I think we all know that leadership – true leadership – requires courage.
Here’s something else I think we all know, either consciously or intuitively: courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is about doing the thing even in the presence of fear.
Now, there are a lot of leadership experts, gurus, thought leaders, influencers (you name it) out there who will tell you that courage comes from inside. We have to – they say – develop the internal fortitude to forge ahead and do the thing. We have to – they say – “feel the fear and do it anyway.” We have to – they say – get “comfortable with being uncomfortable.”
I could unpack each one of those three things (and have done so, somewhat, with the third, here). But that’s not where I want to go today.
To start with, I cry bunk! (a.k.a. bull! and baloney!) to all three of those bits of advice and counsel.
There are many qualities of leadership that come from a strong sense of self, who we are as a leader, and that rely on personal, individual characteristics.
Courage is not one of them.
Courage comes from outside.
It comes from the feeling that we have, however tenuous, the support we need.
It comes from knowing that there are people in our lives whom we can rely on. People who have our back. And that we have the resources we need – whether that’s time, budget, supplies, equipment, and so on. As I heard Simon Sinek put it on a podcast interview, “We have the courage to jump out of an airplane because of the parachute on our back.”
Okay. It’s not quite that simple. We also have to have the desire to do the thing – to jump out of an airplane (I’ll fly one. I won’t jump from one!), to lead, to take the risk of being vulnerable, to do whatever the thing is.
So: courage is a combination of desire and external support.
Always? Maybe not. But I suspect that even those people whose leadership we look up to, and think they’re doing it from that sense of internal fortitude … aren’t entirely on their own. Whether we see it or not, they have support outside of themselves.
Where are you finding support in your leadership journey?
Support can come from many places, including (hint, hint!) training and coaching. And you can always message me with a question.
The podcast interview was on Greg McKeown’s “What’s Essential” podcast, episode 76.