PNTV: The Courage Quotient by Robert Biswas-Diener (#397)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV today. Yes, another great book, the Courage Quotient by Robert Beeswas Diener. The Courage Quotient subtitle How science can make you braver. So Robert Biswas Diener is awesome. He's known as the Indiana Jones of positive psychology. He's traveled all around the world studying some amazing cultures to understand what we have in common, what might be unique, et cetera. The Indiana Jones of psychology isn't that awesome? He's a professor at a university on the west coast. We featured another one of his books called Happiness, which he wrote with his father Ed Diener, who is another one of the bright lights luminaries of the psychology world. We're honored that Robert joined us as a faculty guest, faculty luminary in our Optimized Coach program where he shared wisdom from this and some other of his books. Check that out. Check out. We've got the Philosopher's Note, as always.

With a bunch of big ideas.

6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3, 600 of them now along with a bunch of other stuff. Optimize Me if you want to go deeper with us, join a community of thousands, couple thousand people nearly now from over 70 countries around the world who have gone through our Optimize Coach program. Check that out at Optimize Me Coach. So the courage quotient, courage is super important. In fact, Aristotle says again, the summum bonum, the highest goal is eudaimonia, to have a good soul, to flourish. You do that by living with arete or virtue or excellence. Right? But he says the number one virtue, to actualize our potential and to live with that virtue. And high five. Our inner daimons is courage. Right? Yet it hasn't been scientifically studied much. Which is why when I heard about this book from another book that we'll.

Reference soon or do one of these.

Episodes on soon, I immediately got it, loved it and was excited to share the note and then this discussion. So the courage quotient, obviously there's a quotient that Robert has come up with. Here it is. He basically tells us that courage scientifically can be defined as the willingness to act in the presence of fear. It's a powerful, simple statement. The willingness to act in the presence of fear. Now it's not about getting rid of all of your fear per se. It's about knowing what to do and how to control your fear and then doing what needs to get done. We Want to be at that virtue, virtuous mean of courage. Not the vice of deficiency where we're a coward or the vice of excess. Well, we're rash. It's properly using fear. And these two variables make up willingness to act. That's our numerator. So if we have a quotient, every good quotient has a numerator and a denominator. The numerator is the willingness to act and the denominator is fear. Now basically, we need to cultivate our sense of agency, right? Which is a science word for our confidence in ourselves so we can meet life's challenges and we're willing to act in the presence of fear, then we need to learn how to control our fear. Because if our fear is always getting the best of us, we're gonna have a tough time. So then run it through the quotient to get your math on where you are courage wise. Right? And he gives, Robert gives some corporations questions. You can actually take survey, you can take in the book to get clarity on this. But basically, if you have a 10 out of 10 willingness to act, boom. That's pretty darn good. And you're really good at controlling your fear. You know how to use tools like I'm excited, bring it on. Boom. This is going to make me better. My infinite potential exists on the other side of my comfort zone. You're alchemizing fear.

You've controlled it.

It's a one for you now, not a 10. Your ratio here, your quotient is 10 to 1. That's awesome. You are courageous human being. Boom. Let's go. Now if on the other hand, you are unwilling to act in the presence of fear, you can't get yourself to do what needs to get done, right. You get overwhelmed by that and your fear levels are very high and you haven't practiced the skills. And again, we all feel fear. Anyone who says they don't feel fear, David Reynolds, the Zen therapist says, is both stupid and lying. So it's not about not ever having fear. Right. But it's about knowing how to alchemize it and deal with it and properly wisely act in the presence of that fear. So if you're not willing to act and you have an overwhelming amount of fear, you're 1/10 boom. We want to become more agent driven.

Willing to act in the presence of fear that we've learned how to control.

That's the courage quotient. I absolutely love this idea. We talk about it a lot in.

Our work together as we help Our.

Coaches and optimizers operationalize virtue throughout the process. Now, the second idea here is what Robert calls courage blindness. Kind of coined this phrase, is that he's saying that most of us are actually way more courageous currently than we give ourselves credit for. And I extend in the note to virtue blindness. We're actually doing a lot of things pretty darn well that we may not be seeing properly. And it's super important that we celebrate the gains that we're making. Right? So in this context, we want to see the idiosyncratic ways in which we're already expressing courage. He also talks about general courage versus specific courage. General courage is what we all recognize as courage, but it tends to be the person rushing into a fire to save a child or a warrior going out and saving his buddy or defending our peace, et cetera. Right. Those are kind of traditional, general ideas of courage. But then he says, we have specific expressions of courage because you have different issues than I have, and I got plenty of them. You've got plenty of them. We've all got plenty of them. And we need to demonstrate our own specific, idiosyncratic versions of courage to meet our own challenges and to fight our own dragons, which is what the good hero's journey is. Right. But we need to not be blind stated positively. We need to see all the times in our past when we have demonstrated courage. So we talk about this a lot as well. We have a session, a whole module in our mastery series called Heroji. I happen to be in a documentary called Finding Joe, featuring Joseph Campbell's wisdom and with Deepak Chopra and Laird Hamilton and Robin Sharma, some great teachers. Finding Joe, the movie. Check it out. Patrick Solomon, the director, put it up for free in its entirety on YouTube when Covid came to town. Super powerful movie. And what we do in our program is take it and operationalize it. So we talk a lot about seeing how you're already demonstrating courage. So one of the things we talk about is hero bars. You got to eat your hero bars. You got to see the one or two or three moments in your past when you crushed it, when you were courageous, when you executed at your highest level and did what you were afraid to do and were willing to act in the presence of fear. Think about it right now. If you feel inspired or when you have time for reflection, what are three things? I literally start my day every day saying, I'm a success.

That's what I do.

And I look at, boom. These are the five things I've done.

I'm most Proud of.

And every single one of them, every single one of them required me to go through obstacles, some significant pain, and to demonstrate courage. David Goggins, the great Navy seal, calls it his cookie jar. This is a guy who's achieved an extraordinary amount in his life and he remembers to go to his cookie jar those times in his life when he crushed it. When he's not feeling motivated and he's not feeling willing to act and the fear is overwhelming him, he goes and eats his cookies. His hero bars, we would say. So what's on your now? I'll go to another metaphor highlight reel. We talked about this in It Takes what It Takes by Trevor Moad. Super bowl champion. Russell Wilson is one of Trevor's clients. He literally created a highlight reel that Russell watches while he eats breakfast. Breakfast of champions. You gotta see all the moments in your life when you crushed it and not occasionally. Every single day, day in and day out. The whole point here is you can't do these things occasionally. It needs to be a day in and day out practice such that we can get rid of our blindness. Then the third idea is a really cool one too. He says you need to play courageous roles. And he tells the story of a nine year old in China and there's a huge earthquake around 2008 and this nine year old boy rescued a bunch of the kids from his school. And I get goosebumps as I said that. Nine years old and this little guy is cruising around saving his classmates. And he was asked what made you do that? And he said, well, it was my job. I was the hall monitor. Tears in my eyes. This nine year old kid was the hall monitor and he played that courageous role. Well, he became a hero in China and he led the opening ceremonies.

Part of it anyway.

In the 2008 Olympics we got to create roles for ourselves that are heroic, that are courageous. Which again is what we talk about again and again and again. We just went off on it in our last pntv. I went into detail in how to Think Like a Roman Emperor on the identities that I've created for myself that we help others create. Energy, work and love wise. Who are you at your courageous best? I. I'm an athlete, I'm a philosopher and I'm a soulmate with my family. Energy, work and love. I'm going to play those roles as well as I possibly can today. Inspiring you, hopefully teaching you one thing today that can transform your life in a small or significant way. And then aggregate and compound it. Boom. That's a courageous role I've chosen to play. And again, the science is clear here. Ellen Langer can bring people into her lab. She's at Harvard. Created something called the psychology of possibility. She simply dresses people up as Air Force pilots, then has them do an eye test and compares them to people who aren't dressed up. They aren't playing a role. Just putting on an Air Force pilot outfit will make your vision better. That's crazy. The roles create outcomes that are superior. Todd Herman talks about a similar thing.

In the alter ego effect.

Do the same thing with kids, only this time have them pretend and dress up as Batman or Dora. They can pick. They will be more gritty, they will be more tenacious and going persistent in going after their goals than if they weren't playing that role. So again, the question is, what's your role? Create some courageous roles for yourself. Move from victim to hero and say, boom, this is how I'm going to show up for my family, etc. The fourth idea is a super important one, which is failure. One of the things that gets in the way of living courageously is failure. Ruminating on our past failures, thinking something's wrong with us because we feel fear and have failed in the past. And Robert makes the unequivocal point that all the great teachers echo that failure is essential. That's not a design flaw, it's not a bug. It's essential to the process. He quotes a friend of his who's I think an Oscar winning documentarian director who says, look, I film hundreds and hundreds of hours of frames for a documentary and only 1% max make it in to the final cut. Now were all of those. So you got an hour and a half and you had hundreds and hundreds of hours of film. Were those failures? Were those wasted efforts? This guy says, no, I needed every single one of those frames to get where I am now. Well, same with you. Every single one of your failures, your mistakes is how Michael Beckwith, the great spiritual teacher, tells us. It's like to go back to the movie metaphor, imagine a director of a movie. Do they say action and then in one take, get to the end, an hour and a half, two hours later, and say cut. Boom. Guys, you crushed it. No, every single scene is done again and again and again until it's done right. It's a mistake, no big deal. Do it again. I say this to Emerson and to our kids all the time. Oh, that was a mistake. Let's do it again. Retry. Let me do it a little bit better this time. When we Embrace failure. We have the power to grow. We have the power to be willing to act in the presence of fear. And we can control our fear because.

We know we're going to fail.

We don't need to shame ourselves on it. We can approach it as neutral, data, win or learn style, etc. It takes what it takes. We also talked about to hit the game winning home run, you need to be willing to strike out in the same batter's box. To throw the game winning td, you got to be willing to throw the game losing interception bliss fiasco, as Joseph Campbell says. And again, to be a Hall of Fame to make sure I throw 20 metaphors at you.

To be a Hall of Fame baseball.

Player, you bat 300, you fail 70% of the time. It is what it is. Embrace failure. Learn to accept it. And then play to win. Final idea. Fun. 1. Here Robert talks about motivation theory and some research done on this subject. Imagine bringing people into a lab to play Scrabble and you tell them two different groups. One group has said, okay, you're going to get paid a base amount of money and will pay you more if you crush it. The other group is told, hey, we're going to pay you a base amount of money, but we're going to take money away. If you make mistakes and you fail, boom. Watch them play Scrabble. Who do you think does better? The group that is playing to win. When you're incentivized to win and you're not afraid of losing, you perform at a higher level and you enjoy the process a heck of a lot more. So we want to orient our goals and Robert tells us just how important it is to to have meaningful goals.

I'll draw our target one more time.

What are you aiming your life force at? What's important to you right now? That's what's going to generate the courage to move through inevitable obstacles. You need to have a target. If you want to have hope, which is a virtue closely connected to courage, you have to have a future you're excited about. Literally, science says, and I will repeat this again and again and again, three parts to have hope. And we'll do one of these show episodes on the psychology of hope.

First, you need to have a target.

A goal that you're excited about, a future you're moving toward. Two, you need to have what's called agency. Fun. We already wrote that down. One, a target, a goal. Two, you believe you can hit the target. You have agency. And then three, you're willing to take multiple shots or they would call it pathways. You have a plan to get it, but you know that plan probably won't work. And you're willing to explore pathway after pathway after pathway. Wow. Playing to win, accepting failure, having courageous roles, not being blind to your virtues, seeing all the heroic things you've already done. And then mastering this courage quotient. Being willing to act while controlling your fear. Getting a solid. Go to 11. Boom. Turn it up all the way to 11. Let's go. That is the courage quotient.

Again, thank you, Robert, for the great.

Book and lifetime of effort, you and your family. And what did you get out of this? What's the one idea that just landed? Let's pause for a moment to think about it and then think about how you can move from theory to practice to mastery today. Because if we can truly operationalize this and aggregate and compound all those little games over an extended period of time, we can create magic. Let's do it today.

See you tomorrow.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

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