At 8:00 AM on a gray March morning, the CEO of a fast-growing biotech company clicked “join” on a video call with her senior team. In the past 24 hours, new sanctions in Eastern Europe had forced their main supplier to halt shipments. The sanctions also slammed the local currency, driving up the cost of the company’s foreign debt by several million dollars.

The CEO’s inbox pulsed with board messages. Unless she cut spending by 35%, the company could risk bankruptcy. With global supply chains already stretched thin, there were no easy fixes. She was left with an impossible choice:

• Layoff one-third of her scientists, upending careers and years of research progress.
• Gamble on emergency bridge financing—a short-term loan meant to keep the business afloat—in a market frozen by geopolitical shock.

While it may seem like an outlier, scenarios like this are becoming increasingly common for today’s leaders. Economic shocks, political uncertainty, deepening polarization, ethical landmines, and eroding public trust have created an environment where even routine decisions carry real risk. Expertise may help you map out a strategy. But when the road ahead is unclear, the stakes are personal, the fallout is public, and people are looking to you for guidance—knowing your choices will affect them—courage becomes a critical skill.

Conventional advice often confuses courage with bravery, an innate and heroic quality that can be summoned during a one-off crisis. But courage isn’t an instinct; it’s a muscle built through consistent, values-aligned actions taken in the presence of doubt, risk, or fear. This kind of steadied, practiced response is what I call “everyday courage.” It’s especially powerful in moments that feel too small for a headline, but big enough to shape organizational culture, trust, and legacy.

Understanding Everyday Courage

Stretching all the way back to Aristotle, scholars have tried to sort courage into delineated buckets. In the 1990s, one researcher grouped courage into physical, moral, and psychological forms. More recent work refines moral courage into distinct subtypes.

Drawing on years of existing research and my work with senior leaders, I’ve put together a playbook that offers leaders a fresh lens—moving beyond the heroic and abstract to something practical and applicable. It focuses on six types of everyday courage that reflect the most common, consequential, and complex challenges leaders face today.

The Six Types of Everyday Courage

Courage type	Core risk	Leadership action	Payoff
Moral	Reputation damage, lost revenue, political backlash	Prioritize principles over profit when values conflict with opportunity	Long-term trust and brand integrity that attract employees, partners, and customers
Social	Status loss, ostracism, career penalties	Speak up against groupthink or misconduct—even when others stay silent	A culture of psychological safety that surfaces risks and encourages ethical behavior
Emotional	Vulnerability, emotional exposure, loss of composure	Name and stay present with difficult emotions—your own and others’—during crises	Greater trust, engagement, and resilience across the organization
Intellectual	Being wrong, appearing indecisive, undermining authority	Question your own assumptions publicly and invite dissenting views	Faster learning cycles and higher-quality strategic decisions
Creative	Failure, ridicule, sunk costs	Propose bold, unproven ideas and test them through small experiments	Breakthrough innovations that drive growth and keep the firm ahead of rivals
Physical	Personal safety, health, or security threats	Show up in high-risk settings to see the situation firsthand (e.g., factory floors, conflict zones)	Credibility with frontline teams and faster, fact-based problem-solving

To help you learn and apply each type of everyday courage to real-world situations, I’ve broken them down into three parts:

• A brief definition supported by research.
• A real-world example based on leaders I’ve taught or advised.
• A set of day-one practices you can use to strengthen this skill.