How to Be More Courageous For Other People
Are you Type T?
Where I live there are now quite a few running for town council and warrant committee, which is an amazing thing, especially since for a while there were only two people running for two seats and four for five, respectively.
Still, despite this new level of involvement (seven for two seats; eight for five), people are still constantly saying on social media and in personal conversations:
I like myself too much to run for that.
That’s fearless. I am not fearless.
Nope. Nope. Nope. They rip councilors apart.
Are you insane? I would never run for council.
Then I’d be a politician. I hate politicians. Politicians are evil.
And a lot of the people running (though not all) have those same worries and fears.
It takes a sort of civic courage to run for office just like it takes a sort of civic courage to stand up for what’s right.
Risk and civics are intermingled, right? When we deviate from social norms (run for office, stand up to a bully, stand up for what we believe is right, protest, call people out on mean behavior), we risk ourselves.
People could reject us. People could arrest us sometimes. People could skewer us in editorials or just in the produce section of the grocery store.
This happens in big ways and small ways all the time.
Back in 2015, Bree Newson, 30, Black, climbed a South Carolina flagpole at the state capitol and pulled down the Confederate flag. She yelled, “You come against me in the name of hatred, repression, and violence. I come against you in the name of God.”
Was she arrested? Yes.
Was she taking a risk? Yes.
Was she brave? Absolutely.
That was bravery on a large scale. There’s a woman in my town who protests a man who is integral to getting conservative justices into office. She wrote protest slogans in chalk and dealt with people yelling at her, getting threatened. There are people who carry signs about all kinds of things. There are people who speak at meetings. There are people who I agree with and I don’t agree with, taking risks because of their beliefs every single day.
The questions is how and why. Why are they brave?
CONFLICT AVERSION AND RISK TAKING
I don’t think of myself as much of a risk taker. I don’t jump on opportunities. I’ve missed a lot of them because of fear of going bankrupt, of not being able to provide for my family. I’m not proud of that at all. I am super open about having stage fright when it comes to calling or meeting people.
I tell people that I’m conflict averse.
That’s kind of a lie.
Because there’s something inside of me that absolutely loses it when I think something is unjust.
That can come in a lot of different ways.
It might mean I tell a high-powered agent on a panel we’re both on that she’s full of poop when she says that writers have to stay in their genres to be successful and I see all the pre-published writers in the audience faces crumple.
It might mean that when I’m at a fundraising planning event and someone keeps saying racist or sexist that they don’t realize is racist or sexist, I say something because I’d want someone to say something to me. But also because they are hurting someone cool who is sitting right next to them.
Or it might mean that if someone is saying things that are oppressive about women or gay marriage at dinner, I’ll disagree.
I had a husband who really hated this about me. He was conflict averse, too, except when it came to me. “You don’t have to call them out,” he’d tell me. “You can just let it be.”
We all have things, places, where we might lean into conflict, into stating our opinion no matter what.
Again, the question is why?
BECOMING CIVICALLY COURAGEOUS
According to the Greater Good, you can cultivate courage, which is pretty cool and gives me hope for myself, honestly.
They say the approach is multi-pronged, particularly when it comes to being courageous about bigotry, with the first step being knowing what bigotry is. The site has great resources about how to build courage when it comes to fighting oppression.
That’s an important part of civic courage, standing up against inequalities.
Civic courage is multi-pronged, too. It’s also about personal responsibility.
In “How to Find and Practice Courage” Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries writes of how brain researchers have show that there is a “Type T” personality.
Type Ts are thrill seeking and the structure of their brains isn’t quite the same as those of us who avoid risk. Their cortex, the outer layer of the brain, the gray matter is a bit thinner. They also might have less dopamine receptors. Those receptors, he writes, “record sensations of pleasure and satisfaction and as such, may require higher levels of stimulant and endorphin activity in order to feel good.” They also might have more testosterone, which also equals less inhibitions.
“A neurological architecture predisposed to risk taking, combined with a strong value set determining what they perceive as right or wrong, could make it more likely, when the situation requires it, that Type Ts will act in a courageous manner,” he writes.
Which, if you are decidedly not Type T, like me, makes you wonder how you can build up your courage, too, right? Maybe it’s hopeless?
It is not hopeless.
“But even if some people may be genetically predisposed than others to have a greater capacity for risk-taking, it doesn’t mean that they will necessarily show more courage,” he writes. “Along with Stanley Rachman, author of a classic book on the topic, I believe that non-biological factors—specifically, a person’s psychological makeup, values, and beliefs, along with conditioning by early role models—can compel us to act at risk to ourselves in the interest of protecting other people. Your brain chemistry might make you readier than my grandfather would have been to take a bungee jump, but would it have made you readier to shelter Jewish refugees as he did, living in German-occupied Holland during World War II?”
It’s pretty interesting and some of the elements that matter are:
Self-efficacy: the belief we can face challenges that come to us.
Learning courage by practicing courage
Realizing that we are predisposed to expect negative outcomes instead of positive ones (the negativity bias).
Practice facing our fear and doing things that are uncomfortable
Our body responds to fear. We can train our body to respond differently. Practice makes perfect … or at least closer to perfect.
As the Greater Good writes,
“A deep sense of personal responsibility for taking action is key. Action involves challenging the societal norms that normalize silence."
It’s a journey, they say, that “requires introspection, education, and action. It demands that we step outside our comfort zones, confront our fears, and engage in the work of building a more just and equitable society. Through sustained effort and commitment, we can bridge the gap between who we really are and who we want to be.”
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Harvard Business Review article