Training courage

The brave is the one who knows how to be stronger than fear. Train courage and courage!

Courage training is like training muscles in the gym. First you take a small weight, as much as you can lift. When you take this weight already easily, move on to a heavier weight and try to lift it. Likewise with fear. First you train yourself against a small fear, then move on to a bigger one.

If you are afraid to speak in front of the public, speak more often where it is scary, but not very, where you will be supported — for example, at a training in a training group. Pass self-confidence training. Do you want to deal with this fear on your own? Great: gather your friends and perform in front of them — as long as it becomes easy for you. Next, gather 30 people and speak to them. If at this stage you have problems, you are afraid, you forget what you have to say, you get lost, train with such an audience until you get used to it and start to feel comfortable. Then go to the audience of 50 people and so on up to at least 1000.

If you are not a very sociable young man and are afraid to meet girls, start with grandmothers: you will be able to start a conversation with them. Next, see How to get acquainted on the street. Understand the main principle: learn to overcome small fears, then take on big ones.

To train courage and overcome fear in the future, the following exercises will help you:

• Non-standard actions
• Falling on the back of a chair
• Fall from a pole

Cultivating Courage in Children

We all want our children to be successful, self-confident, strong-willed, able to overcome obstacles and win! How to bring it up? I will tell you how these qualities were brought up in noble families: here is an episode from the memoirs of Princess E. Meshcherskaya.

My older brother, Vyacheslav, considered it his duty to educate my sister Katya. Knowing that his sister was afraid of thunderstorms, he dragged her by force onto the sill of the open window and set her under the downpour. Katya lost consciousness from fear, and when she came to herself, her brother wiped her wet face with his handkerchief and said: “Well, answer me: will you still be a coward and be afraid of a thunderstorm?” Then, carrying the girl in his arms down the stairs, he said: “And you, if you want me to love you and consider you my sister, be brave. Remember: there is no vice more shameful than cowardice.

The riskiness of such educational procedures was largely due to a sincere belief in their beneficence, and this belief made a corresponding impression on the children: they perceived such experiments on themselves not as the arbitrariness and cruelty of their elders, but as a necessary tempering of character. So, Ekaterina Meshcherskaya, already an old woman, recalls this incident from her childhood without resentment and indignation; on the contrary, she concludes with satisfaction: «And I was never afraid of a thunderstorm again.»

How parents instill courage in their children today, see →

Applicability limits

• Courage is not always justified. Courage, like any other manifestation of personality, is appropriate and inappropriate. See →
• Not all fear needs to be removed. It is important to keep in mind that not every fear and not always needs to be removed: if a feeling of fear stops you in front of a real danger, then perhaps you should not remove fear, but stop risking your life for nothing and do something more productive.
• It is not always necessary to pay attention to fear. It is often scary in war, but adults are used to it just as much as to the fact that life is hard, sometimes cold, sometimes painful. If there are more important tasks, they remove it from the field of attention and do their main activity, and not work with fear. At the same time, during the training of cadets, work with fear occurs: for example, crawling under barbed wire, when a machine gun with live ammunition is scribbling over you. Cadets must be ready for really scary situations.

The technique of courage training in practical psychology is called implosion therapy. This is a method of treating phobias (fears), when the client is immersed in a situation of maximum tolerable fear for a sufficiently long time — until he gets tired of being afraid and realizes that it is stupid and useless to be afraid.