A Leaders Most Powerful Weapon

All of us walk around discouraged. And there is a lot to be discouraged about.

If it’s not what’s happening in the world around us at every moment of every day our personal lives and relationships are filled with enough drama to fill a weekday afternoon soap opera.

Most of us feel insecure. Whether we like to admit it or not. Actually most of the time our refusal to admit our insecurity shows just how insecure we actually are. And our leaders do not do a good job of reassuring us of our efforts.

What people crave the most is the thing we are not getting enough of: encouragement.

Encouragement means to give some of your courage and hand it to another person.

If you have any leadership experience you have some amount of courage to do the task or job at hand. Even if that courage is minimal at the moment, you are most likely a bit more courageous than most. Leading people is one of the hardest jobs to take on because it often means standing at the head of a group and proclaiming follow me, if you’re wrong, you’ve just taken everyone else with you.

If you don’t think of yourself or the things you do as courageous it’s because we don’t really use this word much anymore and maybe you have never truly understood what it means or how important it is to embrace and use.

Courageous individuals might conjure up pictures of heroic figures from history, (insert Mel Gibson in Braveheart of Russel Crow in Gladiator) but the reality is much more subtle than pop culture stereotypes.

Courage is the ability to do something that frightens us.

A couple of really important things to note: 1. Courage is the ability to do… courage involves taking action, people who have courage have some amount of confidence in their ability, or in the least are not paralyzed by failure. And 2. Courage is about something that frightens us… to have courage you must have fear. In fact it is a prerequisite to whether or not something takes courage to do it or not.

Fear is what prevents us from trying new things, fear is what causes people to not speak up, fear is what causes lack of movement, loss of momentum.

Courage is the ability to act even when a person fears failure.

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

I don’t know where you are at today. I know I need a daily dose of courage and chances are your people do to. When you choose to give your people courage you will find something amazing happens, you will receive courage yourself.

And one final quote about courage because they’re just so good:

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." - Winston Churchill