May 11, 2025 • 64 mins
What IS courage?
I’ve been getting increasingly curious... mainly because I talk about it a LOT. I talk about how, when I reflect on ‘young Tiff,’ she thought she was courageous for doing the things that scared other people (while artfully dodging the stuff that really scared her). Solid little facade, really.
I talk about how the world seems to throw being fearless and being courageous into the same bucket, when really, they’re just second cousins who rarely show up at the same family function… because if you take fear out of the equation, courage kinda ceases to exist. I talk about all the things I reckon have to come into play to be courageous. And yet, I still wasn’t satisfied with my own understanding of it.
So off I went on a bit of a quest… and found Professor Cynthia Pury to help encourage a deeper understanding #SeeWhatIDidThere. Cynthia’s a Professor of Psychology and a pioneer in the study of courage, with her work widely cited across personality and positive psych.
Oh, and that thing I used to do? Turns out there’s a name for it. It’s called accolade courage, as opposed to process courage - which is actually doing the scary thing. So there you go.
Enjoy!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
She said, it's now never.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
I'm tiff.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
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(00:33):
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Speaker 1 (00:51):
See Perry, welcome to Roll with the Punches. Thank you,
thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I thought i'd open the door for the listeners to
come in because we've gotten online and we've been chat
chat chat chat chatting, and I'm loving it already, and
I was like, oh.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
We probably should do a podcast. Yeah, definitely, definitely. How
are you over there?
Speaker 4 (01:10):
In?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Was it Norville, South Carolina? South Carolina? See, I'm pretty
proud that I could remember that already. I am. I
am impressed. I don't know places in Australia at all.
So you're ahead of me.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Film and that's the only one you need to know,
and that's the coolest place to be.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
There you go, Box, There you go.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
I've been really excited to talk to you because I've
been thinking and talking and obsessing a lot and starting
to get really into the psychology and concept of courage.
Resilience was a bit of a rant that I was
going on, but it seems to be intersecting for me
with courage, and I'm developing a real interest in I
(01:56):
like to take the simple memes and if you don't
mind me swearing bullshit and las answers and magic pills
out there, that is people saying I can be resilient,
do hard work? Do these do that be five seconds
of courage with no context. I'm like, well, five seconds
of courage. It's all well and good, but what the
(02:16):
fuck is that?
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah? And how do you and how do you get there?
You know, it's it's you know, it's one thing to
say like I can recognize it when it's happening, versus
it's another thing to be like, I'm going to go
do this thing now. And that's a that's a very
different experience and they In our research, we're finding that
(02:41):
there there's a difference between whether you're going to take
a courageous action and whether you're going to call something
that you're seeing or even that you see in yourself
in the past, courageous. So in my theory, all of
courage comes down to taking a worthwhile risk. So it's
(03:03):
a situation where a person is aware of some kind
of a risk. There's a thing a person wants to do,
and there's some kind of a risk they have to
take to do the thing. The question is is it worthwhile?
Is it worth doing? And you have to add the
worthwhile part to it because otherwise you end up with
situations where people doing some ridiculous TikTok challenge is courageous
(03:26):
and it's like thank you, not really, not really, And
the people are more likely to say something's courageous and
more likely to do the courageous thing when the goal
is very clearly worthwhile, is very clearly important to you,
(03:47):
or good or valuable or societally lauded or something like that,
but the risk runs the opposite direction in the two
different forms, the higher the perceived risk, the more likely
you are to say the action is courageous up to
a point where the risk overwhelms how good the goal is.
(04:10):
But the more risky something is, the less likely you
are to actually do it. So we call the two
different kinds of courage accolade courage and process courage. So
accolade courage is calling the thing courageous. Process courage is
do you do the thing. Accolade courage is increased when
(04:32):
the action seems riskier or when you build up the risk,
and process courage is decreased when you build up the risk.
So it's already so yeah. So a really great example
of that is I saw a thing online the other
day that Monty Python in The Holy Grail is fifty
(04:52):
years old, and if your listeners are familiar with that
movie at all, there's a character in it named Sir Robin.
And not to give away too many spoilers or anything,
it's a delightful old movie if you have a chance
to see it. But this Sir Robin character is one
of the knights who's seeking the Holy Grail, and he
(05:13):
has a minstrel who follows after him talking about brave, brave, brave,
Sir Robin. But Sir Rabin's minstrel just follows him around
talking about how he's not afraid to be killed in
nasty ways, and then proceeds to delineate all the nasty
ways in which Sir Robin might die. And of course
Sir Robyn does not find this encouraging and chickens out.
(05:34):
And it is a peak professional moment for me that
I'm able to quote Monty Python in professional settings. So
you know, life goal achieved, but there is it's funny
because there's some truth to it. So if you are
(05:55):
telling someone I see you have a you have a
boxing career, yes, yes.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Yeah, yeah, yes, my background he's boxing, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
So if if I'm your coach and I'm going to say, Tiff,
you're super super brave for going up against her. She
is so tough, you know, the last person she put,
the last person in a hospital, You're so freaking brave
to go in there. Like, that's not really the pep
(06:24):
talk that you need. You need the pep talk of
you've got this right, You've got this, Your training's going
to kick in, you know, get her do this. You know,
here's some professional technical advice that I have for you,
based on my knowledge of boxing, which for me is nothing.
But you know, here's what you want to do that's
(06:47):
going to be helpful. It's in the it might be
helpful at the end. It might make you feel good
at the end if I say, wow, you were so
brave in there. But if I if I lead with
that before you go into the ring, you're going to
be like, well, I don't want to know how tough
she is. I don't want to know that she's probably
(07:08):
going to briecklay nose. I don't want to know that
right now. Thanks.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
So, yeah, it's like you've listened in on some of
I've got a brutal boxing coach.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
I'm not fighting anymore. But like one of one of
the last.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Times I was fighting under him, and i'd had a
break and I was coming back, and the pep talk
that day was so you're fighting and I'd had I'd
had bugger all training. I was like, I'd gone in
and I said, I want to start training, but I
can't fight because I'm about to open two brand.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
New gyms, so I'm very busy.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
And that went from I walked in at week three
and he goes, you're fighting on whatever whatever I've made
and I was like, okay, right, so that's how he rolls,
and that was that was his tact was you're fighting it,
you're fighting an ex Commonwealth Games Chicken. I'm like, and
I never but I wouldn't know. I was like, you
do everything to get a rise out of me. I
don't know whether that's true or not.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. But it's not building
up how incredibly risky this is. It's instead like I
hear you say that, and I mean I wasn't there,
but I hear you say that, and it sounds like
it's the sort of thing that's meant to be motivating,
Like I have faith that you can do this. Yeah yeah,
(08:26):
yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
My curiosity I think first started around this area when
so I was twenty nine, when I had my first fight,
and I was a bit of a gung ho.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Oh yeah, oh do this look at me?
Speaker 3 (08:36):
And I had this facade of look at like of
who I was at the time, with a fair lack
of self awareness that I now have when I reflect back,
and so I look at now, I look back at
that and I go, that was a girl who was
doing everything that she could to do the things that
(08:57):
other people were scared of and called and curR and
believed it was courage.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I'm like, oh, people are.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Scared of this pool And it was only the penny
only dropped when people kept asking are you're scared of
being punched in the face? That's crazy? And I was like,
that's a bit crazy. I'm not really scared of that.
What am I scared of? And then it's like, okay, well,
what is courage if it's because because we paint pictures
of courage and then we believe it and it's not true.
(09:24):
And also it can be reckless.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yes, yeah, and I think and that's that's where the
worthwhile goal comes in. And so if you imagine two
people running into a burning building to save a baby,
so that's a really good goal, right, and one person
is really afraid to run into that burning building and
(09:49):
the other person's a little less afraid to run into
that building. They both are heroes, and they both are
are are lauded as being courageous, even though it kind
of took more for the one person to do it
than the other. And there's some of the early research
(10:10):
in psychology by Jack Rafman on courage looked at the
fear proneness of people who were decorated bomb disposal operators
and found that they were not they experienced less fear
than other people, and so he's like, well, maybe they're
not courageous, maybe they're fearless. And I'm like, I don't know.
(10:31):
I feel like that's not how we talk about it,
and that's not how we think about it as a society.
And that got me headed down the road of thinking
about like this difference between what it takes to do
the action and what the action and how it looks
to the outside. And there are some situations in which
(10:56):
someone can be incredibly courageous, but it's really only career,
just just for them. So any sort of like personal
fear that you have that's more specific to you is
going to take more accolade courage for you to do. Now,
does that mean that I think you deserve a metal
for it? Not necessarily, but maybe just within your own self,
(11:20):
you can be like, oh, I was really afraid to
speak in public, or I was really afraid to ask
for a raise, or I was really afraid to ask
out this person, or I was really afraid to I
was really afraid to go up in a high place,
or some sort of thing like that, and we kind
of neglect those. I think the other thing with the
(11:43):
burning building example is that it has to be for
a good reason. And so if there's two people again
in the burn unit, they ran into a burning building,
let's pretend they're equally afraid. This time the one person
ran into, say a baby, but the other person ran
(12:04):
into make a TikTok video. Like that other person's just
an idiot, right, most of us think that other person's
just an idiot. But I guess I could see where
you know, that person might be thinking, oh, I'm pursuing
this super important thing, and but yeah, our view of
(12:27):
what the risk of what the both the risk and
the goal is matters a lot.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
What do you think about I feel like everyone wants
to wear the courage badge but also be feearless, and
they talk about it like it's the same thing. I
want to be fearless, which I don't want to feel
fear but I want to do I want to be courageous.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
I yes, Well, some people think that and other people
kind of lean into the I am going to exhibit
personal growth by doing one thing per year that scares me,
and I have encountered people who have said that to
me that I teach improv and and people take the
(13:14):
intro improv class and they'll be like, I'm doing this
because it scares me. I'm doing one challenge per month
or whatever, and I'm like, great, come on in, We're
happy to have you. But it's it's a There's a
famous book in the US that a ton of i
(13:36):
think middle school basically kids have to read called The
Red Badge of Courage, which spoiler is about a soldier
who's excited for the war because he gets to prove
he's courageous and then he finds out that that sucks
and that's the Uh. It's kind of like so it's
(13:58):
I think you'd get like these weird extremes, and I
think people don't know what to do with the fear
sort of thing and courage, and so to me, it's
easier to just talk about it as risk rather than fear.
So you have to think that it's some kind of
a risk, whether you focus on that risk or not.
If there's absolutely no risk, I don't think people would
(14:20):
necessarily think that it was courage, but I think that
they could see how other people could see it. As courage.
So I had an interesting discussion once with somebody who, Oh,
my gosh, what kind of a He was some sort
of a surgeon type person who did what I'd consider
like scary operations. Plus I've got a little bit of
(14:42):
that ill factor for blood, and so for me his job,
I'm like, oh, no, I would be horrified if I
had to do your job. But I was telling him
something about my class that I was teaching that morning,
and somehow it came up that there were like three
hundred people in the class, and he's like, how do
(15:02):
you do that? You know? And I think we were
both like, thinking, how do you do that? That's you know, wow,
I couldn't do that. So it depends on courage. I often,
really often get asked a question about courageous people, and
I the longer I do this, the harder I push
(15:26):
back against thinking about courageous people just as a whole,
because I think we all move through the world with
our own sense of what's risky for us, what seems risky,
what we may have a fear response to, or we
might just think to ourselves that's risky, and or even
(15:48):
just that's very hard for me to do well, and
we all have our own goals that we're pursuing, and
we often end up with situation so that the things
that are held up as as sort of peak courage,
that there are monuments to for courage are almost always
(16:12):
situations in which the society that puts up that monument
thinks that interprets the goal of whatever the action is
is really good as a worthwhile, valuable one, and interprets
the situation as having a lot of risk for that person.
(16:36):
So we have monuments to fallen heroes, especially who died
in service of their country, and we have monuments to
great leaders who risk things that are considered societally appropriate.
In the US, we had a lot of things happen
(17:00):
and where monuments were taken down to causes that people
no longer believe in, and monuments put up to other
and it's a huge especially with civil rights stuff. It's
been a civil rights versus civil war, which interestingly I'm
only connecting now have exactly the same start to them
(17:20):
of civil But the rhetoric around that has been absolutely
fascinating and I think really gets at what a society,
or at least the loudest people in a society are
valuing at any given time, or the richest people or
(17:42):
the people who own the land who put up the monument,
and this whole area of accolade courage can end up
being really controversial and people have really strong opinions about it.
When I first started doing research and courage, I would
go to a conferences, and the way academic conferences work
if you're on some sort of a panel discussion or
(18:05):
some sort of a symposium, is that usually the speakers
meet beforehand briefly to talk about logistics. Who is going
to run the PowerPoint? Do we want all our powerpoints
on one computer or do we want them on to
plug in our computers separately? Do we want questions after
everybody's talk or after each individual talk. And I would
(18:29):
be in a group of people who'd done research on courage,
and we would we would have these conversations, but then
it would always turn into what I got to calling
the Courage Researcher support group, where we sat around and
we talked about how people would get offended by our
research because they would be offended by our research. This
(18:51):
one woman, I'll never forget, she would on a job
interview talking about her dissertation research, and someone like banged
on the table ball at dinner and stood up and said,
you're cheapening the idea of courage. And he huffed out,
and I'm like, wow, that's kind of a lot. That's
a lot, And I think that a lot of it
(19:14):
is this accolade courage sort of idea that if I
call something courageous that you don't agree with the goal
or you don't see as risky, you're gonna be kind
of offended by it, Like how do how do you
don't see that as risky? So at that same conference,
(19:36):
we had a discussant, the person at the end who
kind of summarizes what all three people talked about, who
was just simply offended by me. Because I had a
scale where we asked people. It had a whole bunch
of questions about I would willingly give my life for
my country if needed, down to I I would have
(20:01):
dental surgery to save a tooth, or I would ask
for a raise if I really needed one. It had
sort of these lower level ones also, and he was
just super offended by this, and he asked everybody, He's like, cool,
here thinks it's courageous to ask for a raise if
you need one, that's just being good at work. And
I was like, wow, okay, Bud. And outside of the
(20:24):
clinical psychology community, I've gotten a lot of pushback from
people about these risky kind of actions that people take
that feel risky to them but not to most other people. Weirdly,
within like this therapy kind of community, people get that
because that's what therapists see. They see people who come
in and they say, here's this thing that everyone else
(20:46):
can do and I can't do, and I want your
help doing it. But yeah, it's it's just wild. And
people also have really strong opinions about the the worth
of the action and what that risk benefit thing turns
out to be. So I do a lot of research
(21:08):
where I ask people to describe a time they've acted courageously,
and then I will have undergraduate students help me code
them into different categories. Every single person who's done some
coding for me has encountered something where they read it
and they think to themselves, that's not courageous. And what's
happening is they're identifying that they don't really see that
(21:31):
as risky and or they don't see it as valuable.
So a couple of my favorite examples. I had a
student who was from South Africa and she had a
hard time reading any of our statements that people in
the US had made about being courageous when dealing with
(21:52):
a vicious dog because she grew up with lions near
The kids were worn about lions. You know, if you're
outside you see a lion, they're going to eat you,
so watch out. And that's different and perhaps so Australia.
You have a different thing. I don't know. The perception
(22:12):
in the US is that Australia is filled with dangerous
animals who will kill you. But that may be a
little bit of an overstatement, but the I thought that
was super interesting. I was later on talking with a physician,
one of my a personal physician of mine, and he
(22:35):
did the little you know, like let me chat with
you a little bit before you're sitting there in your
paper gown and it's awkward, And he was asking me
about my research, and I told her about an older
person we had interviewed who talked about how her doctor
told her that she couldn't have any more, that she
(22:55):
should not get pregnant again because it could kill her,
but she really wanted another child. So she went ahead
and had another baby, and he just like, he just
was like, that's a terrible idea. That's not courageous, that's
just dumb, and you know, but he's seen very different things, right,
so he's seeing that from a totally different perspective. For me,
(23:18):
the one that stood out for me was reading a
was reading a narrative of someone who said that she
was dating this guy and they were really in love
and they'd talked about marriage, but the problem was that
her that his parents, his mom didn't like her, and
(23:43):
one day the mom asked her to break up with him,
and so she did, and she never told him why,
and she described this as courageous. I know, it goes
against it goes against the narrative that we all have
of how true love should go. But her description of
(24:03):
why this was courageous was that she knew that he
always came with his mom and this was setting him
up for lifelong tension with her, and if she didn't
tell him that it was his mom, then he would
continue to have a good relationship with her. And now
(24:27):
I still have a hard time wrapping my head around
that one, but it is what it is, and there's
in the extreme sort of a version of it. People
who've done heinous things will call themselves courageous, and you
think to yourself, no, that was a really bad thing
(24:50):
you did. You shouldn't do that. But if you read
writings that they have put out in their crazy manifesto,
for example, they'll use the language of courage like, nope,
this is this is a good thing, and I'm risking
it all for this good thing that everybody's going to hate.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
But it's it's.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
People have very strong opinions about what counts as courage
and what doesn't. And it almost always says a lot
a lot more about the person saying that it's courageous,
I think, then it says about the actual person doing
the thing. It says I I see what you did.
(25:36):
I see it as valuable, and I see that you
took a risk to do it. Not necessarily that it'd
be risky for me, but I see that you took
a risk to do it. So if I can understand
where you're coming from. And we did this with little kids, right,
so we'll tell little kids that they're brave or courageous
for having done some kind of a thing. It's super
(26:00):
common here in the US, if you get little kids
after they get their vaccines, they'll get a little sticker
from the doctor's office. Very commonly they'll say, oh, it
was brave, right, And you know, is it courageous to
get poked with a needle? You know, if you're an adult,
probably not, unless you're fearful of needles, in which case
(26:21):
it probably is. But you're not going to go around
being like, I was so brave I got a vaccine
today and I'm forty five. You know, you're not going
to say that that.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
Stupid courage in the in academia. Does courage full under psychology?
Does your research full under psychology?
Speaker 1 (26:41):
There are I think my research has ended up being
more being kind of at the intersection of psychology and philosophy,
and I've collaborated with philosophers a lot. They're actually more
philosophers interested in courage than psychologists.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Interesting is there was there before your work? And I
guess is there broadly a consensus on what courage is?
Speaker 1 (27:08):
Is there? Is it easily?
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Yeah, no, not at all, not at all. Uh yeah,
that's that's that's also probably part of the traction issue.
That's why I'm so so keen to say, my definition
is my this is how I see it. So the
strongest definition of courage in psychology, the one that gets
(27:35):
the most study, is probably that courage is acting despite fear.
And I think that this definition comes at this, well,
I know this definition comes out of clinical work, where
my theory says that, well, sure, within a clinical context,
(27:55):
courage is acting despite fear, because that's the problem people
are coming to you to solve, Right, They're afraid of
doing something. They want help doing the thing, and so
they've come to you for assistance doing the thing that
they're afraid of. And because because you know you're good therapist,
(28:17):
you're not going to treat somebody who comes in and says,
I'm afraid of standing in the middle of traffic on
an interstate, but i'd like some help in being able
to do that. That person is going to get a
different kind of evaluation and they're going to get a
(28:37):
different kind of treatment, and you would never help to
systematically desensitize them to standing in traffic. Right, that would
never even occur to you that that's a thing you
should consider. But if you describe courage, if you define
courage as acting despite fear, you end up saying that
(29:00):
those folks are courageous, that that would be a courteous action,
because that's a terrifying thing to stand on the interstate
and like face down a semi truck, Like why would
you do that? You shouldn't do that, don't do that.
It's a bad idea. But the if you just leave
courage that way, that's how it ends up, and if
(29:26):
you define that. The philosophy definition of courage, on the
other hand, is super heavy on the objective good of
all of it and the objective fear that people feel
or feeling the proper amount of fear. And as a psychologist,
(29:48):
that doesn't resonate with me very much, because we all
have very different opinions about what the good is and
about what risks are for us, and about what feels
appropriately risky for us and what we are the risk
is overblown. But I think that those are really personal
(30:13):
excuse me kind of things, and I always have to Oh,
and also, philosophers are excited about moral exemplars and exemplars
of things, and I am not a giant fan of
exemplars because I think that people who can be very
courageous in one situation might not be courageous at all
(30:36):
in a different situation. So someone who's afraid of public speaking,
I think, would see my life and think, oh, you
do all these courageous things. You must be a very
courageous person.
Speaker 3 (30:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
I talk in front of hundreds of people all the time,
like it's literally my job. I seek out those very
large classes and I'm excited by them. I do improv
comedy where I make up things in front of people
and hope they laugh. But I'm really afraid of heights,
(31:12):
and I'm really afraid of inclosed spaces. So if you
asked me to change a light bulb on top of
the auditorium, I'd be like, no, that's not me. And
I found out I was afraid of inclosed spaces when
I had an MRI, or tried to have an MRI once,
And so I'm in the MRI machine and I'm going, oh,
this is very tight and very loud, and then at
(31:36):
one point I wiggled a little bit and they were like,
we have to start over again. Lay still, and I
was like, oh, I can't, you know. And I did
everything I could think of to do this. I trained
as a clinical psychologist specializing in anxiety disorders and desensitization.
So I tried all of those things. I teach an
online class that involves a ton of breathing exercises and relaxation,
(32:01):
mindfulness kinds of things. I tried all of those things.
I actually it was a General Electric MRI machine. My
father designed X ray equipment for General Electric. Although he
never designed MRIs, he was friends with the MRI group,
(32:23):
and one of his friends probably got a patent on
some of the stuff that was in that very machine.
So I thought about my dad's friend, who I was
sure had designed this. None of that helped. I pressed
the little panic button and I noped out of it,
and yeah it, Yeah, I'm going to need sedation if
(32:46):
I need another one of those. But anyways, the the
you know, the if you look at me in a
medical context, or you look at me in the context
of free climbers, for example, I and the biggest chicken
in the world, and I think that's true. I mean,
(33:07):
I'm kind of extreme on both of those. I think.
I think I'm more fearful than most people of the
one thing, and I'm less fearful than most people of
the other thing. But I all of us have some
of those different characteristics, right, So you'll often see first responders,
for example, who are super courageous in doing and taking
(33:32):
physical risks of some sort for their own for the
sake of other people. I mean, admirably so. But you'll
see that if some sort of traumatic kind of thing
happens on the job, they're now very often sent to
talk to someone, and a lot of them just don't
(33:56):
want to do it and find that threatening to their
idea of who they are that they would even need this,
or threatening to you know, it's threatening to open up
like that. So that would be a case where the
person who's not taken physical risks but who jumps wholeheartedly
(34:18):
into therapy when needed would be more courageous in that context.
And so that's mostly about like the differences in the risk,
but I think the difference in the goals are striking too.
So we had a study published a couple of years
ago now looking at how courageous Americans rated two different
(34:44):
women who both were in the news at the time
that the data was collected, Kitlyn Jenner and Kim Davis.
And so Kitlyn Jenner is a famous transgender woman who
had rose to fame as a male athlete and publicly
(35:07):
came out and since has had a whole lot of
political weirdness that wasn't a part of it at the
time of the study. At the time we collected the data,
it was really just her being on the cover of
various magazines saying I'm Caitlin and I'm transitioning. And Kim
(35:30):
Davis was a county clerk who issued marriage licenses, and
when same sex marriage became legal in the US, she
refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples because
of her religious beliefs, she said. And so those two
(35:52):
women were both in the news for sort of politically
opposite reasons, and we asked people how We gave people
little description of what one of the two women did,
and we said, how courageous is this person? How much
risk did she take? How much did she do a
valuable thing? And how much she did a valuable thing
(36:14):
predicted their ratings of courage better than anything else. How
much she did a valuable thing was also very much
predicted by their traditionalism, their their belief in traditional gender
roles and traditional family structure. And it was exactly the
results that you would predict. And since then, I've had
(36:38):
this weird little hobby of looking at whenever anybody calls
someone else courageous in the news, and it's virtually always
someone calling somebody courageous for doing a thing that they
that the person saying it's courageous believes in. It's never Oh,
(37:01):
I'm pro right to choose, but I can see how
these pro lifers are are courageous, Like, no, that never happens.
That doesn't happen. That's a thing where we kind of
fight against. And that's that's part of your horrified expression
when I was for those listening, she had had a
(37:21):
horrified expression when I was describing the woman who dropped
her boyfriend and didn't tell him why.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
The uh, the extent to which you disagree with what
that goal is prevents you from seeing someone else's courageous.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
And I think sometimes we see what is an apparent
counter example to that in soldiers or in other sorts
of situations, like I can definitely, I'm just presuming that
you have thought of courageous opponents that you've had in
the ring. But you both are boxers, they both are soldiers.
(38:12):
They kind of have the same sort of ethos and
it's the same activity it just so happens that you're
paired up against each other for some kind of a reason.
But it's it's usually my spineless, my spineless colleagues from
the other party are trying to do this cowardly something
(38:34):
some some some compared to my brave colleagues from my
own party, who are doing this heroic and noble thing
and standing up to evil blah blah blah. And it's
it's a it's it is so wrapped up in how
much you believe in what that goal is.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
It's fascinating and it makes me think of what a
profound impact Atlas of the Heart, which was one of
Brede Brown's more recent books, was written. When I read
that and leaned into language and definitions and how we
understand and when you were talking before about how we
(39:20):
tell kids they're courageous, and as you were talking before,
at some point I had an epiphany and I had
to google it was like, is encourage and courage are
those two words related? I had to google it because
they do. Yeah, because encourage has it feels like it
has a very different context.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
But they are.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
But I don't feel like when we encourage someone, we
feel like we I don't know, like convinced them too,
but without some sort of veil of bravery or fear.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yeah, but often, I mean often I think that like
a reallycoag like an encouraging kind of statement, things like
you're gonna be okay, you got this, you can do this,
and that building up the likelihood that you're going to
succeed is a thing that people do to try to
encourage themselves as well, to try to make themselves feel
(40:15):
more courageous. I mean, I tried it in the MRI.
It didn't work for me there, but It's worked for
me in other situations where I'm like, yeah, yeah, you
can you totally you can do this. And that's a
common kind of a thing. But a thing that most
the thing that people do most often to try to
make themselves feel more courageous is they think about how
(40:37):
valuable the goal is. They think about how good that
outcome is going to be if they get it, and
that you know, at least if they try excuse me,
And that's also sort of a kind of encouragement, right,
so you know, like if you if you just say
he was encouraged to do he was encouraged to make
this investment, well, probably he was told that the investment
(41:00):
would pay off in the long run. Right now, is
that a good thing or is that a bad thing?
I guess it depends on if it pays off or not,
and if you believe in whatever the investment is. But
the the but yeah, the whole idea of encouragement. We
(41:21):
do encourage others. We usually encourage them to do things
that we want them to do, though we don't encourage
them to do something that we think is bad. Like
you would be a terrible friend if you encouraged your
friend to date someone who you thought was really inappropriate
for them, Like, that's that's wrong. You shouldn't do that.
(41:42):
It should be you know, you'd encourage them to date
the person if you thought, oh, they'd make a good couple.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Where did your interest in all of this begin? And
what was like? Was there somewhere where you got to
a crossroad? And when discourage thing is a thing?
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Look way to stop? So there's kind of two answers.
I think I've always been interested in it. I've always
been very interested in stories of people doing hard things,
and I've always found that compelling and interesting. I had
(42:21):
been doing research in the psychology of fear and attention.
And the short summary of thousands and thousands, maybe tens
of thousands of psychology studies is that when people are afraid,
(42:41):
they pay more attention to threat. And I got bored
with my research. I honestly, I got very bored with it.
And in the US we have I'm in a tenure track.
I was in a tenure track job. I'm now tenured.
What that means is you have about six years to
(43:02):
publish a certain amount of research or you're fired. And unfortunately,
I discovered I was very bored with my research probably
about three years, two or three years into my tenure
track job, and that was really unpleasant. Another article would
come out.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Bottom was it that you did? It feel like it
just made too much sense. There was no way to
go with it.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Yeah, it felt like it felt like this is an
area that has been very thoroughly explored, this is an
area that's well known, and we're now down to my
We were looking at minutia instead of looking at bigger,
broader swaths of things, and it did not seem like
the sort of it seemed like that's a very valuable
(43:53):
part of science. I do not mean to denigrate that
at all. That's a super valuable part of science. It's
just not a part of science that I personally have
the attention span for. And I've never been good at
the fuying details, finishing things. I remember in middle school.
I had loved art up until this point, but in
(44:16):
middle school, all of a sudden you had to like
polish your art and finish it completely. It couldn't be
just like, you know, here's the general outline, Oh I'm done. No,
it was it was all about like craft and completing things.
And I remember we did this statue right, and halfway
through the statue it was time to sand our statues,
and the teacher, mister Ackert, he was great, but he
(44:40):
was like, you know, now it's time to stand it.
You know this is going to be most of your time.
And I was just like, oh no, it's not. I
got so It's like I had the overall sort of
thing right, but I couldn't stand it. I just I
took like a wirebrush and I scraped it so that
it just looked done faster. But anyway, I felt like
(45:00):
the research on fear and attention felt like that to me.
It felt like the standing part. And I thought I
just I can't do this, and every time a new
article would come out, I would think to myself, crap,
another thing to read. And that was really long. It
was really it was a long, long, long three years
(45:23):
to finish that out and to get enough done, and
I just barely made it eat. But around the time
that I got tenure, I had a colleague asked me
to do an honor seminar for fear and about fear
and horror, and I said sure, And so I put
(45:46):
together the readings for this seminar and they were all
pretty depressing, and so at the end I thought, well,
let me put together let me have them read some
things about what you can do about this. Okay, what
if your fear is reasonable? Is unreasonable? Well, gosh, there's
so many good treatments for that. Let's do some readings
(46:09):
on treatments for phobias and for anxiety disorders. What if
your fear is reasonable? Well, oh wow, there's so much
safety sort of things, so much safety research being done,
much of it in my own department. We have a
thriving human factors program and graduate students with degrees in
how to make products safer. So let's read some stuff
(46:31):
about that. Oh gosh, but what about threats? What about
like if you're afraid of something and it's reasonable and
you can't do anything about it, Well, I guess you
can respond with courage. So I thought, well, I'm going
to look up the research on courage. And I found
out that the research on courage literally like fit in
my purse.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
It was.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
I printed it all out, and I was like, I
don't even need to bring out a tote bag. I
can just puld this up and take it home in
my regular old purse. And so I saw it was
a really neat delineation of the two different jobs that
(47:11):
many faculty professors have, which is as a teacher and
as a researcher. So as a teacher, it was really
sad that there was nothing to really share with students,
but as a researcher, it was a really exciting opportunity.
And so I've been running with that kind of ever since.
(47:32):
I was terrifically encouraged myself by the late Shane Lopez,
who I met at a conference in twenty twenty three
or two thousand and three, two thousand and three. I
guess that's the right way we say that now, and
it was just now two thousand and four doesn't matter anyways.
It was just a life changing experience because he was
(47:53):
so warm and so encouraging, and it was one of
the most It was like the best professional conversation of
my life. And that was a real turning point for me.
And I went, Yes, this is very exciting, and this
is new. And I was right that this is new,
and I was right that this is in set, that
this is meaningful to people, and that it can help people.
(48:18):
And so that was super helpful. But I also realized
well before that. Before I finished my graduate degree, I
was an intern at a veteran's affairs hospital and I
was lucky enough to work on a unit or severe
post traumatic stress disorder from the viet mostly from the
(48:39):
Vietnam War, and we had all these patients who had
this blend of like trauma and courage and it was
really remarkable. And it was and the themes courage of
(49:00):
things that they talked about and the consequences of failure
to act courageously and what that did to what that
the implications that had for them later in their life,
and trying to get over things, and watching patient after
patient after patient confront like the worst thing that ever
(49:23):
happened to him for the goal of getting better or
in some cases, for the goal of being a better
family member. Was actually really inspiring. And yeah, and I
kind of took that with me and I didn't realize
at the time that, but I think a lot of
(49:46):
what I liked about that rotation was seeing the courage
up close like that. One of my really neat Yeah.
Speaker 3 (49:58):
One of my favorite guests was Captain Charlie Plumb and
he was a prisoner of war for six years in
the Hanoi Hilton.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (50:06):
Yeah, And I loved talking to him about adversity and
resilience because it felt like sitting and speaking to some
joyous grandfather of mine that had you know, that had
spent his life in a in an armchair, you know,
not not a prison cell, you know, getting exposed to
(50:28):
what he did, and it was it was beautiful to.
Speaker 1 (50:33):
To I guess.
Speaker 3 (50:36):
The curiosity that he gave me around how could people
be treated like that and be Okay, there is there
is something that we are not pulling from that experience.
There's so much because you because everything that was done
to them was done to break the human spirit and
(50:58):
came out of there and they had that had kept
themselves well, They had connected that created language, that created community,
that created joy, And I'm like, why are the rest
of us living ourself the lives out here? Why why
we're not learning? Why are we not learning from this?
Speaker 1 (51:17):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah. That that does
remind me though of just sort of a general perspective
that so it. I think it's one thing when you
come to that realization about yourself, like why am I
upset about my soft little life compared to this other person?
(51:39):
But when someone says that to you, it's kind of offensive.
So because who am I to say what your worst
thing is and compare it to somebody else? I think
that's a that's a choice you have to make, yes,
And I think when people make that choice for themselves
(52:01):
it can be amazingly powerful and amazingly wonderful. But when
other people try to make it for you, you just
feel like they're a calling you weak or be disrespecting
the actual suffering that you have experienced. And everybody's This
(52:21):
was a big thing that helped me during the pandemic,
which was everybody's worst thing is their worst thing? Yeah, whatever,
it was that you lost during the pandemic. That was
the worst thing for you, was your worst thing, And
if you want to mourn that and be sad about
(52:42):
it for yourself, you should be able to do that. Now.
If you're going around demanding that other people respect that suffering,
you know you're probably going to get pushed back from,
and rightly so, from people who lost relatives or lost
their job or something like that. But if I want
to be sad about not taking a couple of planned
(53:05):
trips with my adult children, I'm going to be sad
about it because I was looking forward to those. Yeah,
you just they're never going to happen.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
Yeah, you just made me think of I remember a
time I'd had a really stressful, shitty period of time
and a few things had gone wrong, and I'd gone
to hang out with someone and they said how are you?
And I was like ah, as I told them a
few things and I was like, I said, it's just
the worst. I looked at me and said, is it?
(53:33):
Though it's not cancer, is it? And I remember thinking,
I remember thinking it made me so mad. I was like,
I literally have a podcast where I gained perspective from
people that go through real shit. I understand that it's
a pretty fucking cushy problem to have, But right now,
what I was trying to do was get a bid.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
Was share.
Speaker 3 (53:56):
Some connection with my friend and have someone go yep
that to beat sheet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to
them in the face.
Speaker 1 (54:06):
Yes, And you would know how to do that too, So.
Speaker 3 (54:11):
Yeah, bright carriage by not doing it when I want.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
To absolutely absolutely no, And that's that's a yeah, that's that.
And I think that the courage sort of thing ties
into that also with you know, like it's a courage
contest or something. And somehow if if I say that
I'm brave, or if I think that a thing that
(54:36):
I did was brave by facing a thing that I'm
afraid of. In graduate school, I decided I would I
would work on my fear of heights during my behavior
therapy exposure each class. And so I did that. And
so there was a stairwell right outside our classroom and
we were on the second floor, but it went all
the way down to the first floor, and they were
(54:57):
pretty tall. It was pretty tall too, and it's very open.
And so during our break every week I would or
every I guess it was every week or every two days,
I would get a little closer to that railing. And
my goal is to be able to chat with my
friends who were checking their mailbox in the basement of
that stairwell. And I hate it, and I'm still proud
(55:20):
of that, and I'm still afraid of heides, but I'm
less afraid of heights than I was. And you know,
for me to say that it took courage for me
to move closer to that railing, I think is one
hundred percent accurate. But you know, if someone goes, you're
cheapening the idea of courage. What about people who have
(55:41):
died for our country? You know, I'm going to be like,
you know, like literally I was trying to say this
thing about my life or like for me, I have kids,
and I had an induction with my first pregnancy and
I remember like standing next to the bed, going you're
(56:02):
going to hop into that hospital bed and then it's
gonna hurt a lot. Yeah, and like I had to
make myself do it, right, I had to make myself
do that, and it it was you know, and again,
you know, am I saying that I risked my life
(56:23):
or you know, no, I'm not saying that am I
saying that I took a public stand in the face
of being and being thrown in jail. No, I'm not
saying that I did that. But I did do this
thing that I needed to do for me, and that
kind of that kind of and.
Speaker 3 (56:46):
Yes, we're both watching your background to do an enormous
leap across the piece of furniture.
Speaker 1 (56:53):
And you know, and and interestingly for her, she has
pretty bad arthritis. She's very old and she has pretty
bad arthritis. And she's been getting some some shots from
the vet that's a high tech Oh I know the
name for this. My husband does pharmaceutical things. I've forgotten,
(57:17):
some kind of high tech biologic that works really great
for arthritis and cats. And she can now do that
because that was one But what I say courageously, it
was it was well And you know, and if you
think about it, like it's courageous if she has the
if she's in a lot of pain for the arthritis,
but if you reduce that pain, she's more likely to
(57:37):
be able to do the thing. I think that's a
great analogy for courage right, Like if you reduce the
sense of felt risk, you're going to be more likely
to be able to do it. If you're with your friends,
you're gonna and they're giving you social support, or you're
all doing the same thing, you're going to be more
likely to be able to do it. We have the
greatest exercise that the owner of the theater I worked
(58:02):
for came up with for improv, which is an exercise
where you play some silly music and y'all stand in
a circle and one person does a dumb dance move. Right,
So they're doing this dumb, stupid looking dance move and
it looks really stupid until everybody else joins in. And
(58:24):
when everybody else is doing it, like the risk of
doing it, the risk of looking stupid is totally gone,
and it actually looks kind of cool and it flips
from being stupid to sort of cool. Yeah, yeah, I
love that, And I think that's a lot of the
social support for some of the socially courageous things we
see that people do.
Speaker 3 (58:44):
I've really loved this, and I dare say you've given me.
You've put a lot of fuel into my mind that
I'm going to be unpacking and thinking of that. So
thank you, because you're welcome. Yeah, you took me. I
think I really wanted to go with this, which was
deeper into curiosity.
Speaker 1 (59:04):
Cool cool, Well, this was totally worth getting up early for.
Speaker 3 (59:09):
Hold day ahead of you. You've written a book. Is
that an academic book or is that a for everyone book?
Speaker 1 (59:15):
It is an academic book. I have high hopes to
be writing a for every one book in the relatively
near future, So stay tuned. And maybe a picture book
for people like me one day. That would be very fun.
It would have to have my cat leaping. You can
cross that gap. Yeah, is there.
Speaker 3 (59:34):
Anywhere you'd like to send people or anything you'd like
to promote while.
Speaker 1 (59:37):
I have you? Gosh, you know, I mean, this is
going to sound really silly, but if you're if you're
trying to increase your social courage, and in proud class
is actually a great place to do that because you
will be you will be getting your brain will be
(59:58):
so full of and doing fun things that you won't
notice that you're also learning how to do the hard things.
And yeah, so that I mean and talk about sort
of like a joyous kind of way to think about courage,
that would be that would be one of them. So yeah,
(01:00:19):
I guess that would be my only My only vague
recommendation and if you're ever in Greenville, South Carolina, come
see the Alchemy Comedy Company. I love that.
Speaker 3 (01:00:28):
I a few years back one of my good mates
from San Diego, Bobby, he's often on the show, and
he heard me, Now, I this is completely ignorant of me.
I guess. I think, now, how could I have not known?
But I had never I didn't know what improv was.
He goes, I've got oh, yeah, one of the best
improv coaches you have to have on your show. And
I go, okay, what's improv? I'm like, okay, And so
(01:00:53):
I look it up. I'm like, so it's pretending. So
it's pretending. And I'm like, that's okay, that's weird.
Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
Is it?
Speaker 3 (01:01:01):
Does he pretend? Is he a pretend coach? Is he
coaching pretending?
Speaker 1 (01:01:04):
Like? What does he coach? What is he a coach? Oh?
I got I love the phrase coaching pretending. I am
going to I am going to use that. That's a
delayedful phrase.
Speaker 3 (01:01:14):
Halfway through this conversation, I had this epiphany and I
was like, I feel about what you're describing to me
the way I felt about the metaphoric value to my
life of the boxing ring. So I started up and
did an online improv and with friends, and then when
the world opened up, I went and did an eight
week in the city improv Beginner's Call and I loved it.
Speaker 1 (01:01:37):
I love that. That's great. Yeah, it is. It is
like the nicest it's like the nicest twee to connect
with people. It really is, really and it is right.
Speaker 3 (01:01:48):
It is a great place to practice courage because in
that moment you fear doesn't help. You can't overthink your
way to a solution because you don't know what's coming exactly.
Speaker 1 (01:02:01):
There's no place for anxiety. There's no it doesn't do anything.
Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
Yeah, Kenny, I don't really have time to focus on
feeling like this is because I've got to be ready
for when the thing is throwing my way.
Speaker 1 (01:02:14):
And also I've got a friend who does both stand
up and improv, and he he always says that, like,
criticism of his stand up hurts so much more because
improv you didn't like, you didn't like the show, I
just made that up, fuck you versus stand up is
like I worked really hard on that. That was like
(01:02:35):
me and so yeah, so that's uh yeah anyways, but
but yeah, that would be. That would be my takeaway
to people is if if social courage is the thing
you're looking for, that is it's kind of the social
courage equivalence of boxing or ultimate fighting, or you know,
(01:02:57):
any of the challenge and rock climb, free climbing, any
of the sort of physical danger, confrontation sort of things
you might encounter. I actually love it, and I love it.
Speaker 3 (01:03:09):
Seems like such a paradox to have an academic on
that's then going, hey, I also do himprom I'm like, oh,
I expect that.
Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
No people usually people usually don't, but there's actually kind
of a lot of overlap. And I started doing it
when I had the colleague tell me that I should.
I should now since I was studying courage, you know,
at some point you're going to have to jump out
of an airplane. And I was like no, no, no,
I'm not. And then he was like trying to trying
(01:03:39):
to encourage or cajole me into doing you know, some
kind of apparently dangerous thing. And I was like, well,
I'll do something that I think is meaningful to me
rather than meaningful to others.
Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
So yeah, I love it. You're right, Yes, I'll have
links to well of links.
Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
For Alchemy Comedy. Yeah, I'm telling you Comedy comedy. Yes,
Alchemy Comedy, Alchemycomedy dot com. We have shows every Thursday, Friday,
and Saturday night. And we'd love to see anybody in
your listeners who happens to be in Greenville. All right,
get over there, guys. Yeah, thank you so much, Cynthia,
Thank you very much. TIF. It was nice to talk
to you.
Speaker 2 (01:04:20):
Hie, Cheers everyone, she said, it's now never I got
fighting in my blood.
Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
It
She said, it's now never.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
I'm tiff.
Speaker 3 (00:10):
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Speaker 1 (00:51):
See Perry, welcome to Roll with the Punches. Thank you,
thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I thought i'd open the door for the listeners to
come in because we've gotten online and we've been chat
chat chat chat chatting, and I'm loving it already, and
I was like, oh.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
We probably should do a podcast. Yeah, definitely, definitely. How
are you over there?
Speaker 4 (01:10):
In?
Speaker 1 (01:10):
Was it Norville, South Carolina? South Carolina? See, I'm pretty
proud that I could remember that already. I am. I
am impressed. I don't know places in Australia at all.
So you're ahead of me.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Film and that's the only one you need to know,
and that's the coolest place to be.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
There you go, Box, There you go.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
I've been really excited to talk to you because I've
been thinking and talking and obsessing a lot and starting
to get really into the psychology and concept of courage.
Resilience was a bit of a rant that I was
going on, but it seems to be intersecting for me
with courage, and I'm developing a real interest in I
(01:56):
like to take the simple memes and if you don't
mind me swearing bullshit and las answers and magic pills
out there, that is people saying I can be resilient,
do hard work? Do these do that be five seconds
of courage with no context. I'm like, well, five seconds
of courage. It's all well and good, but what the
(02:16):
fuck is that?
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Yeah? And how do you and how do you get there?
You know, it's it's you know, it's one thing to
say like I can recognize it when it's happening, versus
it's another thing to be like, I'm going to go
do this thing now. And that's a that's a very
different experience and they In our research, we're finding that
(02:41):
there there's a difference between whether you're going to take
a courageous action and whether you're going to call something
that you're seeing or even that you see in yourself
in the past, courageous. So in my theory, all of
courage comes down to taking a worthwhile risk. So it's
(03:03):
a situation where a person is aware of some kind
of a risk. There's a thing a person wants to do,
and there's some kind of a risk they have to
take to do the thing. The question is is it worthwhile?
Is it worth doing? And you have to add the
worthwhile part to it because otherwise you end up with
situations where people doing some ridiculous TikTok challenge is courageous
(03:26):
and it's like thank you, not really, not really, And
the people are more likely to say something's courageous and
more likely to do the courageous thing when the goal
is very clearly worthwhile, is very clearly important to you,
(03:47):
or good or valuable or societally lauded or something like that,
but the risk runs the opposite direction in the two
different forms, the higher the perceived risk, the more likely
you are to say the action is courageous up to
a point where the risk overwhelms how good the goal is.
(04:10):
But the more risky something is, the less likely you
are to actually do it. So we call the two
different kinds of courage accolade courage and process courage. So
accolade courage is calling the thing courageous. Process courage is
do you do the thing. Accolade courage is increased when
(04:32):
the action seems riskier or when you build up the risk,
and process courage is decreased when you build up the risk.
So it's already so yeah. So a really great example
of that is I saw a thing online the other
day that Monty Python in The Holy Grail is fifty
(04:52):
years old, and if your listeners are familiar with that
movie at all, there's a character in it named Sir Robin.
And not to give away too many spoilers or anything,
it's a delightful old movie if you have a chance
to see it. But this Sir Robin character is one
of the knights who's seeking the Holy Grail, and he
(05:13):
has a minstrel who follows after him talking about brave, brave, brave,
Sir Robin. But Sir Rabin's minstrel just follows him around
talking about how he's not afraid to be killed in
nasty ways, and then proceeds to delineate all the nasty
ways in which Sir Robin might die. And of course
Sir Robyn does not find this encouraging and chickens out.
(05:34):
And it is a peak professional moment for me that
I'm able to quote Monty Python in professional settings. So
you know, life goal achieved, but there is it's funny
because there's some truth to it. So if you are
(05:55):
telling someone I see you have a you have a
boxing career, yes, yes.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Yeah, yeah, yes, my background he's boxing, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
So if if I'm your coach and I'm going to say, Tiff,
you're super super brave for going up against her. She
is so tough, you know, the last person she put,
the last person in a hospital, You're so freaking brave
to go in there. Like, that's not really the pep
(06:24):
talk that you need. You need the pep talk of
you've got this right, You've got this, Your training's going
to kick in, you know, get her do this. You know,
here's some professional technical advice that I have for you,
based on my knowledge of boxing, which for me is nothing.
But you know, here's what you want to do that's
(06:47):
going to be helpful. It's in the it might be
helpful at the end. It might make you feel good
at the end if I say, wow, you were so
brave in there. But if I if I lead with
that before you go into the ring, you're going to
be like, well, I don't want to know how tough
she is. I don't want to know that she's probably
(07:08):
going to briecklay nose. I don't want to know that
right now. Thanks.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
So, yeah, it's like you've listened in on some of
I've got a brutal boxing coach.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
I'm not fighting anymore. But like one of one of
the last.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Times I was fighting under him, and i'd had a
break and I was coming back, and the pep talk
that day was so you're fighting and I'd had I'd
had bugger all training. I was like, I'd gone in
and I said, I want to start training, but I
can't fight because I'm about to open two brand.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
New gyms, so I'm very busy.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
And that went from I walked in at week three
and he goes, you're fighting on whatever whatever I've made
and I was like, okay, right, so that's how he rolls,
and that was that was his tact was you're fighting it,
you're fighting an ex Commonwealth Games Chicken. I'm like, and
I never but I wouldn't know. I was like, you
do everything to get a rise out of me. I
don't know whether that's true or not.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. But it's not building
up how incredibly risky this is. It's instead like I
hear you say that, and I mean I wasn't there,
but I hear you say that, and it sounds like
it's the sort of thing that's meant to be motivating,
Like I have faith that you can do this. Yeah yeah,
(08:26):
yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:27):
My curiosity I think first started around this area when
so I was twenty nine, when I had my first fight,
and I was a bit of a gung ho.
Speaker 1 (08:35):
Oh yeah, oh do this look at me?
Speaker 3 (08:36):
And I had this facade of look at like of
who I was at the time, with a fair lack
of self awareness that I now have when I reflect back,
and so I look at now, I look back at
that and I go, that was a girl who was
doing everything that she could to do the things that
(08:57):
other people were scared of and called and curR and
believed it was courage.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
I'm like, oh, people are.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
Scared of this pool And it was only the penny
only dropped when people kept asking are you're scared of
being punched in the face? That's crazy? And I was like,
that's a bit crazy. I'm not really scared of that.
What am I scared of? And then it's like, okay, well,
what is courage if it's because because we paint pictures
of courage and then we believe it and it's not true.
(09:24):
And also it can be reckless.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yes, yeah, and I think and that's that's where the
worthwhile goal comes in. And so if you imagine two
people running into a burning building to save a baby,
so that's a really good goal, right, and one person
is really afraid to run into that burning building and
(09:49):
the other person's a little less afraid to run into
that building. They both are heroes, and they both are
are are lauded as being courageous, even though it kind
of took more for the one person to do it
than the other. And there's some of the early research
(10:10):
in psychology by Jack Rafman on courage looked at the
fear proneness of people who were decorated bomb disposal operators
and found that they were not they experienced less fear
than other people, and so he's like, well, maybe they're
not courageous, maybe they're fearless. And I'm like, I don't know.
(10:31):
I feel like that's not how we talk about it,
and that's not how we think about it as a society.
And that got me headed down the road of thinking
about like this difference between what it takes to do
the action and what the action and how it looks
to the outside. And there are some situations in which
(10:56):
someone can be incredibly courageous, but it's really only career,
just just for them. So any sort of like personal
fear that you have that's more specific to you is
going to take more accolade courage for you to do. Now,
does that mean that I think you deserve a metal
for it? Not necessarily, but maybe just within your own self,
(11:20):
you can be like, oh, I was really afraid to
speak in public, or I was really afraid to ask
for a raise, or I was really afraid to ask
out this person, or I was really afraid to I
was really afraid to go up in a high place,
or some sort of thing like that, and we kind
of neglect those. I think the other thing with the
(11:43):
burning building example is that it has to be for
a good reason. And so if there's two people again
in the burn unit, they ran into a burning building,
let's pretend they're equally afraid. This time the one person
ran into, say a baby, but the other person ran
(12:04):
into make a TikTok video. Like that other person's just
an idiot, right, most of us think that other person's
just an idiot. But I guess I could see where
you know, that person might be thinking, oh, I'm pursuing
this super important thing, and but yeah, our view of
(12:27):
what the risk of what the both the risk and
the goal is matters a lot.
Speaker 3 (12:33):
What do you think about I feel like everyone wants
to wear the courage badge but also be feearless, and
they talk about it like it's the same thing. I
want to be fearless, which I don't want to feel
fear but I want to do I want to be courageous.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
I yes, Well, some people think that and other people
kind of lean into the I am going to exhibit
personal growth by doing one thing per year that scares me,
and I have encountered people who have said that to
me that I teach improv and and people take the
(13:14):
intro improv class and they'll be like, I'm doing this
because it scares me. I'm doing one challenge per month
or whatever, and I'm like, great, come on in, We're
happy to have you. But it's it's a There's a
famous book in the US that a ton of i
(13:36):
think middle school basically kids have to read called The
Red Badge of Courage, which spoiler is about a soldier
who's excited for the war because he gets to prove
he's courageous and then he finds out that that sucks
and that's the Uh. It's kind of like so it's
(13:58):
I think you'd get like these weird extremes, and I
think people don't know what to do with the fear
sort of thing and courage, and so to me, it's
easier to just talk about it as risk rather than fear.
So you have to think that it's some kind of
a risk, whether you focus on that risk or not.
If there's absolutely no risk, I don't think people would
(14:20):
necessarily think that it was courage, but I think that
they could see how other people could see it. As courage.
So I had an interesting discussion once with somebody who, Oh,
my gosh, what kind of a He was some sort
of a surgeon type person who did what I'd consider
like scary operations. Plus I've got a little bit of
(14:42):
that ill factor for blood, and so for me his job,
I'm like, oh, no, I would be horrified if I
had to do your job. But I was telling him
something about my class that I was teaching that morning,
and somehow it came up that there were like three
hundred people in the class, and he's like, how do
(15:02):
you do that? You know? And I think we were
both like, thinking, how do you do that? That's you know, wow,
I couldn't do that. So it depends on courage. I often,
really often get asked a question about courageous people, and
I the longer I do this, the harder I push
(15:26):
back against thinking about courageous people just as a whole,
because I think we all move through the world with
our own sense of what's risky for us, what seems risky,
what we may have a fear response to, or we
might just think to ourselves that's risky, and or even
(15:48):
just that's very hard for me to do well, and
we all have our own goals that we're pursuing, and
we often end up with situation so that the things
that are held up as as sort of peak courage,
that there are monuments to for courage are almost always
(16:12):
situations in which the society that puts up that monument
thinks that interprets the goal of whatever the action is
is really good as a worthwhile, valuable one, and interprets
the situation as having a lot of risk for that person.
(16:36):
So we have monuments to fallen heroes, especially who died
in service of their country, and we have monuments to
great leaders who risk things that are considered societally appropriate.
In the US, we had a lot of things happen
(17:00):
and where monuments were taken down to causes that people
no longer believe in, and monuments put up to other
and it's a huge especially with civil rights stuff. It's
been a civil rights versus civil war, which interestingly I'm
only connecting now have exactly the same start to them
(17:20):
of civil But the rhetoric around that has been absolutely
fascinating and I think really gets at what a society,
or at least the loudest people in a society are
valuing at any given time, or the richest people or
(17:42):
the people who own the land who put up the monument,
and this whole area of accolade courage can end up
being really controversial and people have really strong opinions about it.
When I first started doing research and courage, I would
go to a conferences, and the way academic conferences work
if you're on some sort of a panel discussion or
(18:05):
some sort of a symposium, is that usually the speakers
meet beforehand briefly to talk about logistics. Who is going
to run the PowerPoint? Do we want all our powerpoints
on one computer or do we want them on to
plug in our computers separately? Do we want questions after
everybody's talk or after each individual talk. And I would
(18:29):
be in a group of people who'd done research on courage,
and we would we would have these conversations, but then
it would always turn into what I got to calling
the Courage Researcher support group, where we sat around and
we talked about how people would get offended by our
research because they would be offended by our research. This
(18:51):
one woman, I'll never forget, she would on a job
interview talking about her dissertation research, and someone like banged
on the table ball at dinner and stood up and said,
you're cheapening the idea of courage. And he huffed out,
and I'm like, wow, that's kind of a lot. That's
a lot, And I think that a lot of it
(19:14):
is this accolade courage sort of idea that if I
call something courageous that you don't agree with the goal
or you don't see as risky, you're gonna be kind
of offended by it, Like how do how do you
don't see that as risky? So at that same conference,
(19:36):
we had a discussant, the person at the end who
kind of summarizes what all three people talked about, who
was just simply offended by me. Because I had a
scale where we asked people. It had a whole bunch
of questions about I would willingly give my life for
my country if needed, down to I I would have
(20:01):
dental surgery to save a tooth, or I would ask
for a raise if I really needed one. It had
sort of these lower level ones also, and he was
just super offended by this, and he asked everybody, He's like, cool,
here thinks it's courageous to ask for a raise if
you need one, that's just being good at work. And
I was like, wow, okay, Bud. And outside of the
(20:24):
clinical psychology community, I've gotten a lot of pushback from
people about these risky kind of actions that people take
that feel risky to them but not to most other people. Weirdly,
within like this therapy kind of community, people get that
because that's what therapists see. They see people who come
in and they say, here's this thing that everyone else
(20:46):
can do and I can't do, and I want your
help doing it. But yeah, it's it's just wild. And
people also have really strong opinions about the the worth
of the action and what that risk benefit thing turns
out to be. So I do a lot of research
(21:08):
where I ask people to describe a time they've acted courageously,
and then I will have undergraduate students help me code
them into different categories. Every single person who's done some
coding for me has encountered something where they read it
and they think to themselves, that's not courageous. And what's
happening is they're identifying that they don't really see that
(21:31):
as risky and or they don't see it as valuable.
So a couple of my favorite examples. I had a
student who was from South Africa and she had a
hard time reading any of our statements that people in
the US had made about being courageous when dealing with
(21:52):
a vicious dog because she grew up with lions near
The kids were worn about lions. You know, if you're
outside you see a lion, they're going to eat you,
so watch out. And that's different and perhaps so Australia.
You have a different thing. I don't know. The perception
(22:12):
in the US is that Australia is filled with dangerous
animals who will kill you. But that may be a
little bit of an overstatement, but the I thought that
was super interesting. I was later on talking with a physician,
one of my a personal physician of mine, and he
(22:35):
did the little you know, like let me chat with
you a little bit before you're sitting there in your
paper gown and it's awkward, And he was asking me
about my research, and I told her about an older
person we had interviewed who talked about how her doctor
told her that she couldn't have any more, that she
(22:55):
should not get pregnant again because it could kill her,
but she really wanted another child. So she went ahead
and had another baby, and he just like, he just
was like, that's a terrible idea. That's not courageous, that's
just dumb, and you know, but he's seen very different things, right,
so he's seeing that from a totally different perspective. For me,
(23:18):
the one that stood out for me was reading a
was reading a narrative of someone who said that she
was dating this guy and they were really in love
and they'd talked about marriage, but the problem was that
her that his parents, his mom didn't like her, and
(23:43):
one day the mom asked her to break up with him,
and so she did, and she never told him why,
and she described this as courageous. I know, it goes
against it goes against the narrative that we all have
of how true love should go. But her description of
(24:03):
why this was courageous was that she knew that he
always came with his mom and this was setting him
up for lifelong tension with her, and if she didn't
tell him that it was his mom, then he would
continue to have a good relationship with her. And now
(24:27):
I still have a hard time wrapping my head around
that one, but it is what it is, and there's
in the extreme sort of a version of it. People
who've done heinous things will call themselves courageous, and you
think to yourself, no, that was a really bad thing
(24:50):
you did. You shouldn't do that. But if you read
writings that they have put out in their crazy manifesto,
for example, they'll use the language of courage like, nope,
this is this is a good thing, and I'm risking
it all for this good thing that everybody's going to hate.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
But it's it's.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
People have very strong opinions about what counts as courage
and what doesn't. And it almost always says a lot
a lot more about the person saying that it's courageous,
I think, then it says about the actual person doing
the thing. It says I I see what you did.
(25:36):
I see it as valuable, and I see that you
took a risk to do it. Not necessarily that it'd
be risky for me, but I see that you took
a risk to do it. So if I can understand
where you're coming from. And we did this with little kids, right,
so we'll tell little kids that they're brave or courageous
for having done some kind of a thing. It's super
(26:00):
common here in the US, if you get little kids
after they get their vaccines, they'll get a little sticker
from the doctor's office. Very commonly they'll say, oh, it
was brave, right, And you know, is it courageous to
get poked with a needle? You know, if you're an adult,
probably not, unless you're fearful of needles, in which case
(26:21):
it probably is. But you're not going to go around
being like, I was so brave I got a vaccine
today and I'm forty five. You know, you're not going
to say that that.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
Stupid courage in the in academia. Does courage full under psychology?
Does your research full under psychology?
Speaker 1 (26:41):
There are I think my research has ended up being
more being kind of at the intersection of psychology and philosophy,
and I've collaborated with philosophers a lot. They're actually more
philosophers interested in courage than psychologists.
Speaker 3 (26:58):
Interesting is there was there before your work? And I
guess is there broadly a consensus on what courage is?
Speaker 1 (27:08):
Is there? Is it easily?
Speaker 3 (27:11):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (27:11):
Yeah, no, not at all, not at all. Uh yeah,
that's that's that's also probably part of the traction issue.
That's why I'm so so keen to say, my definition
is my this is how I see it. So the
strongest definition of courage in psychology, the one that gets
(27:35):
the most study, is probably that courage is acting despite fear.
And I think that this definition comes at this, well,
I know this definition comes out of clinical work, where
my theory says that, well, sure, within a clinical context,
(27:55):
courage is acting despite fear, because that's the problem people
are coming to you to solve, Right, They're afraid of
doing something. They want help doing the thing, and so
they've come to you for assistance doing the thing that
they're afraid of. And because because you know you're good therapist,
(28:17):
you're not going to treat somebody who comes in and says,
I'm afraid of standing in the middle of traffic on
an interstate, but i'd like some help in being able
to do that. That person is going to get a
different kind of evaluation and they're going to get a
(28:37):
different kind of treatment, and you would never help to
systematically desensitize them to standing in traffic. Right, that would
never even occur to you that that's a thing you
should consider. But if you describe courage, if you define
courage as acting despite fear, you end up saying that
(29:00):
those folks are courageous, that that would be a courteous action,
because that's a terrifying thing to stand on the interstate
and like face down a semi truck, Like why would
you do that? You shouldn't do that, don't do that.
It's a bad idea. But the if you just leave
courage that way, that's how it ends up, and if
(29:26):
you define that. The philosophy definition of courage, on the
other hand, is super heavy on the objective good of
all of it and the objective fear that people feel
or feeling the proper amount of fear. And as a psychologist,
(29:48):
that doesn't resonate with me very much, because we all
have very different opinions about what the good is and
about what risks are for us, and about what feels
appropriately risky for us and what we are the risk
is overblown. But I think that those are really personal
(30:13):
excuse me kind of things, and I always have to Oh,
and also, philosophers are excited about moral exemplars and exemplars
of things, and I am not a giant fan of
exemplars because I think that people who can be very
courageous in one situation might not be courageous at all
(30:36):
in a different situation. So someone who's afraid of public speaking,
I think, would see my life and think, oh, you
do all these courageous things. You must be a very
courageous person.
Speaker 3 (30:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:52):
I talk in front of hundreds of people all the time,
like it's literally my job. I seek out those very
large classes and I'm excited by them. I do improv
comedy where I make up things in front of people
and hope they laugh. But I'm really afraid of heights,
(31:12):
and I'm really afraid of inclosed spaces. So if you
asked me to change a light bulb on top of
the auditorium, I'd be like, no, that's not me. And
I found out I was afraid of inclosed spaces when
I had an MRI, or tried to have an MRI once,
And so I'm in the MRI machine and I'm going, oh,
this is very tight and very loud, and then at
(31:36):
one point I wiggled a little bit and they were like,
we have to start over again. Lay still, and I
was like, oh, I can't, you know. And I did
everything I could think of to do this. I trained
as a clinical psychologist specializing in anxiety disorders and desensitization.
So I tried all of those things. I teach an
online class that involves a ton of breathing exercises and relaxation,
(32:01):
mindfulness kinds of things. I tried all of those things.
I actually it was a General Electric MRI machine. My
father designed X ray equipment for General Electric. Although he
never designed MRIs, he was friends with the MRI group,
(32:23):
and one of his friends probably got a patent on
some of the stuff that was in that very machine.
So I thought about my dad's friend, who I was
sure had designed this. None of that helped. I pressed
the little panic button and I noped out of it,
and yeah it, Yeah, I'm going to need sedation if
(32:46):
I need another one of those. But anyways, the the
you know, the if you look at me in a
medical context, or you look at me in the context
of free climbers, for example, I and the biggest chicken
in the world, and I think that's true. I mean,
(33:07):
I'm kind of extreme on both of those. I think.
I think I'm more fearful than most people of the
one thing, and I'm less fearful than most people of
the other thing. But I all of us have some
of those different characteristics, right, So you'll often see first responders,
for example, who are super courageous in doing and taking
(33:32):
physical risks of some sort for their own for the
sake of other people. I mean, admirably so. But you'll
see that if some sort of traumatic kind of thing
happens on the job, they're now very often sent to
talk to someone, and a lot of them just don't
(33:56):
want to do it and find that threatening to their
idea of who they are that they would even need this,
or threatening to you know, it's threatening to open up
like that. So that would be a case where the
person who's not taken physical risks but who jumps wholeheartedly
(34:18):
into therapy when needed would be more courageous in that context.
And so that's mostly about like the differences in the risk,
but I think the difference in the goals are striking too.
So we had a study published a couple of years
ago now looking at how courageous Americans rated two different
(34:44):
women who both were in the news at the time
that the data was collected, Kitlyn Jenner and Kim Davis.
And so Kitlyn Jenner is a famous transgender woman who
had rose to fame as a male athlete and publicly
(35:07):
came out and since has had a whole lot of
political weirdness that wasn't a part of it at the
time of the study. At the time we collected the data,
it was really just her being on the cover of
various magazines saying I'm Caitlin and I'm transitioning. And Kim
(35:30):
Davis was a county clerk who issued marriage licenses, and
when same sex marriage became legal in the US, she
refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples because
of her religious beliefs, she said. And so those two
(35:52):
women were both in the news for sort of politically
opposite reasons, and we asked people how We gave people
little description of what one of the two women did,
and we said, how courageous is this person? How much
risk did she take? How much did she do a
valuable thing? And how much she did a valuable thing
(36:14):
predicted their ratings of courage better than anything else. How
much she did a valuable thing was also very much
predicted by their traditionalism, their their belief in traditional gender
roles and traditional family structure. And it was exactly the
results that you would predict. And since then, I've had
(36:38):
this weird little hobby of looking at whenever anybody calls
someone else courageous in the news, and it's virtually always
someone calling somebody courageous for doing a thing that they
that the person saying it's courageous believes in. It's never Oh,
(37:01):
I'm pro right to choose, but I can see how
these pro lifers are are courageous, Like, no, that never happens.
That doesn't happen. That's a thing where we kind of
fight against. And that's that's part of your horrified expression
when I was for those listening, she had had a
(37:21):
horrified expression when I was describing the woman who dropped
her boyfriend and didn't tell him why.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
The uh, the extent to which you disagree with what
that goal is prevents you from seeing someone else's courageous.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
And I think sometimes we see what is an apparent
counter example to that in soldiers or in other sorts
of situations, like I can definitely, I'm just presuming that
you have thought of courageous opponents that you've had in
the ring. But you both are boxers, they both are soldiers.
(38:12):
They kind of have the same sort of ethos and
it's the same activity it just so happens that you're
paired up against each other for some kind of a reason.
But it's it's usually my spineless, my spineless colleagues from
the other party are trying to do this cowardly something
(38:34):
some some some compared to my brave colleagues from my
own party, who are doing this heroic and noble thing
and standing up to evil blah blah blah. And it's
it's a it's it is so wrapped up in how
much you believe in what that goal is.
Speaker 3 (38:58):
It's fascinating and it makes me think of what a
profound impact Atlas of the Heart, which was one of
Brede Brown's more recent books, was written. When I read
that and leaned into language and definitions and how we
understand and when you were talking before about how we
(39:20):
tell kids they're courageous, and as you were talking before,
at some point I had an epiphany and I had
to google it was like, is encourage and courage are
those two words related? I had to google it because
they do. Yeah, because encourage has it feels like it
has a very different context.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
But they are.
Speaker 3 (39:40):
But I don't feel like when we encourage someone, we
feel like we I don't know, like convinced them too,
but without some sort of veil of bravery or fear.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Yeah, but often, I mean often I think that like
a reallycoag like an encouraging kind of statement, things like
you're gonna be okay, you got this, you can do this,
and that building up the likelihood that you're going to
succeed is a thing that people do to try to
encourage themselves as well, to try to make themselves feel
(40:15):
more courageous. I mean, I tried it in the MRI.
It didn't work for me there, but It's worked for
me in other situations where I'm like, yeah, yeah, you
can you totally you can do this. And that's a
common kind of a thing. But a thing that most
the thing that people do most often to try to
make themselves feel more courageous is they think about how
(40:37):
valuable the goal is. They think about how good that
outcome is going to be if they get it, and
that you know, at least if they try excuse me,
And that's also sort of a kind of encouragement, right,
so you know, like if you if you just say
he was encouraged to do he was encouraged to make
this investment, well, probably he was told that the investment
(41:00):
would pay off in the long run. Right now, is
that a good thing or is that a bad thing?
I guess it depends on if it pays off or not,
and if you believe in whatever the investment is. But
the the but yeah, the whole idea of encouragement. We
(41:21):
do encourage others. We usually encourage them to do things
that we want them to do, though we don't encourage
them to do something that we think is bad. Like
you would be a terrible friend if you encouraged your
friend to date someone who you thought was really inappropriate
for them, Like, that's that's wrong. You shouldn't do that.
(41:42):
It should be you know, you'd encourage them to date
the person if you thought, oh, they'd make a good couple.
Speaker 3 (41:50):
Where did your interest in all of this begin? And
what was like? Was there somewhere where you got to
a crossroad? And when discourage thing is a thing?
Speaker 1 (42:00):
Look way to stop? So there's kind of two answers.
I think I've always been interested in it. I've always
been very interested in stories of people doing hard things,
and I've always found that compelling and interesting. I had
(42:21):
been doing research in the psychology of fear and attention.
And the short summary of thousands and thousands, maybe tens
of thousands of psychology studies is that when people are afraid,
(42:41):
they pay more attention to threat. And I got bored
with my research. I honestly, I got very bored with it.
And in the US we have I'm in a tenure track.
I was in a tenure track job. I'm now tenured.
What that means is you have about six years to
(43:02):
publish a certain amount of research or you're fired. And unfortunately,
I discovered I was very bored with my research probably
about three years, two or three years into my tenure
track job, and that was really unpleasant. Another article would
come out.
Speaker 3 (43:21):
Bottom was it that you did? It feel like it
just made too much sense. There was no way to
go with it.
Speaker 1 (43:29):
Yeah, it felt like it felt like this is an
area that has been very thoroughly explored, this is an
area that's well known, and we're now down to my
We were looking at minutia instead of looking at bigger,
broader swaths of things, and it did not seem like
the sort of it seemed like that's a very valuable
(43:53):
part of science. I do not mean to denigrate that
at all. That's a super valuable part of science. It's
just not a part of science that I personally have
the attention span for. And I've never been good at
the fuying details, finishing things. I remember in middle school.
I had loved art up until this point, but in
(44:16):
middle school, all of a sudden you had to like
polish your art and finish it completely. It couldn't be
just like, you know, here's the general outline, Oh I'm done. No,
it was it was all about like craft and completing things.
And I remember we did this statue right, and halfway
through the statue it was time to sand our statues,
and the teacher, mister Ackert, he was great, but he
(44:40):
was like, you know, now it's time to stand it.
You know this is going to be most of your time.
And I was just like, oh no, it's not. I
got so It's like I had the overall sort of
thing right, but I couldn't stand it. I just I
took like a wirebrush and I scraped it so that
it just looked done faster. But anyway, I felt like
(45:00):
the research on fear and attention felt like that to me.
It felt like the standing part. And I thought I
just I can't do this, and every time a new
article would come out, I would think to myself, crap,
another thing to read. And that was really long. It
was really it was a long, long, long three years
(45:23):
to finish that out and to get enough done, and
I just barely made it eat. But around the time
that I got tenure, I had a colleague asked me
to do an honor seminar for fear and about fear
and horror, and I said sure, And so I put
(45:46):
together the readings for this seminar and they were all
pretty depressing, and so at the end I thought, well,
let me put together let me have them read some
things about what you can do about this. Okay, what
if your fear is reasonable? Is unreasonable? Well, gosh, there's
so many good treatments for that. Let's do some readings
(46:09):
on treatments for phobias and for anxiety disorders. What if
your fear is reasonable? Well, oh wow, there's so much
safety sort of things, so much safety research being done,
much of it in my own department. We have a
thriving human factors program and graduate students with degrees in
how to make products safer. So let's read some stuff
(46:31):
about that. Oh gosh, but what about threats? What about
like if you're afraid of something and it's reasonable and
you can't do anything about it, Well, I guess you
can respond with courage. So I thought, well, I'm going
to look up the research on courage. And I found
out that the research on courage literally like fit in
my purse.
Speaker 2 (46:50):
It was.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
I printed it all out, and I was like, I
don't even need to bring out a tote bag. I
can just puld this up and take it home in
my regular old purse. And so I saw it was
a really neat delineation of the two different jobs that
(47:11):
many faculty professors have, which is as a teacher and
as a researcher. So as a teacher, it was really
sad that there was nothing to really share with students,
but as a researcher, it was a really exciting opportunity.
And so I've been running with that kind of ever since.
(47:32):
I was terrifically encouraged myself by the late Shane Lopez,
who I met at a conference in twenty twenty three
or two thousand and three, two thousand and three. I
guess that's the right way we say that now, and
it was just now two thousand and four doesn't matter anyways.
It was just a life changing experience because he was
(47:53):
so warm and so encouraging, and it was one of
the most It was like the best professional conversation of
my life. And that was a real turning point for me.
And I went, Yes, this is very exciting, and this
is new. And I was right that this is new,
and I was right that this is in set, that
this is meaningful to people, and that it can help people.
(48:18):
And so that was super helpful. But I also realized
well before that. Before I finished my graduate degree, I
was an intern at a veteran's affairs hospital and I
was lucky enough to work on a unit or severe
post traumatic stress disorder from the viet mostly from the
(48:39):
Vietnam War, and we had all these patients who had
this blend of like trauma and courage and it was
really remarkable. And it was and the themes courage of
(49:00):
things that they talked about and the consequences of failure
to act courageously and what that did to what that
the implications that had for them later in their life,
and trying to get over things, and watching patient after
patient after patient confront like the worst thing that ever
(49:23):
happened to him for the goal of getting better or
in some cases, for the goal of being a better
family member. Was actually really inspiring. And yeah, and I
kind of took that with me and I didn't realize
at the time that, but I think a lot of
(49:46):
what I liked about that rotation was seeing the courage
up close like that. One of my really neat Yeah.
Speaker 3 (49:58):
One of my favorite guests was Captain Charlie Plumb and
he was a prisoner of war for six years in
the Hanoi Hilton.
Speaker 1 (50:05):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (50:06):
Yeah, And I loved talking to him about adversity and
resilience because it felt like sitting and speaking to some
joyous grandfather of mine that had you know, that had
spent his life in a in an armchair, you know,
not not a prison cell, you know, getting exposed to
(50:28):
what he did, and it was it was beautiful to.
Speaker 1 (50:33):
To I guess.
Speaker 3 (50:36):
The curiosity that he gave me around how could people
be treated like that and be Okay, there is there
is something that we are not pulling from that experience.
There's so much because you because everything that was done
to them was done to break the human spirit and
(50:58):
came out of there and they had that had kept
themselves well, They had connected that created language, that created community,
that created joy, And I'm like, why are the rest
of us living ourself the lives out here? Why why
we're not learning? Why are we not learning from this?
Speaker 1 (51:17):
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah. That that does
remind me though of just sort of a general perspective
that so it. I think it's one thing when you
come to that realization about yourself, like why am I
upset about my soft little life compared to this other person?
(51:39):
But when someone says that to you, it's kind of offensive.
So because who am I to say what your worst
thing is and compare it to somebody else? I think
that's a that's a choice you have to make, yes,
And I think when people make that choice for themselves
(52:01):
it can be amazingly powerful and amazingly wonderful. But when
other people try to make it for you, you just
feel like they're a calling you weak or be disrespecting
the actual suffering that you have experienced. And everybody's This
(52:21):
was a big thing that helped me during the pandemic,
which was everybody's worst thing is their worst thing? Yeah, whatever,
it was that you lost during the pandemic. That was
the worst thing for you, was your worst thing, And
if you want to mourn that and be sad about
(52:42):
it for yourself, you should be able to do that. Now.
If you're going around demanding that other people respect that suffering,
you know you're probably going to get pushed back from,
and rightly so, from people who lost relatives or lost
their job or something like that. But if I want
to be sad about not taking a couple of planned
(53:05):
trips with my adult children, I'm going to be sad
about it because I was looking forward to those. Yeah,
you just they're never going to happen.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
Yeah, you just made me think of I remember a
time I'd had a really stressful, shitty period of time
and a few things had gone wrong, and I'd gone
to hang out with someone and they said how are you?
And I was like ah, as I told them a
few things and I was like, I said, it's just
the worst. I looked at me and said, is it?
(53:33):
Though it's not cancer, is it? And I remember thinking,
I remember thinking it made me so mad. I was like,
I literally have a podcast where I gained perspective from
people that go through real shit. I understand that it's
a pretty fucking cushy problem to have, But right now,
what I was trying to do was get a bid.
Speaker 1 (53:54):
Was share.
Speaker 3 (53:56):
Some connection with my friend and have someone go yep
that to beat sheet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to
them in the face.
Speaker 1 (54:06):
Yes, And you would know how to do that too, So.
Speaker 3 (54:11):
Yeah, bright carriage by not doing it when I want.
Speaker 1 (54:14):
To absolutely absolutely no, And that's that's a yeah, that's that.
And I think that the courage sort of thing ties
into that also with you know, like it's a courage
contest or something. And somehow if if I say that
I'm brave, or if I think that a thing that
(54:36):
I did was brave by facing a thing that I'm
afraid of. In graduate school, I decided I would I
would work on my fear of heights during my behavior
therapy exposure each class. And so I did that. And
so there was a stairwell right outside our classroom and
we were on the second floor, but it went all
the way down to the first floor, and they were
(54:57):
pretty tall. It was pretty tall too, and it's very open.
And so during our break every week I would or
every I guess it was every week or every two days,
I would get a little closer to that railing. And
my goal is to be able to chat with my
friends who were checking their mailbox in the basement of
that stairwell. And I hate it, and I'm still proud
(55:20):
of that, and I'm still afraid of heides, but I'm
less afraid of heights than I was. And you know,
for me to say that it took courage for me
to move closer to that railing, I think is one
hundred percent accurate. But you know, if someone goes, you're
cheapening the idea of courage. What about people who have
(55:41):
died for our country? You know, I'm going to be like,
you know, like literally I was trying to say this
thing about my life or like for me, I have kids,
and I had an induction with my first pregnancy and
I remember like standing next to the bed, going you're
(56:02):
going to hop into that hospital bed and then it's
gonna hurt a lot. Yeah, and like I had to
make myself do it, right, I had to make myself
do that, and it it was you know, and again,
you know, am I saying that I risked my life
(56:23):
or you know, no, I'm not saying that am I
saying that I took a public stand in the face
of being and being thrown in jail. No, I'm not
saying that I did that. But I did do this
thing that I needed to do for me, and that
kind of that kind of and.
Speaker 3 (56:46):
Yes, we're both watching your background to do an enormous
leap across the piece of furniture.
Speaker 1 (56:53):
And you know, and and interestingly for her, she has
pretty bad arthritis. She's very old and she has pretty
bad arthritis. And she's been getting some some shots from
the vet that's a high tech Oh I know the
name for this. My husband does pharmaceutical things. I've forgotten,
(57:17):
some kind of high tech biologic that works really great
for arthritis and cats. And she can now do that
because that was one But what I say courageously, it
was it was well And you know, and if you
think about it, like it's courageous if she has the
if she's in a lot of pain for the arthritis,
but if you reduce that pain, she's more likely to
(57:37):
be able to do the thing. I think that's a
great analogy for courage right, Like if you reduce the
sense of felt risk, you're going to be more likely
to be able to do it. If you're with your friends,
you're gonna and they're giving you social support, or you're
all doing the same thing, you're going to be more
likely to be able to do it. We have the
greatest exercise that the owner of the theater I worked
(58:02):
for came up with for improv, which is an exercise
where you play some silly music and y'all stand in
a circle and one person does a dumb dance move. Right,
So they're doing this dumb, stupid looking dance move and
it looks really stupid until everybody else joins in. And
(58:24):
when everybody else is doing it, like the risk of
doing it, the risk of looking stupid is totally gone,
and it actually looks kind of cool and it flips
from being stupid to sort of cool. Yeah, yeah, I
love that, And I think that's a lot of the
social support for some of the socially courageous things we
see that people do.
Speaker 3 (58:44):
I've really loved this, and I dare say you've given me.
You've put a lot of fuel into my mind that
I'm going to be unpacking and thinking of that. So
thank you, because you're welcome. Yeah, you took me. I
think I really wanted to go with this, which was
deeper into curiosity.
Speaker 1 (59:04):
Cool cool, Well, this was totally worth getting up early for.
Speaker 3 (59:09):
Hold day ahead of you. You've written a book. Is
that an academic book or is that a for everyone book?
Speaker 1 (59:15):
It is an academic book. I have high hopes to
be writing a for every one book in the relatively
near future, So stay tuned. And maybe a picture book
for people like me one day. That would be very fun.
It would have to have my cat leaping. You can
cross that gap. Yeah, is there.
Speaker 3 (59:34):
Anywhere you'd like to send people or anything you'd like
to promote while.
Speaker 1 (59:37):
I have you? Gosh, you know, I mean, this is
going to sound really silly, but if you're if you're
trying to increase your social courage, and in proud class
is actually a great place to do that because you
will be you will be getting your brain will be
(59:58):
so full of and doing fun things that you won't
notice that you're also learning how to do the hard things.
And yeah, so that I mean and talk about sort
of like a joyous kind of way to think about courage,
that would be that would be one of them. So yeah,
(01:00:19):
I guess that would be my only My only vague
recommendation and if you're ever in Greenville, South Carolina, come
see the Alchemy Comedy Company. I love that.
Speaker 3 (01:00:28):
I a few years back one of my good mates
from San Diego, Bobby, he's often on the show, and
he heard me, Now, I this is completely ignorant of me.
I guess. I think, now, how could I have not known?
But I had never I didn't know what improv was.
He goes, I've got oh, yeah, one of the best
improv coaches you have to have on your show. And
I go, okay, what's improv? I'm like, okay, And so
(01:00:53):
I look it up. I'm like, so it's pretending. So
it's pretending. And I'm like, that's okay, that's weird.
Speaker 1 (01:01:00):
Is it?
Speaker 3 (01:01:01):
Does he pretend? Is he a pretend coach? Is he
coaching pretending?
Speaker 1 (01:01:04):
Like? What does he coach? What is he a coach? Oh?
I got I love the phrase coaching pretending. I am
going to I am going to use that. That's a
delayedful phrase.
Speaker 3 (01:01:14):
Halfway through this conversation, I had this epiphany and I
was like, I feel about what you're describing to me
the way I felt about the metaphoric value to my
life of the boxing ring. So I started up and
did an online improv and with friends, and then when
the world opened up, I went and did an eight
week in the city improv Beginner's Call and I loved it.
Speaker 1 (01:01:37):
I love that. That's great. Yeah, it is. It is
like the nicest it's like the nicest twee to connect
with people. It really is, really and it is right.
Speaker 3 (01:01:48):
It is a great place to practice courage because in
that moment you fear doesn't help. You can't overthink your
way to a solution because you don't know what's coming exactly.
Speaker 1 (01:02:01):
There's no place for anxiety. There's no it doesn't do anything.
Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
Yeah, Kenny, I don't really have time to focus on
feeling like this is because I've got to be ready
for when the thing is throwing my way.
Speaker 1 (01:02:14):
And also I've got a friend who does both stand
up and improv, and he he always says that, like,
criticism of his stand up hurts so much more because
improv you didn't like, you didn't like the show, I
just made that up, fuck you versus stand up is
like I worked really hard on that. That was like
(01:02:35):
me and so yeah, so that's uh yeah anyways, but
but yeah, that would be. That would be my takeaway
to people is if if social courage is the thing
you're looking for, that is it's kind of the social
courage equivalence of boxing or ultimate fighting, or you know,
(01:02:57):
any of the challenge and rock climb, free climbing, any
of the sort of physical danger, confrontation sort of things
you might encounter. I actually love it, and I love it.
Speaker 3 (01:03:09):
Seems like such a paradox to have an academic on
that's then going, hey, I also do himprom I'm like, oh,
I expect that.
Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
No people usually people usually don't, but there's actually kind
of a lot of overlap. And I started doing it
when I had the colleague tell me that I should.
I should now since I was studying courage, you know,
at some point you're going to have to jump out
of an airplane. And I was like no, no, no,
I'm not. And then he was like trying to trying
(01:03:39):
to encourage or cajole me into doing you know, some
kind of apparently dangerous thing. And I was like, well,
I'll do something that I think is meaningful to me
rather than meaningful to others.
Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
So yeah, I love it. You're right, Yes, I'll have
links to well of links.
Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
For Alchemy Comedy. Yeah, I'm telling you Comedy comedy. Yes,
Alchemy Comedy, Alchemycomedy dot com. We have shows every Thursday, Friday,
and Saturday night. And we'd love to see anybody in
your listeners who happens to be in Greenville. All right,
get over there, guys. Yeah, thank you so much, Cynthia,
Thank you very much. TIF. It was nice to talk
to you.
Speaker 2 (01:04:20):
Hie, Cheers everyone, she said, it's now never I got
fighting in my blood.
Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
It
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