests: If you don’t ask, the answer will always be no.
- Confronting Long Held Fears: Most people suffer more from their imagination than they ever do reality.
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Manipulate your thoughts
It doesn’t work to say to yourself, “I have to stop being afraid.”
- If you notice yourself having a thought that undermines your attempts at bravery, simply label it as such
Consider that your fear isn’t legitimate
Legitimate fear tends to make us want to get the heck out of whatever situation we are in.
Not-helpful fear makes us hesitate rather than bolt.
We are afraid of looking stupid, and so we don’t ask a burning question. We fear failing, and so we don’t even try.
The "If X, Then Y” plan
- IF my team grumbles or pushes-back because I’m not working on the weekends anymore,
- THEN I will forward them Leslie Perlow’s Harvard Business Review article about how ‘Predictable Time Off’ improves both work quality
- AND quality of life, even in client-oriented businesses.
Fear is the thing that in truth makes actions hard, not the action that we think we are afraid of.
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Read 1 book per week
Ordinary people seek entertainment. Extraordinary people seek education and learning.
Taking even 15–30 minutes every day (especially during the morning) to read uplifting and instruct...
Do something that terrifies you
But you don’t have to constantly be battling your fears. You only need to be courageous for 20 seconds at a time.
If you courageously confront fear for 20 seconds every single day, before you know it, you’ll be in a different socio-economic and social situation.