Brian Tracy breaks down seven types of courage you can practice: setting ambitious goals, making total commitments, leaving your comfort zone, taking risks without guarantees, learning from failure, owning your results, and outlasting others. He argues courage is learnable, not something you're born with.
Perhaps the most important quality that you can develop for success and happiness in life is the quality of courage. Winston Churchill once said, courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it all others depend. There are several forms of courage that you can develop with practice. These different forms of courage will help you to achieve the great success that is possible for you. And they're all learnable with practice. In other words, you can actually become an absolutely unafraid person by practicing courage whenever the situation requires it. The first form of courage is the courage to dream big dreams and to set big goals. This is where most people are stopped. The very idea of setting big, challenging, exciting, worthwhile goals. Sometimes they call them bee hogs, big, hairy, audacious goals. The very challenge of doing that is so overwhelming that most people quit before they even begin. They think, oh, I could never do that. They think of all the reasons why they might fail and all the money they might lose. And they literally shut themselves down even before they get started. But this is not for you. Sit down and write out your goals as if anything were possible for you. Sit down and write out your goals as if any anything were possible for you. And never be afraid to dream big dreams. The second type of courage you can develop is the courage to make a total commitment, throwing yourself wholeheartedly into whatever it is you decide to do. All successful people of my experience are people who are living fully engaged. They are fully involved in their lives and in their goals. They don't do things by half measures. They may have no guarantees, but they're not afraid to put their whole hearts into their activities. If they fail, they fail by trying greatly, not by playing it safe and wishing and hoping that everything will work out all right in the future. What they do is they take great risks with no guarantee of success. And so can you. The third type of courage you need is the courage to move out of your comfort zone. It's the courage to move into your zone of discomfort where you feel awkward and clumsy and sometimes alone. The comfort zone is one of the greatest enemies of human potential and of your potential. When people get into a comfort zone, they strive to stay in that comfort zone. Even if they're not happy with their situation. All often their whole lives pass them by while they're furnishing and reinforcing their little rut of medium performance. You need the courage to continually move yourself in the direction of your biggest goals and ambitions. You need to be willing to face discomfort in order for you to grow. You need the courage to Launch in Faith with no Guarantees of Success Someone once wrote, if every obstacle must first be overcome, nothing will ever get done. Courageous people are those who have a dream and set a goal. They make a plan and they take the first step with no assurances and no guarantees that their efforts will result in success. However, if you look upon every step forward as a learning experience, and every setback is a valuable lesson that has been sent to you to make you stronger and better, you will not be afraid to launch in faith into the unknown. You need the courage to risk failure. You need the courage to endure constant setbacks and disappointments and temporary defeats. You need to learn to deal with failure by realizing that failure is an indispensable prerequisite for success. You can't succeed without failing failing lots of times Remember that wonderful quote from Thomas J. Watson Sr. The founder of IBM. He said, if you want to be successful faster, you must double your rate of failure. He said success lies on the far side of failure. You need the courage to treat failure as an opportunity to more intelligently begin again. You need to overcome the fear of failure by doing the things you fear over and over until the fear is gone, and then by resolving to bounce rather than break when things don't work out for you. You need the courage to turn toward danger continuously to face the things you fear. Now identify all the fear situations in your life that cause you stress or anxiety today. Decide what the worst possible outcome of each of these situations might be. Resolve to accept the worst should it occur, and then take action to resolve each of these situations. Refuse to allow a fear situation to remain in your life, dominating your thinking and emotions and holding you back. You need the courage to be willing to make mistakes and learn from them all. Peak performers continually make decisions, make mistakes, learn from them, pick themselves up, self, correct, and carry on. Successful people are not those who necessarily make the right decisions all the time, but by hanging in there, they make their decisions right. If they make a mistake, they accept it. They learn as much as possible from it. Failing and making mistakes and carry on. The more you fail and the more mistakes you make, the smarter you become and the more likely it is that you will eventually achieve your goals. You also need the courage to accept complete responsibility for your life, which means to take ownership for results. You need the courage to refuse to make excuses or to defend yourself. You need the courage to say over and over again, I am responsible, I am responsible and refuse to blame anybody else when something goes wrong. You focus on the solution rather than the problem. Or the person you ask. What do we do from here? What's the next step? What's the solution? What action should we take? You then pick yourself up and carry on extracting the wheat. The lessons from the situation and throwing away the chafe. The things that happen that you cannot change. The final courage you need is the courage to persist longer than anyone else. Persistence is the quality that will ultimately guarantee your success. Your willingness to persist in the face of every adversity can be your greatest asset. The ability to persist is the number one quality for success in every field in life. It can be the one factor that guarantees your success. In the end. If you refuse to quit, you must ultimately succeed. Just as in baseball, you won't ultimately hit a home run unless you keep on swinging. In 30 years of studying successful people, I've discovered one fact over and over. No one was ever defeated until they accepted defeat as a reality. No one can ever defeat you but yourself. Thanks for taking time to listen. I hope you found these ideas useful. 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