Ep. 81: Harnessing the Transformative Power of Courageous Leadership with Guest Cindy Solomon

Are you ready to harness the transformative power of courage in your leadership journey? Join me as I dive deep into this pivotal topic with leadership guru, Cindy Solomon, who has spent decades researching and teaching the concept of courage. Together, we unravel the essence of courage, debunking the myth that it's the absence of fear and instead embracing it as a skill that can be learned, honed, and applied in any leadership scenario.

Our enlightening conversation meanders through the multifaceted landscape of courage – from everyday bravery to moral and creative courage. Cindy and I share insights on how these various dimensions of courage can shape us into better decision-makers, emphasizing the need to acknowledge fear and yet take decisive action. We debate over the philosophy that every small act of courage, no matter how inconsequential it may seem, contributes to our overall growth as leaders.

Wrapping up our discussion, Cindy imparts invaluable advice on how to nurture your courageous leadership skills. She shares pragmatic tips on breaking down this abstract concept into smaller, achievable elements, and setting tangible goals. Cindy underscores the importance of adequate preparation, leaving you, our listeners, with a resounding message - courage is a skill within your grasp, ready to be refined. So plug in those earphones and get ready for an episode that's sure to leave you inspired and poised to lead with courage.

Cindy Solomon is one of the most sought-after leadership and CX experts in the world. Her extensive global experience includes work with 26 J.D. Power Award winners; 16 Best Places to Work; and industry leaders such as Google, Alaska Airlines, UPS, Oracle, Wells Fargo, Dow, the ABA, The Gates Foundation, and over 400 others seeking to build courageous leadership at scale.

As Founder and CEO of The Courageous Leadership Institute, Cindy works with her global team of facilitators to serve as the catalyst for organizations and individuals who want to cultivate greater professional courage, leadership skills, and performance.

Cindy’s accessible and hilarious Courageous Leadership programs are the fast track for organizations who wish to leverage their leadership potential to manifest customer and employee engagement through any disruption or challenge.

Cindy’s awards and accolades include the 2023 Top 30 Global Leadership Guru, Top 200 Biggest Voices in Leadership for 2023 by leadersHum, Fast Company’s Fast 100, Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies, and more. Cindy’s TED Talks have been viewed by over 1.9 million people and her best-selling books, The Courage Challenge Workbook and The Rules of Woo, are available on Amazon.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Power of Courage in Leadership
• 8:36 Courage and Leadership Research Project
• 11:48 The Power of Everyday Courage
• 25:36 Building Courage and Leadership Skills
• 38:01 Understanding Courage and Building Leadership
• 43:36 Supporting Leadership School and Free Resources

Transcript

Cindy Solomon: 0:00

Which is women are taught culturally that we shouldn't be courageous and if we are, don't tell anybody. Men are taught that equally destructive, they darn well, better be courageous and if they aren't, don't tell anybody. And those culturalization pieces come through in things like applying for jobs. Right, you know famous meta study that if a job has 10 qualifications, a woman won't even consider applying until she has seven or eight of them. Men will apply with two or less.

Kyla Cofer: 0:38

Welcome to the Leadership School podcast. I'm your host leadership and self-care coach, Kyla Cofer. Here at the Leadership School, you'll hear leaders from around the world sharing their stories and expertise on how to lead with balance and integrity. Our goal Teach you how to be an extraordinary leader. Welcome back, leaders.

Kyla Cofer: 1:04

I am so excited to speak today with Cindy Solomon. She is one of the most sought-after leadership experts in the world, with accolades including being on the 2023 list of top 30 leadership gurus, the top 200 biggest voices in leadership and more. Her TED Talks have been viewed by coming up on 2 million people. And today we're speaking all about courage. She's been doing research on courage for decades and speaks about it in her keynote talks and in her best-selling book, the Courage Challenge Workbook. So today she's sharing with us what is courage, how can it be defined? Can it be defined and is it an emotion or is it a skill? Find out as she explains and shares with us why courage matters to leaders and how you can develop it to be a more courageous leader yourself. So thanks so much, Cindy, for joining me. It's such a pleasure to have you here. And listeners, this is a perfect time to join us over on our Patreon page at patreon. com/ leadership school, because Cindy and I continue this conversation about courage over on our Patreon page and we get into talking about fear and the difference between courage and fear.

Kyla Cofer: 2:13

Cindy, thanks so much for joining me. It's such an honor and privilege to have you here, cindy. I'm really really grateful for you joining me on the Leadership School podcast for like dozens of reasons, and one of them being that you are not feeling that great and you're here doing a conversation with me. Anyway, it's amazing. So thank you so much. I really really appreciate it. I'm so honored and pleased to have you here. My pleasure. So can you tell us your story? You have an incredible story that spans decades of research and information. So can you tell us how you got started? Just give us the five minute shortest version of the long story.

Cindy Solomon: 2:50

Okay, I'll do my best, we'll see. You'll have to remind me of what we shared during our pre-event interview. But I started out in corporate, you know, just like most people do, coming out of college and made my way up through a sales organization, then into a marketing organization and ended up ending my career as a VP of sales and marketing of a large Fortune 50 back in the dark ages. And when I left corporate America. I consider myself a recovering corporate executive at this point.

Cindy Solomon: 3:19

When I left corporate America, it was always so stunning to me how many bad leaders that I had worked for or worked around and how few great leaders that I had the opportunity to work for or work around. And I started really thinking about after I left what is that secret sauce? Like? Why why is it so magic? And I grew up corporately at a time where people were like well, people are born great leaders, you know, and I thought that just can't be true. I just don't buy that. So it started me on this path of trying to understand why certain leaders are, you know, go from mediocre to great, or why certain leaders are already great, why certain leaders seem unable to get it together to become great at what they do, and it started me down this accidental research path of trying to understand what that secret sauce was. And after 9,000 interviews and decades of work now, we've discovered that it's really a very specific set of skills around what I consider courage.

Cindy Solomon: 4:26

And it really is about courage because in order for us you know, you think about any of us who get good at something and once you're good at it, you kind of, you know, go.

Cindy Solomon: 4:38

Oh, thank goodness, I'm good at this, now I don't have to do anything different, now I can focus on other things.

Cindy Solomon: 4:43

But the reality is, it's in that moment that takes the most courage to do something different, when you're already good at something. And as the world changes around us and what it takes to be a great leader now has changed so dramatically than what it was pre-COVID, than what it was certainly 10 years ago or 20 years ago, and what it means to be a great leader changes right along with all those external influences. And it takes courage to keep changing your skills and upping your game and looking at things differently in order to become the leader you need to be, not just for today, but certainly for tomorrow. So that's how we started talking about courage within my company and it exploded from there because once we had this great research, we realized that courage is actually just another skill that anyone can choose to go after to become a better or eventually a great leader. So that's kind of the origin story of this is I really did trip and fall into it just out of my own intellectual curiosity about why there aren't as many great leaders as you can be.

Kyla Cofer: 5:59

So were you already running your own company when you started asking these questions?

Cindy Solomon: 6:04

Yeah, so well, it was always asking the question, like any of us do, when you work for a terrible leader going why? Why am I working for the terrible leader?

Cindy Solomon: 6:13

and why is that leader over there really good, and why can't they sit next to each other? So my bad leader will learn that they can be a good leader, right? So I started asking the question, as many of us do when we're reporting to those people. So where I started to really try to understand it is I had an expertise coming out of my corporate life in customer experience and customer satisfaction is what we used to call with them, and I started to be hired by companies to come in and help them up their customer experience game, help them up their customer engagement, and I realized that you can teach frontline individual contributors all these skills around communication and et cetera, et cetera, but it never really sticks unless they're working for a leader who has the skills to grow and develop them.

Cindy Solomon: 7:04

And so I started to realize that if you want to create great customer experiences, it isn't just about training that frontline. As a matter of fact, it's rarely about that. It's really about creating great leaders who will, in turn, engage people against those skills and coach and develop them. So I would sneak into companies under the guise of customer experience, because companies will spend money on that. They tend to not want to spend money on building their leadership teams. So I would sneak in under the darkness of night as a customer experience person, but what I was really teaching was the leadership skills it takes to create a culture of courage which allows you to then create that customer experience through other people.

Kyla Cofer: 7:47

And is that when you started really investing in actual research on the topic? Go ahead.

Cindy Solomon: 7:52

Well, I was just going to say we tripped and fell into it because I started interviewing people and, in order to interview all the people that I wanted to interview, I had to bring other people on to help me do it. And so we had to create the static group of questions and a certain methodology of getting through it. And I wasn't a market researcher. I'm not a market researcher, I know just enough to be dangerous. I can read a market research report. That's about it, but I was just curious.

Cindy Solomon: 8:16

I wanted to understand it, and one thing led to another, so I started to speak on it, and so it allowed me to interview more people in preparation for that speech. And then I started to do workshops on it, and so I had to interview more people to understand the people who were doing it versus the people who are struggling with it, et cetera. And so if you listen to my TED Talk, I talk about it being an accidental research project, and it absolutely was. It happened organically because I wanted to get to the root of it. I wanted to understand how I could help people. I just don't want people to work for bad leaders anymore. I don't want people to have to go through that, and so I wanted to find a way to create courageous leaders at scale, so fewer people would have to work for those bad leaders.

Kyla Cofer: 9:05

Wow, and you know through your research. You said you mentioned your TED Talk, your keynote speaker, and you are on all these amazing leadership lists like top 30 leadership gurus. Congratulations on all these accolades. You've really worked hard for him, so they're well deserved, thank you. And your TED Talk is on courage and leadership.

Cindy Solomon: 9:24

Yeah, I actually do TED Talk. So the first one is about how to build your courage, which is really a personal TED Talk, because I wanted people to understand that courage is not just a business skill, but it absolutely is a personal skill that you can choose to grow. So that one is really about how you can build your courage individually. And then I have another TED Talk on how to deal with meeting overload, which I also think is courage.

Kyla Cofer: 9:48

Yes, yes, yes, it does. So can you clarify for me how you centered in on this one word? You're interviewing all these people and you're finding these, noticing that good leaders have these skills, and how did you center in on this one main word courage.

Cindy Solomon: 10:04

I think we really discovered three things in the research that led us to that. The first thing is that when people talked about courage that they we always say, oh I wish I had the courage to, or that leader had the courage to well, I don't have the courage to. And so we wanted to hone in on what that was for people like, how they described it, how they defined courage, and we started to dig into that and we discovered three really interesting things. The first is that courage is entirely personal. Nobody can talk you in or out of your courage, nor can they talk you in or out of your fear. Well, actually, they can talk you into fear, but they can't talk you out of your fear. And that was kind of the first aha moment for me. You know, you, or anybody out there listening, has kids, and you know, have you ever tried to teach your kid or talk your kid out of being afraid? Right, All of us have tried it. Has anybody been successful at it? Like ever?

Kyla Cofer: 10:59

No, never, never, never. So I live in town in Nashville, tennessee. We like live in the city and just this week there somehow is a bear in town, like a black bear, wandering through our neighborhoods. And yesterday our kids were like all playing outside and I'd forgotten about it and then I realized, oh there's a bear. Like I wouldn't let the kids go outside again. They're like my mom. My mom and I refuse to tell them because I have learned with my kids they will be scared, they will never play outside again. So I was like I'm just not going to tell them. You can't. You're right, you cannot talk somebody out of their fear.

Cindy Solomon: 11:33

Exactly. It's just this entirely internal, personal thing. So that was kind of the first big aha is we just can't go into organizations or say to people be more courageous, right, so can't do it that way. She can't use your words to get it done. Second thing we discovered is that most of us don't think we are courageous, and that was kind of a big surprise to me because when we did these in-depth interviews, really only one in three people believe they're courageous and that's simply not true.

Cindy Solomon: 12:05

100% of us are courageous. We make courageous decisions every day, but we don't take notice of them. I mean, sometimes, let's be honest, you know, back on the COVID year sometimes just getting out of bed was courageous act. Taking the time to listen to this podcast, I would argue, is a courageous act. It's the little everyday actions that we don't understand are courageous because we're choosing a path. And that's where I started to realize the courage is simply a decision making skill that you can choose to employ and use.

Cindy Solomon: 12:43

And there's this great quote, going back to my first point about courage is entirely personal. You know, we've been taught that courage is about being fearless, and that's simply ridiculous. I mean, if you're not fearful in today's day and age, you're simply not paying attention. We've been taught that courage is about being fearless, and it's not at all. There's a great quote by Rolo May that says courage is not the absence of fear. Rather, it's the ability to take action in spite of that fear.

Cindy Solomon: 13:13

And once you realize that it's that moment where you have that bit of anxiety or stress or uncertainty, it's in that moment where your choice is actually the courageous act. It's okay to feel those things, but then the courage is in making the choice to act. So going, just flipping back to the leadership piece for a second, if I am great at public speaking and I just keep doing it and I don't do anything different and I just keep doing it, yeah I'm going to be fine at it. But as my audience changes, I need to change along with it. And the courageous act comes in me doing it differently, me doing a different story, me doing a different approach to one of the topics, me creating a whole new keynote as an example. I should get that anxiety, I should get that fear, but the courage is not letting that fear stop you from taking the step, making the decision, choosing the path, executing differently.

Kyla Cofer: 14:17

Yeah, I love there's a current phrase going around through social media that just says do it scared. Yeah, go do what you're going to do anyways. If you're scared, fine, just do it anyways, and be scared while you do it.

Cindy Solomon: 14:28

Exactly Well and let's be honest, I mean if we're only unafraid or not stressed or comfortable in the things that we're doing on autopilot. I mean you think back about like when you learned to drive right. Remember how exciting and crazy it was and everything scared you and every little noise. And now you know you can leave your garage and wake up at the grocery store and not have any memory of getting there because it's so automatic. So if you're growing and changing, you have to feel that stress, you have to feel that anxiety, you have to feel that fear or anxiousness, and it's in that moment where you realize that you have an opportunity. Just the act of making a decision off of that and not freezing up with it is courageous.

Kyla Cofer: 15:13

I was so focused on what you were saying I want to make sure did we hit all three? You said there were three things that you discovered.

Cindy Solomon: 15:19

Exactly. So, that courage is entirely personal, that most of us don't think we are courageous, when in fact, 100% of us are courageous. We're courageous every single day, and that courage can be learned.

Kyla Cofer: 15:32

Okay, so tell me more about this learning, the learning just in the doing and just going anyways.

Cindy Solomon: 15:40

Well, part of it is that there's a great quote by Ruth Gordon that says "courage is like any other muscle it's strengthened with use. So part of it is recognizing that when you have that anxiety, you have that friction of fear, you have that even, sometimes, anger. Most of the time our anger is actually fear-based. You know, you're sitting in a meeting with somebody and they say something and you're just instantly livid. It's usually because you're afraid that they're derailing the project, they're going to take it in the wrong direction, they're not being attention to your opinion, et cetera, et cetera. But we went a little bit deeper is once we realized that courage can be learned. We wanted to really identify the different types of courage that existed. And this is where the research gets super cool, because we looked at a whole bunch of different variables and realized that there were kind of four categories of courage. Okay, and I'm going to go through these really quickly, so stop me and ask questions as we go.

Cindy Solomon: 16:38

The first type of courage that we identified is blind courage. You know, if I had a visual of it, it's you know, somebody jumping off of a bridge with a bungee cord on them or skydiving. Blind courage is that close your eyes and jump courage. It's the not thinking of the consequences leap of faith. A lot of times it's what we consider like that gut courage or instinct or intuition. And the reality is blind courage we actually have discovered is maybe not so blind. We're working with a neuroscientist at the University of California in Berkeley and she is discovering that when you put people in a position for them to act in this blind courage world, their brains are actually lighting up and what she thinks is happening is that instinct, that gut feeling that we have, like where all the data says to go one way, but you know you need to go a different way. That gut feeling is actually not so blind. She actually thinks it's our subconscious processing information, data points, previous perspectives at a rate so quickly that we can't even consciously absorb it. And I think I can almost prove this and I'm speaking in front of a big audience. I'll say how many of you have had that gut feeling before and everybody raises their hands. I say how many of you have not gone with your gut and regretted it? And the same 100% of hands stays up. So blind courage really maybe isn't so blind, but it's our brain working behind the scenes to try and help us make a different decision. And the thing that's interesting about blind courage is you would think we don't really need it, but it keeps us alive number one most times, right. Second piece is it really does incorporations that I work with. I work with a lot of global companies and they need blind courage. I mean, all of us have sat in that fifth meeting, about a thousand dollars spend or a one line process change and we're like, well, there's an hour of our life, we'll never get back, we'll see it next week, because people think you have to have all the information to make a decision and the reality is we'll never have all the information again. You have to be able to exert a little blind courage to keep things moving. So that's the first type of courage.

Cindy Solomon: 18:54

Second type of courage is role courage, and I think that's what anybody listening to this podcast is doing and what you're helping people grow. Because role courage is all about the training. If you believe it, you are it and you're so well trained that you really don't have a fear of failing. And I think a lot about first responders as an example. They're so well trained that they can actually, through their training, override their cellular need to stay safe. They run into the burning building, they thwart the crime. They do all those things and it's because they're so well trained that they know they'll make the best possible decision for themselves and their team. Not necessarily the right decision, but the best possible decision given the circumstances. And so role courage is all about gaining insights and doing things like listening to this podcast and to build that role courage in yourself, because role courage is where the ability to try things and fail a little and feel comfortable with comes from. It's where you don't really attach to the failure. You're just learning and growing as you go. So that's role courage.

Kyla Cofer: 20:04

Is that like when you apply for a new job that you might not be 100% qualified for, but you're going to apply anyways and go, or even just a job, and that's just taking a little bit of courage, knowing that you can handle the job Exactly?

Cindy Solomon: 20:16

Well, and the thing something I didn't say back at the beginning around most of us don't think we're courageous, but really where we see a big difference in this is between men and women. It's really the only statistically significant differentiator that we found in our research, which is women are taught culturally that we shouldn't be courageous and if we are, don't tell anybody. Men are taught that equally destructive, they darn well better be courageous and if they aren't, don't tell anybody. And those culturalization pieces come through and things like applying for jobs. Right, you know famous meta study that if a job has 10 qualifications, a woman won't even consider applying until she has seven or eight of them. Men will apply with two or less. And I think part of this plays into this role courage bit. Coming back to the role courage type of courage, because the better trained we are, the more confidence we have in our own abilities, and we then make the courageous choice to apply anyway, even without having all of the qualifications, with the understanding that we can learn them as we go. Got it Okay, absolutely.

Cindy Solomon: 21:32

Third type of courage is crisis courage, and that's exactly what it sounds like. I mean, just say COVID. Right, it's the first six months to a year of COVID, where you know you literally well. Then it was life or death. Right, but you feel like it's life or death. You're acting on instinct, you're just reacting to external forces, and I actually think this is where we've really become bogged down in a lot of the organizations that I work with. Is because we were in that crisis for so long that it kind of rewired our brains a little bit and it got us addicted to reacting instead of taking a pause, taking a breath and making a choice about what action we then, in turn, take.

Cindy Solomon: 22:14

And I think about some of the research that we've done on this. And if you scare somebody to death, no surprise, they actually are more productive. As a matter of fact, research shows that you scare somebody to death, they're 34% more productive. Now, if you're listening to this, don't write that down. Does make people more, for that is not the leadership nugget I want you to leave with. But if you do scare them to death, they are more productive. And if you think back to those first six or eight months, we were all more productive because, man, we were hitting on a thousand cylinders during that.

Cindy Solomon: 22:47

The sad part is, you scare somebody to death the second time there's six percent Productivity boost, scare somebody to death the third time and productivity drops off the flip and I honestly think so many people I'm one of them and I'm sure you are as well, and many people listening, people are burned out because we have been going at it for really since March of 2020 without a lack of uncertainty, without constant fear flowing at us through our phones and through our social media channels. I mean, we have been stuck in this hyper crisis reactivity mode for a long time and, some people maybe you have a team that's going through something and you'd need them to be in that crisis mode to get that bump in performance, to get them really hyper focused, but when you're in it too long, productivity just brines to a halt and it's just exhausting. You know if you've ever worked for that leader who everything's a number one priority, everything's a crisis.

Kyla Cofer: 23:47

It's exhausting right, it is exhausting. You don't want to stick around for it?

Cindy Solomon: 23:52

Well, no, because you can't, because it just drives you into the ground, right. But so many of us have become addicted to that way of working and do it, even if we had an actual inclination to it at the beginning. Boy, covid just made it permanent. You know, I just recently heard another speaker speaking about this and they're just now starting to look at our brains after COVID, and the way she described it is that we basically have a world of people who have post-traumatic stress disorder that haven't dealt with it, haven't really processed it and have just kept moving to keep alive, to keep doing.

Cindy Solomon: 24:27

I'm not saying that you some, you know, I would argue entire industries need to should be in the crisis quadrant right now. I just got an email from Amazon that they are now in the pharmaceutical business. They now have Amazon pharmacy that they're testing. So Walgreens, cvs, dwayne Reed, you know, whatever your pharmacy is, they should have been in crisis, the crisis quadrant, two years ago, because now there's no catching up. Taxi industry ten years ago should have been in crisis before uber ate them alive. So there's certain times where you want to choose to use it and it's important, but you can't become addicted to it and you can't sit in it. Because it does drive that lack of productivity and that burnout.

Kyla Cofer: 25:11

Hey leaders, have you ever considered starting your very own podcast? Podcasting is a really amazing way. I want to just say for myself my own experience and creating this leadership school podcast. I have grown my business, I have learned, exponentially. I've had a ton of fun and my confidence level has increased tenfold by Continuing to show up and put on a really great show.

Kyla Cofer: 25:36

If I could help you to start your very own podcast without feeling overwhelmed, without the confusion of what do I do or how do I start, without dealing with all the self-doubt, would you take me up on the offer? If so, what I want you to do is right now, go to podcaster school. net. That's podcaster school. net. You can start out by taking the quiz on what kind of podcast should you create. From there, go ahead and schedule a call with me and let's check. So I want to hear about what your potential ideas are. What would make you interested in starting a podcast? It's such a fantastic way to really grow, increase your knowledge, your business and really get yourself out into the world. So take a look at podcaster school. net, take the quiz, schedule a call with me and let me help you get started on your very own show. So that crisis mode is meant for a temporary it. That is the courage that you need to get through a temporary situation. It's not makes our long-term continual ongoing process.

Cindy Solomon: 26:35

Exactly. Yeah, it's not the way to lead. It's the way to jumpstart people for a super short period of time. Then you got to quickly step away from it. It helps with alignment. It helps with getting really innovative, because sometimes it is life or death, like it was for six months of COVID.

Cindy Solomon: 26:50

For all of us. Fourth type real quickly, is core courage, and this is probably the toughest, because core courage is all about understanding who you are, where you want to go, where you want to be in six to eight years, where you want to be in six to eight weeks. For some of us, it's really about taking the time to understand who you are, what your North Star is, what your legacy even is going to be. And the thing is so hard about core courage is that you have to do that work before you need it. So if you've ever worked for a leader who the whole world is on fire around them and they're just like steady eddy, they're super focused on the goal, they're bringing people together, call them cool and collected, they're acting probably from a place of core courage and it's because they've done the work ahead of time, before the crisis or the difficulty hit. And so for us, you know, I think a lot as it relates directly to leadership.

Cindy Solomon: 27:57

What do you want your legacy to be as a leader of people? I mean nobody, you know, I use a slide sometimes in my keynotes that has a tombstone and it says they made their metrics. That's not what you want your legacy to be. You really want your legacy to be that, because of your leadership, somebody had a different career trajectory, somebody took a roll on that changed their lives, somebody you helped somebody build a career that lasted so far beyond you that it impacted other people that they then interled. So really getting us more used to sitting back, taking that pause and Thinking about what's the legacy that I want to leave. That's when you're able to utilize your core courage and it's in that moment that you're prepared for whatever might come. So those are the four types that we've identified.

Kyla Cofer: 28:49

That's so fascinating because I was expecting to come in here and give me one solid definition for courage. I think I even wrote it down as a question. I wanted to ask you, like, how do you define courage? But courage is really broken down into a lot of different ways, and I'm curious if you would classify courage as more of an emotion or a skill or somewhere in there.

Cindy Solomon: 29:14

Yeah, so courage is flat out a skill, okay, I mean, and anybody can choose to build it if they want to.

Kyla Cofer: 29:22

That's fascinating, so, but yet we all have courage and we all act courageously, but we can act more courageously.

Cindy Solomon: 29:31

Absolutely. So let me put it, give you an analogy. So let's say I want to run a marathon. Okay, which, by the way, would never, ever happen. But let's say I wanted to run a marathon. I can't just go and jump outside and start running and hope for the best. I mean I can. It's going to be a long haul to get to that.

Cindy Solomon: 29:53

The other piece of the puzzle is if I'm not understanding that today I ran a mile in this amount of time, but tomorrow I ran a mile and a quarter and maybe my time got a little bit better too, right? So you have to start measuring it and becoming aware of it so that you can do a little bit more each time. And the other piece of the puzzle is running a marathon isn't just about running a marathon. It's not just about running the million or however many miles marathon is. It's about understanding your stride, your breathing, your nutrition, your hydration, your, how your feet land, how you use your arms right, how much sleep you get. So you have to break it down into those bite-sized pieces and get better at each one in order to bring them together. You also need to measure it and give yourself credit. If I run out there and I just do. You know, I don't even know how much I do, but I just run and go well, hope that helps and then go do it again the next day. I'm never really going to make that progress in the fastest possible way.

Cindy Solomon: 31:03

The skill of courage is exactly the same. I want to be a more courageous person. That's the goal of running the marathon. But how I have to do it is I have to break it down into bite-sized pieces and work on those. And each time I do better at it I'm measuring it, I'm looking at it, I'm paying attention to it, each time I do better, I say good job, well done, that was better. Now, next time, I have that confidence that I can do a little bit more. I can go another quarter mile, I can go another eighth of a mile, or I can do the same sprint but a little bit faster. But until you get conscious of it, you can't build it because there's no yard marker. Does that make?

Kyla Cofer: 31:53

sense Absolutely, and I'm thinking how that can directly apply to being that courageous leader, because the leader is all about the people who follow you. So when you have practiced something, you understand that the people behind you need to practice it as well, and then you have some skills to pass on and also some compassion and empathy, while they're still learning. Exactly.

Cindy Solomon: 32:17

Exactly so. Let's talk about leadership for a second. Really specifically, one of the things that we teach in our courageous leadership courses is how to create an inspiring message in less than five minutes. People completely flip out, like that we're going to make them do this and we make them practice it. And then we make them stand up and do it and people are like literally like sweating, they feel like they're going to pass out and, without exception, 100% of people are able to do it. I mean, we have a process that we take them through and they do it step by step by step. But after this process, about 20 minutes later, they create these messages that they can't believe are coming out of them. And when I asked them, how many of you would have believed me had I said now it's been 30 minutes ago, right 30 minutes ago that you were going to stand up in front of the room and knock this exercise out in the park, how many of you would have believed me? And not a single person will raise their hand. And I say okay, now how many of you believe that with another two or three rounds of practice, you can be really good at this? Raise your hands. Almost everybody will raise their hands. So then we send them out into the wild and have them tested out on their people. And that takes even more courage because now they're not in the safe environment of the skill practice but they're actually out with their people.

Cindy Solomon: 33:38

And some will report back that their teams are like, why are you talking like that? Like, did they break you while you were in that training? Stop talking like that. It's just weird. Like nobody comes out of the gate and it's perfect. People might be like, stop, you're acting weird. Who is this? But they are able to, because they have the confidence that they went from zero to this good, that if they just keep practicing it they'll get a little bit better each time. But they have to intellectually think about okay, what worked in that? And now next time I do it, what would I do differently to be better? And it's the courage of having that moment to take a pause and self-evaluate, not just what didn't go well, but what worked, that you want to keep doing. That's what actually starts to build that courage muscle.

Kyla Cofer: 34:25

I don't really know what to ask you next. I really was. I've just been like listening and soaking it in because thinking about, of course, my own situations and plenty of examples and stories that I've heard and how this could really change leadership If you have every leader who's acting courageously in the way that we do that and the way that, yes, it does build that muscle. And I was thinking too about when I have run half marathons I have not made it to a full, but half marathons and I remember day one being terrified and then the pride that you build after you do it and after you accomplish it, and that you do create more pride in yourself as you practice and you try and you go forward anyways.

Cindy Solomon: 35:04

Well, and think about just even that example, going back to those four types of courage. Right, like, think about that for a second, because it's blind courage. Probably that makes you start it, which is like I'm going to do this. I don't know how it's going to work, let's try it. You're using blind courage. But then, more than likely, you got into some role courage because you were like, okay, I need to figure out, what do I need to be eating? What time of day do I do this? Like, how do I set my practice, my, whatever it's called? I don't run it all. So I'm like you're running schedule, whatever it's called. You crazy runners. How do I work on my breathing, etc. Etc. Right, so that's the role courage part.

Cindy Solomon: 35:40

I would argue that you, I'm sure you had a moment of crisis courage where either you, like, got to the middle of the race and you started to feel bad, or you weren't hydrating enough or whatever, and you are acting on instinct. You're trying to figure out what do you need to do to keep going. And then the core courage. Part of that example is it's when you've had those difficulties throughout the training for it that you've kept going because you had in your mind's eye that you can do this, that you want to be the person who finishes the half marathon. So you actually use all four types of courage. Probably and all of us use all four types of courage in any given day. I mean, hopefully we don't have to use crisis very much, but if you have children, you're using crisis every day. It's being able to understand that there's no one type of courage that's better than any other.

Cindy Solomon: 36:34

You can employ all four in any given situation. But understanding that helps you, because there's something that I want to go out and do that's going to require blind courage, and I'm a blind courage addict. I love blind courage, but in this one particular situation I have more fear around it because it's something physical and I'm worried that physically, I'm not going to fail at it. And I literally had the discussion with myself in my own mind a couple of days ago. I'm like, oh, for Pete's sake, Cindy, you are the courage girl. You're all about blind courage. You just need to exercise a little blind courage right now because it's going to be fine. And having that conversation with myself, I was like, oh my gosh, of course that's absolutely right.

Kyla Cofer: 37:16

So what that tells me is that, yes, it's a skill and you're constantly developing it and as you grow in that skill, the process becomes shorter, from I am not going to do that and I have to talk myself into it. You know the process of how to work through it because you're seeing that end goal. You know where you want to go and you know what that process is and where you're trying to be. And so the gap between I can't do it to I've accomplished it, you can shorten that by practicing and developing that skill and be intentionally. Absolutely.

Cindy Solomon: 37:47

It's the lifting the weight. The more I'm lifting the weight and paying attention, the stronger and stronger I get, thus making that time from thought to result so much shorter, absolutely.

Kyla Cofer: 38:01

It's so fun because these are things that I've intuitively been talking about for years and years and years, but to hear you talk about it in research and data terms it makes it so much more clear and helps understand. When you can break it down into different pieces and different definitions, it really helps understand this full picture of what courage is and why it really matters. But to be to like it's noticing right, so we all have it. What you're doing is you're just you're noticing the courage within you.

Cindy Solomon: 38:31

Yeah, Well, and I think the other thing about it is the tricky part of this is, until you understand that every single one of us is courageous, we can't teach others. So I think about this a lot as a parent. I mean, I did all this research when my daughter was a lot younger and I thank God for it because it made me realize that until I was conscious about my own courage and talking about it and helping define it and helping her understand that it was a skill, that helped her in her development. And so we can't teach others how to do it until we understand that we are doing it and that we are also growing the skills simultaneously.

Kyla Cofer: 39:15

Sydney, if you had one piece of advice or to give to our listeners, or maybe even a summary or one thing that you want to make sure our listeners have heard and walked away with, what would it be? I?

Cindy Solomon: 39:25

think the most important thing is to understand that 100% of us are courageous. And courage is not the absence of fear or anxiety or stress or uncertainty. It's the ability to take action in spite of that fear. And that quote if you could see my office here as huge poster on my wall is that quote? Because I think we hurt ourselves and therefore those around us by believing we should be fearless. But we shouldn't be fearless. We should have the fear and make the choice to take action in spite of it. Every time you have that little anxiety, that frisian, that anger, stop, take a breath and then think about what choice you're going to make at that point, because that's the courageous moment.

Kyla Cofer: 40:24

Well, thank you so much, Cindy. How can we learn more from you?

Cindy Solomon: 40:28

Absolutely Well. As I mentioned, we train about probably about 50,000 leaders a year now at the Courageous Leadership Institute. So just go to our website, courageousleadershipinstitute. com. Check out my TED Talks. On TED how to deal with meeting overload, which again takes a lot of courage, or how to build your courage and get in touch. I'm really easy to reach Cindy@ thec ourageousleadershipinstitutecom. If you're looking to build courageous leadership at scale for the leaders within your company.

Kyla Cofer: 40:58

Thank you so much. This has been such a pleasure and I really really just do value the breakdown and the explanation and understanding and being able to relate it to something in our lives, Because I'm thinking about all the times in my life where I was like, oh yeah, that's just something you did and there are not things I ever thought that were courageous. But there have been times when I've been like I have no idea what I'm doing. I have a goal and I'm going to go forward and do it anyways. I'm going to figure it out, and sometimes it's taken longer to get there because I've had to work through the fear in it, but I've been actively working it out and I've never labeled myself as courageous, like you said. So that's a really really fascinating piece to me, Absolutely.

Cindy Solomon: 41:42

But it takes some mystery out of it. It's not just some magical thing that people have or don't have. Anybody can build their courage if they choose to go after it.

Kyla Cofer: 41:52

We see that a lot. We see people, we look at them and they're like oh, they're just natural born gifted great leaders no.

Cindy Solomon: 42:01

I'm so glad you mentioned that, because every single person that I talk to somebody will invariably say well, aren't leaders born and not made? It's like no. To be a great leader, it is simply a set of very teeny, tiny skills that are repeated consistently over time. Great leaders work really hard at it. It might look effortless. It is not. They have done the heavy lifting and kept getting better and better and better because of being conscious about wanting to build those courageous leadership skills.

Kyla Cofer: 42:38

Cindy, thank you so much. This has been such a great conversation, so honored and privileged to have you here with us. Thank you, my pleasure.

Cindy Solomon: 42:44

Thanks so much for having me.

Kyla Cofer: 42:49

So I started this podcast because I wanted to learn and grow in my leadership journey and I have been so incredibly inspired by the guests and the conversations. So once the interview ends, I actually keep the conversation going, because I have found that sometimes the richest part of the conversation is when we feel like the interview is over and we can just kind of have a relaxed, more casual conversation. Also, if you've noticed, if you've been following this podcast for some time, I used to ask every guest two questions what does integrity mean to them and what does balance look like to them? Well, I haven't stopped asking those questions. We're just putting those over on our Patreon page. So go check it out at patreon. com/leadershipschool. And for $6.50 a month you can support this podcast.

Kyla Cofer: 43:36

It takes a lot to produce every single episode and honestly, I could use a little bit of support. So anything that you're able to contribute would really mean a lot to me and would be able to help me to continue to bring these high caliber guests in to have conversations on what does it look like to be an extraordinary leader and how do we practically do that. So those conversations are continuing over at patreoncomcom slash leadership school, where I'm asking guest some extra questions, some bonus questions. You'll get some bonus content over there, so be sure to go check it out. Thanks so much for your support and thanks so much for subscribing, listening and sharing this podcast. It really does mean a lot and I'm so honor to show up here in your podcast feed. Hey, thank you so much for listening. If you've liked what you heard and you want some more tools and resources to help you on your journey, go check out kylacofercom forward slash free stuff.