The Courage Playbook. Gus Lee
recruited me, an All‐American Chicken Little. I feared everything, ran from my own fears, and couldn't find “courage” in the dictionary. It methodically equipped me to obey my coaches, practice doing the right thing, train others to beat their fears, and to care for those whom I could reach. Courage gave me life. Because it can be acquired by anyone, never again would I find myself running on empty and fleeing discomfort on the fumes of my fears.
A result is The Courage Playbook, your personal invitation to flex your essential courage muscles before they atrophy from unthinking neglect. Here, intellect, emotions, actions, and inner spirit unite in a principled way so you can become who you were always supposed to be.
This differs from other books on leading your life and the like. It departs from the popular, mainstream leader and self‐development efforts that rely on listening to speakers rather than actually acquiring practical on‐the‐ground skills and focusing on self‐gain rather than on helping others. Per professor‐psychologist‐aviator‐humorist‐writer‐and‐boxer Dr. James P. Sullivan, we win greatness of ability by practicing the skills of courage instead of listening to people talk about them. Crucially, we gain courage for the common good.
The difference is captured in a simple axiom: We get courage by doing courage.
How do we do courage? By practicing its now‐forgotten behaviors.
The Courage Playbook walks you through those actions in five basic Steps.
The ideas and exercises in The Playbook come from a revolutionary courage training program that has equipped individuals and organizations to overcome their fears so they can act with unfettered freedom, resolute confidence, and a sense of humor, all for the right reasons.
It's not how I used to do it. For decades, working for top global and national leader development institutions and business schools, we taught leadership knowledge as if it were an academic subject like English or math. Thousands of smart, experienced, and educated participants took notes, enjoyed personality insights, simulation games, camaraderie, and meals and gave us 4.5 stars. They left emotionally refreshed. But their behaviors hadn't changed. Our binders sat brightly on the shelf, but the learning hadn't installed practical interpersonal abilities. They knew more than before, yet the fears they had on arrival were waiting for them when they returned. The glow lasted about a week. Yet they had not functionally improved as leaders or individuals. We'd taught intellectual theory; we hadn't trained in actual courage and skills.
The participants’ organizations continued to practice denial and blame, avoid glaring problems, tolerate toxic managers and be stymied by poor performance, disrespect, turnover, dishonesty, and divided cultures. They drove for profits instead of quality; picked on others for not improving while refusing to change themselves; didn't want to hear the truth; chose short‐term results over sustainability and became bad companies—sadly, the very issues that had brought them to us for training. In business and in personal lives, they knew more about why they struggled, but didn't know how to implement courageous actions for authentic improvement, to become who they were supposed to be. Courage had been left out of the training schedule. It's as if they had attended a running clinic without stepping outside the classroom; they hadn't learned and then conscientiously practiced the fundamental plays, leaving them to hesitate once the starter gun sounded.
In the language of the earlier book on courage, they had read about crossing the River of Fear—the barrier between us and our best selves—but they hadn't practiced doing it and hence didn't know how to pull it off.
I realized that leadership shouldn't be only for those with rank, and courage can't be only for those who can afford an executive coach. The very definition of courage requires that it be available to everyone and that it not be for you alone; when you gain it by practice, you'll then generously share it.
Courage is essential in leadership—it's impossible to lead and inspire others to be their best selves while being anxious about approval, constantly fearing failure, or avoiding difficulties. But courage is rarely presented as central to human effort and is almost never the subject of actual, practical behavioral training. Research into our national efforts to develop positive work, family, and community cultures through leadership training has confirmed what I'd observed and learned through decades of experience.
Acutely lacking leaders, the United States spends $170 billion every year ($520 per capita) to develop them—without producing effective leaders.3 We've tried agility, change theory, conceptualization, do what you feel, emotional intelligence, execution, fishbones, going to Gemba, pursuing Kaizen, chasing habits, laws, Lean Six Sigma, rules, break the rules, forget the rules, no rules, perseverance, positivity, quality programs, Root Cause Analysis, scrums, speed, sprints, strengths, transparency, trust, and vision.
The results? Per John Kotter of Harvard, we suffer a 400 percent deficit in leaders at every level.4 Dr. Paul Brand, an international medical missionary, noted that Americans, who live with greater physical comforts than most in the world, are unequipped to cope with simple discomfort and are especially vulnerable to sharp disappointments.5
Brimming with good ideas, we have found ourselves back where we began.
We are missing something, and it's big.
What happened? I'll tell you what happened: we lost our courage, and watching endless PowerPoint presentations and taking personality assessments and doing simulations have sadly failed to bring it back. With brains, universities, and a big economy, we sit on the fence of positive action, suffer great falls, and can't put Humpy Dumpty together again.
We've created and then fallen face‐first into a yawning Courage Gap.
But when I was engaged in one‐on‐one executive and private coaching, I did things differently. By guiding clients to courageously stop basic and common negative habits, practice key courageous behaviors, and to be actually accountable, the coaching became personal, relational, and impactful. They became dramatically stronger as listeners, communicators, teambuilders, and effective solvers of tough, recurring problems at work. But beyond that, more importantly, they were able to repeat the same behaviors in their private lives, the place that counts the most. By changing themselves, they inspired change in others. We laughed, not at preplanned jokes to warm up participants, but from experiencing the spontaneous and deeper mirth from the lost art of courageously realizing our foibles. And they then practiced the behaviors of courage, which locked key skills into mind‐muscle‐heart memory, and shared their courage with others. The results were often life‐changing.
I found myself looking more carefully at the goals of leader development and at how to create a training model for real results.
Pitching thought‐based education from a platform or stage, I'd let the university habit of only gathering knowledge to override the practice of courage to equip us to rightly live and lead so we could then actually apply cognitive data.
The first courage book was written for that simpler time and I used boxing examples to illustrate an approach for facing fear. But to train people to actually overcome fear, I had to rely on deeper matters of moral instruction, core identity, family repair, relationship reconciliation, marriage, and parenting.
Half of us are football fans, so half of us aren't,6 but the sport is instructive regardless of what we like. So I studied the training methods of a once‐obscure college football coach named Bill Walsh. Walsh then took over the worst franchise in sports history—the San Francisco 49ers—and transformed the organization, improved the game, and saw his teams win five Super Bowls. It's helpful to know the answer to: How'd he do it?
First, to form a selfless and unified team structure, he picked morally courageous players instead of egotistical