18 FEBRUARY 2025 WorldWide Drilling Resource® The Un-Comfort Zone II by Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. Stepping into Courage can Liberate You from Many Fears In this space, I have encouraged people to be more bold, advised people to stand up for themselves (especially with bullies), and suggested that people take risks, but recently I’ve come to realize these are actually all about courage. Courage is about stepping out of your comfort zone; it means confronting your fears and anxieties while resisting the urge to run away. The good news is, discovering the autonomy of courage is liberating, it’s empowering, and it creates opportunities. I’ve had to discover the power of courage separately and at different times for each of the various areas of my life. Courage has not come to me all at once. It has been incremental. When I was in primary school, I was bullied by the older kids. When I got to fifth grade, I started getting bullied by my own classmates - kids my age. It made me angry enough to find the courage to fight back. I had several fights, but by the end of the year, word had gotten around I was no longer a pushover and the bullying stopped. Sixth and seventh grades were peaceful. Then when I started high school, a boy two years older and much bigger than me bullied me every day in the gym locker room as we got dressed for physical education class. He punched me in the arm, slammed my locker shut (relocking it), pushed me off the bench where I was sitting, and then threatened to beat me up if I tried to get dressed before he was finished. I tried avoiding him, but it didn’t work. I was afraid, but the situation was intolerable. I knew I was going to have to fight him, and get hurt. I also knew if I got caught, I would get suspended from school, which would get me in trouble with my father. My first step of courage was to tell Dad and ask his permission to get suspended. He fully understood and gave me the green light. I was scared, but I visualized exactly what I would do. The next day when the bully hit me and pushed me off the bench, I jumped up and started punching him with my fists as rapidly as possible. I was shocked; it didn’t faze him. He picked me up like a TV wrestler and threw me against the lockers, then laughed. My back hit with a loud thud and I fell to the floor, but I jumped back up and resumed punching him. Again he picked me up and threw me into the lockers, and again I jumped up and continued hitting him. At that point, we were surrounded by dozens of kids yelling, “Fight, fight, fight!” All the yelling alerted the coaches who came rushing into the room, demanding, “Who’s fighting?” Before they could identify the bully and me as the fighters, we quickly sat down and returned to getting dressed. No one ratted us out. The bully never bothered me again. In fact, no one ever did. It was liberating; I was 13 years old and able to walk the halls of a five-year high school without fear. Unfortunately, that was just one instance. I’d like to tell you that lesson translated into every area of my life, but it didn’t. Looking back at the mental hurdles I’ve had to overcome makes those days of physical fighting seem simple. The biggest challenge to come was being true to myself and living authentically. Perhaps the hardest for me was developing the ability to set boundaries. I was afraid if I set boundaries, I would lose the relationship. I needed to set boundaries with friends, family, and especially in my love relationships. When I finally started doing it, the results were amazing. For example, I would say assertively, “I don’t like it when you speak to me that way.” Sur- prisingly, my friends didn’t abandon me; even better, they respected my wishes. It was truly empowering. I kept doing it more and more, and before long I rarely felt stress in my relationships. I was able to be myself and not fear rejection. My default mode is to stay home and curl up with a good book. I’m an introvert, although no one believes it (probably because I make my living as a public speaker - which is considered by many to be scarier than dying). I have to push myself to attend social gatherings. However, when I feel reluctant to attend an event, I recite this mantra: “Good things happen when I leave the house.” And they usually do. Courage creates possibilities. When I go out, I meet interesting people and discover new options, prospects, and choices. It was through volunteering that I recognized I could become a professional speaker. By going to networking events, I have gotten valuable speaking gigs. I, like many people, find the pressure to conform to social norms extremely difficult to resist. Finding the courage to do so is a big step in living with authenticity. During the COVID years, the social pressure to conform reached new highs with demands to shelter in place, wear surgical face masks, and stand six feet apart in public despite the lack of scientific evidence to support such actions. Those who didn’t comply were treated as pariahs. As a critical thinker who didn’t buy the hype, I did my own research to learn the truth. It irritated me how much propaganda and fake news was being thrown at the public. The strength of fake news reminded me of the Solomon Asch Conformity Line Experiment Study from 1951. It examined how social pressure from a majority group could influence an individual to conform. In brief, the experiment asked a group of participants to match the length of lines on posters in 18 trials. The correct answer was designed to be obvious, yet out of five participants, only one was a true subject. The subject was told it was a vision test. Meanwhile, the rest were associates of Asch, who were instructed to give an incorrect answer in 12 of the trials. Remarkably, one-third of the subjects conformed to the majority answer each time; and a whopping 75% of the subjects conformed at least once. Only 25% never conformed. It is astonishingly liberating when you develop the courage to question authority and begin thinking critically. Thinking for yourself is a major component in living authentically. The more often you step into courage, the more resilient you’ll become to the fears that cause you to resist change or taking chances. I can’t recommend it highly enough! Robert Robert is an innovation/change speaker, author, and consultant. He works with companies that want to be more competitive through innovation and with people who want to think more creatively. Contact him via e-mail to michele@worldwidedrillingresource.com “You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind, next to honor. ~Aristotle
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