Courage and Your Unlived Life

I have spent thousands of dollars and hours on self-proclaimed gurus, masterminds, and glitzy courses that promised to help me make money doing what I love (writing, teaching, speaking). 

The ROI was pathetic. Not zero, but pretty damn close.

I spent more time “learning,” planning, and very little time “shipping.”

I should have kept my money and gone back and re-read my dissertation.

I devoted 6 years of my life to studying courage and, as a result, earned a Ph.D. I didn’t earn much money, but I did have those three impressive letters behind my name. Yay. 

Most people couldn't care less about doctoral degrees, and I get that. Even postgraduate students joke that Ph.D. stands for “Piled High and Deep.” But sometimes, profound understanding emerges from the research that culminates in that degree. That was true in my case.

I ignored the understanding I had gained from working with dozens of frightened men and women, and I literally paid the price. But not any longer.

My research looked at the influence of agency and self-efficacy on human achievement and life satisfaction. In other words, I wanted to understand how people could re-engineer their lives.

Self-efficacy is the belief that you can make things happen in your life, and agency is the ability to act on those beliefs.

Twenty years ago, I met a fellow graduate student who desperately needed an infusion of courage. She needed to seize control of her thoughts and, to paraphrase Thoreau, move more confidently toward her dreams. 

She needed heavy doses of self-efficacy and agency. She needed to write a different story about who she was and who she could become.

She wasn’t just stuck; she was paralyzed by fear.

Her name was Anne. She was studying for her master’s degree in elementary education and agreed to share her story as part of my research. 

We met at the campus library, where we sat across from each other at a long conference table. An hour into our conversation, Anne, a 40-year-old Haitian immigrant and single mother of 3, and I were both crying uncontrollably.

Anne arrived in the United States when she was ten. Her family settled in a low-income neighborhood in New Orleans. Anne’s parents enrolled her in a strict Catholic school, where her future would soon be engraved in steel.

One day, during a math class, Anne was instructed by her teacher, a large nun dressed in traditional garb, to go to the board. Anne spoke very little English, and her math skills were almost nonexistent.

Staring at the blackboard, Anne began to tremble. She had no idea where to start.

The teacher approached her, her heavy black heels clicking on the wooden floor.

And then, that teacher said something to her that would forever crush her dream of becoming a dentist and returning to Haiti.

“I said, forty-nine times fifty-seven! What are you, stupid?”

That single, cruel remark would define Anne’s view of herself for the next three decades.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid.” That single word became an endless soundtrack in her mind.

Anne believed in her bones that she was stupid. She didn’t limit that “stupidity” to math; it was all-encompassing.

That abusive teacher decided Anne’s future, for she was too young and vulnerable to see herself differently. 

As Anne spoke those words, “I’m stupid, stupid, stupid,” she began to sob, and I started to weep. We took a break to gather ourselves.

Anne was reliving the experience as if it had happened yesterday. It was raw.

She had learned to turn over control of her life to people in positions of authority. She had surrendered her self-efficacy to people who dismissed her as useless, incompetent, or even intellectually impaired.

If “agency” is a high-performance race car, then self-efficacy is the fuel. Anne’s fuel gauge read empty. Her racecar, her hidden potential, was parked in a dark, subterranean garage and going nowhere.

I wish I could share that Anne summoned the courage to change her thoughts and actions, but I cannot. She continued to limit herself based on false beliefs.

Self-efficacy is domain-specific, meaning you can possess boundless confidence in your ability to paint beautiful landscapes, for instance, while having no confidence in your ability to learn mathematics. 

Anne had become paralyzed by the prospect of learning math.

Had she decided to ignore the words spoken by her “teacher,” things might have turned out differently.

Anne abandoned her dream of becoming a dentist when she learned she would have to take science courses in college, which required mathematics prerequisites.

The first step in building self-efficacy is deciding that you want it.

So profoundly crippling was Anne’s self-efficacy, her belief in her ability to master mathematics, that she abandoned her dream and herself.

Don’t do what Anne did…please. Make a decision now to stare down fear and that belittling voice in your head and reclaim your power.

How often have you convinced yourself that you were not intelligent, popular, or courageous enough to make your dreams real? Instead, you likely chose to play small. You lived someone else’s version of who you were. Or, you surrendered control of your life to that vicious voice in your head.

If you did, you are grieving what the Jungian analyst James Hollis calls the “Unlived Life?”

The life you were capable of living but have not.

Gurus often brag that they have the answers and will share them with you…if you pay them enough. (Reminds me of a sign I have seen in a few stores - “In God we trust, all others pay cash.)

Gurus are the authority figures, and I surrendered my self-efficacy and agency to them without flinching, just like Anne has done years after her fateful collision with an incompetent teacher.

Not only did I study courage in graduate school, but I also studied statistics. For Pete’s sake, I taught statistics! One of the golden rules in statistics is that anecdotes are not evidence.

My gurus used misleading (i.e., not remotely representative of typical outcomes) success stories to finagle money out of my wallet, and I fell for it. I should have asked, “What is your customers’ success rate?”

I have startling news: Anyone who offers you the keys to your “Unlived Life “ is lying. There are no such keys for sale - you must mine the metal, carve it into a shape resembling a key, and grind it down all by yourself.

Fortunately, you are MORE than enough.

The path to living your dreams is not glamorous, but it is the same one most reasonably successful people follow. It is defined by hard work (not surprisingly), consistency, humility, and courage. Gurus would have you believe otherwise.

If you wanted to build a house, you would learn what tools you need and how to use them. Then, you would get to work. The house won’t build itself.

I now spend my money learning to use tools like ROAM Research, Beehiiv, Notion, and Evernote. I build skills while pounding nails into my house. To my surprise, you don’t need a Ph.D. to learn how to build your own house, your own future.

You just need the humility to admit where you are ignorant, to ask for affordable help, and the courage to swing your hammer.

Find the courage to look at the life you want to live and go build it.

You don’t need permission or gurus. You need a dream and the courage to acquire the skills to make it a reality.

And by the way, if the thing you are pursuing is not inspiring, you will either regret the life energy you expend on it, achieve hollow success, fail, or some combination of all of them.

Inspire yourself. Get to work. Ship.

If you need support, reach out.

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Are you living small? Are your eyes peering out from beneath a mask of crushing beliefs? Let’s work together to do something about that.

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You can also find me at CourageousHumans.com