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 tamed and transformed into something more positive and constructive.
Often, Courage is developed accidentally - for example when someone acts impulsively in reaction to a dangerous or fearful situation.
Deeply rooted Courage can also be developed intentionally with forethought and planned action steps.
People know what causes them to feel fear. People can anticipate most of the situations that cause them fear. As one example, people can anticipate other people’s actions that cause them to experience fear. More specifically, in business, people can anticipate the specific actions their bosses do that trigger feelings of fear.
Most of the situations that cause us to be fearful can be anticipated.
Because we have this ability to anticipate fearful situations we also have the ability to plan ways to counteract those fearful situations before they visit us. In summary, we can role-play fearful situations in our minds long before those fearful situations happen in reality. While we role-play those fearful situations in our mind 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, later, when fearful situations arise in real life we can face them and take pre-planned actions. And, because we know what we are doing and why we are doing it we can be more objective. We can 'self-analyse' to assess, rate, adjust, and improve our performance in fear-situations. Following this approach we can improve our handling of fear-situations and build Courage until we reach the level of Courage we desire.
The more fearful situations we can anticipate and plan for the more opportunities we will have to test different fear-countering actions… the goal being ‘fear management’...i.e., Courage.
The process described here helps us master our fears, build Courage, and build self-confidence. This is the optimum process for development of Courage because we control the pace and we get first-hand feedback as we succeed in small steps. It is also an excellent way to build self-confidence, that state of mind where we know we have the ability to address and handle situations when we face them.
Courage and self-confidence are the states of mind most conducive to building positive mental attitudes toward other people and situations and, of more importance, toward ourselves.