There is a version of courage that is a trait — something a person either has or lacks, expressed in their nature, confirmed by their history. The person who acts under pressure is courageous. The person who does not is not. This model is intuitive and widely held. It is also empirically unsupported.

The research on courageous behaviour in high-fear contexts, beginning with Stanley Rachman’s work in the 1980s, points consistently in a different direction: what separates people who act effectively in the presence of fear from people who do not is not the presence or absence of fear itself, and not some fixed quality of character that some people possess and others lack. It is a specific set of psychological capacities, each of which is learnable, each of which can be built deliberately, and each of which becomes more available through practice.

This has substantial practical implications for anyone operating in a commercial environment where effective action in the presence of fear is not an occasional requirement but a routine one.

What Rachman found

Rachman’s research on bomb disposal operators and paratroopers was designed to establish what distinguished people who acted effectively in high-fear situations from those who did not. The expected finding — that the most effective operators experienced less fear — was not what the data showed. Experienced paratroopers showed physiological fear responses on jumps that were comparable in magnitude to the responses of novice jumpers. The fear was present in roughly equivalent measure. What differed was the relationship between the fear and the action that followed from it.

The experienced operators had developed what Rachman described as the capacity to function in the presence of fear — to complete the required task while the fear activation was occurring rather than having to wait for it to subside. The novices showed performance impairment under fear. The experienced operators did not. The distinction was not in the fear but in the capacity to act alongside it.

The practical implication is significant: the goal of courage development is not the elimination of fear before action. The elimination of fear as a precondition for action is both psychologically impossible — fear responses are automatic and rapid, not subject to choice — and unnecessary. The fear can be present. The action can happen anyway. These are independent variables, and the relationship between them is modifiable.

How self-efficacy builds the capacity

Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy research provides the mechanism through which the capacity to act in the presence of fear is actually built. Self-efficacy — the belief in one’s capacity to execute the required action in a specific domain — is the variable most predictive of action under fear, and the source of self-efficacy that is most powerful is mastery experience: having done the feared thing and survived.

The sequence is specific. The first approach to a genuinely feared situation happens with maximum fear activation and minimum self-efficacy: the person does not yet have evidence that they can do it. If the approach is completed — if the feared action is taken and the feared outcome either does not occur or is survived — the mastery experience updates the self-efficacy upward. The next approach to the same feared situation begins with a higher self-efficacy baseline. The fear activation may be equivalent, but the person now has evidence that they can function in its presence. The third approach begins higher still.

Bandura’s work with severe snake phobics demonstrated an additional finding that is particularly relevant: the self-efficacy built through mastery experience in one feared domain generalises. Participants who completed graduated mastery experiences with snakes showed improvements in self-efficacy across unrelated domains — public speaking, social situations, performance contexts — that they had not directly practised. The courage-building that mastery experience produces is not domain-specific. It accumulates.

The inverse of the Bandura sequence is what produces the avoidance trap: each time the feared situation is avoided, the self-efficacy that would have been built is not built, and the fear maintains its full governance of the decision. The avoidance produces relief, which reinforces the avoidance. The mastery experience that would have made the next approach easier does not occur. The fear does not recede through avoidance; it consolidates.

The values mechanism

Steven Hayes’s committed action framework provides the psychological mechanism that makes action possible in fear’s presence before the self-efficacy has been built through mastery experience — which is to say, at the beginning, before the first approach has occurred.

Committed action is behaviour guided by values rather than by emotional state. The ACT account makes a specific claim about fear and action: the capacity to act in accordance with values while fear is present is achievable not because the fear has been reduced or suppressed but because the behaviour is being guided by something other than the current emotional state. The fear is present. The values are also present. The person chooses which of these guides the next action.

This is not a trivial distinction. The alternative to committed action is not fearlessness; it is action guided by the emotional state rather than by values — which produces behaviour that is consistent with what the fear wants (avoidance, retreat, concession) rather than what the values require. The entrepreneur who acts from values in the presence of fear is not experiencing less fear than the one who avoids. They are choosing the guidance system for their action differently.

The ACT randomised controlled trials confirm the behavioural outcome: psychological flexibility — the capacity to act in accordance with values in the presence of aversive internal experience — consistently produced better outcomes in high-stakes contexts than anxiety reduction strategies alone. The target is not the reduction of the fear; it is the expansion of the repertoire of possible actions available while the fear is present.

Building the capacity through graduated exposure

The exposure therapy research provides the most rigorously evidenced courage-building protocol: Craske’s inhibitory learning account establishes that graduated exposure to feared situations at progressively higher intensity builds the new learning — the inhibitory association — that makes subsequent approaches less activating. The mechanism is not desensitisation in the classical sense; it is the accumulation of new evidence that the feared outcome does not inevitably follow the feared situation.

The protocol translates directly into entrepreneurial practice: the courage capacity is built through the structured approach to feared situations, beginning at low intensity and building. The entrepreneur who fears public speaking begins with small, low-stakes audiences and builds toward larger ones. The one who fears pricing negotiations begins with lower-stakes transactions and builds toward higher ones. The one who fears investor conversations begins with warm, informal conversations and builds toward formal pitch contexts.

The graduated sequence is not avoidance. It is the construction of the mastery experience hierarchy that Bandura’s self-efficacy research identifies as the most powerful source of the courage capacity. The hierarchy provides the series of evidence-generating approaches that update the self-efficacy upward at each step.

The cognitive capacity for courageous choice

Ethan Kross and Özlem Ayduk’s self-distancing research identifies the specific cognitive capacity most associated with courageous action under fear: the capacity to take the perspective of a wise, distanced observer — to ask what a person they respect would do in their position, or to address themselves by name as though advising a friend — reduces the egocentric distortion that fear produces. Fear narrows the perceived option space: under fear activation, the options visible from inside the experience are typically the options that reduce the fear most rapidly (avoidance, concession, retreat). The self-distancing move opens the option space to include the values-consistent action that fear had rendered less visible.

The self-distancing practice is a learnable cognitive skill. It is available in the moment before the feared action must be taken, and its effect on the option space is measurable and reliable across the research literature.

What sustains courage over time

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s self-determination theory predicts the motivational basis of sustainable courage: action that is genuinely autonomous — arising from authentic values that the person has freely chosen — is more sustainably maintained under adversity than action driven by obligation, external expectation, or the fear of what not acting would mean.

The entrepreneur whose courageous actions are expressions of genuine values maintains those actions under sustained difficulty because the values do not disappear when the difficulty increases. The courage that is driven by obligation or performance of identity is more brittle: it is sustained by external conditions that may change or by a self-image that adversity can challenge. The courage grounded in authentic values is renewed by the adversity rather than undermined by it, because the adversity is the context in which those values are most clearly expressed.

If the patterns described here are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Rachman, S. (1984), Fear and Courage, Behavior Therapy, 15(1), 109-120. Rachman, S. (1990), Fear and Courage (2nd ed.), W.H. Freeman. Bandura, A. (1997), Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, W.H. Freeman. Hayes, S.C., Wilson, K.G., Gifford, E.V., Follette, V.M. & Strosahl, K. (1996), Experiential Avoidance and Behavioral Disorders, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(6), 1152-1168. Craske, M.G., Kircanski, K., Zelikowsky, M., Mystkowski, J., Chowdhury, N. & Baker, A. (2008), Optimising Inhibitory Learning During Exposure Therapy, Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46(1), 5-27. Kross, E. & Ayduk, O. (2011), Making Meaning out of Negative Experiences, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(1), 21-25. Deci, E.L. & Ryan, R.M. (2000), The “What” and “Why” of Goal Pursuits, Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227-268. Biswas-Diener, R. (2012), The Courage Quotient, Jossey-Bass. Magness, S. (2022), Do Hard Things, HarperOne.