This is what my colleagues Nitin Nohria and Franz Wohlgezogen and I found more than a decade ago, when, during the 2008 financial crisis, we examined how 4,700 public companies had navigated the three previous recessions. We discovered that about 9% were able to emerge from each downturn in stronger shape than before, not just because they thoughtfully cut costs but also because they simultaneously took calculated risks to invest in growth. Without intending to, we documented the significant difference that courage makes in business.

Since then, I’ve been investigating what drives courageous behavior. In challenging circumstances, why do some leaders make daring moves while others hesitate? Philosophers as far back as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Mencius pondered whether bravery was an innate virtue or could be taught. Modern-day scientific research, spanning the fields of psychology, sociology, economics, neuroscience, and healthcare, confirms the latter view, showing that many types of people, including those who didn’t previously consider themselves brave, can be just that when the situation calls for it. And yet few studies have sought to understand how individuals can become more courageous—until now. Over the past several years, I have surveyed existing social and natural sciences scholarship, collected and analyzed leadership stories—some through archival research, others through more than 200 detailed interviews—and distilled the insights into a playbook for anyone looking to be more intrepid at work.

Bravery as a Choice

I define courage as a willingness to take bold, risky action to serve a purpose that you perceive to be worthy, usually in the face of an abiding fear. It can involve accepting a physical challenge, making yourself emotionally vulnerable, risking social or economic standing for your moral beliefs, or publicly championing new and unorthodox ideas. And as Nelson Mandela famously said, it is not the absence of fear but triumph over it.

Many experts argue that, in work and business settings, the best way to overcome anxiety about uncertainty is risk management. As professor Kathleen K. Reardon has written, courageous action is really an “intelligent gamble” based on “careful deliberation and preparation” that includes weighing risks and benefits. Indeed, when considering decisions like whether to fund a new business, undertake a merger or acquisition, or switch jobs, it’s sensible to do a cost/benefit analysis to reduce the odds of negative outcomes and mitigate their potential consequences. People have long used these tools to effectively manage and even profit from risk. But as research by the late economist Frank Knight has shown, they aren’t enough to help us behave boldly in situations where we can neither identify all the potential dangers we face nor estimate their chances of materializing. Under volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) conditions, when possible outcomes are unknown, most people feel a loss of control, triggering fear, which often leads to paralysis (the so-called freeze response) or retreat (flight). Brave leaders, by contrast, are able to reclaim their agency and fight.

And there are many examples of those who have: political leaders like Mandela and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky; decisive CEOs such as BlackRock’s Larry Fink and Chanel’s Leena Nair; scrappy entrepreneurs, from the legendary Steve Jobs to the lesser-known Aloke Bajpai of India’s online travel agency Ixigo; and even everyday employees and citizens, like Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, former US Airways pilot C.B. “Sully” Sullenberger, and the Taj Hotel staff members who risked their lives to help guests during a 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai.

In my research I found that individuals like these develop courage in five ways: They create positive narratives, cultivate confidence, take small steps to boost their comprehension of the challenges they face, make connections, and stay calm, employing a variety of techniques to do each.

At a moment when 76% of S&P 500 companies are citing “uncertainty” in their earnings calls (up from 37% in the three months prior, according to FactSet), these strategies are especially critical. What’s more, any leader can learn and deploy them to become more courageous.

[Here is the first of five.]

The stories we tell have an enormous influence on our sense of self, our understanding of the wider world, and our ability to behave courageously. There are three ways that the leaders I studied crafted narratives to either lessen their fear or overcome it.

Go risk hunting.

The first tactic is identifying and mitigating the challenges and threats you face. The point is not to reduce risk to zero (often an impossibility) but to shift how you perceive the unknown so that it becomes less daunting and you feel more capable of conquering the chaos. Risk hunting helps recast the world in a more orderly light, thereby emboldening you to move forward.

Larry Fink, cofounder of the asset management firm BlackRock, has built his entire career and business around this approach. He tasked his first hire, Charlie Hallac, with developing a comprehensive risk-assessment platform, later dubbed Aladdin, which has since become the gold standard among finance professionals. But even in the absence of such sophisticated tools, leaders like Fink obsessively search for signals in the noise around which they can build a positive story that will inspire action. For example, in this year’s annual letter, he pointed to clear opportunities for matching uninvested capital (the $25 trillion sitting idle in banks and money market funds in the United States alone) with government and corporate needs (an estimated $68 trillion for public and private infrastructure projects around the world over the next 25 years). Such data points—along with more detailed analysis—gave Fink and his management team the confidence to pursue three big acquisitions in late 2024: Global Infrastructure Partners, a firm with $170 billion in assets invested across more than 100 countries; Preqin, a private market data firm; and HPS, a leading manager of private credit.

Find a moral quest.

Another tactic is to recast your work—including any risky decisions or actions you might take—as the heroic pursuit of values that you or your organization holds dear. Scholars have found that when people are inspired by their moral principles to act courageously, they feel a greater sense of belonging and self-worth and overcome their fears more easily.

Consider how Haugen, an engineer, explained her decision to release internal Facebook documents showing that the company’s products were damaging teen mental health, failing to curb misinformation, and fomenting violence. As she told a reporter, “I did what I thought was necessary to save the lives of people…who I think are being endangered by Facebook’s prioritization of profits.” By leaning on her personal values, she found the courage to quit her lucrative job and share what she knew. Helena Foulkes, former president of CVS Pharmacy, and her team also gave moral reasons for their 2014 decision to stop selling cancer-causing tobacco products, which sacrificed $2 billion in sales and risked a consumer and investor backlash. “We had a lot of debates, and we didn’t all see eye to eye…because it’s a very scary thing to walk away from that size of business,” she recalled. But “we had 25,000 pharmacists working for us at the time….For all of them and us, to be working for a company which had made such a bold move really created a sense of pride.”

Call upon your faith.

Many leaders also draw on their belief in a higher power to find courage in difficult circumstances, with a narrative that says, “I have encountered adversity, but I can appeal to God (or fate, or luck, or the universe) to emerge victorious.” Some people disparage such thinking as magical or irrational, but researchers tend to see it as adaptive, an important way of coping. For example, studies have shown that entrepreneurs spend more time praying than most people and are more likely to believe in an engaged, responsive God who takes a personal interest in them. Other research has shown that the belief that we will have good luck increases our sense of agency, which can help us face up to our fears and embrace more-difficult challenges.

Several successful U.S. company founders—Cadbury’s John Cadbury, Standard Oil’s John Rockefeller, Walmart’s Sam Walton, and Aflac’s Dan Amos—were or have been very public about the role their Christian faith played in helping them navigate the uncertainty of entrepreneurial life. Consider, too, former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, who kept a statue of the Hindu god Ganesha, the remover of obstacles and facilitator of success, in her office. “There are times when the stress is so incredible…then you close your eyes and think about a temple…and suddenly you feel, ‘Hey, I can take on the world.’ Hinduism floats around you and makes you feel somehow invincible,” she told The Times. That mindset no doubt emboldened her to pursue a purpose-driven shift to more-healthful products during her tenure, despite also having to deal with the 2008 financial crisis.

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