Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. ~ Ambrose Redmoon
The second competency for sustaining success in life is courage, and when you consider courage within the context of both letting go and learning anew, I believe that thinking of courage as a competency that can be developed makes imminent sense.
To be willing to let go of something that I'm comfortable with, to let go of something that has worked historically for me, there has to be a certain amount of courage there. To trust the process, to be willing to step off the cliff so to speak and leap into that void of no guarantees is courageous.
For adults in particular learning is a challenge requiring courage primarily because of our need for certainty in life. Most adults detest the feeling of being a beginner that is part of learning. I've got four grandkids and I watch how they learn and how they absolutely revel in the learning process itself. What they don't have is something that has worked before, so they are willing to go out and explore and experiment.
As we become adults, we develop models for how to be successful when we get into our organizations, and for when we get into really living our lives. Based on these models we begin to do things, we're successful with them, and we try to replicate those over and over and over again, and learning has stopped. We become preoccupied with questions of right and wrong or good and bad. These questions are always asked within the context of our success models.
Among the things that enable the development of courage are different kinds of questions. Questions like “is what I'm doing today working or not working?” This is a different type of question than one oriented around right/wrong or good/bad. If it's not working then I have the opportunity to do something different. But it will often mean letting go of my historic success model and that is a huge challenge for a lot of folks. In this sense courage has less to do with bravery and far more to do with willingness to learn as a beginner.
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