The Courage Playbook. Gus Lee
linebacker. Jack was the “most telling personnel move I ever made,” said Walsh. “He set an example for everybody… that single addition was the key to our success.”7
Many heard the word—a failing organization was saved by hiring a humble, nondescript, overlooked leader of character—and preferred to focus on the players that Reynolds led to greatness.
Walsh also picked Joe Montana (“too skinny”) and Steve Young (“too reckless”) because he needed smart and studious (vs. big, huge‐armed) quarterbacks who knew his playbook to fluently call, “Green RT Slot Z Opp Fake 98 Toss Z and watch that safety,”8 and had the mental calmness to make off‐schedule plays. Second, and most importantly, Walsh coached his players to acquire mastery by practice, practice, practice. His coaches identified the skills required for each position. They memorized and practiced hundreds of plays from a huge playbook. Offensive linemen had to personally master 38 specific skills in realistic drills that required more brains than mass. Bobb McKittrick, the bald, well‐read, world‐traveling offensive line coach, turned Walsh's high‐character, undersized, low‐draft picks into 19 Pro Bowl selections.9
“That's the essence,” said Walsh, “repetition developing skills and then under pressure, being able to perform.”10
The Playbook does the same, without the bruising or the need for ice baths and physical therapy. And without the weight of Walsh's Oxford English Dictionary–sized game manual.
How many plays do most of us know, and how many of us get coached in courage?
Only a precious few. Thus, The Playbook.
Courage is not a life panacea but it comes awfully close. In the steps of this playbook, you'll see courage acted out by parents and teens, managers, firefighters, nurses, doctors, teachers, C‐levels, and the jobless. People of every background who saw themselves as good but never brave, and then found their courage because they practiced it. They became effective leaders as courage countered individual fears, natural disrespect, bias and discrimination.
Aristotle was the great thinker who invented useful things like empirical research, character training, and the happiness formula. Despite being the scorned alien, he persisted in earnestly training Athenians because they needed his wisdom. He remains fresh for reminding us that courage is the single virtue that helps us navigate hard times of fear and stress in order to achieve our best personhood.
Aristotle also saw that sadness, difficulty, and struggle—the hard signs of our times—can help us break unhealthy habits, inspire us to gain what we're missing and to prep moral meals from disregarded ingredients. Professor Brené Brown found strength in our vulnerabilities. Researcher Dr. Angela Duckworth discovered that low points can lead to high ones.
The data tells us that we can leverage sadness and dismay to defuse old habits of fear, find our forgotten courage, reframe poorly defined mindsets, and even overwrite sad pasts.
Courage, unlike avoidance, is a positive, heroic verb. Unlike utopia, it's not a fictional notion. Like sports, it becomes real with practice. Courage is the unique virtue that gives us deep values like self‐control, integrity, respect, generosity, love, justice, trust, and an authentic caring for others—the sweet higher order goods that represent our deepest, heartfelt desires.
J.M. Barrie, polymath educator and creator of Peter Pan, recognized courage as a life goal. He bluntly warned college graduates: “If courage goes, then all goes.”11
We no longer speak or act courageously at work, in our families, or in the public square. We privately say totally wrong things to ourselves that deepen our fears and separate us from our courage. We seek comfort by hopefully reciting that we're special while not remembering that courage calls us to see what is unique in others.
Despite a deep inner need, courage has few followers, fewer advocates, and no network. It lacks a central, unified curriculum and has no cultural platform and few champions. It faces powerful and corrupt foes in business, government, and society. Once the path of the good life and the renewable fuel for human thriving, courage is now a boutique answer to an arcane trivia question and a distant theory. It seems to be a pleasant thought without boots on the ground.
We think we're okay without it. We think practicing it is unnecessary.
This is a huge mistake.
It's unwise to unfriend courage, gaslight ourselves with barrages of bad news, and nurture our fears as if they were household pets. It's wrong to ignore the practice of courage to be captives of our anxieties.
Global poverty experts Brian Corbett and Steve Fikkert find there is little courage left in the world.12 Courage has been asked to leave our cultural stage. But all has not yet gone. It remains the approved solution to undo our impulsive reliance on negativity, criticism, bias, and self‐harm. Long before handheld screens and the discovery of the coffee bean, we were prewired to be courageous and thereby free of self‐perpetuating fears.
But how do we go from a capacity for courage to becoming courageous?
We practice its behaviors.
Those who practice sing better than those who do not. If you exercise, you tend to be more fit and will feel and function better than when you only sit. When we practice honoring all persons we chip away at the monoliths of self‐centeredness and racism.
“String Bean,” said Coach Bonifacio, his nickname for my less than impressive physique. Coach B was a wing chun gong‐fu si fu, a martial arts master on a work visa from Manila.
“You think courage out of reach. You think you can't punch your way out of a wet paper bag. But courage made just for you, the weak of heart.”
Practicing courage with others makes us courageous leaders for others.
Singing well, boxing, acting rightly, reconciling conflicts, solving moral problems, and leading courageously when stressed are not inborn gifts or accidents of nature. They directly result from behavioral practice. Thus, the need for a courage playbook.
Living in our shape‐shifting, conflicted culture, we forget that we own a very real personal capacity for courage.
Courage is race and gender neutral, honors all faiths, and favors no party. It requires neither unique powers nor specific intelligence, unusual gifts, or a generation with a special name.
“Cowardice,” said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “seeks to suppress fear and is mastered by it. Courage faces fear and thereby masters it.”13
How can you be like Dr. King? You practice the behaviors of courage, which you will soon own. The Playbook trains you to face fear and master it, to ascend the five practical and logical steps to courage.
Gangly and socially awkward, Sir Edmund Hillary was the first to reach the peak of Mount Everest. Suddenly a world sensation, he was asked about reaching that deadly summit.
“It is not the mountain we conquer,” he said, “but ourselves.” Conquering our fears is Tolkien's and Lucas's classic moral struggle. Can Frodo find the courage to give up the ring? Will Aragorn overcome the terrors of his painful past? Can Solo defeat his smugness, Leia her sarcasm, and C3PO his nervous frights? The great saga turns on the single, eternal issue of our heroic identity: Can Luke master his anger? Can you?
Our battle isn't