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Courage is Contagious

If you’re a Jordan fan, you remember the commercial clearly. You’d never thought about the message he shared from that direction; but the moment you heard it, you knew just how true it was.
The commercial starts with Jordan walking down a hall, photographers' cameras clicking in the background, when you hear him say: "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
What made this commercial so appealing wasn't what Jordan said. It was that he said it at all. Here was the greatest basketball player in the world (and of all time … you know it’s true), at the peak of his career, publicly cataloging his failures. He'd been cut from his high school varsity basketball team, lost hundreds of games, and missed thousands of shots during his career. But instead of hiding those failures, he was broadcasting them to millions.
The commercial was impactful because it revealed the under-appreciated connection between courage and fear. Jordan was modeling a completely different relationship with failure and, in turn, a different relationship with the courage to move forward in spite of it. Fear spreads when people hide their failures and pretend excellence comes easy. Courage becomes contagious when we are willing to own our failures publicly and make it safe for others to do the same.
Why Should We Care?
We don't just catch each other's colds. We catch each other's habits, behaviors, and beliefs too. The emotional climate of any team or organization is contagious. When a leader operates from fear by avoiding risks, magnifying failures, or playing it safe to protect their reputation; that fear spreads like a virus through their entire team. But when a leader models courage by taking calculated risks, processing failure as feedback, and staying calm in uncertainty; that courage becomes equally contagious. 
This is one of the reasons why the people we surround ourselves with matter so much. If you're surrounded by people who operate from scarcity and fear, you'll absorb that mindset whether you try to or not. But, if you're around people who process failure as part of the process you'll develop an entirely different relationship with courage and risk.
Your mindset around failure doesn't just affect you. It shapes the entire culture of your team. The leaders who build truly resilient teams aren't always those with the most talent or resources, they're the ones who have learned to process failure in ways that inspire courage rather than spread fear. 



REAL TALK - Action Steps
Becoming someone who spreads courage rather than fear requires intentional practices around how you process failure and how you create environments where others feel safe taking risks. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Take a “Failure Inventory” 
  
  • Catalog your failures as evidence of your courage. At the end of each month, write down the difficult conversations you’ve had, the things you’ve tried to start but failed, and the decisions you made that turned out to be wrong. When you consistently acknowledge your failures as part of your pursuit of excellence, you create an environment where fear loses its power. 
    
• Check Your Language
  
  • Pay attention to the words you use when things go wrong or when facing adversity. Do you speak in extremes or do you maintain perspective and normalize struggle? Fear spreads through language as much as through body language. Spend one week tracking your language in moments of difficulty. Consciously shift toward more courageous language that opens up possibilities rather than shutting them down.
    
• Create a Courage Circle
  
  • Identify 2-3 people who process failure as feedback, a part of growth, and evidence that you're taking shots worth taking rather than playing it safe. These should be people who will celebrate your attempts even when they don't work out. You need people in your life who will help you find lessons in your failures rather than letting you spiral into shame or fear. 
    

Fostering contagious courage is really pretty simple. Surround yourself with people whose courage is more contagious than their fear, whose response to struggle strengthens you rather than diminishes you. Then, be that for others.

Checkout Surrender the Outcome on Amazon and order The Score That Matters with Ryan Hawk & Brook Cupps. The latest blog from Blue Collar Grit can be found here!