Transcriber: Anna Sobota Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Have you ever thought if I just had the guts,
I’d speak up?
I’d make that change?
I’d take that chance?
Have you ever wished for more courage?
If it were easy to defy the gravitational pull of the status quo,
more people would.
But I’m here to tell you
that all the courage you have ever admired in others,
lives in you.
And I’m going to help you find it, beginning with a horse riding lesson.
Growing up on a small dairy farm in the Aussie Bush, I was horse crazy.
But prolonged drought left little money to buy a horse,
so my dad did the next best thing.
He went into a horse raffle:
20 cents a ticket, six for a dollar.
For weeks leading up to that ravel raffle, I was on my knees:
“Dear God, please let us win that horse. Please, God.”
Well, it’s true, “be careful what you pray for,”
because we won a wild brumby from Australia’s rugged Snowy Mountains,
who went from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds flat.
Often, leaving me on the ground, behind him.
But my mission to master that horse,
was greater than my fear of him throwing me off.
And so every day, I would go out to the paddock
and I would settle up my horse.
Day after day, week after week, my confidence grew and my fear waned,
and within a year, I was winning local barrel races.
The lesson?
Courage and comfort can’t ride the same horse.
Courage is being defined in lots of ways,
but my favorite is John Wayne’s definition,
“courage is being scared to death and settling up anyway”.
I'm guessing that you've had times when you've settled up anyway,
but I’m guessing there’s also been times when you haven’t.
When fear of what you didn’t want
kept you taking the very actions to go after what you did want.
Fear does that.
Fears wired into our psychological DNA to keep us safe,
to protect us from pain.
If our brains weren’t exquisitely wired to alert us to potential dangers,
to protect us, we wouldn’t be here now.
In fact, MRI scans of our brains in the process of decision making,
and we make about 35,000 decisions a day,
give or take two or three.
Show that our brains are twice as sensitive
to potential losses as they are to potential gains.
We are wired to focus on all the things that could go wrong
far more than what could go right.
We tend to overestimate the risks.
We tend to underestimate ourselves, particularly we women.
[We tend] to catastrophize outcomes,
to rationalize the status quo and to discount the cost of inaction.
You know, if it were easy to do those things that scared you,
so many people wouldn’t spend so much of their life
inside their comfort zone.
The truth is,
it’s uncomfortable to live the life that you’re capable of living.
It’s why courage is what it takes to bridge the gap
between who you are and who you could be,
between the life you have and the life you most want.
The latest research on leadership by Korn Ferry aligns with ancient wisdom
that courage is a force multiplier of our gifts.
It helps us grow into who we can be, to live and lead,
with all that it takes to achieve what it is
that we really want in our lives.
As Aristotle said,
courage is the first of all virtues
because it makes all others possible.
The bad news: there is no shortcut to courage.
There is no magic bullet to bravery.
The good news, well, courage is a skill.
And like all skills, it can be learnt and mastered with practice.
Just like you would go to the gym to build your muscles,
you can exit your comfort zone to train the brave.
And every time you do, every time you take action
in the presence of your fears;
often disguised as mild-mannered doubt;
you reclaim the power that your fears have had over you.
And as you do you,
you develop new neural pathways in your brain.
And not only that.
You develop what psychologists call “affect tolerance,”
that is, you get more comfortable being uncomfortable.
You train the brave
and you expand your confidence for bigger goals
and greater challenges and broaden your horizons.
Growing up, the big sister of seven,
my own horizons didn’t extend much further than our back paddock.
But those years of settling up anyway,
they emboldened me,
first, to go to university in the big city;
I was the first-generation college student;
and then, after graduating, to buy a backpack and head off
with a round-the-world ticket for a year-long adventure.
That experience,
combined with many I’ve had over the last 30 years,
have taught me that all of us, universally,
regardless of the culture or country we have grown up in,
we all struggle with an internal tug of war
between the short term desire
for comfort, certainty, control and looking good
and our deepest desire for learning, growth and doing good.
It’s just that for most of human history,
we didn’t live in a digital fear economy
glued to devices pummeling us 24/7
with reasons to feel afraid, magnifying our sense of the dangers,
stocking our doubts,
driving us to turn our forecasts into fear casts.
And to quote Eleanor Roosevelt,
“tiptoeing gently through life only to make it safely to death.”
You see, it’s not the risks that we take that we tend to regret most.
It's the ones that we didn't take.
It's why at the end of life,
the biggest regrets people have,
aren´t the chances they took that didn’t pay off.
It’s the chances they didn’t take.
It’s that they settled too fast, for too little.
Not just shortchanging themselves,
but shortchanging the world of all that they could be.
And it’s why in the long arch of our lives,
we fail so much more from timidity than we ever do from over daring.
Research shows that we humans flourish and thrive the most
when we’re working hard toward meaningful goals,
ones that give us a sense of purpose,
but ones that also, by default,
invite challenges into our lives
and put us at risk of feeling the very emotions
that we most want to avoid:
rejection, disappointment, hurt, heartache.
But here’s the deal,
if all you do is trying to protect yourself from those emotions,
you ultimately make yourself more vulnerable, not less so.
And less secure, not more so.
It’s by opening your heart and arms wide
to the full, wild and sometimes messy adventure that is life
that you ultimately spare yourself the biggest risk of all
and that’s looking back one day and wondering, what if?
“Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all,” said Helen Keller.
And yet all of us treat life, sometimes,
as though it is a dress rehearsal.
The fact is, while life is --
you are on the adventure of a lifetime.
And the truth is, none of us get out of it alive.
Early on in my marriage to my husband, Andrew, we decided to pursue adventure.
We were living in Melbourne, Australia,
and we made a competition who could land the first job outside Australia.
We were thinking New York, London, Paris, maybe Shanghai, Singapore.
He came home one day and said,
“I think I’ve got an opportunity, Papua New Guinea.”
It wasn’t really on my mind, Papua New Guinea.
In fact, a lot of people don’t even know where Papua New Guinea is.
But we were ready for adventure.
So we packed up our life and off we moved to Port Moresby.
I quickly landed work and we had some incredible adventures.
Two years along,
I was 18 weeks pregnant with our first child,
the first grandchild, the first niece or nephew.
And I was sitting at work one day in my office
when three men stormed in with sawn-off shotguns.
One step forward and putting it to my forehead, he said: “Open the safe.”
“I don’t know how,” I said.
He thrust the gun barrel further into my forehead
[and said again:] “Open the safe.”
Again, I said, “I don’t know how.”
After a minute or so,
they decided that I was telling the truth, and I was.
They told me to lay face down on the ground,
leaving one man to stand over me.
I felt his hands go up my skirt between my thighs.
And in that moment,
I was more terrified of being taken back to their village
and gang raped,
which was not an uncommon occurrence in Port Moresby
than I was of being killed.
Minutes passed. It felt like hours.
The men found the cash elsewhere and they left.
Ten days later,
I went for the 19 week scan.
I guess I should have been able to see it in the technician´s eyes,
but it had never occurred to me,
not once, that I might lose my baby.
But I had.
The timing, they said, was purely coincidental,
that those two traumatic experiences would happen just 10 days apart.
It rocked my world.
And in the weeks and months that followed,
I journaled daily as I regained my footing.
And one day I arrived at the decision,
I will not be defined by this experience,
I will not be its victim.
And I will not let my fear shrink my future.
It was one of those life defining moments
as I got clarity about what I wanted and what I didn’t want.
You could argue that moving to PNG was too risky
and that my sense of adventure had worked against me.
But my three years, living in PNG in my 20s,
were incredibly formative.
They nurtured in me resilience, courage
and the capacity for dealing with the challenges
and the heartaches that have come my way since.
And there’s been a few.
You see, heartache is part and parcel of what it is to be human.
It is part of the human condition at times
to feel like the rug has been pulled out from underneath us.
But when all we do is play it safe,
we actually shrink our ability to deal with the challenges life brings our way.
Of course, turning fear into your ally is a key way to unlock your courage
that is asking yourself,
what do I need to be afraid of if I don't take the risk?
And then making the decision to step forward
and do whatever it is that most inspires you.
But of course, courage isn’t just an intellectual exercise.
Fear isn't known for its logic.
I learned this lesson when I went off to circus school for the day.
It sounded like fun, kind of did.
But then, I climbed the rope ladder,
Up and up, and then, looking down and down.
It was a bad decision.
My body froze.
My fear screamed at me, “Climb back down!”
Intellectually, I knew I could not fall to my death,
but my fear screamed otherwise.
Fear does that.
It lives in our tissues.
A racing heart, shaking hands, shaking knees, a dry throat:
I felt them all 20 minutes ago. I'm feeling them now.
But my friends being highly supportive, as they were,
started yelling out to me my book titles:
“Find your courage,” “Stop playing safe.”
Fear of professional humiliation won out over fear of falling to my death.
So defying my inner chicken little I reached out, grabbed that bar
and let out an almighty scream; I will spare you the sound effects.
That day in circus school taught me two really valuable lessons.
Number one, I had not missed my calling to run away and join the circus.
Number two,
the only way to conquer our fear, is to first dare and then believe.
History has taught us
that we fail so much more from playing it safe
and being overcautious than being over daring.
And right now, it is a time for us to be daring,
to reimagine a future that is not defined by our past.
And so for you.
Before you make one more decision,
I invite you to consult your inner brave heart.
Put your hand on your chest
breathe in courage, breathe out fear.
And ask yourself,
where do you need to be braver in your one and only precious life?
To take a chance, to settle up anyway.
Whatever the answer, take one step,
however small, however uncomfortable,
choose courage over comfort.
And then, tomorrow, repeat.
A year from now, you will be so glad you did.
Thank you.