Do you give courage?
For whatever reason, when I sent out my newsletter last week, it had more of an impact than usual. A number of kind people took the time to reply with gratitude and encouragement. A sample of the replies:
Mike said “Outstanding Col!”
Gayle said “Lovely stuff, Col.”
Chad said “Dude… I would buy 10 copies of a book with only your hand drawn graphics in it. Nothing else.”
Each of those messages would’ve taken ten, fifteen seconds to compose and send, at most. The cost to Mike, Gayle, and Chad (and all the others, thank you ) is effectively zero.
The effect it has on me? Priceless.
I’m so excited to put together a newsletter this week. I’m way more motivated than I usually am and I will be for a number of weeks. All because a few lovely people took ten seconds to give me just a little bit of encouragement.
I reckon your life is much more likely to be defined by the accumulated effects of moments of tiny courage, than it is by moments of big courage (an idea I wrote abouta few years ago).
The tiny courage to share an idea with the division manager (whom you barely know) leads to a conversation with the executive team, which leads to a new project you’re in charge of, which leads to a promotion, which leads to…
You get the point. Whatever the details of the story are in your case, moments of tiny courage become snowballs that gather a lot of momentum.
If you agree, and you realise this is equally true about the people around you, the idea of leadership can start to become pretty simple; just give people courage.
This might be one of those things that’s so painfully obvious that you’ve never noticed it before, but you do realise the word “encourage” means “to give courage”, right? The etymology of it is pretty explicit.
And don’t you think it’s amazing that by simply saying a few little words to someone, you can increase their ability to commit to something by enormous amounts? It’s a superpower! And yet, I think that we fail to draw on that power far too much of the time. We all live with and around each other, and rarely take the time to deliberately give each other energy and courage. What a waste.
Be a leader.
Give courage.
(Chad, your email did inspire me to wonder if I could try to create a hand-drawn graphic per week for a month, to see if I we like the results, but I left my iPad down at the beach-house by accident so that experiment will have to wait till next month).