The Courage Complex Part 2— Why Your Confidence Is Holding You Back.
Avoiding pain is easy but finding pleasure is hard.
I’m a man without a mission. I am working hard but no idea what I’m trying to achieve.
The Courage Complex is an evolving beast.
It is almost certain you will face adversity and opportunity in equal measure throughout your life. How we respond to these challenges is what marks us out as different.
“It’s not how many times you get knocked down that count, it’s how many times you get back up.” — George A. Custer
We will face setbacks.
We will doubt ourselves.
We will fail.
The outcome, however, has not been written in stone just yet. You have the ability to change your future.
It will be hard work.
It will take effort.
But you CAN get there.
The question is… “do you want to?”
I’m sure we’ve all heard the phrase that ‘talk is cheap’. There are many truths to this. We can talk about taking action all we want but until we actually do take action, it means nothing.
Accompany this with another phrase of prophetic importance and you can see how the courage complex becomes increasingly important in everyday life.
There is a big difference between knowing and doing.
We all know what we should do — eat well, move more, drink less alcohol etc. — so why don’t we do it?
Predominantly because it means not taking the easy option or the path of least resistance.
Once we have tasted the sweetness of the easy way out, the decision to turn our back on this euphoric dopamine hit of relaxation is hard. Really hard.
The problem is, in much the same way smart investing works, the easy option operates on a compounding interest basis. The more often you take the easy option, the hard it becomes to break this cycle.
Applicability to the Courage Complex is the thickening of the Boundary of Doubt.
The longer we divert our attention and efforts away from the hard choices and actions, the weaker our courage muscle becomes and the less likely you are to break through the Boundary of Doubt.
All is not lost though.
We are wonderfully resilient creatures. We have the ability to grow, learn and develop. If we want to.
You see, the secret to keeping your Boundary of Doubt smaller and your courage muscle strong is to maintain focus.
Focus on what?
Your goals.
As with a business wanting to be successful, the aims, aspirations and goals are written down for reference and progress monitoring. The goals can be big hairy and audacious or smaller more realistic, it really doesn’t matter.
They need to be applicable to you.
I don’t give a sh*t what someone else is working towards.
They are not you.
You are your own person and with it, the specificity of having your own aspirations. What you do to achieve these goals and how you act does matter.
It matters a great deal.
A major problem here though, is most people won’t have a goal. Or even be able to articulate what their goal is.
They are coasting through life.
Picking up ideas from others and ultimately fooling themselves on the likelihood of achieving success.
I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news but it’s not going to happen.
If it does, then it will be more by luck than judgement.
At this point, I will stand back and congratulate you. However, you will deep down know it was not a planned action plan that got you there. More the fortuitous set of events which propelled you to your goals.
Fortunately, we can increase the odds of success greatly. That is to define your goals and write them down.
This is something we can all do.
There really are no excuses.
You don’t’ need to show them to anyone else if you don’t want to. But failing to write them down is not acceptable. I would rather you stop ready this article, grab a piece of paper and pen and scribble down your first thoughts on goals now, that put it off to finish the article.
Every day that goes by without a goal is wasted. You continue to bob on the ocean of opportunity without a rudder or direction.
Why do this to yourself?!
One of the reasons why goals are put off is because people try to avoid experiencing pain.
Pain of failure, pain of not having what they want. Or even physical pain e.g. sore back etc.
The avoidance of pain means you continue to drift. Your ‘Spear Arm’ (that which controls your courage speer) continues to get weaker.
You are less and less likely to break through to the Opportunity District.
Motivated people, or those who have a mission, accept the pain and actively try to move towards pleasure.
Pleasure will take many forms but requires significant hard work.
Imagine trying to change the direction of a cruise liner?
The Captain will change course and it could take hours before the true direction is reached. Whilst I’m not comparing you to a cruise liner (!) the point is it won’t happen immediately.
What you do need to immediately is show up.
You need to commit. You need to say this time it is different. I do want to succeed. I’m tired of not getting what I want.
This commitment needs to happen every day.
Large grandiose actions are not needed. The small repeatable hard yards are the differentiator. Those actions which you can do each and every day.
I know how this works, as I’ve been where you are.
I wanted to get fit but couldn’t get a habit “to stick”. The endless search for the ‘perfect’ programme, the new clothing that would help or the next training fad. I tried them all.
It becomes demoralising.
You see men and women grace the covers of magazines and think it’s unreachable. Every way you turn, you feel that you are being conspired against. It is easy to beat yourself up about it.
This is the Boundary of Doubt playing on your insecurities.
The inability to counteract these negative thoughts lies at the heart of your courage muscle not being strong enough.
Your Courage Arm (the combination of the muscle and speer) are not working in unison. There is no cohesion, no symmetry, no efficiency.
Fortunately, there is a way to break this cycle.
As mentioned earlier, the one action which created the habit for me was to show up. Every. Single. Day.
To start out, I would decide the night before what I was going to do.
I would select the workout from the programme and commit to it. I would make my breakfast the night before as well. This meant less brain power in the morning and more opportunity to succeed.
In the beginning, you don’t see much of a difference. But the aggregation of the small steps every day soon begin to add up.
You start to see some muscle definition. You start to eat healthier on a regular basis. You start to FEEL better.
This is the tipping point.
The moment you start to feel better, you are well and truly in the confidence-competence loop.
You may not have heard this term, but I have no doubt you have experienced it at some point. The way it works is this:
- You start to have confidence in your own abilities — in this case, sticking to the process and seeing the difference
- You start to be competent in your endeavours
- Which in turn gives you more confidence
- And so, the cycle continues.
In essence the more confident you are in an action, the greater competence you create, which in turn gives you greater confidence.
This blindly simple symbiotic relationship can be applied to any facet of life.
The hard part is creating the confidence to get started. Not only that but the confidence to stay commitment which sh*t gets tough. That’s usually when people stop. Right on the precipice of success.
Please don’t let that be you.
A quick anecdote:
I take on endurance challenges, most recently the Pikes Peak Mountain Marathon in Colorado, USA. It is widely regarded as one of the toughest marathons in the world. A 26.2 mile run up and down the tallest peak in the Colorado range topping out at 14,115ft. All to be completed within a 10-hour time limit.
I had trained hard and although being a “flat lander” i.e. Someone who lives at sea level in London, was confident in my ability. I had put the work in every day for the last 4 months. Even the days when it was cold and wet, and my body ached.
I knew I had to do it.
My motto of ‘train hard, race easy’ embodied the attitude of do the hard things in training so when it matters, you know you can.
Long-story short, this was the closest I have ever come to quitting during a race.
It was brutal.
The quads cramped, the calves spasmed, the hamstrings were screaming. It’s fair to say that there were tears too.
Did I quit?
No.
I vowed to myself that I would finish even if past the time limit. I had started out on the journey and I was a man on a mission.
Would you like to know the single biggest reason why I couldn’t quit?
It was because I couldn’t come home and tell my friends that I didn’t finish.
That thought process was untenable to me.
I hadn’t trained to return home a failure. I know my friends and family wouldn’t say I failed but that’s how it would have felt. Remembering the moment, you quit and leave the race, that’s it.
Game over.
You can’t go back and restart if you change your mind. It is definitive.
With this in mind, I knuckled down, plodded along and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Slowly the miles ticked by and after 8 hrs, I crossed the finish line.
Euphoria. Relief. Pain. All leapt through my body.
What mattered, to me, was I had finished. I had come through adversity and succeeded. I don’t do these challenges for anyone else. They are for me and me alone.
The purpose is to see if I am capable of doing it. I am genuinely unsure at times but with an inner self-confidence I have built up which turns into competence, I give it a go.
The cycle for me has not always been there as I’ve had to work at it to. But the point is, if I can do it, so can you.
It all starts with a first step.
Bringing it back to the Courage Complex, you need to have a mission, a goal, a purpose. Call it ‘a reason for being’. This focus will help you stay on course and keep moving forwards.
Those individuals who have a purpose are constantly challenging themselves and with it using their Courage Arm. The courage arm embodies accountability, motivation, action taking and the ability to try and fail.
Remember, you will fail.
That is inevitable.
The question is will you get back up again?
With the Boundary of Doubt getting thicker for every day you fail to address it, the opportunity cost of not pursuing your goals grows.
The world is an incredible place with a plethora of opportunities, and it is up to us to decide how we tackle them.
The easy option is to revert into our comfort zone and take the easy path. The by-product of this is your Boundary of Doubt grows stronger and the Courage Muscle gets weaker.
The alternative option is to take action.
It will be the harder route for sure, but I promise you a more rewarding choice. The Courage Muscle will benefit from the action, getting stronger from every experience and in turn, adding to the confidence-competence loop.
Entry into the loop is what you are seeking.
This is the tipping point to success.
As you sit here reading this, what do you truly want to achieve? And what’s stopping you?
If you haven’t exercised your courage muscle in a while, the best time to start again is now. The longer you leave it the harder it will be. Conversely, the sooner you start, the sooner you can move towards your goals!
The first action you need to take is define your goals.
Write them down now!
If you need help, comment below and I’ll happily help you.
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