My mentor used to say leaders need to maintain an environment of healthy respect. When he elaborated, he said he meant the hockey form of respect: fear. He didn’t want word to get out about how nice he really was. He wanted people to think he was likely to ruthlessly enforce justice so that they’d do their work well and not have to encounter him.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt said that “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” Courage is in constant tension with fear. Fear for the dangerous, the powerful tornado, the power greater than oneself is justified. Courage is running toward the feared at risk of sacrifice in order to protect what you love. Courage is not fearlessness.
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The strength required to effectively engage courage is a gift, a gift that can be trained and honed and multiplied many times over. In cycling, it it the strongest among the group with the courage to drop back and assist the weaker cyclist. The strong make a choice to assist, a choice of generosity or compassion, though not all the strong will choose this way — only those that prioritize the cohesiveness of the group. But only the strong have the capacity to be courageous and survive, to face the danger and overcome it. The cyclist struggling to hang on to the group cannot afford the extra energy required, and if he or she tries both the assister and assisted will be lost to the group that day, but the assister will also grow stronger. There are many kinds of strength: physical, character, spiritual. To grow the strengths you are given, excercise them to near the point of failure often.
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I would not wear a key that said fearless. Fearless implies a pride, a refusal to recognize how small we are, a failure to acknowledge real powers greater than ourselves. When we are fearless we are deluding ourselves, and inviting learning through abject failure. It is fear that is respect, and fear of loss greater than the fear of action that inspires the courage to use all our strength.
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Originally published on Medium in the publication We are all Overcomers. Order historical fiction novel Rekindled with the button below.
