Above and beyond everything else, Courage is the mind state that promotes positive mental attitude.
Like every other mind state, with focused and persistent effort, Courage can be developed.
Courage is about facing fears and acting against them. So, courage is a mind state laced with emotion. It is a mind state where fear is converted into something more positive and constructive. Often, courage is developed accidentally. For example, this happens when a person acts impulsively in reaction to a dangerous or fearful situation.
Of importance, with forethought, deeply rooted courage can be developed intentionally over time through planned action steps.
People know what causes them fear. People can anticipate most of the situations that cause them fear. People can anticipate the actions of other people that trigger experiences of fear. For example, in business, people can anticipate the actions of bosses and know whether or not those actions cause feelings of fear.
Because we have this ability to anticipate we also have the ability to plan ways to counteract these fearful situations before they visit us.
In essence, we can role-play fearful situations in our minds long before those fearful situations happen in reality. While we role-play these fearful situations in our minds we can role-play various reactions to those fearful situations and, in effect, we can train ourselves in advance on the best ways to react to fearful situations. Then, after fearful situations arise and we face them and take pre-planned actions, we can perform self-analyses to assess, rate, adjust, and improve our performance. We can perform iterative processes of planning and testing actions designed to combat fears and build courage. We can repeat these processes until we attain the level of courage we desire.
The more fearful situations we anticipate and plan for the more opportunities we will have to test different actions and observe results…the goal being fear management and its counterpart, development of courage. This process helps us master our fears, build courage, and build self-confidence. This process itself is a process of courage. It is the best way to build self-confidence, that state of mind where we know we have the ability to address and handle situations when they arise.
Courage and self-confidence are the states of mind most conducive to allowing us to build positive mental attitudes toward other people and situations and indeed toward ourselves.