Living in the COVID World ... and Beyond #74: Courage

When I was working at IBM, I had a whiteboard in my office.  And on that whiteboard, I had one word that I kept there all the time, and that word was “courage.”

What is courage?

According to Webster’s Dictionary, courage is “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear or difficulty.”  

I think courage is that capability to face fear and act because something more important is possible.   Being courageous does not mean that we are not afraid.   It means that we choose to act despite our fear.  

I’m reminded of a quote by Georgia O’Keefe: “I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life - and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

I believe that everyone is born with courage inside of them and wants to do their part to set things right in the world.   Unfortunately, many, if not all of us, have had that sense of courage that we all had get damaged.     That damage occurred at home, at school, and in our religious institutions.   The damage happened as we were disciplined, threatened, and silenced.   Our courage was systematically chipped away at, to such an extent that most of us struggle to act courageously today.

When I was at IBM, there were policies, programs, and processes that if implemented I believed would improve the effectiveness of the organization and the work lives of IBM’s employees.    And these programs were not in the minds of the senior leadership of the company.   To make change, I had to advocate.   And I had to advocate repeatedly and with as much force as I could muster.   This was hard to do.   I often felt like giving up and just going along with the status quo. 

This is where “courage” on the whiteboard played a key role.   I wrote it there during a meeting that I had with some of my team members.   They were pushing me to be the advocate that I wanted to be.   And I said I’m going to need courage to do this (I don’t even remember what this was about at that time).   What helped me to act with courage was that team that I had with me.  Even though I would go to meetings with senior management on my own, I had my team with me in my mind and that gave me more courage to speak my truth and to advocate forcefully for what I believed.

I’m choosing to write this blog today because I feel like we all need to be more courageous, including me.   We need to advocate for the changes that we believe will make people’s lives better.   We need to act as forcefully as we possibly can.  And what will help us to do that?   I think it will be the same thing that helped me to act at IBM.  We must notice that we have each other on our side.  Let’s recognize that not one of us is alone.  We are together.   The great protest song slogan of my youth was “United we stand, divided we fall.”  

What helps you to act with courage?