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It’s likely that many of you have heard of Brené Brown, author, research professor and owner of one of the most viewed TED talks to date. She’s the author of the book ‘Daring Greatly’ about the transformational effects of finding the courage to be vulnerable. For me, it is important to be able to ‘dare greatly’ in a way that is true to who we are. If you ever find yourself having a gut sense that you need to do something that scares the living daylights out of you, you probably need to dare greatly – read on as I aim to explore what can help us to do just that.
The name of Brené’s book comes from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech at the Sorbonne, Paris in 1910. In it he says “..there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasm, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly..’
Many organisations use competencies or leadership behaviours to help people know what is expected of them and ‘managerial courage’ is often one of these. I would prefer to label what’s required from each of us as ‘human courage’ because it takes connecting with what makes us human to be able to take on these ‘scare the life out of us’ scenarios in a way that is right for each of us. By that I mean that we need to be clear on our values that guide our choices and decisions as well as our own standards of behaviour that we expect of ourselves towards ourselves and towards others.
It is also helpful to recognise David Rock’s 5 key domains from his SCARF model that are important to us and others in how we approach situations. Neuroscience research implies that these domains activate the same threat and reward responses in our brain that we rely on for physical survival. The domains are Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. Let’s look at a few scenarios that might require you to ‘dare greatly’ that link to each of these domains to understand why they might feel threatening:
(1) If our role is made redundant, or we give up a career we are not enjoying without knowing what we will do next, we risk the ‘status’ that we feel we have through what we’ve achieved in our career to date. What will others think of me?
(2) If we’ve worked at an organisation for a long time and believe we’d be better off somewhere else but aren’t sure we could get another job and don’t want to risk rejection it is likely the ‘uncertainty’ of getting that next job that feels daunting.
(3) If we have a manager who seems to be looking over our shoulder at every turn and wants us to seek their approval for every decision then we are likely feeling a lack of ‘autonomy’ which can be stressful and make us feel powerless.
(4) If we move to a different part of our organisation where we don’t know anyone, we can feel like an outsider before we start to make connections and build trusting relationships. This lack of ‘relatedness’ can mean that we doubt ourselves and feel threatened.
(5) If we believe that someone else has been promoted over us where we believe we have better justification for our own promotion a lack of perceived ‘fairness’ creates a similar threat feeling.
Given the above, here are three considerations to help you step into daring greatly:
1. If you recognise you are facing a scenario that feels like you need to pull on your human courage, checking if one of the five SCARF domains is at play and labelling the situation accordingly can take some of the fear out of it. You can then reappraise the situation to see if you can address it. Try to step outside of yourself and imagine one of your close friends was approaching this scenario, – what might you say to them?
2. Try not to worry about how others may judge your situation or your actions as long as you can say hand on heart that you did what you felt was right for you and demonstrated integrity.
3. I like to think that our character is lived through the way that we act day in day out. The more we retreat from what we know we need to tackle, the bigger the fear becomes, and the smaller we become in terms of what we are prepared to engage with going forward. We are not fixed in terms of who we are. We can change and shape who we are as human beings by the way we act. When you look back over your working life, what do you want to be able to say about it and who you were within it? In order to be able to say that, what do you need to do now?
Finally, I think it is worth being kind to ourselves when we ‘step into the arena’ and attempt to dare greatly. We may not get it right every time but we’ll get better. As Brené says in her book: “The willingness to show up changes us, it makes us a little braver each time.”
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