6 Ways to Practice Everyday Courage

Harvard Business Review

4 days ago

At 8:00 AM on a gray March morning, the CEO of a fast-growing biotech company clicked 'join' on a video call with her senior team. In the past 24 hours, new sanctions in Eastern Europe had forced their main supplier to halt shipments. The sanctions also slammed the local currency, driving up the cost of the company's foreign debt by several million dollars.
The CEO's inbox pulsed with board messages. Unless she cut spending by 35%, the company could risk bankruptcy. With global supply chains already stretched thin, there were no easy fixes. She was left with an impossible choice:
Layoff one-third of her scientists, upending careers and years of research progress.
Gamble on emergency bridge financing—a short-term loan meant to keep the business afloat—in a market frozen by geopolitical shock.
While it may seem like an outlier, scenarios like this are becoming increasingly common for today's leaders. Economic shocks, political uncertainty, deepening polarization, ethical landmines, and eroding public trust have created an environment where even routine decisions carry real risk. Expertise may help you map out a strategy. But when the road ahead is unclear, the stakes are personal, the fallout is public, and people are looking to you for guidance—knowing your choices will affect them—courage becomes a critical skill.
Conventional advice often confuses courage with bravery, an innate and heroic quality that can be summoned during a one-off crisis. But courage isn't an instinct; it's a muscle built through consistent, values-aligned actions taken in the presence of doubt, risk, or fear. This kind of steadied, practiced response is what I call 'everyday courage.' It's especially powerful in moments that feel too small for a headline, but big enough to shape organizational culture, trust, and legacy.
Understanding Everyday Courage
Stretching all the way back to Aristotle, scholars have tried to sort courage into delineated buckets. In the 1990s, one researcher grouped courage into physical, moral, and psychological forms. More recent work refines moral courage into distinct subtypes.
Drawing on years of existing research and my work with senior leaders, I've put together a playbook that offers leaders a fresh lens—moving beyond the heroic and abstract to something practical and applicable. It focuses on six types of everyday courage that reflect the most common, consequential, and complex challenges leaders face today.
The Six Types of Everyday Courage
Source: Alex Budak
To help you learn and apply each type of everyday courage to real-world situations, I've broken them down into three parts:
A brief definition supported by research.
A real-world example based on leaders I've taught or advised.
A set of day-one practices you can use to strengthen this skill.
Moral Courage
Moral courage is the willingness to act on your values, even when doing so carries personal or professional risk. The concept has roots in ancient philosophy, but in a leadership context, moral courage was popularized by philosopher Rushworth Kidder. He defined it as action that requires three conditions: a foundational principle, looming danger, and the stamina to endure backlash.
What does it look like in practice?
A senior university leader is faced with a decision: whether to accept generous funding from a multinational company accused of human rights abuses. The partnership would provide a crucial lifeline amid budget cuts (looming danger), but it conflicts with the university's long-held commitment to ethical responsibility (foundational principle). Speaking out or rejecting the deal could damage the institution's finances and the leader's career (backlash). Choosing to turn down the partnership to uphold the university's values, despite the risks, would be an act of moral courage.
How can you build moral courage?
Clarify your core values.
Moral courage starts with knowing what you stand for. If you're unsure of your personal values, it's hard to defend them under pressure. Personal reflection tools such as James Clear's Values List and the Personal Values Assessment can help you identify the principles that matter to you. For example, you can scan Clear's list of 50+ values and highlight the 10 that resonate most—then narrow them down to your top three to guide tough decisions.
Once you've named your values, make them visible: Define what they look like in everyday behaviors and language, and communicate them through your words and actions. If you value transparency, for instance, that might mean regularly explaining the 'why' behind tough choices.
Do the same at the organizational level. Translate your company's core values into principles and practices to help people understand what drives decisions at the top.
Pre-commit before a crisis occurs.
Leaders are more vulnerable to a phenomenon called ethical fading under stress. It occurs when pressures like loyalty or self-interest obscure the ethical stakes of a decision. To counter this, try to identify situations that might test your values and plan on how you'll respond before they arise. One helpful technique is drafting 'if/then' statements grounded in your organization's values. For example, 'If funding requires whitewashing abuses, then we decline, no matter the financial implications.' Revisit these scenarios quarterly to keep your principles front of mind.
Social Courage
Many people stay silent at work not because they lack ideas, but because they fear rejection. Social psychologist Solomon Asch's famous conformity experiments show how deeply this fear is ingrained in us, and how quickly group norms can override personal judgement—even when the group is wrong.
Social courage is the willingness to speak out or stand apart from the group, despite the risk of embarrassment, exclusion, or reputational damage.
What does it look like in practice?
At an executive offsite, a long-standing leader mockingly dismisses a pointed question from a newer team member, triggering visible discomfort among many. While others attempt to quickly move on, the chief people officer speaks up to pause the conversation: 'I think we need to make space for dissenting views—especially from new voices.' It's only a moment, but in a high-status, well-networked room, disrupting group dynamics takes social courage.
How can you build social courage?
Name the risk, then speak.
When speaking up feels socially risky, acknowledging the stakes up front can demonstrate self-awareness and signal good intent. Don't apologize—just frame your dissent with clarity and conviction: 'This perspective may not be popular, but…' or 'This might go against the grain, but I think it needs to be said.'
Reward principled dissent.
Actively invite people to challenge the majority view. Ask questions like, 'Who sees this differently?' and thank those who surface hard truths. Another strategy is to use a rotating 'contrarian chair' to legitimize alternative viewpoints in meetings. Research on psychological safety shows that when leaders consistently reward this socially risky dissent, they send a powerful message: Disagreement is needed to make the smart decisions.
Emotional Courage
Unlike social courage, which focuses on external risks, emotional courage is about inner bravery—the willingness to feel, name, and act on your own discomfort. Psychologist Susan David describes it as the capacity to face uncomfortable emotions with openness and honesty, using them as a guide for thoughtful, values-aligned action rather than letting them control or define you.
What does it look like in practice?
A healthcare COO must announce layoffs after a project she championed failed to meet its financial goals, resulting in major budget cuts. She chooses not to let HR deliver the message on her behalf. Instead, she speaks to the organization directly, takes responsibility, and stays present—even as employees react with disappointment, frustration, or grief. When shame and regret rise up, she resists the urge to shut down or pull away. Her emotional presence won't erase their pain, but it can preserve her credibility, show accountability, and start to rebuild trust.
How do you build emotional courage?
Own the feelings, not the room.
When you're in a position of power, it can feel risky to show any kind of emotional openness—let alone admit fear, regret, or uncertainty. But emotional courage isn't about unloading your feelings onto others; it's about being honest in a way that's grounded, intentional, and appropriate for the moment. As Brené Brown, a leading expert on vulnerability and leadership, puts it, ' clear is kind, unclear is unkind.' She warns against what she calls 'floodlighting,' or oversharing to dodge real vulnerability.
A useful guideline is to share emotions when doing so creates clarity. Ask yourself: Will sharing how I feel create understanding and connection or confusion and emotional burden?
Notice, name, and ground your emotions.
When you find yourself wanting to shut down or deflect, try to catch the impulse. Before a tense meeting, jot down three emotions you're feeling and plan to name one. This will help you avoid defensive statements like, 'These things happen,' and replace them with honest ones like, 'This didn't go the way I'd hoped, and that's on me.' Try to resist the instinct to smooth things over too quickly. You can follow up with something simple: 'I won't rush past this.'
Intellectual Courage
Intellectual courage is the willingness to question your own assumptions, entertain opposing viewpoints, and admit what you don't know—all in service of better thinking and better outcomes. It creates the psychological safety that fuels learning, fosters innovation, and helps leaders avoid the trap of quick fixes or familiar thinking when a situation or challenge requires change.
What does this look like in practice?
A VP of product has long defended one of her company's core offerings. But her instincts—and the data—suggest that the market has shifted and the offering needs to change. She schedules a strategy meeting to discuss this, but by changing her position, she risks appearing indecisive or losing credibility with longtime stakeholders.
Still, she puts aside her pride, names her doubt, and invites her team to explore alternative strategies. By creating space for the best answers to emerge, she is demonstrating intellectual courage.
How do you build intellectual courage?
Interrogate your own thinking, publicly.
When you hold power, questioning your assumptions out loud shows others that rethinking is a natural part of solving problems. It gives your team the same permission to ask questions and challenge the status quo without fear of judgement. You can say: 'Here's the logic I've used, but what might I be missing? Does anyone see a flaw in my thinking or a different way to look at this?'
Detach identity from ideas.
When you've led a strategy or defended a position for years, it's easy to mistake familiarity for certainty. Over time, your ideas might even become a part of your identity. But in business, nothing is stagnant and staying relevant means staying flexible. To shift your mindset, celebrate moments when you're proven wrong with the same energy as when you're right. That humility will keep you, and your team, level-headed.
Creative Courage
Unlike intellectual courage, which is about questioning what is, creative courage is about imagining what could be. It means sharing bold ideas, championing experimentation, and inviting others to do the same—all while knowing that some efforts will fail. Research shows that while new ideas can come from anywhere, leaders play a key role in nurturing and advancing them. Conversely, when creativity is suppressed, organizations risk stagnation.
What does it look like in practice?
A senior product leader at a large consumer goods company is preparing for an innovation summit with 30 senior executives. The safe option is to suggest a modest product upgrade, something conventional and fundable. But instead, she presents a radically new concept: a zero-waste packaging model that would disrupt the company's longstanding supply chain, alienate some manufacturing partners, and encourage consumers to change their behavior. She knows it may be rejected, but she believes the company's future depends on it. With people demanding sustainable products and legislation on the horizon, she sees this as a necessary leap to stay competitive.
How do you build creative courage?
Make room for risks.
Creativity isn't a rare talent—it's a skill everyone can build. Reframe it this way for your team. Encourage playful exploration by running quick divergent-thinking drills: spend 10 minutes generating 'bad ideas,' 10 on 'impossible ideas,' and 10 on 'reverse ideas' (flip a core assumption and imagine its opposite). Then, mine them for unexpected insights. To reinforce that creativity requires risk, close team meetings with a simple question: 'How did you fail this week, and what did you learn?' Over time, you'll build a culture of curiosity.
Shrink the stakes.
Don't dismiss a promising idea just because it feels risky. Lower the pressure by testing the waters: Pilot a concept in one market, time-box a rough prototype, or run a 30-day 'fail fast' sprint. These low-commitment tests can help you build confidence, gather feedback, and learn quickly—without overcommitting too soon.
Physical Courage
In moments of real risk, being physically present signals solidarity and builds trust through action. This is physical courage: the willingness to act in the face of physical risk, discomfort, or danger, especially in service of others. In a business context, it's about showing up when it matters, whether that's walking the floor during a crisis or standing with your team in difficult conditions. Research shows this kind of courage is often fueled by a mindset of resilience, optimism, and strong values and social support—qualities that help leaders move from hesitation to action.
What does it look like in practice?
Reports of unsafe conditions surface at an overseas plant. Rather than delegate, a manufacturing CEO travels to the facility during a time of civil unrest, insisting on touring the plant themself—despite security concerns and potential physical risks. By showing up in person, they send the message: Frontline workers are visible and valuable to the company.
How do you build physical courage?
Train the discomfort muscle.
Ease gradually by putting yourself in situations that stretch you: Speak first in difficult public conversations or tense meetings, walk into rooms where your viewpoints may be unpopular, or visit your team in person instead of checking in via email. The more you practice showing up in uncomfortable moments, the more natural it will begin to feel.
Proximity as policy.
Create space on your calendar for regular, agenda-free time in the field. Shadow a production line, sit with the service team, or eat in the same break room as your frontline workers. Treat these visits as mutual learning labs. When executives and frontline employees share the same air, noise, and constraints, leaders gain firsthand awareness of the challenges others face and model the kind of presence that encourages openness, trust, and accountability at all levels.
Courageous leadership doesn't hinge on rare, dramatic moments—it's built through everyday choices. The leaders who rise in times of uncertainty are those who clarify what they stand for, celebrate acts of integrity and bold thinking, and commit to small, consistent actions that align their behaviors with their values. Practiced this way, everyday courage doesn't just shape decisions, it signals to your team that this is a place where truth matters, where risks are welcome, and where doing the right thing is expected. In a noisy, fast-moving world, that's a leadership edge competitors can't replicate.