Fear is the most common emotion in my life. I’ve been afraid for so long— well, honestly, I can’t even remember not being afraid. It’s what you choose to do with that fear that makes all the difference. ~ Laird Hamilton
The Grit To Be Your Best When You’re At Your Worst
The Grit To Master Fear
The Grit To Recover
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Glossary
Physical Courage: This is a willingness to push the limits of one’s body. This is the kind of courage that shows up in all sorts of athletics, in individual pursuits like skiing and mountain biking and motocross—places where injuries are both common and (often) significant.
Battle Fortitude: is a term that refers to one’s willingness to take grave chances with one’s life in the company of like-minded individuals. This clearly overlaps with moral courage (for example, this great talk by New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin on the Freedom Riders), but really applies to anything from football through war— meaning it pops up when one takes the “field (be it a battlefield or field of play) with “teammates.” Thus the courage required is a shared, cooperative psychological state, rather than an individual necessity.
Moral Courage: This is the courage to stand up for one’s beliefs in the face of overwhelming opposition. It’s best exemplified by the actions of Mahatma Gandhi or Rosa Parks. While it seems likely that there are examples of moral courage independent of other types, this particular subsets seems to include parts of physical and intellectual courage (see below), alongside empathetic courage (again see below).
Intellectual Courage: Obviously, this is the willingness to come out in favor of an idea that others find patently ridiculous. I think there are probably a few subset in here as there seems to be some kind of fundamental difference between, say, Galileo’s courage to argue that the earth revolves around the sun (based on scientific evidence) and the courage to defend an idea like creationism (that flies in the face of scientific evidence), but how to tease them apart further is not yet clear.
Empathetic Courage: Empathetic courage is the ability to feel deeply for another being. A great example of this is the animal rescue community.
Maternal/Paternal Courage: This one may be much more natural than nurture, but when parents do things like rush into burning buildings to save their offspring, this is exactly what we’re seeing.
Decision Making in the Face of Uncertainty: As Daniel Kahneman proved over 30 years ago, decision-making under uncertainty is not easy. In fact, in our modern world—where the proliferation of choice is both expanding exponentially and psychologically crippling, just choosing what to eat for dinner is often a very complicated decision (and one that our species really didn’t start making in earnest until this century).
Stamina: This is different than physical courage. Physical courage requires confronting catastrophic consequences (thus there’s an element of heavy uncertainty at work here), while stamina—like the fortitude to run a marathon or swim across the English Channel)—requires the ability to confront constant pain and exhaustion for a set period of time (no uncertainty, tri-athletes know the race will hurt, but they also know they’ve confronted such pain previously and can take it).
Emotional Courage: This is a willingness to do something like get divorced or break up with your boyfriend and the like, where one knows that you will feel emotionally wretched for a considerable period of time afterward, yet you’re still willing to suffer those consequences for a greater emotional (ie. chance at happiness) pay-off later.
Tactical Courage: This is a willingness to put the lives of others at risk—like what happens when a general sends an army into battle or the CIA sends a spy into hostile territory.
Intoxication: A lot of folks would be hesitant to include this category here (believing intoxication a kind of false courage), but based on Ronald Siegel's work at UCLA, intoxication is one of the oldest forms of bravery amplification known to man and one of the most frequent forms to surface in society.
Fiscal Courage: The willingness to risk one’s money, either in the stock market or the poker table or in start-up companies the world over. Since money is nothing beyond a stand- in for all things survival, this form of courage deserves its own category.
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