How to Build Courage and Silence Self-Doubt as an Author

Ferol Vernon (00:01.993)

Okay, welcome to the Written Word Media Podcast. I am Farrell Vernon and today I have Jonathan Graham with me from Daily Courage. Jonathan, how you doing, man?

Jonathan (00:12.719)

doing great. Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

Ferol Vernon (00:14.829)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks for joining us. So Jonathan runs a company called daily courage.com and you have spent the last little chunk of time focusing on courage. So I’m really excited to talk about how this applies to authors and how courage can be an asset for them. But how did you get into this? How did you pick courage as the thing that you wanted to focus your career on?

Jonathan (00:40.643)

Yeah, I had no idea that this is what I was gonna be doing, but I’m so grateful that I am doing it. I spent the last decade plus in Silicon Valley, working at a number of different companies. Most recently, I spent the last five years working at Apple, and I had two entrepreneurial failures before that. I had some scar tissue around failure, a lot of negative self-talk, but I knew that I would regret not actually trying again and being an entrepreneur. And one of the biggest regrets I had in life was not studying abroad and in school.

So I always wanted to speak another language. I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur again. I had a limited amount of time. And there’s a great book I’ll recommend called Die with Zero that played a role in this, but basically says all our years are not equally valuable. And to make the most out of your money, you need your money, your time and your health. So I took a leap of faith. I ended up leaving, my place and moving to Latin America with the intention of becoming conversationally fluent in Spanish. Ended up doing that. But before I left,

It was a huge surprise to all my friends, family and colleagues. And they asked me, hey, where did you get the courage to do this? And it turned out that I had been, yes, I was a product manager in technology and I basically read a number of different books and created some own little frameworks to help myself overcome these things, including getting on stage and doing standup comedy, skydiving, running with the bulls. And I realized, I could help productize this knowledge and help it with others. And so.

Ferol Vernon (01:44.076)

There it is.

Jonathan (02:03.778)

What started as just a short cohort-based course that I created for friends and family has now blossomed into a much bigger vision that I have of building out a whole business around helping remove fear as a barrier to human-

Ferol Vernon (02:16.501)

Amazing. so tell me what is it that spoke to you about courage? Like you talked about your, you know, how you kind of got into this, but what is it about that where you were like, that’s, that’s the thing I want to spend, you know, my time on. And that’s the thing that I want to bring to others.

Jonathan (02:30.731)

Yeah, so in product management, it’s largely driven by understanding that the role of a product manager, in case you’re not familiar, is to work with engineering teams and design teams and analytics teams to deliver a product. So I used to work, originally I started at Apple, I was working on Siri, and then I transitioned to the App Store and worked on product partnerships there. And you have a North Star metric that basically says, this is the thing that we’re optimizing for, and this is the best yield, the highest and best resource. If you have a team of engineers and designer,

What should we build? Should we build this feature? Should we build that feature? How do we think about what’s the best, you know, based on the business’s outcome, the goal that we have and the vision? And I started to think about my life as a product. I said, for the gifts that I’ve been given, the resources I have, what is the maximum way that I would think about using my time, energy, attention and the gifts that I’ve been given to have the most money back? And I realized that the North Star metric that I have is I wanted to positively impact as many lives as possible. And so the way that I wanted to do that,

is by helping people have more courage because courage isn’t the absence of fear, courage is the willingness to act in the face of fear. And so I believe that we all have a certain level of potential that we have, and most of us, if not all, are playing a level below where we could be. And to the degree that fear plays a role in that, I wanted to help close that gap. So that’s my life’s goal, is to positively impact as many lives as possible by helping people have more courage. So whether it’s writing a book, publishing a song, having an uncomfortable conversation.

leaving a job, leaving a relationship, all these things are a global tax on fear. Excuse me, a global tax on, fear is a global tax on society. And so fear is at the root of those things.

Ferol Vernon (04:11.627)

Got it, okay. And so this is amazing. one of our most popular blog posts at Rhythm World Media is we have a few posts on writer’s doubt or like self doubt, right? So where does this fear come from? Like in the writer, the creatives process, like why are people experiencing fear and how can courage help them with that?

Jonathan (04:32.51)

Absolutely. We all experience fear. So it’s part of the human experience and fear was designed as an evolutionary response to help us survive. That’s our goal is to survive. And it was fantastic when you think about this thousands of years ago, assuming the worst case scenario is what we needed to survive. If we’re on the Serengeti and you hear a rumble in the bushes and you’re wondering, is it a lion or is it a giraffe? Well, it’s in our advantage to assume the worst case scenario so that we can survive. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (05:00.051)

Get out of the way, right?

Jonathan (05:01.758)

And so our brain still works the exact same way. We still think about things from the worst case scenario. And if you’re thinking about that fear-based operating system, intentional about being able to do that, then you’ll fall victim to it. And courage is not the absence of fear. It is the willingness to act in the face of fear. So self-doubt is normal. Fear is normal. It is a biological, physiological, evolutionary response that we feel. The problem is when we have excess amounts of fear.

that is more than we actually need and that’s where it keeps us stuff.

Ferol Vernon (05:33.396)

Got it. That’s amazing. I think that’s really important because a lot of our writers and the folks listening, it can often be a very solo endeavor. It’s like you and your keyboard and you can experience this. I think it’s really important that everybody hears from Jonathan, who’s an expert in this, that this is normal. Everybody’s experienced this. It’s not that the writers that are out there succeeding are somehow magically not experiencing this emotion. They are too. But somehow they’re getting over that. And so Jonathan, how

How do people do that? What’s the physiological or psychological response that allows people to get through this fear?

Jonathan (06:03.957)

Yeah.

Jonathan (06:08.14)

Yes, so the first step is, there’s three things that I want everyone to make a habit. If you do these things, they will change your relationship with fear because I know it personally and I’ve also helped over 137 people do it as well. The first is writing that down. So I want you to create a fear log. So this is, can do it in a Google notes file, you can do it in Excel, you can do it pen and paper, does not matter. But the point is that you start being aware of your fears. And there’s so much power in this.

because we have thousands of thoughts a day and most of us don’t think about them in an analytical way of understanding any patterns or understanding the validity of them. So there’s a law that says, you, so literally in the fear log, I want you to do is what is the scenario? So I might be at my keyboard, I’m about to press send and I have some sort of anticipation of an unwanted experience or outcome. What is the scenario? What is the surface level fear? And then what is the level of intensity? If you just do that thing and

keep a log of your fears and once a week you go back through them and you want to fact check your fear, just like there’s fake news on the internet, right? And their politicians will lie to you. Fear more often than not is an acronym that stands for false evidence appearing real. Fear is more often than not a false prophet. So a prophet prophesies of things that are going to come. So it’ll tell us as a writer or creative, people are not gonna like your work. You’re gonna fail, you’re gonna be judged. you’re no good.

Who are you? All these things, your false evidence appearing real and it’ll tell us these worst case story outcomes that never end up happening. So that’s the first step is being aware of your fear. The second is run that through the facts framework. So this is five steps to help you fact check your fear. The first is to find the fear. So you wanna name it so you can untame it. This is literally, there’s power in literally just naming things. There’s a science behind all these things. We don’t have the time to go into all of them. But the point is that when you make something specific,

and clear, you remove its power. So the movie, The Shining, movie Blair Witch Project, the movie Final Destination, all three of these were hit, know, commercial movies that are in the horror space. They all have one thing in common. They don’t show the monster. And that’s because ambiguity, ambiguity amplifies anxiety. So if you can be super specific about the thing that you are actually fearful of, you now begin the first and the most important step in solving it. So that’s F, first step.

Ferol Vernon (08:17.0)

That’s fascinating.

Jonathan (08:29.884)

Step two is A is the accessibility of POS Welcomes. We always get the worst case scenario for free. You don’t have to plant.

Ferol Vernon (08:36.712)

That’s amazing. Yeah.

Jonathan (08:39.722)

You don’t have to plant weeds in your garden. It’s just a part of the reality in this world. so think about, we always think about the worst case scenario, but you never think about the most likely case scenario or the best case scenario. So you want to have at least three of those. F-A-C-T-S.

Ferol Vernon (08:43.548)

Yeah, it’s gonna happen, yeah.

Ferol Vernon (08:52.807)

Yeah. Right. That’s kind of like, that’s like, you know, you might get hit by a bus tomorrow, but you probably won’t, right? Yeah.

Jonathan (08:58.986)

Correct, correct, exactly, exactly. So FAC is calculate the probability of those outcomes. So just try and sign a quick waiting to it. So I’d like your point of, I could get hit by a bus, but let me think about the likelihood of this. I’ll never leave my house if I’m worried about those things. So just sign a quick waiting to it. Step four is T is to take steps to de-risk. This is the most important one that you can do like actionably. What can I do? Can I watch a YouTube video?

Can I take a course? Can I, instead of me having to publish this as a full blog or a book, can I just put something on Substack? Can I write it as a tweet? Can I do a little micro testing of these things? Can I run it by friends or family? There’s a number of different steps that you can do to de-risk. Can I publish it under a pen name? All these things that you’re worried about, that worst case outcome, there are different things that you can do to reduce that. And the last in the FACTS framework is the step back for perspective. So there’s a great rule that I love. It says if it won’t matter in five years,

Don’t let it matter for more than five minutes. So ultimately, you publishing a book that isn’t well received probably doesn’t have this catastrophic outcome that you think it is. The people that love you, your dog, your fans, your family, you still have your health. There’s so many things that you have that are going for you. So that’s the second technique. And the third, last is the soup list. So confidence is the residue. It is a byproduct of courageous action. So literally, this soup list helps you become more confident. And this is another list I want you to write down.

And SUP stands for stacks of undeniable proof. So imagine self doubt. Imagine fear being a prosecutor coming to you with charges and you are in a courtroom and now you are equipping the defense attorney with all the evidence for why you are not guilty. You are not a fraud. So your SUP list is all the times where fear is lied to you in the past. That’s why the fear log is so important because you see, these worst case scenarios did not actually happen every time that you’ve

Ferol Vernon (10:51.087)

Interesting, yeah.

Ferol Vernon (10:55.696)

They never happened, right? It’s great.

Jonathan (10:57.417)

Yes, Penn State University did a research on this and they found that 91.4 % of the fears that people had never came true. And then another 8 % of the ones that did actually happen didn’t even reach the magnitude of which people were fearing. And so more of the story is when you have that soup list, anything that you’re proud of, your self-fordoing, where you had to rise to the occasion, right? That’s literally what confidence is. It comes from your belief in the ability to rise to the occasion. And so the soup list is now hardcore evidence.

that you have, that you are that person that can do those tough things. So I call those things the key three. I want everybody to make those a habit. If you really do them, they will change your relationship with fear.

Ferol Vernon (11:30.854)

That’s amazing. I love that. So there’s the…

Ferol Vernon (11:37.936)

That’s amazing. And I love how actionable and easy to remember that stuff is. So I think a lot of people listening, these are writers largely. We have some creatives that are sort of ancillary, but mostly these are authors. And I think they often wrestle with this self-doubt. And a big part of that is like, is my work good enough? I think that’s really common when I speak with authors. That’s like one of the most common fears. so do you have anything specific? Obviously the things you just mentioned are

amazing. Anything specific to sort of the creative process that you think is especially applicable that might be less applicable to the general population or is this sort of fear really just related to more generally the things that we’re scared of?

Jonathan (12:22.426)

No, this is great. would say if they haven’t already, would say Julia Cameron, who wrote a book called The Art Its Way, all about creativity, that should be in your library. Rick Rubin has a book called The Creative Act. In there, he says that, okay, perfect. He’s got some great, even if you don’t want to read the book, you can go watch a podcast interview with him. And then there he basically says, your creative work is a gift of God. And it’s not for you to criticize in doing that.

Ferol Vernon (12:29.722)

Got it.

Ferol Vernon (12:34.537)

I loved that book.

Jonathan (12:50.002)

and it’s to express and your job is just do the best that you can do. As long as you’ve given the best, let the rest happen. The Intergame of Tennis by Timothy Goway, it’s a book, it’s about tennis, but it’s all about the mind. think those are really great. Steven Pressfield is a writer who I love. His book, The War of Art, all about the creative process. His book, Turning Pro, and just understanding the process that, you know.

Ferol Vernon (13:11.269)

Yeah, I’ve heard of that.

Jonathan (13:20.208)

you are doing something that is inherently going to require risk for a sense of social risk in doing something. And the way that you get good at it is by going through it. You’re never gonna become better by avoiding it. And every writer will tell you that. And even to the degree of fear being false evidence appearing real, one of my favorite books, The Alchemist by Paul Aquila. This is a classic book favorited by Oprah Winfrey and…

Ferol Vernon (13:35.236)

Right.

Jonathan (13:49.061)

Matthew McConaughey, many, different celebrities. This book sold like all of two copies in its first six months. The author talks about this. It sold like millions of copies now, right? And he talks about that. And I would also say positive intelligence. This is based on some really great neuroscience. Shuzhad Shamim is the author of this book. It’s a New York Times bestselling author, but everyone can go take a assessment. It’s about saboteurs that we have. So really great book, not so great cover, but love you Shuzhad. But there’s a…

Ferol Vernon (13:54.767)

Hahaha

Jonathan (14:18.457)

saboteur assessment that you can can read and understand, it’ll help you understand yourself. It’s totally free. And we all have saboteurs. And these developed from a protective state of mind early on. And ultimately, they end up holding us back. So the critic, the judge, the victim saboteur, these are all different things that we have. But I did stand up comedy. And one of the things that my teacher, my instructor taught me was, when you are in the creative mode, you are not in the critique mode. So

In order for you to do your best work, you have to be fully present and just focus on creating. There will be a time and place for you to go back and critique. But when you’re in the critique mode, you cannot be a fan to yourself when you’re doing that.

Ferol Vernon (14:52.26)

That’s amazing.

Ferol Vernon (15:00.121)

Yeah. That’s so important. think, cause so, so many writers, you know, and there’s, there’s lots of different camps, right? Some folks, right. Just blast through it. And then they go back and edit. Some people edit as they go. But I think, you know, what I’m kind of hearing from you is that like, it’s really a mindset thing, right? Like you have to be in creative mindset and not sort of in your editor mindset, even if you do that editing, and that critiquing of your own work, which I think everybody does, it’s important to sort of really make sure those two things are separate. Yeah. Amazing.

Jonathan (15:16.614)

100%.

Jonathan (15:27.525)

Exactly.

Ferol Vernon (15:30.093)

And so I think one question that I have about this, this sort of fear that, that you’re mentioning is when do we experience that? Because for me, at least when I’m trying to do something, there’s both like this fear, this anticipation, like, I have to go give a presentation that I’m not so sure about, or I’m like scared of the audience. And then there’s actually doing it. And for, for writers, lot of time there’s like, my gosh, I’m going have to sit in front of that blank page. And then there’s sometimes where like I’m releasing the book. Right. And so

Jonathan (15:48.091)

Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (15:58.52)

What’s the relationship there between anticipation and the actual act itself when it comes to fear?

Jonathan (16:03.386)

Yeah, no, this is great. So fear, by just definition, is the anticipation of an unwanted experience or outcome. And so anytime that we experience fear, we’re simply, so we always experience in the present, but it’s always about something in the future that we don’t want to have happen. So it’s important that you remember that because when we have the opportunity, when we are experiencing fear, we actually have the opportunity to practice courage. So that’s why my company is called Daily Courage.

Ferol Vernon (16:20.771)

Right.

Jonathan (16:33.059)

because I want it to be a daily habit, just because courage is like a muscle. And this is actually from, I wish I could take credit for this, but Robert Biswas-Diner is a researcher. He’s a PhD in psychology. He wrote a whole book called The Courage Quotient. And he was set.

Ferol Vernon (16:46.109)

By the way, Jonathan, I just, I love that you have all these books like right there. And for those of you listening or on video, Jonathan is like pulling up like these incredible books of like all the things that he’s talking about. He’s obviously has his library close by, which is really cool. Anyway, go ahead.

Jonathan (17:00.336)

Yeah, Robert wrote a great book. He’s a happiness researcher and came across the connection between courage and happiness. And in here he says that courage is like a muscle. And so just like any muscle, in order for it to grow, whether it’s your biceps, your triceps, your quads, you have to experience discomfort and you have to do it repeatedly over time. so courage is exact same way. Fear is simply the anticipation of an unwanted experience or outcome.

So whether it’s me doing my taxes, worrying about publishing an article, my newsletter, publishing content, it’s always about anticipating some experience, some feeling that I don’t wanna have and me thinking about that. so courage is the willingness to act in the face of fear. And so simply acknowledging that that’s part of it and that the way that you become more courageous, the way that becomes stronger is literally by doing it. So courage is the muscle, fear is the weight. A 10 pound weight is a 10 pound weight. Fear will never go away.

But as you get stronger, lifting a 10 pound weight becomes easier. And so as you do these courage reps, you see that your courage muscle becomes stronger. And so over time, the level of intensity, the duration and the frequency all become smaller. So you’re able to deal with fear in a much better way. It’s like playing whack-a-mole. You just get better at knocking it up.

Ferol Vernon (18:18.21)

Yeah. So let me ask you this, and I’m sure this is something that everybody is thinking right now as they’re listening, is like, do I ever get it to a point where it doesn’t actually feel scary? can I practice this muscle so much that I’m never worried about the outcomes? Or is it really, this is always something that you deal with and it just gets a little bit softer?

Jonathan (18:39.525)

Yeah, I think there’s a point where it becomes negligible, where you’re able to see it for what it is. So I’ve done this literally hundreds of times in my head, the fear log, whether it’s public speaking, going up to someone as a stranger, publishing something, I’m able to spot it, and then I’m able to, that’s why it’s habitual, I’m able to fact check my fear in real time, and I’m like, okay, now I can spot it. And this is something that you just get better at with anything else. But Steph Curry, they will tell you.

Ferol Vernon (18:42.54)

Okay.

Jonathan (19:08.097)

Many of the world’s best performers, they still experiencing anxiety, which is another form of fear. And this is also, this is really important as well. And this is why the soup list is so important for you to do, because it’s really not about the event. So I have a phrase that I say, separate the sting from the story. The sting is the event, the outcome that we don’t wanna have happen that carries the emotional pain. But the story is what we attach to it.

And that’s so important. And so if I tell myself a story that because people didn’t read my article or I didn’t get enough clicks or I didn’t get views, that means I’m not worthwhile.

Ferol Vernon (19:48.396)

Interesting.

Jonathan (19:48.76)

That’s the hard thing. That’s the part that limits us. But if I have a different story that says, you know what? This is actually on the path to greatness. I have a story that says, know, so and so face bankruptcy too. They face failure too. This is what it means to be great. This is what it feels like to get better. It’s so important. So the sting is inevitable in life. We will fail. We will get rejected. That is inevitable. But it’s so important that you understand the story that you’re telling yourselves.

Ferol Vernon (20:15.765)

That’s amazing. Yeah. And I think, you know, it’s really interesting because I think that’s a very useful mindset because, know, our listeners are all storytellers, right? And so you’re, telling yourself some story that may or may not be true. And I think the thing that I think is really empowering about what you just said is that you’re in control of that story, right? Like you get to tell yourself whether that story is true or not, you get to guide it. And I think that can be really motivating for people once they’re able to grasp it. Yeah. So.

Jonathan (20:39.715)

100%.

Ferol Vernon (20:43.202)

We talked about a couple of practical behaviors. You talked about keeping your fear log, which I think is such a cool idea. I’m totally going to do that starting tomorrow, by the way. But what are some other things that people can do? What are some other techniques? Obviously, there’s the author that’s sitting down at their computer for a writing session. We talked about that a little bit. But as they’re going around the other parts of their life, reading reviews, maybe getting a rejection letter from an editor or from a publicist or somebody like that,

Jonathan (20:47.905)

Mm-hmm.

Ferol Vernon (21:12.417)

What are some other techniques that people can use on their daily life to try to build courage?

Jonathan (21:16.78)

Yeah, I think the number one thing is don’t stay in your head. Don’t stay in your head. so literally the word courage, the way, courage comes from the root word of courage. So I lived in Latin America, was learning Spanish. How you say courage in Spanish is coraje. And how you say corazón is how you say heart. So the root word for courage comes from French. That was the first etymology of it was to express one’s heart.

Ferol Vernon (21:38.197)

Yeah, right.

Jonathan (21:45.004)

And so courage comes from the heart and fear lives in the head because we’re always anticipating something. So the more that you operate from this place of your heart and you’re not getting caught up in your head, which is where self doubt lives, it is these anticipations and all these other things. literally one, don’t get in your head, like externalize it as soon as possible. This is why the fear log is important. Name it so you can tame it. Ambiguity amplifies anxiety. But the second is don’t do it alone. And so this is really why the work that I do, I never do it.

Ferol Vernon (21:57.195)

Yep.

Jonathan (22:14.709)

one-on-one because courage is contagious, but so is cowardice. And so there’s power, there’s so much power in other people’s stories and their shared experiences. So when you read a biography of someone, an autobiography, even the Wikipedia page, there’s a sense of community and understanding that this is, you know, I’m not alone in this. But when you are going through an experience, all experiences in life, whether good or bad, are better shared. And so for you to be in community, have a small writing circle, have other friends,

Ferol Vernon (22:18.507)

Hmm, interesting.

Jonathan (22:44.514)

or buddies and accountability pod, but just small wins that you can have and just an understanding that makes a world of difference.

Ferol Vernon (22:52.32)

Got it. Is there, cause these kinds of groups occur very naturally for writers. There’s people that review each other’s work, people that help get each other unstuck, they share tips, all that kind of stuff. And we’ve heard time and time again, how valuable those sort of micro communities are for creatives and specifically for writers. Is there like a number, you said, know, courage is contagious, but so is cowardice. Is there like an ideal number for one of these groups? is…

Is three good enough? Is it better with 10? Is it worse with 10? Like how do you think about the size of the community when you’re trying to build this muscle?

Jonathan (23:25.283)

Yeah, as small as three is plenty. mean, even as small as two. I would say just don’t do it by yourself because you’re going to fall victim to your worst thoughts and these patterns. having accountability, but yes, I think having three to five people is great. And you can have a level of intimacy and trust and vulnerability and you all grow together. And yeah, there’s so much power in community. I don’t know if this is going to be a future product offering of written word media, but it sounds like it should be one if it’s not already.

Ferol Vernon (23:27.764)

Yeah. Yeah.

Ferol Vernon (23:55.083)

Well, yeah, know why we talk about this all the time. Like how can we, and I, you know, I give this talk about EOS for authors, which is a, it’s a different talk, but it’s a, operating system for how to keep yourself accountable for, for executing work. And one of the things I do at the end was I say, Hey, if you don’t have an accountability partner, just email me. Right. And I put my, put my email address on the thing and invariably, you know, most of people in the audience don’t email me, but you know, I get, you know, three or four or five people every time I give that talk emailing me. it’s so salient because I’m like,

Jonathan (24:04.385)

Yeah

Ferol Vernon (24:23.348)

You know, it’s amazing that these people reached out. don’t know me. They just like showed up at some talk that I’m giving. And it’s really a cool thing, but I think it underscores the need for communities, even if they’re really small, to help you make progress.

Jonathan (24:34.454)

Yeah, and the creator, like, it’s a lonely path. Being an entrepreneur, being an author, it’s a lonely path. And there’s already going to be things that are challenging about it. There’s no need to make it harder on yourself by trying to do it alone. And even the way that we met, we both made an investment to be in community for a weekend with other people that are building audience-based businesses. And because we understand that ourselves, right? And there’s value in sharing your journey.

Ferol Vernon (24:48.48)

Yeah, that’s amazing.

Yeah, right.

Jonathan (25:03.916)

helping each other along and sharing wins and also potentially going through the downs. So absolutely, don’t get stuck in your head and don’t do it alone.

Ferol Vernon (25:11.424)

Absolutely. That’s all.

There you go, I love that. And then one of the things that we’re always looking at here is output, right? And so sometimes a writer will measure, you know, words type per day. That’s just like a rough measure output or books published per year or something like that. With building this courage muscle, how do we measure it? Because it’s really something that is, like you said, it is a little bit in your head and we can keep our fear log, but how do you score whether or not you’re getting better?

Jonathan (25:41.599)

Yeah, that’s a great question. And this is something that Dr. Robert Bissler-Zehner actually has in the courage quotient. there’s, and I’m behind on this as well, is actually productizing this because I, even my own insecurity, I haven’t gotten to a place where I want the website to publish it and have this quiz. But yes, there will be on dailycourage.com. So measure your courage quotient. We’ll give you a scalar value between one and a hundred, and then we’ll also break it out between the six types of courage. So there’s emotional, there’s physical courage.

Ferol Vernon (25:45.183)

I love it, a book. Yeah.

Jonathan (26:11.362)

There’s emotional courage, there’s social courage, there’s moral courage, there’s intellectual courage and spiritual courage. So that will tell you where you are, give you a starting point, and then you can measure it over time. So just like muscle, we all may have a different starting point, but there are things that we can do to grow it over time, but if you don’t use it, you will lose it.

Ferol Vernon (26:28.831)

Amazing. And then, you know, I wonder, do you have any stories? Cause you’ve worked with a lot of folks on this and you’ve done obviously a ton of reading and research and become really an expert in this. What are some like salient stories where somebody has overcome courage and it’s really like transformed what they’ve done or, obviously we’re looking at the creative aspect of this thing, but you know, what are the kinds of examples that you can share with somebody’s like made a big breakthrough? And I’d love to just hear a little bit more about that.

Jonathan (26:55.033)

yeah, people who’ve started building brands on social media. A couple of number of people do that. That’s a very common thing, the courage to create. So many people have been wanting to build a personal brand. They see the value of having an audience in doing that. One of other students just submitted an LOI. They got accepted on a business of buying a plant nursery. They wanted to move from one career path to buying small businesses. And they understood the mechanics of business buying, but not like the psychology of it.

I’m signing a personal guarantee, etc. And yeah, I mean, there’s another person just sent me a I do have a thing called Shoot Your Shot Sunday. So I shoot a basketball every week for the metaphor and encourage people to shoot their shot. And I highlight folks who have done that. And I just got a text message on Saturday from someone who wants to change jobs, saw somebody on a panel and they reached out to them and now they’re interviewing because they sent a cold DM. So yeah, it’s very gratifying work.

Ferol Vernon (27:41.15)

That’s cool.

Ferol Vernon (27:52.421)

I bet.

Jonathan (27:53.546)

to, you know, it’s a form of non-monetary compensation to see people, you know, make progress towards their goal.

Ferol Vernon (27:59.912)

That’s amazing. And I want to just touch briefly on authenticity here because, you know, there’s one school of thought that’s like, hey, fake it till you make it. Like if somebody is, you know, pretending, right, this is imposter syndrome stuff, hey, I’m pretending that I’m doing this, but I’m able to get over it. Does that help me with courage or is that a way of sort of skirting the issue and just getting by the actual event itself?

Jonathan (28:21.952)

I’m so glad you brought that up. So Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who you may know, he’s an author, worked on Wall Street. He’s written a number of different books, The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. He actually has a quote that says, courage is the only virtue you can’t fake.

So you can fake being generous, you can fake being kind and considerate, you can fake being a good human being, but you can’t fake courage because you actually have to do it. You gotta feel the fear and do it anyways. And so I am not a fan of telling people to fake it till you make it. I am a fan of telling people to faith it till you make it or face it till you make it. So fear, one of those acronyms that we mentioned is false evidence appearing real. The other that I love is face everything and rise.

And so this is really facing your fears. Our natural inclination is not to want to sit with an uncomfortable feeling. We want to have our fight or flight reactions always kick in and we want to turn away from it. There’s so much power with sitting with your fear. And another book for you, Dr. David Hawkins, an actual MD and PhD, spent 20 years doing research and found that each emotion that we experience maps to a frequency. And this is called the map of consciousness that he has in here. It’s fascinating stuff.

Ferol Vernon (29:19.966)

Yeah, of course.

Ferol Vernon (29:26.583)

Hahaha

Jonathan (29:39.55)

Courage is at a, and he broke it down to a scale and it’s logarithmic, but courage is at the level of 200, which is a critical level of hitting the higher levels of enlightenment and nirvana and love. At the lower level is fear. So fear, shame, guilt, pride, and anger is where about 85 % of the global population, according to his research, lives. And only about 49 % of Americans are there. So one out of two people you meet, the primary state that they’re in is fear, shame, anger, pride, and guilt.

and you can never create your best work there. The best decisions in life are never seldom are made from a place of fear. And so that’s what I want to get people to do is face everything, face the fear. What is it that I’m really having? And then rise to the higher level of energy to actually pass courage and to love. Cause that’s really where, when you think about where self data is, it’s your ego worrying about you, you, you. You’re not thinking about the person who’s going to read your book and whose life you could potentially change. So when you make the focus not on you and you start thinking about who you can serve.

Ferol Vernon (30:30.535)

Right.

Jonathan (30:39.197)

your best position to serve the person that you once were. Find your uniqueness and exploit it in service of others. When you really have that mindset, it makes things a whole lot easier.

Ferol Vernon (30:49.436)

amazing. Alright, so Jonathan, we’re kind of coming to a close here, I want to ask you, if there’s one thing you could say, let’s say there’s a writer out there who’s struggling with this, and they’re scared of hitting published, they’re scared of getting started, whatever it is, what’s like the one thing you could say to them?

Jonathan (31:06.332)

Yeah, do it scared. Do it scared. This is what my, this changed my life. So it was literally like an aha moment for me. So one of my really good friends told me, her dad told her this, and she was like, do it scared. And I’m like, so many of us interpret fear as a stop sign. Because I felt fear, means that was a permission for me not to do anything. And it’s simply, courage is not the absence of fear, it’s the willingness to act in the face of fear. And society, when you think about how many,

Ferol Vernon (31:08.636)

I love that.

Jonathan (31:35.195)

advancements in society all come because of people are willing to continue through fear. Whether it’s social and different leaders from different movements willing to deal with ridicule, the Wright brothers for commercial aerospace, they had to fail a number of times. Any drug compound, you think about thousands of drug compounds that have to happen, they have to fail before we find one that actually makes it through two clinical trials and then even a, know, probably one out of 10 makes that before we can actually get that breakthrough. So

The advancement of society is dependent upon people who are willing to fail. People are willing to experience fear and discomfort. At no point of any movie have you ever gone and wanted to celebrate the person who operated from the lens of cowardice. The hero’s journey involves failure. It involves tension. It involves a triumph over good versus evil and succumbing to the lower levels of fear is not what any one of us aspire to. So you are riding your own hero’s journey. When you see your fear, you face it and you move for it.

Add it to your soup list. Do it scared.

Ferol Vernon (32:34.844)

Do it scared. I love that. What a place to close. Jonathan, thank you so much for talking to me today. If people want to find out more about daily courage and more about what you’re doing, where can they go to learn more?

Jonathan (32:44.624)

DailyCourage.com and I am Daily Courage on all social media platforms.

Ferol Vernon (32:50.172)

amazing. All right, well, that is the pod for today. Ladies and gentlemen, go out there, make your fear log, do it scared. And thank you, Jonathan, for joining me.

Jonathan (32:57.148)

Yes. Thank you Farrell. My pleasure.

Ferol Vernon (33:01.243)

Cheers.