Pod Insights How to Be a Better Human Stressed, stuck, and overthinking? The science of moving forward w/ Ranjay Gulati | 10% Happier About this episode In today’s special featured episode of 10% Happier with Dan Harris, hear from Ranjay Gulati, a Harvard professor and author whose pioneering work focuses on unlocking organizational and individual potential—embracing courage, nurturing purpose-driven leaders, driving growth, and transforming businesses. Find out how you can decipher courage and recklessness, build moral anchors for your decision-making, and take action when you’re feeling stuck.
10% Happier with Dan Harris is a show about how to do life better, hosted by a former ABC News anchor turned bestselling author. Drawing on a mix of ancient Buddhism and modern science, this podcast covers self-compassion, relationships , productivity, and more. Find out how happiness is not an unalterable factory setting; it’s a skill. You can find more episodes of 10% Happier with Dan Harris wherever you get your podcasts.
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Transcript 10,221 words · 8 speakers
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0:00 Chris Duffy? Hello, How to Be a Better Human listeners. Today, instead of a new episode of our show, we have something special for you. This is an episode of 10% Happier with Dan Harris. I'm a big fan of Dan Harris's work. I loved his book. I love the podcast 10% Happier. And in today's episode, Dan is in conversation with Ranjai Gulati, a Harvard professor and author whose pioneering work on courage has changed the way that a lot of people think about their lives. In this episode, you'll hear nine evidence-based tools that can help you act decisively when fear and uncertainty are keeping you in a holding pattern. Everything from the difference between courage and recklessness to how to accept your fears without being controlled by them. Tools for remaining calm when the situation is not in the importance of asking for support.
0:43 Chris Duffy? Very practical and also very, very important and challenging to do. So this episode is a great one. I really hope that you enjoy it. And we will be back next week with more episodes of How to Be a Better Human. But until then, enjoy 10% Happier. Here you go.
1:02 Speaker 01 This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
1:16 Speaker 01 Hello, everybody. How we doing? Okay, so we've all been there. Those moments of uncertainty and fear where we freeze, we feel paralyzed, we overanalyze, we overthink. And then, as a consequence, we fail to take action in ways that can later produce a lot of shame and regret. I suspect this situation I'm describing right here is increasingly common right now when anxiety and uncertainty are through the roof. We're dealing with so many X-factors in the world right now. AI, war, political polarization, I could go on. So in this context, in a world that is more uncertain perhaps than ever,
1:57 Speaker 01 that leaks into our daily lives in all sorts of conscious and subconscious ways. In this context, how do you give yourself the resources to get out of paralysis and into action? In other words, how do you develop, and I'm going to use a loaded word here, courage? You may be tempted to think of courage as an inalterable factory setting, but my guest today argues that it's actually a skill, which is right on point with the major theme of this show. That happiness and all the states of mind we want are in fact, skills. And my guest is going to lay out a bunch of very practical ways to develop the skill of courage, ways that are doable for any of us, even if we might think of ourselves
2:42 Speaker 01 as fundamentally fearful, even cowardly. I'm looking at myself here. Not for nothing said, guest actually has a good semi-defense of cowardice, or at least an explanation that made me feel a little bit better. My guest is Ranjai Galati. He's a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of a book called, How to Be Bold. We talk about the difference between being courageous and being reckless, how to accept your fears without being controlled by them, tools for remaining calm in the face of disaster, how to find your moral anchors. I'll let him explain what that means. The importance of having a support squad, how to inculcate courage into your family, your workplace and your friend group, and much more.
3:24 Speaker 01 Okay, we'll get started with Ranjai Galati, right after this.
3:28 Chris Duffy? This episode is sponsored by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Here's a question this show asks a lot. What can one person actually do? Take protecting the environment. When the task feels so big, it's hard to know where to even begin. Turns out, the answer isn't doing it alone. It's teaming up with people who care as much as you do. With the help of 3 million supporters, the Natural Resources Defense Council is in court to defend ancient forests, pristine coasts, and the wildlife that depend on them. None of these places or species can be replaced. They're still here because people fought for them, in and out of court. And that fight needs your support today. Donate at N R D C dot org slash human, and your gift will be matched five times.
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5:30 Speaker 01 Ronje Gulati, welcome to the show.
5:32 Speaker 03 Thank you, Dan. Pleasure to be here with you today.
5:35 Speaker 01 Pleasure to have you here. Well, let me start with an obvious question. Why are you so interested in the subject of courage?
5:42 Speaker 03 First, you don't know what you're studying and why. It's what we call retrospective sense-making. You look back and say, oh, now, why did I do that?
5:50 Speaker 03 What was I thinking? How did I end up here? And this is one of those projects where if you ask me five years ago, "Ronje, you're going to write a book about courage," I'd say, "You're crazy." I mean, why would I want to write a book about that? But now that I look back, in hindsight, it makes sense. My mother was an entrepreneur. My father was a military officer. So I have parents who were exemplifying courage in their own very distinct ways. One was physical courage in the armed forces in combat. My mother as an entrepreneur. And then, you know, some of my own experiences as well that I had, I came to realize that courage is a universal currency. We all kind of admire it, but we don't really know what it is. And I have some moments of embarrassment too.
6:35 Speaker 03 Honestly, I think I studied it for myself. I never thought I'd write the book even. I was really wanting to know more about it out of my own curiosity. Maybe I can become more courageous, not too late.
6:46 Speaker 01 When you say you have your own moments of embarrassment, what do you mean?
6:50 Speaker 03 One of the moments I talk about in the book was when I was fourteen years old. My mother had by now built a very successful fashion business, working with a couple of fashion houses in Paris. And she achieved kind of her dream, which was to buy a piece of land where she was gonna build her own home. She hadn't until now had a home. It was a beautiful piece of land that she found and then a developer decided he wanted it and started chasing her for the land. I was home from boarding school one Sunday weekend and the guard from her gate came said, there's a gentleman on the door insisting on seeing your mom. Can you talk to him? So I went to the gate, he was from the developer, big burly fellow. And he said, ma'am, I wanna see your mom. I said, no, she's not gonna see you, so don't waste your time.
7:32 Speaker 03 He said, no, tell her last time it will bother her five minutes, we'll never bother her again. So I went to my mom, she says, okay, five minutes, bring him in. And she told me, she says, you stand at that door and make sure he's out of here in five minutes. So I bring him into the living room, he sits down opposite her on the sofa. I'm at the door, very immediately he takes out a checkbook with a blank signed check and a piece of paper. Says, ma'am, we're not here to negotiate. We'll give you whatever you want. My mother immediately pushes back, says, it's not about the money, I don't care about money. I'm not selling this land. It's really not about the money. Immediately he gets belligerent and says, I am gonna make you sign this today. So I was shocked, my mother was shocked, she says, excuse me, please leave now.
8:16 Speaker 03 So he then leans back and he pulls back his blazer like I am. And he had a gun tucked in his waist. Now, I am at the door. I'm fourteen years old, pretty big kid by then. But I'm like confused. I'm thinking, should I call the guard? Should I jump him? Maybe he's bluffing. Can I take him on? My mother, my sister, what am I gonna do? My mother, five foot one inches tall, without hesitation, leaps out of her sofa seat, walks across the table, and slaps him across the face. He didn't even see it coming. And she said, "How dare you come into my house? And first you tried to bully me, and now you threaten me with a gun? Get out of here now."
8:57 Speaker 03 Now, it was strategically brilliant in hindsight, because it got him off guard. Her security guard from the gate heard the commotion came running in. This guy was so rattled, he ran out of there, forgetting his checkbook behind. I was embarrassed, because I froze. I didn't know what to do. And by the time I'm fourteen, I was always feeling like, you know, I'm the boy, the man, protect my mother, you know, I had all these kind of illusions about myself. But I was always ashamed of this story, because I did nothing. Now, I asked my mom afterward. I said, "Mom, that was crazy. Weren't you scared? Didn't you see a gun?" She said, "Absolutely, I was scared." But just because you're scared, doesn't mean you do nothing.
9:41 Speaker 03 And that kind of stuck in my head. I was, at one level, ashamed of myself, but I was also kind of in awe of my mother. I hid that story. Honestly, I never told anybody that story till I wrote this book, because I was a little ashamed of my own self in this context.
9:58 Speaker 01 It's an incredible story, and I'm glad you're telling it. And I absolutely agree with your mother, and this is something you say in your book, that courage is being afraid and doing it anyway. And yet, you could have made a move that got you and your mother killed. So, there's also some expression about discretion is the better part of valor, or whatever, you know, like, there is some wisdom to, I don't know about freezing, but at least contemplating carefully, so that you don't provoke the guy with the gun to kill everybody.
10:34 Speaker 03 So you know, Dan, the first essay I could find on courage was written by Aristotle, who was describing the ideal soldier. Way back then, he made a distinction between courageous and reckless.
10:48 Speaker 03 In fact, he had cowardice at one extreme, reckless at the other extreme, and courage was in the middle. It was intentional thoughtful action. Now, there's a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking here because if the action works out, then it was courageous. If it didn't work out, then you say reckless. So I grant you that. But in her mind, she realized, she said, if I hadn't gone to him right away, what was his next move? His next move was to take the gun out. And she said, the next move was not to point it at her because he needed her signature. He was gonna point it at me. And she said, then I knew I had to sign the document. So she said, I had a very narrow window. And
11:31 Speaker 03 let me tell you where it goes back to though. The larger point is, fear is a natural human response. It's biologically hardwired. It's a primitive emotion that activates the amygdala. It's the survival impulse. So we need it. But it paralyzes us. And so much of our life, so many things we do, whether in one of your episodes, you talked about silence, being quiet, not speaking up, even having worry, anxiety, all these things tie back to fear.
12:10 Speaker 03 There's a diffuse manifest fear. And we don't have a way to cope with fear. Winston Churchill said, fear is a reaction, courage is a decision. So what I came to realize is that if any of us, myself included, I'm gonna live a more complete life, I need to find a way to learn to live with fear, engage it, not be ashamed of it. And this ability to learn to accept fear for what it is, but not be overwhelmed by fear.
12:45 Speaker 03 Was the journey I had to go through and I was trying to understand it better as I wrote this book because you know, too many of us live our life through a lens of fear.
12:57 Speaker 01 I'll speak only for myself. It's a very prominent player in my psychology. I do want to come back to this difference between courage and recklessness though, and what you said about how the Monday morning quarterback, there's a way in which your mom's actions could have backfired in ways in which would have led us to describe it as reckless. How can we think about being on the right side of that line? When we're in an acute situation?
13:28 Speaker 03 There's no easy answer to that, first of all. So let me first start with point of origin of fear and then I'll get to your point, actually. Where does fear come from? Fear originates in uncertainty. What is uncertainty? Uncertainty is not the same as risk. Risk is where you know the distribution of outcomes of 10% chance of this, 30% chance of this, 50% chance of this, and you're playing the odds. Uncertainty is, I don't know. I don't know. Early days of COVID, or job dislocation, or a diagnosis of a very deadly illness, or even something more simpler like college applications, where am I gonna go? What am I gonna do of finding a spouse?
14:11 Speaker 03 Uncertainty is everywhere, which means fear is everywhere. Now, how do we deal with this fear? In a reasonable way, because the default answer to fear is not fight or flight.
14:26 Speaker 03 It's freeze or flight. Sometimes doing nothing is riskier than doing something that might not work out. My mother's calculus was doing nothing was not an option. But it required her to deal with her fear. Because she could have just sat back and waited it out to see how this plays out. But if you saw this guy as a violent outburst, you would have known that he wasn't gonna stop. I am not leaving here till you sign this. This thing was going south very fast.
15:02 Speaker 03 So I think you're right. There is always going to be a fine line here. And not every courageous story we know ends up with a happy ending also, right? But the question is, how do we learn to tame fear? How do we learn to understand a fear? And how do we learn to then take the best course of action we possibly can versus fear clouds judgment, fear clouds the amygdala fear clouds the prefrontal cortex? And we are just paralyzed.
15:32 Speaker 01 I think what you're saying is that it can be very hard in the moment to draw the line between courage and recklessness. And often it's only clear in hindsight based on the result. But what the most important thing to do here is to learn how to tame our fear so that we can make the best decision possible, fully understanding that there may be outcomes we don't like. We are taking a risk, hopefully a calculated risk when we act out of courage.
16:07 Speaker 03 Exactly. So what I've discovered is these people who are courageous, as we characterize them, they somehow instinctively have created a system in their own minds about learning to tame fear, even sometimes trick fear. They have a relationship with fear that somehow allows them not to be paralyzed by it. Now, I tried to find the social science research around it saying like, what are these people doing here? And I was looking not at like famous characters only, right? I was looking at Brandon Say, a cashier at a dance hall in California when a mass shooter came in. Captain Sullenberger landed the plane in the Hudson River. But not just people like that who are in the moment courageous.
16:52 Speaker 03 I also looked at Frances Haugen, who was my former student, who spent one year agonizing over whether she should be the whistleblower at Facebook.
17:02 Speaker 03 And so there is sometimes there are instinctive, in moment courage. Some are more intentional, deliberate courage. Some involve physical courage, meaning it's physical danger. Some are moral courage. The word courage gets associated a lot and is confused. So I was trying to say, my biggest learning was that courage is accessible to all. It's a skill, it's a muscle we can all acquire. Given the uncertainty in the world around us and the manifest fear that comes with it. I think it's important to think about courage as a currency we all need today. We need to resource ourselves to not let fear paralyze us in the world we are trying to navigate and live through right now.
17:47 Speaker 01 Okay, so if the operating thesis of the book is that courage is a trainable skill, not an unalterable factory setting. The how of that, you divide up into nine steps or nine Cs, nine words that begin with C, words like coping and confidence and commitment. So let's start working through some of these Cs. We may not get through all of them, but let's do as many as we can in the time we have. The first of the nine Cs is coping. What do you mean by that?
18:19 Speaker 03 I should preface that by saying, historically, human beings, when they'd encountered uncertainty and fear, they prayed. A belief in a higher power. The most effective way humankind for thousands of years has found to deal with uncertainty is to pray. A belief in a higher source as being there for me is an important way in which people kind of cope. Now, there are other ways in which people also understand this. And I found the following among most of these people. If you look at how people operate.
18:55 Speaker 03 We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are. Now, what do I mean by that? We all look at the world through a lens of meaning and identity. Why am I here? Captain Sullenberger, who landed the plane in the USA of his fight in the Hudson River, had 90 seconds to do it. Katie Couric asked him, what were you thinking when you had to do that? He said, I realized in that moment that my 40 years of flying, my entire life up to that moment, had been a preparation to handle that moment. This was it. This was my moment. When I talked to Suma Jan, a physician in New Orleans,
19:38 Speaker 03 ER physician, in the early days of COVID, a young doctor who has two kids at home, young kids at home, and is worried she's gonna bring COVID back home and give it to her family. And a decision she has to make is should she stay home or come to work? She says, this is my Olympic moment. I trained as a physician to do this. I had no option. I had to do it. So coping is one thing where you cope through belief in a higher power. Conviction is another thing where you believe in something. So those are the two I would start with. I discovered that most of these people had a personal belief. Now, I'll go back to my mother.
20:20 Speaker 03 My mother was a self-made woman in a very male-dominated society, where she had to fight against all kinds of gender odds to do what she had done. And she'd been pushed around by a lot of these people in business and government and so forth. And so this guy showing up was just another man showing up trying to bully her, saying, I'm taking away your land, and you can't do anything about it.
20:48 Speaker 03 So it touched her at a very personal level. It was about her identity. Who am I? So it starts from that kind of place where you have a conviction or a belief. I mean, Frances Haugen did not want a whistleblower because it would blow up her career. Hard-charging Harvard MBA. And she was talking to her parents and she said, why me, mom? Let somebody else do it. There's a lot of people on Facebook who should be doing this. Why should I do it? And her parents slipped around and said, if not you, then who? And she was like, yeah. But that story also reveals another scene, which is courage rarely happens alone.
21:30 Speaker 03 The Hollywood portrayal is one of like James Bond, Jason Bourne, the solitary hero. It's usually a collective effort. You know, so I've talked about the first one. I've talked about conviction. I'm not talking about connection. I found that there were four aspects of connection. People looked for resource support. They looked for information support. They look for moral support. And they looked for feedback support. If you look at how Frances Haugen did it, she found all these forms of support from her network of people.
22:13 Speaker 03 Her family was one. A friend of hers who was a priest was another one who gave her feedback. A lawyer at a firm that specialized in whistleblowing was another one. A Wall Street Journal editor was another one. So it was the collective that gave it to her. But you know, the, the modern day version of courage we tell is one of the solitary solo effort.
22:39 Speaker 03 I've talked about three now with you. I just jumped ahead a little bit here. I'll tell you my favorite though. Can I get to my favorite one?
22:46 Speaker 01 Sure.
22:47 Speaker 03 There's two actually. The first one is called comprehension. And it comes from research by a University of Michigan professor, Carl Wyck. And he was studying firefighters. And what he found is that firefighters don't just run into a building. That's reckless, right? They're not running into a building. What they do is they observe the building from outside. They see how fast the fire is going. They try to find out if somebody need to be rescued. They see there's anything combustible there and they form an initial hypotheses. Then they go into the building. As soon as they go into the building, they gather more information.
23:31 Speaker 03 Each step more they go in, they are updating their belief. It's what we call acting your way into knowing.
23:40 Speaker 03 Most of us want to know before we act. That's why we say let's be deliberate, let's be cautious. Sometimes there's no way to know without taking action. So if you're making a big decision, sometimes you break it down into smaller decisions.
23:56 Speaker 03 And each small step you take, you're taking it in order to learn more. So sometimes you have to act your way into knowing. Now, I'll add to that another point, which is I call confidence. I don't like that confidence word. It comes from research by a Stanford professor named Albert Bandura. Bandura was also interested in fear. And he recruited Stanford undergraduate students who were terrified of snakes. Technical term is of video phobes. And he was going to convince them over a period of several weeks with slow exposure, showing them videos and all, to ultimately hold a snake.
24:40 Speaker 03 Actually, a corn snake. They're harmless, don't bite, but they're six feet long. They look scary. Half the students dropped out as the study progressed.
24:52 Speaker 03 The other half who stuck in there eventually held a snake. What's most interesting is not that they did it, but how this simple study transformed how they thought about themselves.
25:07 Speaker 03 It made them realize that if I can overcome one of my worst nightmare fears, snakes, I can do anything.
25:15 Speaker 03 And he called this research self-efficacy, what in local parlance we would call can-do mindset. I can do it. Now, you see that with entrepreneurs, not all, some entrepreneurs. No matter how many setbacks come their way and the business is failing, they're running out of cash, everything is going wrong, I don't know, I'm gonna get it done. I can do it. I got it. I'll figure it out. What I was trying to do was understand how these people resource themselves in different ways
25:48 Speaker 03 to really take on fear. I'll give you one last one and then I'll promise to shut up. It's calm.
25:57 Speaker 03 And this one you've dealt with in some of your episodes. Because one way to think about calm is meditation.
26:04 Speaker 03 The modern day psychology version of this is what is called emotional self-regulation. So sports psychologists are all over this. Because what is their number one job? To keep their player calm in the face of a very stressful situation. There's a whole bunch of strategies inside the calm chapter where I talk about how do these people, and meditation is a very important part of that story too, by the way. But there are other tactical things they do as well.
26:33 Speaker 01 Well, maybe say a little bit more about what those are.
26:36 Speaker 03 So one of them is rituals. I interviewed a Ukrainian commando at the frontline, who used to be a lawyer till four years ago. And he said that on the frontline, he has a whole set of morning safety rituals he does, that he believes invoke a higher power that he believes are going to protect him in this moment. So rituals serve several purposes. One is it invokes a higher power that we believe is going to protect us. It also is a very useful distraction technique. It normalizes things. You stop thinking about the situation. So you compartmentalize. So if you look at Captain Sullenberger, what do pilots do immediately when this thing happens? He starts to make a checklist.
27:21 Speaker 03 And pilots do that because checklist, you stop thinking about the situation and landing the plane on the Hudson. No pilot has ever done this before. The last time a pilot tried to do it, the plane flipped and half of them died. I have to do that in the next ninety seconds. No, he's just going through his checklist. Here's my checklist. Step number one, step number two, step number three, step number four. So how these people find ways to tame their fear, outwit their fear is interesting. And I've given you extreme examples, but I've come to realize most of us in our lives, we're living our fears, not our dreams.
28:04 Speaker 03 There is this diffuse fear that most of us don't even see it. And it really undermines our ability to make choices, take actions, that might allow us to live to our fullest potential, you know, daily choices that paralyze us. You know, some have described courage as the master virtue that unlocks all other virtues. That without courage, you can't really experience other virtues. Now, having said that, I also wrote, my first chapter was on cowardice. Coward is one of the worst words you can use to describe somebody, but I think it's
28:43 Speaker 03 important to start this journey by first recognizing that fear is normal. You've got to name it to tame it, first of all. There's a lot of shaming around fear. Don't be scared. I remember doing that to my kids myself, right? I don't want to go to the basement, Dad. It's scary. I'm like, what do you mean it's scary? Get down there. And we do it much more to boys than girls. There's a gender bias here. So we create a very antagonistic denial relationship with fear. I think fear has to be our friend. You know, I got like, okay, fear, I feel it, I feel it. I'm okay with being scared. But we don't see that in modern day media.
29:27 Speaker 03 We look at the heroic characters we read about and see. We never hear about them being scared. Mahatma Gandhi, you know, amazing individuals.
29:38 Speaker 03 Before he started his political career, he was a lawyer in London. He was terrified of public speaking. When he went for his first case in front of a judge, he froze. He couldn't speak. He just couldn't speak. The judge threw him out, admonished him, threw him out, told his client, "Go find another lawyer." So it made me realize that people find ways to resource themselves, to take on things that are the most terrifying things. And I think if they can do it, there's hope for us. Maybe we can learn something from them.
30:14 Speaker 01 Agreed.
30:18 Speaker 01 Coming up, Ron Jay talks about some more strategies for coping in moments of uncertainty, and how to create a positive narrative to guide you through chaos.
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33:25 Speaker 01 Let me just go back to the beginning of the nine Cs, which was coping. And when I brought it up with you, you talked, and this came up later as well, this idea of a higher power or faith. In the book, I believe you talk about the fact that coping, that there are two strategies that may seem to be in opposition. There's the hyper rational move of what you call risk hunting, which I'm hoping to get you to describe. And then there's also this faith in a higher power. Yeah, how do these work together? How should we think about operationalizing these ideas in our lives?
34:00 Speaker 03 Great catch. I skipped over that. So I found there were two ways in which people cope with fear. One was a belief in a higher power. It's something that is very universal. And by the way, in times of uncertainty, even in modern times, they find that people's attendance of religious institutions goes up.
34:22 Speaker 03 So our belief in higher power increases when there is more uncertainty in our lives, it seems. The other approach I find is interesting, and I don't know if they're necessarily in opposition to each other. The next one, people sometimes lose it. I'm gonna get more data. I'm gonna gather more data and more data and more data. And I'm gonna try and turn this uncertain situation into a certain situation.
34:48 Speaker 03 I need to understand this completely. And somehow I am going to nail this down. Think about how somebody getting a really difficult health diagnosis.
35:01 Speaker 03 Some will pray and say, I hope, you know, I'm gonna be okay. Take care of me, God. They'll also go to the doctor and try to see what they need to do, and they'll understand their options. But then you have others who go like the extreme. I'm gonna research this like a PhD, and I'm gonna find out every single person, the specialist. I'm gonna go talk to 10 different physicians. I'm gonna analyze this like crazy. I am not gonna take your word for it.
35:28 Speaker 03 And I believe in my efforts to gather more information, I will also calm down a little bit. Because I'll feel more in control. I don't think they're in opposition to each other. But there are two ways in which humans respond. I think both are powerful ways to cope with fear. Because ultimately, we're trying to make sure that fear doesn't paralyze us.
35:52 Speaker 01 One of the other strategies you talk about, and I'm not sure which C this falls under, is storytelling. Telling yourself a story about the situation and your role within the situation.
36:05 Speaker 03 What I wanted to point out was here is that when I get into the Cs, commitment is where I talk about the stories we tell ourselves. And not all of the characters, but most of these people.
36:20 Speaker 03 Have a self narrative. You know, we all have a self narrative in our head. Who am I? Why am I here? What am I meant to be doing? Some of us are more familiar with that self narrative. Others are not tuned into it. And it turns out this self narrative that is in our head really shapes how we think about ourselves, how we look at situations. My mother had a self narrative. I'm a self made woman and no one is going to push me around. I worked really incredibly hard to get to where I am. And I am not gonna let anybody take it away from me. So what is our self narrative? What is important to us? You know, Suma Jain, the physician down in New Orleans saying,
37:05 Speaker 03 I trained to be a physician to help people. And now when people need my help in the most critical of moments, I'm gonna stay home because I'm too scared. So you know, she had to really resource herself with that kind of self narrative. Other times, other people give us the narrative, you know? Francis Hough was parent saying, if not you, then who?
37:29 Speaker 03 And so you look at some of these people. They have a narrative about themselves like I am, this is who I am. This is what I believe in. They have convictions about some things that they hold dear. So how do we create a belief system in which there are some fundamental beliefs that we hold dear? And then we can remind ourselves of them when we have situations of uncertainty. And people call them values, their values. But beneath values is purpose. Why am I here? So I found that these people who have convictions, not only do they have a strong set of values, but they have great clarity about their purpose. Why?
38:12 Speaker 03 Intention, what in Sanskrit they call Dharma. Dharma is all about understanding the why question.
38:20 Speaker 03 Most of Hinduism and Buddhism and all the spiritual threads over there were try. If you understand your why, then everything else falls into place. These people are very connected to the why.
38:33 Speaker 01 You raised this question, but I want to push you on it. How do we get a sense of what our moral anchors are in a way that would give us sustenance and resourcing in times of fear and uncertainty?
38:46 Speaker 03 The worst time to try to figure that out is during a crisis.
38:50 Speaker 01 Right, right.
38:51 Speaker 03 Right? So it's not the ideal moment to do that thing. Oh, I'll deal with that when I have to deal with the situation. You ain't gonna be able to deal with the situation. It's interesting, one of my colleagues studies white collar criminals and studies all these people who have a white collar, meaning they had high paying, high powered jobs who end up in jail. And it's interesting, one of the common themes is they never clarified their own moral anchor and principle, belief in advance. They were like, they said, I'm very pragmatic. I figured out my moral principles in the moment as situation demanded. And that's the worst recipe, not to only land yourself in jail, but also you don't
39:35 Speaker 03 have a ready made resource you might need to take bold action. What do you believe in? Why are you here? I look at some of the most insightful people I've met, they have great self-awareness and self-clarity. And I go back to the why question. I think moral principles and values are great, but the ultimate unlock is the why question. Why am I here? And if you get to the why question, a lot of things fall into place. I was meant to do this. I had to do this. I didn't see any other option for myself. And then I think we all have to ask ourselves, what do you believe in? What's important to you?
40:19 Speaker 03 I mean, can I just give you a sports example of this?
40:22 Speaker 01 Please.
40:22 Speaker 03 It's very interesting. I have a side hobby and interest in sports coaches. I used to be an athlete. And it's very interesting to me to see how coaches. Work with players to make them perform better. As one professional coach told me, he said, I take a professional athlete who is self-driven, determined, has pushed themselves to the limits to rise to the top and become one of the top athletes in the world. And then I get them. And my job is to show them how to be even better. How do I do that? This person has pushed themselves as hard as they could, as far as they could. This is football, so it's a team sport. He said, you know,
41:05 Speaker 03 all this time, they push themselves for themselves. And you can do a lot for yourself. Self-interest drives you very far. He said, my job is to connect them to something more than themselves. I wanna connect them to their teammates, to each other.
41:23 Speaker 03 I wanna connect them to the team as a collective, feeling proud of the team. I wanna connect them to me, they're playing for me as a coach. And when you start to do something for something bigger than yourself,
41:39 Speaker 03 you up your game. And the Marines do this too, by the way. Semper Fidelis. In the Marine Corps, you're fighting for each other, always faithful.
41:50 Speaker 03 Some even talk about it as relative fear. The fear of letting your teammates down is greater than the fear of dying. So I think we have to understand how these kinds of people find interesting ways to deal with this thing we call fear, which is a natural human impulse. And once they find their way to work through fear, I know you know the work on regret. And research by some Cornell professors like 25 years ago showed that people have much more regret in life about inaction than action. Yeah. If we can only resource ourself in dealing with fear, a lot of things open up for us.
42:34 Speaker 01 There's another sea I want to dig in. You made a reference earlier to the fact that we can draw a lot of sustenance. We can build a sense of resourcing in moments of uncertainty through the sea of connection through other people. And you referenced that there are four types of support that people fall back on. Can you double click on that?
42:56 Speaker 03 Sure. I must give you an embarrassing example of this.
43:00 Speaker 01 Please.
43:00 Speaker 03 So for fifteen years, one of my favorite leadership case studies that I teach in the classroom is about the South Pole explorer Ernest Shackleton. So Shackleton in nineteen thirteen goes down to the South Pole and he's going to navigate from one end of the pole to the other. And somehow he and his twenty eight men, they get stuck on ice. And the winter comes and the winter's minus seventy degrees. Somehow they survive the winter, but at the end of the winter, when summer is coming, the melting ice crushes the ship and sinks it. And now they only have three lifeboats, twenty one foot long, in the roughest sea on the planet. Even today, to cross the Ross Sea, it's really, really hard journey.
43:45 Speaker 03 And there's nobody down there. And these guys survive for two and a half years and somehow magically he brings them all back alive. We have video here, a primitive camera then, show the video. And the whole case is about Shackleton did this and Shackleton, he did this and Shackleton did that. As I was researching this book, I thought, oh, let me bring Shackleton in as one of the case studies. So I bring Shackleton as one of the case studies. As I'm researching it, I find that in his own memoirs, he explains that he could never have done it alone. He had three people in what he called his support squad. And these were his inner circle. And what kind of support did they give him? And
44:29 Speaker 03 then I said, let me read what he talks about. And I connected it to these four forms of support. First one, moral support. Boss, you can do it.
44:40 Speaker 03 There were so many times when Shackleton actually lost his own self-confidence. I don't know if we can make it. Because he made a number of wrong calls along the way.
44:49 Speaker 01 Hmm.
44:49 Speaker 03 He started doubting his own judgment. And so he got moral support from them. The second thing was information support. One of them was the captain, one was his second first officer. They had also been down there and they were giving him information that he was missing. That was important. Resource support. They were able to tap into resources in the ship and outside saying, okay, we're gonna go and find food. We're gonna go and do this, we're gonna do that. And the last one was feedback support. They gave him real time feedback saying, boss, the people need to see you out there. We don't want to see you being scared and nervous.
45:32 Speaker 03 So it was interesting across all of them. How these heroic characters that we like to teach, I taught it as this Shackleton is a James Bond kind of hero. Actually really leaned on other people for support. I bend back, if you look at Mandela, you look at Gandhi, you look at Martin Luther King, you look at any of these modern day heroes as well. They all had a support squad. So one of the questions we can all ask ourselves is, who's your support squad? Who do you lean on in times of uncertainty? Who do you count as your inner support squad? That I think becomes a really important question to ask ourselves.
46:16 Speaker 01 Especially in an era of social isolation and atomization and hyper individualism and perfectionism and all of this stuff. The culture is not guiding us in the right direction on this one. So I just want to emphasize that what you're pointing at is really important.
46:35 Speaker 01 Coming up, Ron Jay talks about how to inject courage into whatever culture you're operating in, workplace, et cetera, et cetera. And some strategies for becoming more bold.
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49:13 Speaker 01 So just to reset here, your overarching thesis is that courage is a skill that we can develop. The how of that is these nine Cs. We've been talking about the first six of the nine Cs, coping, confidence or conviction, commitment, connection, comprehension, and calm. The last three, plan, charisma, and culture are really about how to engender courage in an organization. You touched on this a little bit, not only through Shackleton, but also through your interest in sports coaches. But what should those of us who are in leadership positions, either in a workplace, or in a family, or in a friend group, know
49:54 Speaker 01 about how to get this, as you called, master virtue into the culture?
50:02 Speaker 03 So you know, as somebody who's been around organizations for a long time, I have learned one thing. Context matters. We are all social creatures. We respond to the social cues in our context. We are individual creatures too, but we, as much as we don't want to believe it, especially in America, we don't want to believe we are in any way socially influenced. We believe we're hyper individualist. Context matters. And I think what I would say is that as we look at context, even in a family, we have a context. We create, as a family, the parents create a context in which behavior is a manifest, what's acceptable,
50:43 Speaker 03 what's not. We role model it. We penalize some things and we recognize some things. So how do we create a context in which courage is not only recognized, but cherished and encouraged? And learning to be bold is something that we not only tolerate, but we actually support. And I tell you what context matters, like one of the companies I wrote a case study on, the leader, when he was gonna change the organizations, he said, somebody gave him advice and said, you can't turn sheep into wolves. So he said, what do you mean? He said, the advisor said, cull the sheep and hire some wolves.
51:28 Speaker 03 And he disagreed with it vigorously. And he said, I'm gonna teach sheep to be wolves. And he led this most incredible turnaround without laying off a single person. The same organization, the bottom rated bank in Singapore, nickname from DBS, it was called Damn Bloody Slow. It was the worst rated bank to the number one bank in the world in ten years. And he said, without laying off anybody. So he said, how do you change the context in which people? Not to underappreciate how context shapes our behavior. So those three chapters are really true for anybody thinking about what is the context you can create?
52:11 Speaker 03 In which people will find the ability to act more courageously. That's really what I was trying to get at there. Now, for the individual, the question I should ask is, we should all opt and self-select to be in contexts that encourage courageous behavior? If we wanna be courageous. You know, some organizations do not, others do. Let's pick one that everybody knows, Netflix is something I talk about in the book. So right now, we look at Netflix and say, oh, my God, how do these guys do it? They took on Blockbuster, which had seven thousand stores. They knocked out Blockbuster out of business. Then they shut down all their DVD rental warehouses, which they had used to
52:54 Speaker 03 knock out Blockbuster and moved into streaming. Then they said, oh, streaming is costing us too much money because you have to pay Disney and everybody else. Let's make our own content. Oh, then, by the way, if we're making our own content, let's make content in India and Turkey and South Africa and Brazil and everywhere else. And you're like, who are these guys? And then eventually they had to compete with Amazon, Apple, Disney, Paramount, and they're still winning the streaming war. And you're like, who are these guys? Reed Hastings was asked, who was the founder, CEO, what do you do as CEO? And you know what he said?
53:41 Speaker 03 I do nothing. I do nothing. Because he said, I've created a context in which they encourage experimentation, trying new things, failing, learning. He wants them all to take bold action. So that's the thing I think you have to, you know, so how do we create a context in which people, they call it context, not control. They call it freedom with responsibility. Right? So those are the kinds of things these people are able to do, is to create this kind of courageous action. So context is hugely important, I think, for all of us. There's a chapter I didn't write today, and I can tell you about that, the last chapter that never got written.
54:26 Speaker 01 Sure.
54:27 Speaker 03 Then the Dalai Lama wrote the foreword, so I didn't write that chapter. I said, like, you know, after the Dalai Lama, what am I gonna say? Is ultimate courage is to really look inwards. Even in the Bhagavad Gita and elsewhere, they talk about that. The scariest thing for human beings is to look inside. And so managing yourself is, I think, the hardest thing to do. We have all kinds of barriers and resistances. So I would say, I came to realize that ultimate courage, or overcoming this fear, is about dealing with our own inner journey. As a human being, what are my goals? What are my values?
55:13 Speaker 03 What's my purpose? What's my legacy? How do I think about myself? Those are scary for most of us, they're scary questions. And that's why we tend to shy away from them. See, I'm dizzy, I don't have time for this, you know, it's like, I don't wanna deal with this. So I think the inner journey, everything I've talked about as courage is an outer journey. But I've come to realize that the ultimate hardest of all is the inner journey. Because courage can be used in that direction as well.
55:44 Speaker 01 Well, I would agree with that in my own experience. You end the book on a sentiment that I also agree with. And it really is an echo of where we began this conversation that I believe your words are that courage is a journey, that we don't arrive at some perfect state of courage. This is a skill that develops over time. The words you use, I believe, are boldness begets boldness, that we can really nudge ourselves in this direction, step by step over time. Am I summarizing that correctly? And if so, what would you add?
56:19 Speaker 03 No, I think that's right. I think is people don't become bold overnight necessarily. Sometimes they do, situations demand it. Think about the snake study I told you about, where it took weeks and weeks for these kids to slowly overcome and understand their fear of snakes. And slowly then try to turn that into an acceptable situation. So courage shows its face in all corners of life. I interviewed a dear friend of mine, who just unfortunately passed away of cancer. And I interviewed her to, this is about a year and a half ago.
57:02 Speaker 03 And she was a healthy, young, athletic woman who had a cough that wouldn't go away. And then she eventually went to see her physician who said, let's do an X-ray. And they found a tumor in her lungs. And this thing then snowballed into a whole set of things. And she was amazing. You know, we don't use the word courage for people like that. I would describe as an epitome of courage. Because she was dealing with so much uncertainty. Because there was no clear treatment plan. You can do this, you can do that. Surgery, radiation, chemo, this maybe on the one hand, on the other, I don't know. It's too big, let's try to shrink it, let's try this first, let's try that first.
57:47 Speaker 03 And how she had to navigate this uncertainty in her life.
57:53 Speaker 03 Until the very end, in Buddhism, they say, you know, the biggest fear is fear of death. So you're confronting your mortality. And how do you do it with grace? Without reading my book, I think she relied on connections for support. She did comprehension by trying to get more information slowly to understand it. She relied on coping, a belief in some higher power or a higher force. Right? So I think part of the issue, I think, is the word courage is out there as a lofty word. It's for the heroic characters out there who do incredible things to save the world.
58:38 Speaker 03 And I think part of the hope I have is we make courage part of our daily vocabulary. I am courageous. Fear, it's okay, bring it on. I'm scared, yes. I am scared. It's a scary situation, but you know what? I'm going to figure out some way. I'm not going to let it paralyze me. I'm going to find some way forward. Might be reckless, might not be the right answer. But being paralyzed is not the answer either.
59:12 Speaker 01 Well said. Ranjai Gulati, the book is called How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage. Thank you very much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Great to meet you.
59:23 Speaker 03 Thank you, Dan. You are a master of this thing. Thank you very much.
59:30 Speaker 01 Thanks again to Ranjai. It was awesome to meet him. Also, don't forget to check out my new-ish meditation app. DanHarris.com is the place to sign up, join the party. There's a free 14-day trial if you want to try before you buy. Finally, thank you to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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1:01:50 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by Parloa. Look, most businesses want their customers to feel heard, not stuck waiting around for someone who can help. Nothing makes you feel less important than sitting on hold for hours, explaining the same problem to the fifth person who picks up.
1:02:09 Speaker 02 But here's the thing, the bigger you get, the harder it becomes to show up the way you want to in each customer interaction. Parloa solves that problem. Their voice-first AI agents handle customer conversations in a way that feels natural, personal, and helpful. They work 24/7 across voice, chat, and email in any language with zero wait time. Plus, your team gets access to features like Lens, which flags issues in real time, and Navigator, which figures out why those issues are happening and what to do next. It's secure, scalable, and built to serve the customer. When AI works well, it shouldn't feel like AI. It should feel like you're being seen and heard and valued.
1:02:54 Speaker 02 Unhold your customers with Parloa. Learn more at parloa.com. That's P-A-R-L-O-A dot com.
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