"I believe that anyone can conquer fear by doing the things he fears to do, provided he keeps doing them until he gets a record of successful experience behind him.”

- Eleanor Roosevelt

Last week I had an interaction with a woman at my co-working space that I’ll never forget.

We were attending a networking brunch and the topic of what we were working on came up.

I told her I'm building a company that helps people build courage.

She basically laughed in my face.

I’m not gonna lie, it stung.

"How is that possible? Isn't courage just something you're born with? That's a personality trait, not a business."

I don’t think she was trying to be dismissive.

She probably thought she was being direct.

She was the stereotypical, highly ambitious, highly educated, neurodivergent, Silicon Valley overachiever with more IQ than EQ.

But here’s the crazy part, an hour later, that same woman was asking to connect with me on LinkedIn.

She'd gone from balking at the fundamental premise of what I’m building to becoming a believer in under 60 minutes.

I wish the whole thing had been caught on camera. It was that good.

So this week, I want to walk you through exactly what I walked her through.

The common misconception

One of the most common misconceptions people have about courage is that it is an attribute like height or eye color. That's simply not true.

Courage is like a muscle.

Yes, some people are born with more muscle tissue than others. But that doesn't mean the rest of us can't build muscle mass. Anyone who trains gets stronger, regardless of their starting point.

Psychologist Robert Biswas-Diener spent years studying courage across cultures, from Greenland to Kenya, and proving courage is not a trait.

And just like any other muscle, it follows the same rules.

First: growth requires discomfort. A muscle only grows under load. If the weight feels easy, nothing changes.

Second: it requires repetition. One heavy lift isn't enough to change your physique. Decades of research on exposure to feared situations show the same pattern: repeated, varied practice with what scares us is what rewires the fear response.

Third: if you don't use it, you lose it. Skip the gym for six months and watch what happens.

And, there’s one more similarity. Just as there are different muscle groups, there are different types of courage. A big upper body doesn't give you big calves.

Someone can jump out of planes and still be unable to sit with uncomfortable emotions in therapy.

So if courage behaves like a muscle, developing it is a skill. Don't take my word for it. LinkedIn's CEO Ryan Roslansky recently named the five human skills AI can't replace.

Courage is literally listed as a skill.

And every skill you've ever learned followed the same path, mapped decades ago by Noel Burch as the four stages of competence. We start at the bottom, unconsciously incompetent. We’re bad at it and we don't even know it. Then we become aware of the gap. Then we can do it, but only with effort.

Finally it becomes automatic.

We climb the pyramid one uncomfortable rep at a time.

At this point in our conversation, she said:

"Okay, Mr. Courage! This is really interesting! How do I actually train it?

I then proceeded to walk her through three frameworks changed my life.

Step one: get aware of your fears. This is the Fear Log. Most fears never announce themselves as fear. They hide in plain sight under aliases like self-doubt, anxiety, insecurity, and procrastination. The Fear Log breaks the loop by getting us to name it. UCLA neuroscience shows that putting feelings into words quiets the amygdala, the brain's alarm center, an effect replicated across dozens of studies. We can't tame what don’t name.

Step two: fact-check the fear. Once a fear has a name, run it through the F.A.C.T.S. framework, five steps for separating what's real from what your brain invented at 2 a.m. Fear is a terrible reporter. It exaggerates, omits, and editorializes. F.A.C.T.S. is the cross-examination. This is what she and I did together at that table, and it's where her skepticism cracked. A fear that had felt permanent turned out to be mostly bad reporting. I quickly break down all five steps on in this Instagram post.

Step three: build your S.O.U.P. List. Stacks Of Undeniable Proof. Every time you act despite fear, write it down. This works because of what psychologist Albert Bandura called mastery experiences, the single most powerful builder of self-belief ever documented. Your brain doesn't trust pep talks. It trusts evidence. Each entry is a receipt.

The reps don't only change what you can do. They change who you think you are. Self-perception theory shows we infer our identity by watching our own behavior, the same way we'd judge a stranger.

Act with courage enough times and your self-image quietly updates: I'm the kind of person who does hard things. That new identity makes the next rep easier. Rinse and repeat to become more confident in any area of life.

And that was it.

From Doubting Debbie to Convinced Connie.

I walked out of there grinning and couldn't stop. Building this company, I've had plenty of days where the doubt was mine. That hour answered it. The system doesn't just survive contact with skeptics. It changes them. I got paid in something better than money: certainty and impact.

Here's your reflection for the week:

What’s a skill you’re now good at but once were bad at. What was your journey to developing it? What can you apply from that to your journey with courage?

Here's your challenge for the week:

Identify ONE thing this week that you’ve been putting off that would make you proud if you added it to your S.O.U.P. List. Take action towards it today.

With courage,

Jonathan