But what if waiting isn’t prudent at all? What if it’s the most expensive choice you’re making?

Today I’m going to show you where that logic fails—and what it’s actually costing you.

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Brush 3 times a day, go to the dentist regularly. It’s clear, sound direction. Yet the appointment reminder sits in your inbox. Your teeth feel fine. You’re busy. So you postpone.

Six months becomes twelve becomes eighteen.

When you finally go, you learn you need a root canal.

You do the math in your head: what could have been a filling eighteen months ago now requires a major procedure. More expensive. More invasive. More time.

The decay was happening the whole time. You just couldn’t feel it.

That’s the problem with costs that compound quietly.

Courage decisions work the same way. The alarm is quiet. The cost is hidden. And by the time you feel it, it’s been collecting interest for months.

That hidden cost? That’s the waiting tax.

The waiting tax is the price you pay while you deliberate. And unlike the dentist, where the problem is obvious once diagnosed, courage decisions let you convince yourself that waiting IS the strategic choice.

This risk is particularly true for people who can see the risks of action so clearly.

The Math Most People Miss

In Brave Math, we know we can calculate Courage with this 3-question framework.

We collect our inputs for taking action:

ACTION
Gains: What do I get?
Losses: What do I give up?
Reason: What do I do it for? (your values, or constant k)

But most people assume inaction is neutral. And they stop there.
No choice made = no consequences.

Without recognizing it, they calculate inaction as:

INACTION
Gains: Familiar / Comfort

But that’s incomplete math.

Inaction has its own Gains, Losses, and Reason. And those Losses? They’re compounding in the background whether you calculate them or not.

Let me show you what that looks like.

Sarah’s Incomplete Calculation

Sarah manages a team of seven. One of her employees has been underperforming for three months—missing deadlines, delivering work that below expectations, disengaging in team meetings.

She thinks she should have a conversation. She keeps meaning to. But… what if the employee gets defensive? What if they have something going on at home? What if the conversation makes things worse?

Sarah delays the conversation, waiting for the right time. Then she hints at the issue, hoping her employee will start to improve. She tells herself she’s gathering more data. Being fair.

Here’s the calculation Sarah is running:

ACTION: Have the hard conversation
Gains: Employee might improve, team performance might increase
Losses: Uncomfortable conversation, risk of conflict
Reason: I want to be an effective manager

INACTION: Wait to address it
Gains: No conflict today, maintain surface-level harmony

Sarah thinks she’s being kind, even strategic.
She’s not seeing what waiting is costing her.

We’ve seen how fear reveals hidden variables in your calculation. The waiting tax reveals different hidden variables—ones that are compounding whether you acknowledge them or not.

The Hidden Waiting Tax

Typically, the Waiting Tax includes three types of costs: the damage that accumulates while you wait, the opportunities you miss while you wait and who you’re becoming while you delay.

What Sarah isn’t seeing

Compounding damage

While she waits, the team’s results continue to decline. Deadlines, quality, morale get worse. The rest of her team is picking up the slack (and resenting it). Two of her best people have started looking elsewhere because they’re tired of carrying dead weight.
The problem isn’t static, it’s getting worse.

The Opportunity Cost

And while she delays, she’s missing something else. Her manager is watching. Every week Sarah doesn’t address this, she’s demonstrating she’s not ready for the promotion. Leadership isn’t about being nice. It’s about having hard conversations when they matter. By waiting, she’s foreclosing her own advancement.
Doors are closing while she deliberates.

Identity Impact

But the most expensive cost is the one she can’t see at all: she’s becoming the manager who avoids conflict. Every day she doesn’t have this conversation, she’s practicing avoidance. She’s teaching herself (and her team) that accountability is lower priority. That’s not aligned with who she wants to be. But it’s who she’s becoming.

The Cost of Delay

By month six, when Sarah finally has the conversation, she faces a harder problem: “Why didn’t you say something sooner?” The conversation she avoided having in month one is now complicated by months of unaddressed pattern. The courage required for that conversation increased, and the damage is deeper.

At this point, she regrets not doing it sooner.

Had Sarah realized there were losses from inaction her courage calculation would have been more balanced.

See how the math would have looked in Sarah’s situation:

ACTION: Have the hard conversation
Gains: Employee might improve, team performance might increase
Losses: Uncomfortable conversation, risk of conflict
Reason: I want to be an effective manager

INACTION: Wait to address it
Gains: Temporary comfort
Losses: Team morale, business results, her own leadership development, respect from high performers, becoming someone who tolerates misalignment
Reason: Avoiding short-term discomfort at the expense of long-term values

Now the choice becomes clear. The waiting tax was always there—she just wasn’t calculating it.

Is Waiting Always Bad?

The waiting tax isn’t about taking premature action or being reckless. Delay can be valuable, strategic even: sometimes you need more information, more runway, more capacity or a support system in place. Especially in big or irreversible decisions.

But most often we’re avoiding short-term discomfort at the expense of long-term cost, and calling it strategic, prudent or responsible.

When calculating courage, the right question isn’t “Am I ready?”
The question is: “What is waiting costing me?”
Once you see all parts of the equation - the cost of action AND the cost of inaction - the decision often becomes clearer.

📝 Your Turn: Calculate Your Waiting Tax

This exercise is simple but don’t do it in your head. You need to write it down to actually see the tax.

1. Think of the decision you’ve been thinking about.

2. You’ve already calculated the cost of action.

3. Now calculate the cost of waiting:

   1. Compounding costs: what’s getting worse? what patterns are normalizing? What damage is compounding?

   2. What opportunities are you missing? What doors won’t be available in six months? What are you not building? What are you not accessing?

   3. Identity impact: Complete this sentence: Someone who avoids this decision is someone who ____? Who are you becoming? What is this delay teaching you about yourself? What are you practicing by staying?

Once you see the waiting tax, you can’t unsee it. And when you see it, fear shows up because now both action AND inaction have visible costs.

That’s when the real decision begins.

Next week, we talk about what to do with that information.

That light had been on for months. My old Honda Accord dashboard was malfunctioning and the light came on randomly. It was a warning signal, it was also wrong.

So I stopped trusting the light and built a better system: I always filled the tank and counted miles. Around 300 miles, I’d refill. The warning light was designed to alert me to a risk, but it was up to me to decide how much to trust it.

In hard decisions, fear works the same way. It’s a warning system—but not every warning is accurate. Some fears are like my gas gauge: loud, persistent, and pointing at the wrong variable entirely.

The question isn’t “Am I afraid?”
The question is: “What is this fear actually pointing to?”

Fear’s Job Description

Fear is loudest when you’re facing uncertainty. That’s its design. But here’s what matters: fear tells you that something important is at stake. It doesn’t tell you what.

In Brave Math, we evaluate the inputs in the equation:

We diagnose fear to improve those inputs. In analyzing it, we better understand the Losses, the Gains, and the Reasons that can guide action. But fear doesn’t run the calculation. It doesn’t weigh trade-offs. It just knows: “HIGH STAKES DETECTED.”

We inherit a simple rule: fear = stop. And that works perfectly for clear threats: don’t touch the hot stove, don’t walk into traffic. Clear danger, clear instruction.

Then someone tells us to “feel the fear and do it anyway,” as if courage means ignoring the signal entirely. But that’s still playing by the same broken rule, just in reverse.

Both approaches skip the most important step: understanding what the fear is actually telling you. Sometimes it’s telling you the stakes are high. Sometimes it’s telling you your assumptions are wrong. Sometimes it’s telling you you’re looking at the wrong variable entirely.

In Brave Math, especially for big decisions, we treat fear as a tool to help us improve the calculation.

Understanding why helps.

Your amygdala—the part of your brain that detects threats—evolved to keep you alive when uncertainty meant danger. Unknown rustling in the bushes? Assume predator. That's the fast system doing exactly what it's designed to do: react first, ask questions later.

The problem is simple: it can't distinguish between high stakes and wrong action. It just knows something important is happening and flags it as potential threat.

What you need for hard decisions is the slow system—your prefrontal cortex—the part that actually runs calculations, weighs trade-offs, and references your values. That system can do the math.

So when fear screams, you listen.
But you don’t let it decide.

Three Ways Fear Misleads You

Before you analyze fear, know its most common mistakes:

1. It confuses high stakes with bad choices. High stakes ≠ wrong choice. It just means the choice matters.

2. It often points at the wrong variable. “I’m afraid of being poor” often masks “I’m afraid of being trapped.”

3. It mistakes inherited beliefs for your own values. “I should stay because it’s stable” might really be “my parents survived by choosing stability but that’s their formula, not mine.”

Your job isn’t to eliminate these distortions. It’s to recognize them and look deeper.

How to Read Fear

Here is how you use it:

1. Name the obvious fear

2. Test it: “If that was completely solved, would I still be afraid?”

3. If yes, there’s something beneath it. Name that.

4. Repeat until you find no other fears

Keep going until you hit the fear you wouldn’t want to say out loud. That’s usually the real one. For each fear, update the Gain, Loss, and Reason. Those answers feed the calculation.

Watch how the same decision became completely different math once I analyzed what fear was actually warning me about when I was deciding whether to leave my job.

The Career Exit: A Calculation in Progress

My Initial Calculation
Loss: Leave a company that is core to how I see myself
Gain: Stay living where I want to live
Reason: So my kid doesn’t have to leave her school

What am I afraid of? I think I’m afraid of leaving the company I dedicated 20 years of my life to, a place that feels “like home.”

I collected data: I talked with people who left this company and went on to work at other places. They were generally happy to have left. They were encouraging.

But I was still afraid. If I was likely to be okay working somewhere else...

What am I afraid of? I think I’m afraid of losing financial security.

I collected data: I considered jobs with similar or higher compensation. I interviewed at different companies. But I was still afraid. A higher-paying job would solve the money problem.

Why was the fear still there?

I realized I was scared to end up in a job that didn’t suit me just because of the money. So I considered: if the work is enjoyable, am I willing to get paid less? The fear got smaller. I knew I was hunting in the right direction. So I updated my calculation.

What if I took less money for work I actually wanted to do? I thought through the lifestyle changes I might have to make. How much less would I accept? A lot, it turned out. That surprised me. But even imagining that scenario—doing work I’d enjoy—something still felt unsettled.

If I would be okay leaving the company, if I could enjoy the work, if I was willing to get paid less, then why was I still feeling scared?

Then it came to me:

I was afraid of ending up in the same cage with nicer wallpaper.

The fog cleared. Fear was still there, but it wasn’t noisy.
Misalignment was always a Loss in my equation. Analyzing Fear made it visible.

Once I named it, I could finally calculate accurately.

My Final Calculation
Loss: Some income, corporate stability, the identity of “P&G executive,” certainty about the future
Gain: Work I’d actually enjoy, flexibility in my schedule, fewer working hours, living in Seattle, building something aligned with who I am
Reason: I am meant to build something that helps people, but I keep ignoring my calling. I can’t teach my daughter to live authentically if I’m modeling self-betrayal every day.

The calculation changed completely. Income became one variable among many. Alignment went from invisible to the dominant Reason. And suddenly I had more Gains than I’d realized—flexibility, autonomy, purpose.

Same decision. Different equation. All because I debugged what fear was actually warning me about.

But most important was the Reason it helped uncover: I could tolerate higher uncertainty and financial risk if I was building something aligned with who I actually am. That Reason—that why—made the trade-offs something I could consider instead of paralyzing.

This was part of my calculations. Analyzing what fear was warning about helped me get better inputs. And better outcomes come from better inputs.

When you get that clear about what’s actually at stake, it doesn’t eliminate the fear. But it quiets the noise enough to decide IF you want to act, even if you don't yet know HOW.

📝 Your Turn

Think of a decision you’re facing where fear is loud.

• Name the obvious fear. The one you’d tell someone if they asked.

• Now test it: “If that fear was completely solved—money handled, approval secured, safety guaranteed—would I still be afraid?”

• If yes, keep going. Repeat until you hit the fear you wouldn’t want to say out loud.

• For each fear you uncover, ask: Does this reveal a Gain I care about? A Loss I'm facing? A Reason that drives me?

• Write it down in the right part of your equation. Update the calculation.

Sometimes analyzing fear is quick. Sometimes, as it was for me, it takes months. That’s legitimate work—legitimate math.

But here’s what changes once you know how to read fear: You stop waiting for courage to arrive. You start debugging the equation until the calculation is clear enough to act on.

When you get that clear about what’s actually at stake, it doesn’t eliminate the fear. But it quiets the noise enough to decide IF you want to act—even if you don’t yet know HOW.

Because courage was never about feeling ready. It was always about having better inputs.

Next week, we'll tackle what happens when fear analysis reveals the truth: you know what you need to do, but you're still not moving. That's when waiting itself becomes part of the calculation.

P.S.: A side note for parents of little kids: Fear, like a child, can be challenging on your nervous system. It lacks the vocabulary to communicate clearly. I try to approach it as I do my daughter when she’s sleeping... when I can just observe her without the constant demands, the negotiations, the mental load. When my nervous system finally calms down enough to feel that uncomplicated love. In the thick of it, it’s exhausting—too much stress and reaction. But when I can step back and look at it from the outside, I remember: it’s here to help me.

I’ve been there too. When I left my 20yr career, the questions swirled in my head for a very long time.

We Don’t Wait for Courage, We Calculate It

You know it’s a big decision. You are just waiting for courage to show up. Or considering (with a little shame) whether you are just not brave enough.

This is the very first mistake we make: We wait for courage.

We are taught to believe that courage is a trait, or a feeling. You have it or you don’t. We hope it will come.

But courage is a calculation.

The Inputs to Courage

Let’s start by stripping courage down to its simplest components.

If we set fear aside for just a moment, in a courageous situation there is:

A Loss
A Gain
A Reason

These are the inputs for the calculation.
It’s almost a risk/reward situation, with a WHY.

In courageous acts:

• The loss isn’t any loss. It’s something valuable and it feels tangible. Income, community, status, life, etc…

• The gain isn’t guaranteed. It’s valuable but it may be hard to measure. Health, relationships, peace, honor, prosperity, etc…

• The reason is meaningful enough to you that you see it as worthy. This is where your values come in — the constant k. Your values are what make the ‘reason’ strong enough to act.

Now that we understand it has those 3 components (loss, gain, reason), we are ready to consider the element of fear. The purpose of fear in humans is to protect us from danger. In courageous moments, fear is a signal that tells us this decision is important to us.

Fear doesn’t invalidate the calculation. It doesn’t say you can’t do it. It’s data about stakes, that the calculation matters. That’s it.

The Equation

Courage is a calculation of gains and losses. Fear highlights that it matters.

To calculate courage, ask yourself three questions:

• What do I give up? (Losses)

• What do I get? (Gains)

• What do I do it for? (Reason)

The harder the decision, the more nuanced it gets. But the core of the formula doesn’t change.

How the Equation Works: Two Real Examples

Here are 2 personal examples:

The Family Conversation

I have a family member who gives a lot of unsolicited advice. It comes from a place of care, but it also drifts into judgment more often than I’d like. I found myself avoiding conversations with this person because not being available was easier. But maintaining relationship with my small family is important. I was scared to address it so I ran the calculation.

The loss: What I was losing was the comfort of not having the conversation. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. I risked upsetting them or being seen as ungrateful.

The gain: What I might gain was a better relationship. More at ease in our conversations. Feel their care without the judgment.

The reason: I value being my authentic self especially inside my family. I also value trying to do my best. I was violating both of those values by avoiding the problem.

The Career Exit

When I left my corporate career, I wasn’t going after excitement. I was responding to a quiet and heavy misalignment.

The loss: I was giving up a steady paycheck, familiarity, the status and prestige of the title I had reached, an incredible retirement program.

The gain: I might gain work that felt meaningful and energized me. I’d learn new things and apply my expertise to new domains. Enticing even if it wasn’t guaranteed.

The reason: I value building a life that reflects what’s important to me. Staying in a place that no longer fit what I was called to do was a cost too high, even if it was comfortable.

The fear was louder. The inputs more complex. But the equation was the same.

📝 Now try your own scenario.

You have a decision you’ve been avoiding. You know your constant k.

What are your losses? What are the gains? Based on your values, which are constant, what is a reason worth considering moving to a decision despite the fear?

Don’t rush through it. Better outputs come from better inputs. It’s that simple.

Sometimes even after knowing the equation, people can get stuck on fear. Frozen. Next week, I’ll show you how to read fear as data instead of an obstacle.

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The Trap of Goals

Most of us are very good at being busy. When something feels off, or we want ‘better’, we default to what we know: set new goals, put systems in place, raise the bar. We get busy living.

The beginning of the year is the epitome of this behavior: a cultural culmination of goals, guides and checklists. We are trained, often unconsciously, to see new goals as proof of growth. Optimization looks like progress. Pursuing productivity earns social currency. Staying busy feels responsible, capable, and in control.

And for many people, it works.
Until it doesn’t.

Constant activity can quietly become a way of avoiding what’s harder to face. Instead of checking if you are misaligned, you gloss over the question and add momentum. Instead of risk, you choose self-improvement. Instead of uncertainty, you double down on effort. What looks like growth might just be numbing, as you use productivity to outrun anxiety, or to quiet a feeling of unfulfillment.

Here’s the thing about misalignment: it doesn’t announce itself.
You don’t wake up one day thinking, “I’m completely out of alignment with my values.”

Misalignment is quiet. It usually shows up as:

• Numbing: you stay busy to avoid feeling the gap

• Avoidance: you know what needs to happen, but you aren’t facing it

• Justification: you have good reasons for why now isn’t the right time

Sometimes you’re just busy. But if you are human, then at least some of your busyness is a shield to ‘protect’ you. It lets you avoid the brave conversation, the hard decision, the real change that you can’t optimize your way through.

So before you pursue new goals, pause.
Ask yourself: do you really need more of what you just added to your list, or do you need more courage?

No one gets to live their whole life perfectly values-aligned. But Brave Math exists because courage isn't reserved for life-altering choices. It shows up in the everyday: declining a request that doesn't align with you, speaking honestly when silence is easier, choosing the uncomfortable conversation over the comfortable distraction. You don't need unlimited freedom to start but you do need to use the agency you have.

In our culture, busy is socially rewarded. Courage is personally costly.

While courage is uncomfortable, it delivers better outcomes than busyness. Research shows that people acting in alignment with their values experience lower anxiety and depression. They report less fatigue and better health.

Start With Clarity

Courage doesn’t start with what you do. It starts with who you are.

Every brave decision includes uncertainty. The choice isn’t whether to act, it’s whether your actions reflect who you truly are. You don’t need new tactics; you need to get clear on what matters most to you. That clarity is where courage begins.

Our common experience with courage goes something like this:

• You name what you would lose.

• You aren’t certain on what you’ll gain.

• You anticipate others will respond negatively.

• You see the outcome isn’t guaranteed.

• You feel fear that makes you want to stop.

Often you're running endless scenarios: what if this goes wrong? What if I regret it? What if… what if… You try to calculate certainty from incomplete data. So you avoid it.

The Constant in Every Brave Decision

When everything feels uncertain, we need something fixed to guide us.
If courage is a calculation, it needs a constant.

Gains, losses, and outcomes are variables. Variables change. They are uncertain.

What doesn’t change are your values. Values are the constant in every brave calculation. They are steady anchors that remain the same while everything else shifts. When the outcome is unclear, when you don’t know how others will react, when you can’t predict what you’ll gain or lose—your values don’t move. That constant is what allows you to tolerate uncertainty at all. Without it, all you see is danger.

This isn't about following your heart or trusting your gut. It's about having a constant in your equation. Without it, you're trying to solve for X when everything is a variable. That's not a feelings problem, it's a math problem. Values are k—the fixed value that doesn't change regardless of context. When you know k, the rest becomes solvable.

A common misconception is that confidence is what’s needed for courage. In reality, what people actually need is more clarity. If you don’t know what you value, then every decision feels heavier than it needs to be. You avoid, delay, over-analyze, waiting for certainty that will never come.

Before you add more goals to your list, get clear on what you value because values simplify decisions when certainty is unavailable.

So how do you actually identify your values—especially if you can't name them off the top of your head?

Uncover Your Values

Even if you can’t easily name your values, they are already trying to guide your life. When you are living out of alignment (which often shows up as avoidance, numbing, overanalyzing) you are still choosing something (often comfort, approval, money) over what truly matters to you.

If you want to know what you value, don’t start with abstract lists or aspirational words. Start with your own behavior.

Most values exercises ask you to imagine who you want to be or pick from a list of words. The exercise below takes a different approach: using self-signaling—an approach from behavioral economics—to reverse-engineer your values from a moment you’ve already lived, where you made a costly choice that revealed what truly matters.

Your Values Exercise: Take 5 minutes to Get Clear.

Here’s what you’ll do:

1. Identify one moment where you acted with courage

2. Answer three questions about the “easier” path you didn’t take

3. Extract the value that was already steering you

👉Click here to download the Values Exercise (pdf | doc)

Do it before next week. You’ll need your answer for what comes next.

What’s Next

Last week, I asked you to identify one decision you’ve been avoiding. Today, by identifying our values, we’re taking the first step toward actually making a decision.

Over the next month, we’ll build the foundation for courageous action. I will show you how to move from avoidance to action one step at a time.

The best version of yourself (the one that showed up in the legacy moments of your life) is still available to you. For the new year, you might not need a longer to-do list or to become someone new. You need to get clearer about who you already are so you can bring it when it matters most.

That clarity is where courage begins.

P.S. Want personalized feedback?
Reply with your value or situation—I’ll use it (anonymously) in future examples

Some of my mentors used the word courage. I’ll tell you this: I didn’t feel courageous for a second. Most of what I was doing felt like every problem I’d solved before: look at the variables, gather data, scenario plan, figure out the right fit, then act. That disconnect between how courage looks from the outside and how it feels from the inside is what got me curious.

What does courage actually feel like?
What I found had been hiding in plain sight. Yet another inherited belief.

The Inherited Belief

One of the earliest documented definitions of courage comes from Ancient Greece. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes who is brave:

The man who faces and fears the right things, with the right aim, in the right way and at the right time is brave. (…) Properly, then, he will be called brave who is fearless in face of a noble death.

In it, he argues the highest form of courage was found in battle. Soldiers willing to sacrifice their lives protecting their city-state.

That image—brave heroic acts, self-sacrifice for a greater cause—is the one most of us still carry. It carried on through Romans and Christianity and is still reinforced today through films, books and medals.

That was thousands of years ago.
Today, we have a gap.

The Courage Gap

Let me show you something…

What image comes to mind when you think of courage?

It probably looks something like this:

Now consider these situations:

• A child who stands up to a bully

• A person who voices an unpopular opinion in a meeting

• Someone who leaves a group that repeatedly disrespects their boundaries

Are these courageous acts? I imagine you would say yes.

But did they come to mind when I asked you to think of courage? Probably not.

This is a problem:

Our mental model of courage highlights rare, dramatic moments and pushes to the fringe the kinds of courage we actually face most often. It ties courage to the extraordinary, when most of us need it in ordinary, day-to-day moments.

That gap makes courage feel bigger and harder than it needs to be. And when courage looks that distant, it’s no wonder many people think it’s outside their reach. This model doesn’t help us act when it matters.

Science Tells Us the Truth

Once I looked past the motivational posters, I found substantial data on courage that rarely breaks through.

Three findings stood out to me.

1. Thinking you’re brave isn’t what makes you act brave.

When psychologists studied what actually predicts courageous action, they found that seeing yourself as a courageous person wasn’t very helpful. What mattered instead was something much more tangible: the decision you make when fear is right in front of you.

In these studies, people were asked to face something they were genuinely afraid of. When they described themselves as courageous weeks earlier, it didn’t predict what they did. But when they paused just before the moment and decided whether they were willing to move forward despite fear, that choice predicted their behavior almost exactly.

Courage showed up not as an identity, but as a decision.

2. Courage can be trained.

There are certain people—mostly nurses and the military—who are already being trained in courageous action. Multiple studies show training increases courageous behavior, treating courage like a skill you can strengthen. If they can learn it, so can we.

3. Fear is not the problem.

One study I found particularly insightful comes from research on paratrooper trainees. Those defined as courageous showed just as much fear (physiological arousal) before a jump as those defined as fearful. The difference wasn’t the fear. It was the action.

The science was confirming what I’d seen: Courage isn’t a feeling you wait to have. It’s a calculation you learn to make.

The Modern Challenge

This matters because the dangers we face in 2025 are increasingly social, not physical.

We’ve all felt that fear. Setting a boundary with a parent. Speaking up in a meeting when our perspective contradicts our manager’s. Leaving a job that pays well but silently takes away our health. Asking for what we need in a relationship.

These aren’t life-or-death situations, and for a long time I minimized that fear. I was surprised to find that our brains actually register social threats in ways remarkably similar to physical injury. Studies on social pain demonstrated that rejection, exclusion, and disconnection activate the same neural pathways as physical pain.

Our brain doesn’t distinguish social vs physical threats as clearly as we might think.

So when you feel afraid to have a difficult conversation, that fear is responding to real risk. Just because you’re not on a battlefield doesn’t mean courage isn’t required.

Here’s the silver lining:
Social risks are risks you can anticipate.
Which means they’re risks you can prepare for.

Why It Matters

The research on courage’s benefits deserves more attention. I experienced many of these in the last year but never connected them explicitly to courage.

People who act courageously have lower anxiety, depression, and PTSD symptoms. They report less fatigue, less chronic pain, and better physical health.

And here’s the finding that can help us during periods of transition: on days people choose to act with courage, they feel better and less stressed—even after dealing with the discomfort of the feared action itself. Not eventually. The same day.

What Comes Next

Courage can be cultivated. Science confirms it. My experience says it’s essential.

For now, identify one decision you’ve been avoiding.
Not the Braveheart kind. Something specific.

If you’re willing, reply and tell me what it is. I’m curious where courage (or avoidance) is showing up for you right now.

PS: For me, this past year was a year of clearing: divorce, career, housing, health. This next year is my year of rebuilding. The courage I’m focusing on now is doing it with intention toward what matters.

Sources:

The Role of Courage on Behavioral Approach in a Fear-Eliciting Situation
Exploring the foundations and influences of nurses’ moral courage
Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion
The effect of courage on stress
Handbook of Self-Regulation

I was one of those children. On a hot summer day, I went to a juice stand and asked for mango with milk. The vendor refused to sell it to me. “For mango, I can only blend it with water. It is for your safety.” This was in the 1980s. Science knew it wasn’t true. People in most of the world knew it wasn’t true. Yet here was a grown man protecting me from a danger that didn’t exist.

But the truth behind that warning is stranger and far more revealing than it seems.

Mangoes in Brazil are everywhere. In the summer, they fall from trees faster than anyone can eat them. It was also an abundant resource during colonial times. Somewhere in a plantation, likely in the 1500’s, a landowner was interested in protecting their limited supply of milk. He told enslaved people that drinking milk when eating mangos would make them sick. Faced with the choice, they picked the fruit they had in abundance. That landowner’s story changed what they believed, and how they behaved.

The strategy worked. The lie became “truth”. Generations later it was still impacting behavior, even when there was science to prove otherwise.

I was taught the origin of this belief years later.

The takeaway shaped my worldview.

I learned to become a student of the gap between what we’re told and what is actually true. Of what is visible, and what lies underneath. Of what feels like common sense, and what was engineered for someone else’s advantage.

This curiosity led me to study Systems Engineering, where I came to understand the mechanics beneath the surface and the relationship between its parts. At Procter & Gamble, I was taught to guide the invisible forces that shape how people think, decide and act. For twenty years, I sharpened my skills on seeing what lies beneath the surface. Mastering data. Spotting patterns. Seeking the truth hiding behind accepted stories.

Always in pursuit of certainty. Seeking control in an uncertain world.

I learned the undeniable truth:

You can’t eliminate uncertainty.
But you can learn to see it clearly.

So when people describe my actions as courageous or brave, I see it differently.

For me, it is a calculus. I gather the data, I consider what is unseen, I investigate the origin, I separate what is fact from myth. Then, using the best information I can gather, I choose the path that makes the most sense — even if it’s uncertain or hard to walk.

That’s how, this year, I made the life decision that surprised me the most: I left the high-paying executive role I spent 2 decades working towards because the math said staying would cost me more than leaving. Even after I decided, people told me it was too risky—especially as a single mom. But the more data I collected, the more I arrived at the same conclusion.

What I learned in making that decision—and in studying the science along the way—is that courage isn’t what most people think it is. It’s not feelings. It’s not blind faith. It’s not even about being unafraid.

Courage is a calculation.

And like any calculation, it can be learned, practiced, and done better.

Which brings me here, to BRAVE Math.
A place to study courage differently — not as a feeling, but as a skill you build.

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My goal is to help us make sense of courage in a way that makes it practical and relevant.

Each week we will study the science, learn the frameworks, and share the stories that help us move forward with clarity instead of fear.

Because courage isn’t about being fearless.
It’s about doing the math and taking the step, even when it’s uncertain.

PS: Walking away from my job in 2025 was an exercise in brave math.
But the path ahead is still uncertain. As I navigate what’s ahead, I will continue to do the calculus. There is a risk I will fail, and doing it publicly makes me nervous. I am doing it anyway because I calculated there is tremendous value in learning together, with a community who is also interested in making bold moves.

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