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Video Description
Courage is not the absence of fear — Mark Twain said it is the mastery of fear. This lecture from Academy of Ideas argues that mastery is a skill anyone can learn. It starts by changing how we relate to emotions: instead of treating fear and anxiety as barriers, we learn to move while they are still present. Reasoning and suppression both backfire, so the video offers better tools — name the emotion to calm it, and take small, progressively bolder steps against the fears that are only phantoms. With practice, the very act of facing fear becomes the art of courage.
Full Video Transcript
In our age of anxiety and victimhood, courage is a trait that many of us sorely lack.
For who among us could not create a long list of things we would do if only we were more courageous?
How often have we disappointed ourselves by succumbing to our fears,
rather than taking actions that could create a better life?
But for those of us in such a position, our future need not mirror our past,
as courage is a skill that can be cultivated,
and above all else, this skill emerges from the way we relate to our emotions.
To act with courage requires that we stop looking at distressing emotions as barriers
to action and instead learn to proceed into life even in the presence of fear, anxiety,
guilt or shame.
In this video we are going to explore some tools and techniques that can help us form
this type of relationship to the emotional side of the world within.
To begin, we need to outline the role that emotions play in a human life and we need
to distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive emotions.
However within this frame of understanding, it will become clear why the typical ways
people relate to distressing emotions promotes cowardice and why an alternative is needed.
Emotions, wrote Michael Mahoney, serve critical roles in directing our attention, shaping
our perceptions, organizing our memory, and motivating our active engagement with the
learning that life relentlessly requires of us.
There has been a persistent trend in the history of ideas, stretching all the way back to Plato,
It characterizes emotions as the unruly and animalistic elements of a human life.
Our emotions, according to this perspective, disrupt our tranquility and impede our ability
to think rationally.
But this view is one-sided and overlooks the prospective role of emotions.
For our emotions, when functioning properly, help us adapt to our environment.
They provide information as to the good and bad of our life and they direct our attention
at a speed that often surpasses that of our cognitive mind.
While all emotions can provide us with information, it is often the most distressing emotions
that are packed with the most important information.
Fear can focus us to a threat.
Anxiety can alert us to the fact that we are taking a wrong path in life.
While guilt and shame can signal that our behavior is not in line with our moral compass.
Or as Leslie Greenberg explains in Emotion Focused Therapy,
The normal function of emotion is to rapidly process complex situational information in
order to provide feedback to the person about his or her reaction and to prepare the person
to take effective action.
Our emotions, in other words, are crucial not just in our ability to survive but to
flourish, but where most of us struggle is in our inability to deal with what are called
maladaptive emotions.
For sometimes our emotions can take on a life of their own, and instead of signaling adaptive
ways to interact with our environment, they deceive us and impel us to behave in ways
that will diminish our well-being.
These maladaptive emotions, as Greenberg explains, no longer help the person cope constructively
with the situations that elicit them, rather, they interfere with effective functioning.
These emotion responses generally involve over-learned responses on the basis of previous,
often traumatic, experiences.
Maladaptive emotions are the little devils that throw our life off course.
They are the emotions that give rise to phobias, anxiety disorders, anger problems, depression,
and to distorted levels of guilt and shame.
Most people try to cope with such distressing emotions in one of two ways, through reasoning
or through suppression.
Both methods, however, are antithetical to the cultivation of courage, as they treat
distressing emotions as states that must be overcome before action can be taken and the
possibilities of life explored.
But what makes matters worse is that both approaches tend to fail in achieving their
intended purpose of freeing us from the grip of the maladaptive emotion.
Reasoning with our emotions is often resorted to when we are cognizant of the fact that
our maladaptive emotions are not in line with the reality of our situation.
At such moments, it can seem reasonable to try and argue with our emotions in the hope
that our cognitive mind can exert control over them and free us to move forward unimpeded
by their presence.
But emotions are rarely controllable by sheer acts of will, nor amenable to the power of
thought alone.
In fact, an intense emotion is more likely to override our ability to think clearly than
a clear thought is to override an intense emotion, or as Alexander Pope famously put
it, the ruling passion be it what it will, the ruling passion conquers reason still.
As our thoughts alone will rarely free us from an anxiety disorder, a phobia, or other
forms of maladaptive emotions, many people give up on this approach and instead turn
to emotional suppression for relief.
If we cannot defeat these emotional states with our thoughts, perhaps we can force them
out of our conscious awareness.
Suppression can work at times, but at a price to pay, for as the psychologist Alexander
Loewen explains in his book Fear of Life,
“…suppressing a feeling doesn’t make it go away.
It only pushes it deeper into the unconscious.
By this action, we internalize the problem.
Internalizing our emotional states merely displaces their effects.
Instead of feeling angry, we may develop chronic muscular tension or migraines.
Instead of feeling anxiety, we may develop bodily symptoms such as digestion problems
or an inability to sleep.
But a further problem with suppression is that it creates a new barrier to courageous
action.
We may no longer feel the emotion, but the psychosomatic ailment we created in the process
will often become our new excuse for remaining stagnant.
Instead of telling ourselves that we must overcome our fear or anxiety before we take
bold actions, we now tell ourselves that we must heal what ails the body.
But if reasoning with maladaptive emotions proves ineffective, and if suppression only
distorts the problem, what is the alternative?
How can we relate to distressing emotions in a way that promotes the cultivation of
courage?
One tool that can assist us in this regard is emotional labeling.
Emotional labeling entails noticing the presence of an emotion, and instead of arguing against
it or trying to suppress it, we accept it and internally label it.
We say to ourselves, I am feeling anxious, I am experiencing fear, or I am feeling angry.
This may seem like a trivial act, but as Greenberg explains,
A growing body of research has revealed that labeling an emotion, i.e. putting one’s
into words helps to regulate affect downwards. Thus, when one sees an angry face and attaches
to it the word angry, there is a decreased response in the amygdala. The benefits of affect
labeling thus go beyond whatever actual insights are gained by knowing what one feels, because the
act of labeling itself actually decreases arousal. After labeling our emotion, we will be in a better
position to evaluate what, if anything, the emotion is signaling us to do.
If the emotion is adaptive and pointing us in a clear direction, then we will have little
reason to disobey what it tells us.
But matters are not so straightforward for maladaptive emotions.
For unlike an adaptive emotion, a maladaptive emotion is best coped with not by doing what
the emotion seems to be telling us, which is usually some form of avoidance, but by
doing the opposite.
We need to expand our life in the face of maladaptive emotions, as constricting our
life only reifies the phantom threats that give rise to these distressing states.
And herein lies a great opportunity for those of us afflicted by maladaptive emotions.
Their presence creates an ideal situation for the cultivation of courage.
For courage, at its essence, is the ability to take action even when storms of doubt rage
within.
The more our life is afflicted by maladaptive emotions, the more opportunities we have to
practice acting in this manner.
To take advantage of our maladaptive emotions, we should create a list of small actionable
steps that gradually expose us to the situations we fear.
Each step should take us progressively further out of our comfort zone, but if we can commit
to taking at least one step each day, we will have turned our maladaptive emotions from
inhibitors of our well-being to promoters of a stronger self.
When a distressing emotion is triggered through this exercise we merely need to label it,
accept it, and then move forward regardless of how uncomfortable we feel.
If we are consistent in our practice we will likely notice that our maladaptive emotions
arise with diminished frequency.
But even if they continue to be part of our life this exercise will teach us that distressing
emotions need not be chains that limit us and that action can be taken even in their
presence.
You will have learned, in other words, the art of acting with courage.”
Courage, wrote Mark Twain, is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
But to become a true master of our fears and one of the rare few who can honestly say that
courage is a trait that defines us, we must be willing to occasionally experiment with
taking bold steps, not just small ones, as sometimes it is a leap that life requires.
To give ourselves the best chance of becoming capable of such feats, we may find it helpful
to add to our arsenal some tools and techniques that harness the power of the body-mind connection,
and this will be the topic of our next video. For the way we hold our body, the way we move
it through the world, and the way we fuel it, greatly influences what we feel capable
of achieving. Our body, in other words, is so intimately connected to the state of our
mind that mastery of the world within must pay homage to the somatic side of our existence.
Or as Carl Jung wrote,
Source: Academy of Ideas