Finding the Courage to Change and Transition
To make genuine changes and transitions, it can be beneficial to surround ourselves with diverse opinions and voices, harness the courage to ask bold questions, create and nurture new partnerships and collaborations, and remember to hold on to your curiosity and care.
This, however, is easier said than done. I believe that genuine courage is something that many people possess but don’t necessarily know that they have. It very often takes an upset, a push, or a wobble for people to engage in the sorts of actions that prove that they are in possession of a huge amount of courage and bravery. But what do we do with that courage once we realise that we have it? Perhaps taking a moment to analyse a few key aspects of courage may help answer this question:
Curiosity and care help support courageous transitions
Courage takes on different forms
Courage is necessary in leadership
Curiosity, care, and courage are at the heart of creating a psychologically safe environment and is at the centre of my work with Lucy Kidd as part of our Collaboration Equation™.
How can we use curiosity and care to help make courageous transitions?
In my November and December blog posts, I spoke about the importance of curiosity and care in our lives, but especially the role they play in leadership. As important as curiosity and care are in any conversation about leadership, they are only two parts of three. The third aspect of importance is courage. In order to be beneficial, these three aspects perform best when they are used together. But why? What does curiosity and care have to do with acting or moving forward with courage?
Firstly, our curiosity can help us ask bold questions, to reflect on situations, events, and people in our lives that promote growth, and those that keep us stagnant. It can fill us with the inquisitiveness to ask about different perspectives or opinions, thus adding diverse voices to our usual circles of peers, friends, and family. Without the curiosity to question the reality of our present state of being, we can’t expect to be able to make necessary or beneficial changes that may shape our future.
Our curiosity leads us to the next stage - care. Once we embrace curiosity and begin to identify the parts of our lives that are in need of changes, we can then begin caring for ourselves and others. This allows us to make the time to practise and nurture the things that lead to transitions being made.
But both curiosity and care rely on the crucial third tenet - courage - to work fully. However, courage is not a neatly delivered, one-size-fits-all kind of thing; it will look very different for everyone.
Courage Takes on Different Forms
There is a form of courage that is suitable for everyone. For some, it may take the form of entering or leaving a relationship, it may be taking a solo trip for the first time, or learning a brand new hobby or skill. For others, it may take the form of quitting a job before a new one is lined up, moving to a new place, or bungee jumping. Recently, I was faced with two situations that required me to find and use courage:
Finding myself in a solitary, quiet place in which I started asking some difficult, personal questions
Surfing
These situations called for two distinctive types of strength and courage. The first required a kind of quiet, emotional and mental tenacity, and the second took sheer physical nerve and the encouragement and support of others.
Courage will look different for everyone, and will be necessary for countless reasons. But how we choose to use our courage will influence the transitions in our lives and our interactions and collaborations with others.
Why Courage Is Necessary to Leadership
When it comes to courage in leadership, I gained meaningful insights from my conversation with the brilliant Febronia Ruocco when she joined me on my podcast Leaders in Conversation with Anni Townend which aired on January 9th. Febronia is a Strategic Insights Professional, Executive Coach, and Leadership and Career Mentor for Undergraduates at Durham and Lancaster University.
She spoke about giving feedback when in positions of leadership and how imperative it is to give that feedback as a gift, with kindness and empathy. We discussed the importance of honesty, integrity, and collaboration and how, as leaders and mentors, we need to remember that everyone goes through difficult times. However, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes relies on the ability to try to understand someone’s experiences, ideals, and perspectives, and these may be opposite to our own. By stepping out of our own comfort zones, we are requiring an immense amount of courage from ourselves as we are treading territory that may be entirely new to us.
Although courage is an important part of leadership, it may be difficult to know where to start looking. We may want an easy answer, we may wish there was a shop that could sell it to us in neatly and beautifully wrapped packaging, we may want to click our fingers and ‘voila’ there it is, all the courage we need to lead, have empathy, and take on our newest challenges. Unfortunately, it is rarely that easy.
Courage is something that sometimes does seem to just fall into our laps in our time of need, and for those times I am always truly grateful, but other times it requires far more effort. It requires us to dig far deeper, ask more difficult questions, sit, perhaps uncomfortably, with the answers we receive in response to those questions and curiosity, and then make the time and provide the care it takes to take hold of and use the courage we find.
What’s helping me find courage at the moment:
Joining Cathy Rentzenbrink’s Sunday Session, an afternoon of writing and learning
Making time for self-care, to be in nature, and to be by myself
Watching Ted Lasso
The poem ‘Wintering’ by Donna Ashworth in her book Wild Hope: Healing Words to Find Light on Dark Days
The Gift of the Night: A Six-Step Program for Better Sleep a book by Philip Carr-Gomm
