Like every emotional intelligence variable I’ve pondered, Courage exists on a spectrum. And like all spectrums, it contains the potential for underdevelopment and overdevelopment.
This morning, I was reviewing the many emotional capacities I tend to reference—humility, empathy, boundaries, vulnerability, curiosity—and wondered if I had overlooked something important. Courage came to mind.
We often view courage as inherently virtuous. But dialectically, it, too, requires balance. You can have too little of it. You can also have too much.
Too little courage can present as avoidance, chronic hesitation, or passivity. Too much can become recklessness, performative self-sacrifice, or an inability to retreat.
Every emotional strength becomes a liability when taken to an extreme. People with too much empathy are often overstimulated and emotionally exhausted. They take in too much emotional data from the external world, distracting them from attending to the emotional variables most relevant to them.
People who are too humble may suppress important thoughts or insights, fearing they’ll overpower others or come across as rigid. However, this can deprive others of perspectives that could be deeply necessary or clarifying.
The same principle applies to courage. It is essential. And it can be distorted.
So first, let’s deconstruct what courage is. This is perhaps why the dichotomy exists—courage is not just a feeling but a choice or process. It is a procedure and behavior. What for? Courage is a response to fear. When the environment presents a task that elicits a fear response, courage propels us to navigate—not succumb to—our fear. It moves us toward action in the service of intention, ambition, or alignment with a value, even when doing so may be dangerous. Telling the truth is a common example.
Can you have too much courage? Can you too often persevere through fear instead of yielding to it—listening to it, running away, or hiding? Yes. I think many of us may be doing that right now. We may want to raise our voices about misrepresentations, misinformation, lies, and radical betrayals of collective values or ethics. But we are afraid of the consequences—not just to ourselves, but to our families and those connected to us.
This creates a line: at what point is that line so crossed that it becomes worth empowering courage to persevere through fear, even when the probability of consequence is high?
Another relevant variable here is the level of responsibility. It is different for the schoolteacher than for a congressperson to succumb to fear related to resistance—to protect from the consequence inherent in publicly resisting the government’s decisions—than for the congressperson to do so. It is different for pedestrians to run from criminals than for police officers to run. It is different for your florist to fear giving you direct feedback than for your therapist.
What a double-bonded choice we end with: to heed fear for protecting ourselves and those closest to us -or to mobilize courage for the collective, for congruence with a more significant ideological position.
