1100: How to Be Bold in the Face of Uncertainty (According to Science) with Dr. Ranjay Gulati

Pete Mockaitis
Ranjay, welcome!

Ranjay Gulati
Thank you. A pleasure to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about boldness and everyday courage and all the ways we can make that happen.

Ranjay Gulati
Yeah, I’m excited to talk to you today. And I think, you know, this has been a topic I’ve been studying for the last four years, so seeing it come to fruition is a relief and a delight both at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just before we pushed record, you started saying great stuff about why right now, right now is when it’s really important to tap into some extra courage and why. So why don’t we pick it up right there? Why now?

Ranjay Gulati
Well, the one thing I don’t need to tell you, you already know this, is that we are right now in what Harvard Business Review calls an uncertainty crisis. We have technological uncertainty, “Where is AI going and how is that going to affect my job?” We have regulatory uncertainty, “Where are tariffs going? How is that going to affect my job?” We have geopolitical uncertainty, “How is that going to affect me and my job?” We have political uncertainty. We have environmental uncertainty. We have health uncertainty. And now there’s uncertainty everywhere.

Now remember, uncertainty is not the same as risk. Uncertainty is where you don’t know the outcomes. Risk is where you, kind of, more or less can model the outcomes, you put some pros and cons, you put some probability on them. And the last piece of the puzzle to understand is when there’s uncertainty, uncertainty activates in the human brain. It really goes right to the primitive brain, the survivalistic kind of reptilian brain, and activates the primal human emotion of fear.

And fear hijacks the amygdala, so you can’t even think straight. And you go into what people usually call fight or flight, but rarely do we fight. It goes to flight or freeze mode. And so, it’s normal to recognize and acknowledge that it’s scary, “I’m scared, but what am I going to do about it?” And that’s where courage comes into the picture.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly, an uncertainty crisis. That sounds like one of the most anxious crises you can have. It’s a crisis about uncertainty itself. And I like that distinction there in terms of risk, right? It’s like, “Huh, maybe I’ll try this thing, and it’s either going to work or it’s not. All right.” That’s risk. Whereas, uncertainty is like, “We have no idea what could unfold in terms of, like, what the options may well be.”

And, yeah, it’s sort of funny, in a way. It’s almost sort of like the air we breathe or the water we swim in. It’s, like, you say that, and it’s like, “Well, yeah.” But it’s like, “Oh, wait a second. It wasn’t always like this.” It wasn’t always like this, but, yes, now that is our everyday reality. We are besieged by uncertainty on numerous dimensions, almost always.

Ranjay Gulati
Yeah. And I think, honestly, I think the question is, “How do we then deal with uncertainty? And how do we deal with the fear?” And I want to go back, when you talk about courage, is to go back to the Wizard of Oz. And if you remember the character, the Lion in the Wizard of Oz, and what does the Lion want? He wants courage.

And, ultimately, when he reaches the Wizard after this tortuous journey, and he tells the Wizard, “I want courage,” and the Wizard says, “But you already have courage because you got here, you took actions in spite of your fear.” And so, I think it’s the first starting point to understand this journey that I’m talking about, is courage is taking action in the face of fear. It’s not the absence of fear.

Very few people in this world are fearless. Most of us experience fear when we encounter uncertainty. And the question is, “How do we build tolerance for that fear? How do we learn to outwit fear? How do we learn to tame fear? How do we learn to face fear? How do we learn to normalize fear instead of succumbing to fear?” That gets to the heart of the issue, is that, “What is my response to normal fear that I’m going to experience in these trying times?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Ranjay, that sounds nice, to have that set of skills, in terms of just our experience of living life and our emotional internal state of mind. I’d also love it if you could make the case for us. Perhaps you have a story of someone who mastered some of these skills and saw some cool results in their career. Or, what’s really at stake for us, whether we continue bumbling along as we are, versus really mastering some of, well, the nine Cs we’re going to get into of being courageous?

Ranjay Gulati
So, courage can manifest either in an instant. There’s a moment that comes up and suddenly you have to step up or not. Or, it can be very deliberate, well thought-out, and how you kind of operate and think through that. Let me give you examples of both. One is an instant one who is Brandon Tsay. So, Brandon Tsay is a young gentleman in his mid-20s, mild-mannered, slightly built, very pacifist gentleman.

In fact, he told me that he’d never really ever gotten to any fist fights or anything like that. He always ran away from a fight. And he’s a cashier at a dance hall in Southern California, a dance hall started by his grandmother. And he’s working behind the cubicle where there’s a cashier desk. And just a typical ordinary evening, the gentleman walks in with a gun.

And Brandon knows right away this is not good. Now the question is, “What is he going to do?” So, one side of him is saying, “Let me duck under the table. Maybe he won’t see me, and this, too, shall pass. I will be there to live fight another day.”

But something gets into him, and he comes out of the cashier’s area, through the door outside, into the lobby, and gets into a fight with this guy who starts punching him. In the process of punching Brandon, who’s taking the punches, he manages to pull the guy’s gun away and gets him out of there. He has no idea why he did it.

Now I had to really probe with him to understand why he did it, but it was in the moment. Now let me juxtapose this against another character whom I interviewed who was a former student of mine – Frances Haugen. Frances is Harvard MBA, you know, hard-charging, doing a great job, having a phenomenal tech career and is now at Facebook.

And she is very troubled by the content on Facebook and what it’s doing to people. And she doesn’t do much about it, she’s just thinking about it and is troubled by it. Then she sees one of her own close friends getting radicalized by Facebook content.

She also sees internal research showing that Facebook knows what their content is doing. So, she has to do, “What am I going to do?” She spends almost a year deliberating on what she’s going to do. Ultimately, she decides she’s going to be a whistleblower, even though it may end her career, which it did. But she felt she had to do something.

So, these are two very different characters, but if you try to understand, and none of them, neither one of them had really shown, they were not like these heroic people who were former Navy SEAL, you know, had been out there, they were always kind of on the front of things, but something activated in them, the capacity to take bold action in the face of uncertainty.

And that’s what I try to understand. How did they resource themselves? How did they find the self-courage to do something they, otherwise, would not have done in the face of uncertainty?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny you said Frances Haugen. I was like, “Wait, I know that name. That’s in the news. Oh, yeah, that Frances Haugen, the famous whistleblower.” So, she was a student of yours.

Ranjay Gulati
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you knew her, pre-whistleblowing times.

Ranjay Gulati
A long time ago, yes. Not very well. She was one among many of my students. But I wouldn’t have flagged her.

Pete Mockaitis
But she wasn’t like a fiery. Yeah, nothing?

Ranjay Gulati
No, I would not have flagged her and said, “Oh, she’s, one day, going to go and whistle-blow.” You know, I think that was my learning. In many instances, these are ordinary people who somehow find in themselves the capacity to be courageous.

Mahatma Gandhi was an ordinary Indian gentleman who wanted to be an English lawyer. He wanted to live in England. Nelson Mandela was not about to be a leader.

So, you have all these people who somehow, and that was what my learning was, “How do they resource? What triggers them? And how do they resource themselves to become courageous?” Because I believe courage is a choice. It’s a choice we all can make and it can really unlock our human potential in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, yes, I’d love to dig into exactly this. When you say “What triggers them?” it’s interesting, you have an equation, which I find intriguing, that fear equals uncertainty, plus loss of control. And I was chewing on this for a while before we got on because, I suppose, if we have something real bad is going to happen to us, but we’re certain of it, the feeling isn’t so much fear.

Like, let’s say, “I’m going to get fired. I know it. Layoffs are happening. I am right in the crosshairs. I’ve got a meeting scheduled with HR, and they never schedule meetings with me. Many other people have been fired. So, it’s pretty much a certainty. I’m going to be fired.” Because there’s no more uncertainty, it doesn’t really feel like fear, so much as I guess dread, disappointment, sadness, resignation.

And then loss of control, there’s uncertainty if we go to the casino, but we chose to be there. Hopefully, we set good limits, “I have $100 to lose at Blackjack,” or whatever. And so, it’s like, “Yeah, there’s uncertainty, but I’m not afraid. This is fun. This is exciting.”

So, anyway, I was just mulling over your equation, and that’s what I came to, but you’re the master. Tell us about this equation and how it impacts how we approach situations.

Ranjay Gulati
So, back to what I was saying, when the human brain, when normal people encounter uncertainty, it typically comes also with feeling of loss of control. And when you have both those things happening simultaneously, it activates in us the primal human emotion of fear. In fact, one of the books I read had a whole chapter on what they call the good coward. Because we use the word cowardice or coward as a very, very negative label. It’s one of the worst things you can call somebody.

But actually, I found cowardice is normal. That’s the default for most of us human beings. Courage is an exception. So, the default for most of us in our jobs, whenever we encounter any form of uncertainty, whether it is job uncertainty, or it could be a project uncertainty, it could be a proposal uncertainty, it could be whatever form of uncertainty, the natural, normal human response is one of fear. And we need to get okay with that and not be, first of all, ashamed.

I used to be ashamed of my fear. When I’d get scared, I’m like, “Oh, I’m not allowed to be ashamed, fearful. I mean, geez, look at James Bond and look at Clint Eastwood and look at Jason Bourne and look at all these people. How can I be scared?” Because in my mind, courage was fearless behavior.

But then once I understood that, once I understood that fear was a normal human response, and once I understood that I needed to find a way to tame my fear, I then tried to understand, “How do people, others, how do they resource themselves and what can I learn from that? Are there some systematic things?”

And I found, actually, a body of research that I tried to understand, it was fragmented, and understanding the research and my own research into this, I was able to triangulate and come up with what I thought was a set of practices that all of us can use to make courage accessible to us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds very appealing. So, here’s a great starting point, that cowardice is the default, fear is to be expected, no need to shame ourselves. Just understand, “Yep, that’s what’s going to happen here. That’s the natural response.” And, thusly, we can choose to go about doing some empowering. So, yeah, let’s do that.

I understand you’ve got, in your book, the nine Cs of courage: coping, confidence, commitment, connection, comprehension, calm, clan, charisma, and culture. Could you maybe give us the one-minute snapshot of what you mean by each of these things? And then we’ll just have some fun digging into the juiciest bits.

Ranjay Gulati
So just to, first, classify them, the first six Cs are at individual courage. The last three are about organizational courage, or team courage even. So let me start with the individual courage. The first one being coping. It’s important to understand that human behavior is not only rational, but it’s also interpretive. It’s how we look at situations. How do we draw meaning in storytelling? What is our story?

So, the first piece of coping is, “What’s your story?” If you have a story about, “I need to do something. I’m committed. It’s not “I’m interested.” It’s, “I’m committed,” that’s a different way of coping with the fear. The next one is comprehension, which is, “I’m looking at the gray, the foggy uncertainty out there. I’m not going to just leap into it. I’m going to do what a firefighter does. I’m going to tiptoe my way in and learn and take small steps into it.” So that’s comprehension.

Another one is connection, “I’m not going to go alone. Courage is not a solo sport. It takes a village. What kind of support do I have that boosts up my courage? I know there are people who give me emotional support, resource support, information support, and even feedback support. Do I feel boosted by the people who are backing me up?”

The next one is conviction, “Do I have conviction? Do I believe in it? Is there some kind of moral imperative underneath it? I need to do this because…” “How does it tie to my purpose?” The next one is confidence. Confidence is not just that I have the skills to do this job. Underneath it is this kind of can-do spirit, “I’ve got this.” How do you build up that kind of a Navy SEALS mindset? How do you build that up to be emboldened?

The next one is calm, “How do I keep calm in the face of the turmoil that fear can unleash? What are the rituals I might have? How do I focus attention on the task at hand and not get distracted? How do I reframe the situation? How do I maybe even use humor to lighten up the situation?” That’s individual courage.

You can then go to collective courage, which I’ll summarize by saying it’s shifting from me to we, “How do I get us all bought in to this idea that we’ve got to do something? How do I make it part of a culture? How do I make it part of our collective rhythm? It’s something we’re meant to do.” So that, in a summary, is the arc of the book, that courage is a choice. You can change and build courage muscles.

Because if you know how to resource yourself, you will find a way to be a lion king. A lion, I’m sorry, not Lion King, the Lion in “The Wizard of Oz.” Different musical.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, no, both are excellent and inspiring. Well, there’s so much good stuff to get in here. What I like a lot is comprehension makes a lot of good sense in terms of, “Well, yeah, if there’s a ton of uncertainty, we can get better comprehension and mitigate some of that by going step by step, taking a peek, doing a test, learning, having a conversation, okay, getting there. And action, absolutely. Hey, I’m about to do some stuff. That’s tricky, that’s demanding a lot of me. Let’s make sure I feel well, well-supported, connected with my people.” I like that a lot.

Tell us a little bit when it comes to coping and story. I think that could be a little bit tricky because sometimes I try to tell myself better stories to feel different things. And I know what I’m doing, it’s like, “Hey, Pete, I know you’re trying to trick me into seeing this differently and feeling differently about it, but I’m still scared. I’m still angry. I’m still annoyed. I still don’t feel like it,” like whatever. So, what are your pro tips in terms of coping and storytelling to yourself like a master?

Ranjay Gulati
So, the first thing I’ve realized is we are the biggest storytellers to ourselves. And these stories that we may or may not even be familiar with, it may be implicit, it may be buried deep in my psyche, have a powerful grip on us. They not only shape how we look at situations, but they also shape how we look at ourselves in those situations.

I’ll give you an example. In a recession, how do companies behave? Ninety-one percent of companies just go cost-cutting because the narrative they have is, “In times of uncertainty, survival is key. So cut costs, do whatever you need to do. This, too, shall pass. We’ll see it on the other side.”

Nine percent of companies, only 9% have a different narrative. They see adversity as opportunity, “This is a unique moment to leapfrog everybody else. Yes, it’ll be risky. Yes, there’s uncertainty here, but, you know, this is a unique opportunity. They don’t come very often. So how are we going to leapfrog everybody else in these down markets where everybody else has got their head in the sand?”

So, you start to see how these kinds of self-narratives, individually and collectively, become part of our way of facing uncertainty, because narrative, our own self-narrative, changes our sense of identity, how I see myself. It also changes the way we look at situations around us and the meaning we attribute to those situations.

So, I interviewed a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, who is now a commando in Ukraine, behind enemy lines. He said, “Look, I just had to do this. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do anything.” So, what’s my story?

And a lot of people in work have an affirming story that, “I want to have an impact, I want to make a difference here. I want to get ahead. I want to be responsible. I want to be somebody someday.” Others have a rather negating story, “I don’t know if I can do it. I’m not sure. That’s too risky. What if it doesn’t work out?” So, “What’s your story?” is the starting point for this journey.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. It sounds like there’s many flavors of story and they’ll take you down different paths, not just in the rough binary of, “Do this. Don’t do this,” but, “How are we going to approach it? And why is it worthwhile or not worthwhile to do so?” We can examine the story in terms of, “Okay, this is the story that is present.” Do you have any perspective on, once you’re aware of that, what’s the next best step?

Ranjay Gulati
You know, there’s an old saying, “Change your story and change your life,” right? And I think there’s some truth to it. This inner story is kind of like a central operating system that impacts everything we do. We’d like to believe that we have a rational calculative machine in our brain, cost benefit, does the math, looks at the expected value, pros and cons, SWOT analysis, scenario planning, we do that.

But there’s a parallel system that overrides all rational calculus, and that is this interpretive system. And you got to find a way to take and harness that. And a lot of courageous people harness that when they take bold action. Whether you look at Frances Haugen, it was her realization that, “I have to do something,” or, Brandon Tsay, in the moment, saying, “I have to do something.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. It’s interesting. As I think about being in Frances’s shoes, you can very easily tell a story, in terms of it’s like, “Well, you know, corporations, they’re going to maximize shareholder value. So, naturally, of course, Facebook is going to try to do whatever it can to maximize engagement on their platform, and that’s just sort of how business works. And I’m just one of tens of thousands of cogs in this machine. And if I’m not digging this job, I could just try something else.”

And so, like that is a story and that is reasonable in terms of, “Okay, yeah.” I guess, none of those things you would just say, “That is utterly false,” but, like, that is a reasonable story. But then she took another one, it’s like, “What I’m beholding is evil. And it’s quite likely, if I do nothing, nobody else will either. So, it is up to me to stop this evil.” And, likewise, those two, those points are also valid, reasonable, rational. And so, which story you’re operating in really would direct the subsequent steps and path.

Ranjay Gulati
Absolutely and very well said. But I think story is the first step in this courage journey. The reason I have all these other Cs is because then you resource yourself. So, take Frances, she didn’t do it alone. She forged connections to really help her find that courage. It took her almost a year to do this after she first thought about it.

She was talking to a reporter who was guiding her on what needed to be done. She was talking to a law firm that helps whistleblowers on what needed to be done over there. She had a friend of hers who was a priest giving her personal feedback on how she should do it. She was talking to her parents who were giving her the moral support, and saying, “Come on, you got to do something.”

So, connections played a key role over there. Another one is confidence, “How did she build up her can-do muscle?” “I got it. I can do it. And you know what? I’ll be okay on the other side of this.” So, there are several other resourcing tools I found. So, it wasn’t just an isolated thing.

Brandon Tsay had moral conviction, “This is my family thing and I’m the custodian here, and my mother who’s passed away is looking up from there and I’m going to hide under a table?” So, he had a moral conviction. So, conviction played a key role as well. Right? So, each of them has resourced themselves in different ways.

Back to Frances Haugen, she didn’t do it all at once. She kind of decided to methodically understand and do it step by step. So that’s why I had to build this model, if I may, of “What are the resources available to all of us to build up that courage muscle?”

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, that’s really powerful, “My mother’s looking down from heaven. And so, who am I going to be? Am I going to be hiding here?” And I think that’s really a beautiful illustration of the power of story there, because, in a way, like they’re just facts. Like, “My mother previously passed away.” Like, that is a fact, that is a reality that is present in his world. But then when we bring that into the picture, it is transformative.

Ranjay Gulati
And I think the part to understand for all of us is, if we look at the magnitude of what these people did, and we’re like, “I could never do that.” But I think it’s really important to understand how they resource themselves. It wasn’t just a James Bond, Jason Bourne move, where you’re jumping off of a cliff with or without a parachute, and somehow magically you survive.

These people are very thoughtful. And how do we do that? We don’t have to be a Navy SEAL or a Marine to do this stuff. And back to the workplace, I think my realization about the workplace is, it turns out, the two most common emotions people experience at work are fear and anger.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a bummer of a work day, “I was angry and then I was scared, and then I was angry again, then scared some more.”

Ranjay Gulati
Yeah, and I think, if there was more courage, more people would be able to live up to their full potential. I think that’s what happens when we live frustrated lives because we don’t. In fact, some research on regret shows that people have much more regret about inaction than about action. And I think we should all contemplate that, “How am I tackling the natural normal?” It’s okay to be scared, by the way, first of all, right? That’s normal. The question is, “What do I do with the fear response?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, you mentioned Navy Seal for the second time, and I did want to dig into the confidence point. My listeners are often saying, “I want more confidence.” Tell us, how does one facilitate, cultivate more of this can-do spirit, Navy Seal, getting after it, kind of confidence?

Ranjay Gulati
So, I was really struggling with this chapter because I thought, “Do people really want to know how to build more confidence? Come on.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, they do. We do.

Ranjay Gulati
There’s actually some great research on the subject by a Stanford psychologist named Albert Bandura. He didn’t call it confidence. He called it self-efficacy. And there turned out to be two broad flavors of self-efficacy. One is very domain specific, “I’m the master of my craft. I’m a great marketeer. I’m a great salesman. I’m a great technologist. I’m a great HR professional. I’m a great whatever.” And you need that.

Domain mastery is critical to having confidence, but is not sufficient. There’s another meta skill that, loosely, we can call a kind of a can-do mindset, “I got it.” Where, you know, if you look at Captain Sullenberger, he had never landed a plane on a water body, right, but that’s what he had to do when he had to land the United Airlines plane, when the engine shut down after the flight taking off from LaGuardia. It’s this kind of, “I’ve got this” mindset.

In fact, when he was interviewed by Katie Couric afterwards, and Katie asked him, like, “What did you have to do to land the plane?” He said, “Oh, I knew what I had to do. I had to have the wings exactly level. I had to have the nose slightly up. I had to be flying above the minimum flying speed, but not below it and not too high above it either. And I had to do them all at once.”

And then she says, “But there was a big if.” And then he turns around, and says, “I knew I could do it.” How did he know he could do it? He never trained for it before, never simulated it before, but he said, “I knew I could do it.” That is confidence. And how do we cultivate that kind of inner spirit is one of the hardest challenges for all of us. But once we have it, we’re the Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah. So, tell us, what do we know from the good doctor Bandura and other research about how one cultivates such a spirit?

Ranjay Gulati
So, he talks about a number of things. In fact, his original experiment was to train, I don’t know, 10, 12 Stanford students who were fearful of snakes. I think they’re called Ophidiophobes, and who say, “I’m scared of snakes” to come into a lab, and then he showed them a corn snake. Corn snakes are harmless, but they look vicious. They’re huge. They don’t bite. They don’t know anything else, but they’re huge.

And he was going to make them hold it. And they’re like, “I don’t want to be even in the room with it.” And so, he talks about first creating micro-wins, small steps. He talks about rehearsing failure modes, “What’s the worst thing that can happen? I want you to start thinking about what’s the worst thing that can happen.” And slowly start to build evidence and build self-belief that, “You got it. You can do it.”

Or, another example of this, a modern example, is what Navy SEALs do. They make the Navy SEALs in training go through all kinds of crazy scenarios. And once you’ve gone through boot camp and training, you’re like, “There’s nothing that’s going to surprise me.” So, how do you create this kind of inner muscle, that, “I can handle”? And that kind of can-do spirit, I think is key.

I think if you look at teaching, by the way, I teach at HBS, and we teach by the case method, which is a very Socratic method, where students can speak. My first time, I’m like, “God, people will ask crazy questions. They might make crazy comments. They might get into arguments with each other. What am I going to do?” So, you start to learn and you see different scenarios and you kind of build your domain-specific craft. But there’s a meta skill, you’re like, “You know, I’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out.”

So, there’s a specific skill and then there’s a meta skill. And I think that is key. And I think, I had to do that myself, by the way. Also, I have a pilot’s license. The first time I flew, I was scared, terrified, even with the instructor in the plane. Then afterwards, after starting my flight school, I thought, “Okay, I’m okay as long as he’s in the plane with me because he’s a seasoned guy. He can land a plane without an engine. He’s done it all. He’s been around. He’s been flying for 25 years. I’m okay.”

But then I had to get on a plane by myself, and I’m like, “Oh, there are so many things that can go wrong. I haven’t trained for all of them. I need him on the radio. Hey, Jerry, are you going be on the radio? Because if I get, if there’s something crazy happen, I want to be able to call you, my lifeline.” But ultimately, I had to fly away from home base where I couldn’t radio him.

Now you’re on your own. You’re like, “Oh, Seattle SeaTac Airport is saying I’m flying too close to commercial lanes. What do I do? What do I do? Do I go higher or lower?” So, how do you build that kind of can-do muscle?

Pete Mockaitis
And so, it sounds like the two key principles there was, one, getting progressive exposure, like to the snakes, “A little bit, a little bit, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more.” And then another is the meta skill of, “Oh, again and again and again, I have entered into situations that were murky and tricky and unclear, and I managed to figure it out. And this will be similar to my previous historical experience. Therefore, I could feel confident.”

Ranjay Gulati
Absolutely, the evidence builds self-belief. How do you let evidence build self-belief? A third version of that is how do you rehearse failure modes? You have to rehearse failure modes, “What can go wrong? Let’s go through everything that can go wrong.” And the rehearsing of failure modes also quietens us down because you’re like, “Okay, what can go wrong here?” And you start to rehearse the failure modes to see that there’s nothing outside the realm of your thinking.

And they use this, actually, a lot also in kind of flight anxiety schools, where people who are paranoid about flying would never get on an airplane. Well, airlines don’t like that, so they all have these flight anxiety management schools where you can go online or in-person and take a class, where they make you sit on a chair that feels like an airplane seat, and it vibrates when the plane is taking off.

You put on your seatbelt. They even have some turbulence, so you simulate the turbulence, you simulate the plane landing and taking off. So, the idea is to kind of immunotherapy, if you will, but a bit of kind of rehearsals, but, ultimately, you’re trying to let evidence build self-belief, that growing of self-belief.

And, you know, sometimes, I’ll tell you what confidence comes from, I’ve found. I’ve seen this in sports a lot, actually, by the way. Sometimes the biggest source of self-confidence is somebody else believing in you. That’s what coaches do so well. The great coaches, they believe in their players. And when they believe in their players, if you think about one of the classic plays was Duke-Kentucky game, National Championship.

I think it was a semi-final, maybe, I think, considered one of the best games ever. Coach K was the coach of Duke. And there was, I think, 2.5 seconds left, something like that. And Kentucky just scored a basket. And they were now, I think, one point ahead. And Duke had two and half seconds to get the ball across the court and hit a basket.

And when the players were asked, Grant Hill threw the pass, and I’m blanking on who threw the basket, but what is his name? Famous. He was an NBA player afterwards. They did it because they knew their coach believed they could do it. And if the coach believed they could do it, they could do it.

So, building self-belief is a huge part of the story as well. So, find yourself somebody who believes in you, and you’ll start to believe in yourself. That’s what moral-emotional support really is.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful and beautiful. And to the rehearsing failure modes, I mean, maybe you strap into a chair that’s vibrating, but I think sometimes that could just be a matter of really just thinking it through and visualizing the situation. I remember after I left Bain and started my own thing, it was spooky because I didn’t have revenue and my savings were depleting day after day, month after month. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh. It’s like the money is disappearing before my eyes. I’m not accustomed to this.”

And it’s funny, but before I examined that, I almost thought, “Well, what happens when a person’s money balance hits zero? What happens then?” Unexamined, it was like, “Well, I just assumed that I’m homeless and sleeping in an alley.” It’s like, “No, that’s not actually what happens.”

And so, to think about, “Okay, imagine a world in which I have $0. What happens? Oh, I go get a regular job. What are my other Bain people doing? They’re going doing strategy stuff for like Kraft Foods or something. Okay, so I would go be a cheese strategist. This is really the worst-case scenario. And I might even find it interesting, figuring out cheese pricing opportunities or whatever.”

So that’s, that’s much less terrifying than being homeless and sleeping in the alley, and much more realistic. But unexamined, that’s just sort of where the emotions can take us to. And that’s not very, very helpful for making wise, calm decisions.

Ranjay Gulati
That’s a great example. An illustration of what I was saying is that, ultimately, we are all engaged in a mental process to tame or even outwit our fear, right? And if we can tame or outwit our fear, we can take courageous steps in our lives. So, it’s acknowledging, so if we’re at work, it’s first is acknowledging that, “You know what? Fear is a normal human response to uncertainty.”

And guess what? It’s very common in the workplace. But most of us are immobilized by fear. But if I really want to have, I want to thrive and live up to my fullest potential, I got to do something about this fear business. And there are some methodical ways to think and act that allow people to behave courageously.

And that’s what I want to learn. And I hope that, you know, my hope, at least, is in this project is to help people find the resources they need to say, “Here’s a…” for lack of a better word, “…a toolkit that I can use to resource myself to act more boldly.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, tell me, Ranjay, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ranjay Gulati
No, I think, ultimately, I have just one line which is, the forward to the book is written by the Dalai Lama.

Pete Mockaitis
A good get.

Ranjay Gulati
Yeah. And he says, “Courage is an inner journey.” It’s really an inner journey. In my mind, courage is a choice. It’s really a choice. You have to make a choice. If you make a choice, “I want to be courageous,” you will find a way to be courageous. It is ultimately a choice. And I think, you know, I haven’t touched on even the second, last one third of the book, where courage is contagious.

You can build a courageous team. You can build a courageous organization. You can bake it into the DNA. You can be a courageous leader who fosters courage in other people. That’s the next piece of the journey. And I think every person, aspiring leader, needs to understand that. Are you leading a winning team or a not losing team? Are you playing to win or are you playing not to lose?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, this reminds me of the movie “Searching for Bobby Fisher,” where his coach, I don’t know why that still fires me up. He’s like, “Are you playing to win or are you playing to not lose? They’re not the same thing.” And so, you know, he gets the idea from his other coach. Anyway, a fun movie. But now, share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Ranjay Gulati
You know, I already scooped myself when I said courage was an inner journey, but I will add a little bit more to it. What the Dalai Lama says in the forward is, “When we recognize our interdependence, our courage naturally expands beyond personal ambition toward the greater good.”

And I think we should contemplate that. That we have to have a more expansive view of ourselves. And when we do and we see the interdependence of ourselves with the world at large and other people around us, we act with more courage.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Ranjay Gulati
There’s a book by Jim Loehr, L-O-E-H-R, called The Power of Story. And the title says it all.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Ranjay Gulati
I have a diary in which I take notes, and then I have my little Post-it notes that help me deal with short-term issues. So, I have a diary that I write down my longer-term projects and my thought processes there, and then I use this to kind of keep track of myself. So, you know, living in the world of ideas, there’s always things coming your way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Ranjay Gulati
Getting up early in the morning and, hopefully, trying to work out before the day gets ahead of you.

Pete Mockaitis
If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Ranjay Gulati
Look, LinkedIn is a great place to find me. I have a newsletter there. I’m reasonably active on it. Otherwise, I have a website where I post a lot of the same similar videos and stuff like that, which is RanjayGulati.com

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ranjay Gulati
I think we all need to ask ourselves, “Am I really living up to my fullest potential as a courageous human being? And how can I resource myself to be more courageous?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ranjay, thank you.

Ranjay Gulati
A pleasure. Thank you so much.