The Courage to
Face Your Fears
Applying
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People to The Seven
Acts of Courage
The lion from the Wizard of Oz isn’t the
only one who struggles to be courageous in life. After
the September 11 tragedy many of us were faced with
reaching deep down and finding the courage to confront
our fears.
Dusty Staub, author of The Heart of Leadership: 12
Practices of Courageous Leaders and The Seven Acts
of Courage: Bold Leadership for a Wholehearted Life,
addresses issues like these in the following interview to
help us grasp these fears while putting our hearts into
all that we do.
NFC:
Are there any changes or additional material in the
paperback version [of The Seven Acts of Courage]
that is coming out?
Staub: There
is one major change, which is some commentary and
thoughts in a preference that I’ve added based on
the events of September 11 and tying in or reflecting on
this. I’ve always thought courage was so critical
and unfortunately in all too short supply. After
September 11, I think that more and more people are
beginning to understand and resonate with that
message.
NFC:
One of my major questions is that there still seems to be
a tremendous lack of courage in the way that you write
about it in the book. The courage to... let me put it
this way. There’s a minister here in Cincinnati who
I’m working with. He’s been in the center of
a maelstrom for the last year or so. You may recall there
was a riot in Cincinnati on April 7, 2001. He was thrust
into leadership whether he wanted to be or not in our
“Ground Zero,” a community called Over the
Rhine. I wanted to work with someone who had the courage
to step forward and help in any way he could. I asked him
if he was willing to die for his beliefs. And like a good
Baptist minister he said “Of course.” Then I
asked him, are you willing to live for them? And
he got it. He said, “Yes I am willing to live for
my beliefs.” More people are willing to die for
their beliefs, and quite easily it seems. But ask them to
live for their beliefs and risk ridicule or failure, not
too many step up.
Staub: In
fact, I think there’s a truism there. My experience
has been that more people are afraid of being embarrassed
or humiliated or ashamed than they are of
dying.
NFC:
Would you agree that it’s like a psychic
death?
Staub: Yes.
And it is fear of that psychic death that drives us.
Remember what Shakespeare said in Julius Caesar,
“The coward dies many deaths, the valiant dies but
once.” The fact is that we can die to our
possibility, we can die to our creativity, we can die to
our potential, we can die to what’s most vital and
important.
NFC: It
appears that a lot of people seem to be satisfied with a
virtual, or more second- or third-hand version of courage
than as you write about it. Let’s say someone wants
to do good works. And they almost feel as though they
have when they read your book or watched the Patch Adams
movie, or something like that rather than actually doing
something. Does that fit in with your
experience?
Staub: I would
agree. I think it’s very hard. That’s where
the fact is that fear is not in short supply.
There’s no danger of running out of fear. The issue
is how you then respond to that fear. I think if people
[ignore] issues of eating themselves to death, or working
themselves to death, or not checking up and getting the
proper medical coverage, or ruining their marriages or
alienating their kids, or even just not doing anything,
[then] there is something running them. And usually if
you scratch deep enough, my experience would say that
there is a fear that has not been dealt with or faced.
And that fear is running
them.
NFC: In
all your different roles do you think a lot of people are
perhaps not even aware of what the fear
is?
Staub: Yes, I
don’t think they’re aware of it. It takes
courage to do the examination. To say, “What are
the shaping forces in my life? What am I living out that
maybe isn’t even part of who I am?” There are
people who live out... there was a guy named Claude
Steiner who wrote a little book called Scripts People
Live. In it he says, “There are scripts that we
learn from our parents, there are scripts that are handed
down by great-great-grandparents, there are social
scripts, there are organizational scripts, and if we
aren’t conscious and aware of who we are and what
we are about, then we are very likely to be running and
living our life as if it were a scripted play, written
and developed by somebody else. To stop and look and say,
which life am I living—my father’s life or my
life, my grandfather’s life or my life—takes
courage.”
NFC:
The Seven Acts of Courage was well received I
presume—the hardback? It has to be if the softback
is coming out. Do you get much feedback from folks who
have just read the book?
Staub: Yeah,
to get promoted in the Illinois State Police it is now
required that you read The Seven Acts of Courage
and actually take a little test on it. That was kind of
neat.
NFC:
That’s a big change for a police
department.
Staub:
I’ve gotten four different e-mails from officers
who said, “I had to read this book and thought it
was just another thing, but when I read it I liked it. In
fact I took it home to my wife. And I wanted to tell you
how much it meant to me.” Which is really neat.
I’ve gotten e-mails from all over the country from
different people, and phone calls from CEOs all the way
to householders telling me what it has meant to them and
their families.
|
The
Seven Acts of Courage
(now available in
paperback):
To Dream and Put Forth That
Dream
To See Current Reality
To Confront
To Be Confronted
To Learn and Grow
To Be Vulnerable/to Love
To Take Action
|
NFC:
You are doing a workshop today, right? Let’s say
you have 20 people in that session—be generous and
say three-quarters of them will act on it in some way in
their work life. But there must be some portion who come
back from the workshop for their business life and say,
“Gee I figured out I am using this in all different
parts of my life.”
Staub:
We’ve probably received, over the past 12 years,
several hundred letters, e-mails, or phone calls from
people telling us how much it meant for their family or
how much it had improved their family life as much as it
did their business.
NFC: It
appears that many people live divided lives. They are one
way at work and another way at home. Sometimes it’s
just absolutely amazing to me when I get into volunteer
or activist kinds of things that people who are very
successful or organized at work or maybe at home are all
of a sudden disorganized when they’re in a new
situation. Or they just can’t apply what they know
in another area.
Staub: Yes, we
do. In fact what I believe is that life is too short to
not be your authentic self everywhere you go. I think
that’s been one of the myths—that you have to
be one way at work and one way at home. It creates a lot
of problems.
NFC:
What you were saying about the whole person reminds me of
what Steven Covey teaches. What you’re doing is not
unique, it’s another doorway and it takes many
different approaches. Would you
agree?
Staub: What I
think Steven Covey did for the nation in a very big way
was to bring the issue of character back into discussion.
And he kind of did away with the faddishness around
leadership style and really started focusing on
substantive issues and principles. I think what I’m
doing is giving people even more practical skills on
focusing on personal mastery. He does an amazing job, but
he doesn’t really address the issue of courage and
how to cultivate it and how to identify it and how to
develop it on a day-to-day basis. And I think
that’s what my book does. So it complements and
adds to what he does. What he does complements and adds
to what I do.
NFC:
You use the Native American Seven Directions in the book.
How did you happen upon
that?
Staub: My
great-grandfather was Cherokee. My grandfather was half
Cherokee. My mother is a quarter Cherokee. So, some of
the principles and spiritual awareness and culture of the
Cherokee was something I grew up
with.
NFC:
Was that in Tennessee or
Oklahoma?
Staub: This
was Arkansas.
NFC: I
was wondering if you’re familiar with the Seven
Teachings of the Ojibwa?
Staub: No,
I’m not.
NFC:
It’s interesting because the way they talk about
it, the seven directions are just seven ways of
understanding something... mystical about north,
southeast, or west. It’s just a vehicle. I
interviewed a gentlemen known as the keeper of the sacred
fire. He referred first to the seven teachings, then the
seven grandfathers, then to seven fires. They use three
different ways to talk about the same thing. Courage is
just one of the significant ones of the seven teachings.
It could be a brand new
book.
Staub: I would
love to see it. Thank you.
NFC:
I’ll send that along. He’s playing this game
or test with a lot of people. Bruce says that he knows
there is an eighth fire, an eighth grandfather, an eighth
teaching. I thought about that and thought about that and
it finally came to me. I called him up at midnight and
said, “Bruce, I got it!” He says, “You
got what?” I said, “The eighth fire,
it’s already taken place.” He says,
“Where is it?” I said, “It’s
inside. It’s when you incorporate the seven
teachings and return to your natural self.”
I’ll send those to you. Has the [Seven Acts]
paperback hit yet?
Staub:
It’s about to hit. It will be out in the bookstores
in April. We have books available. People can get them
from us.
NFC:
I’m just curious as to the timing of the book and
September 11. The impact has been much greater than any
of us expected. And it’s not just here in the
United States.
Staub: For a
long time the call has been going out for more courageous
leadership and to live more courageously and
wholeheartedly. I think September 11 upped the ante in a
very, very big way.
NFC: In
talking with people around the world there’s just a
huge impact. I have a close friend in Ireland and he
reports they’ve been sort of shocked and dismayed
over what the last 15 years has done for Ireland. People
have more money than they ever have. The younger
generation just sort of walked into it and in maybe five
short years is starting to resemble the crowd that we
would associate with Wall Street—me, me, me, money,
money, money. And within just a few short weeks, a month
or so after September 11, he says a lot of people in
their 20s and 30s are taking stock and saying maybe I
have made some wrong choices. Maybe some things are more
important than the shiniest newest car, or whatever. So
in a year or two from now you might write a brand new
preface.
Staub:
I’m very passionate about the idea of wholehearted
leading and the fact that where your courage fails is
where your leadership fails. Where your courage fails is
where your life falters.
NFC: I
think a whole generation of corporate and political
leadership is very, very short of the
mark.
Staub: I
agree. I said that in my very first
book.
NFC:
The Enron case is sort of a capstone. I guess it’s
not unusual that it happened within a year of September
11, it’s like a last little flash. If people
haven’t got it by then, they’re going to get
caught up short I suppose.
Staub:
There’s that Ojibwa saying that I love: “I go
around complaining about my long life while all day long
my soul is being blown across the sky by great
winds.” The sixth act of courage I talk about is
the courage to be vulnerable. And my prayer is that one
of the things we’ve learned from September 11 that
we’ll take to heart is that we open ourselves to
the vulnerability and the humility of learning from other
cultures and the vulnerability of looking at the world
and saying, yes, we are mutually responsible for each
other and if we ignore one pocket or if we abuse one
pocket of the world it comes
back.
Return to
top
June 2002 News for
a Change Homepage
High Impact Consulting— Getting Real
Results
