Courage as a muscle
Not all strength is physical. There are mental muscles, just like physical ones that will be strong or weak as you use them. For those with a martial calling, or just life in general, one of the more important mental muscles is courage. I will address courage both at an individual level where your metal muscles to deal with fear are most important, but also at the group level, as humans are social creatures, and courage and cowardice can be contagious. Reactions to how others behave around you on a subconscious level, such as a yawn or cough, or even crying or vomiting can spread. So can giving in to fear or resistance to it.
The great World War I flying ace, Eddie Rickenbacker, defined courage as ”..doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared”. The opposite of going at what you fear is cowardice, avoiding the thing you fear. Courage has two forms that are distinct, yet interlink to a degree; physical and moral. Physical courage is facing and taking on something that you think can harm or kill you. For purposes of this discussion I will also include willingness to do violence, or being dangerous as part of physical courage. Moral courage is facing a peer group’s perceived ridicule, and a bit more complex. People want to get along and have people like them and not be shamed by a group, even if they are shamed for the wrong reason for doing the right thing. The peer pressure in schools is a prime example with the behavior just getting more sophisticated for adults. The common fear of public speaking, with the mere possibility of group ridicule is another example of this. Doing or saying the right thing when at least the vocal members of the peer group say the opposite is moral courage.
So how do you exercise courage as a muscle? By regularly having courage in the small things, facing a degree of danger when it appears, or steeling yourself to have an unpopular opinion in a group if you feel it is morally right. Develop the mental thinking habits of thinking through scenarios and how you would react. In my more advanced firearms training, going beyond the basics of shooting and getting into fighting around scenarios is good. Any martial art will help at this; although the further it is from sport and closer to real fighting the better. As developing competence in fighting, this helps develop confidence which can build up the courage muscle. Speaking well of the brave and encouraging others helps. Find good role models in people you personally know or study historical figures. Other social norms do this, such as kids playing cops and robbers. Having faith in something bigger than you may help build you up or others having faith and expectations in you can help. Good military units encourage brave behavior or, in an example from history, the Spartan women tell their men to come back with your shield or on it (my wife would end all her letters to me in Iraq not telling me to look out for myself but to give my enemies hell). If you feel inclined, such hobbies with controlled danger like motor racing, rock climbing, or hunting alone in remote areas are also good ways to exercise courage. Further along if you are called to the military or law enforcement. But you do not need to take up prize fighting and dirt bike racing while joining up to be Navy SEAL to build up your courage muscle. Other situations are risk taking in business , pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone physically, mentally, spiritually, and socially (it is a whole other blog entry and somewhat self promoting but most of my clients I tutor push themselves beyond there comfort zone just to show up).
Now all in the previous paragraph can go wrong if reason and common sense are not applied. Foolish risks for no good reason, the loud mouth jerk who is always right (and no moral courage to admit when he is wrong), the braggart who talks up what other people think is heroic but are show and never go are negative examples. Doing something to impress others and for peer group praise (the number of wars started to impress a girl is higher than most people think), and worse the bully who confuses pushing around the weak with strength are some examples of it being misapplied. The flip side is that cowards, both physical and moral, will used these labels against the brave, justifying their own behavior by belittling what they are not. Being brave or not is a spectrum that people move up or down (See Dr. Grossman’s sheep and sheep dog as a great example). Most people are comfortable praising the brave from a distance, but often find courageous and dangerous people up close, well, scary. This can happen to degrees in all kinds of groups. I have seen poorly led military units in which the majority with limited or no combat experience have issues and are afraid of a few combat veterans’ cavalier attitude towards danger and violence. So in extremes you can have a group that is supposed to have physical courage go along with socially popular cowards to belittle brave behavior. This can go on much deeper on this subject and how it affects all forms of leadership, but this is limited depth and I need to do the case study.
Next: Part II- Case Study of David and Goliath