Finding the Courage to Be Bold in the Face of Fear

This is an excerpt from the book “How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage,” written by Ranjay Gulati, HarperCollins Publishers, September 2025.

One of the most courageous people I know wasn’t a legendary explorer, activist, or soldier. She wasn’t a Hollywood stuntperson or an astronaut or a firefighter. She was my mother. In India during the 1960s and 1970s, when I grew up, society was staunchly traditional. Men served as the breadwinners and heads of households, while women were expected to prioritize domestic roles, placing their husbands’ goals and happiness above their own. Few women back then would have dared to separate from their husbands, forge their own careers, and use their life savings to start up a business. But that’s precisely what my mother did. Overcoming any number of obstacles along the way, she cobbled together a business from nothing and became highly successful, in the process creating jobs for others and giving back to her community.

I was too young then to understand all the risks she took, but some were obvious to me—and quite stunning. I’ll never forget a dramatic moment that occurred when I was a teenager. Having achieved a level of prosperity thanks to her business, my mother bought five acres of land in what was then a rural area outside of New Delhi, planning to use it as a weekend retreat. No sooner had she acquired the property than authorities announced plans to turn the area into a new township and build residences on it. Overnight, her farmland became much more valuable.

A real estate developer approached her, asking if she would sell for an attractive price. She refused, telling him she didn’t care about the money—she felt drawn to this particular property on account of its location close to her home. The developer became aggressive, threatening her with consequences if she didn’t sell. Repeatedly, she declined. One day, a stranger showed up at our home, introducing himself as a representative of the developer and asking to speak with my mother. He was a big, stocky guy dressed in a cheap, ill-fitting blazer. My mother initially refused to see him, but he pleaded that he only wanted five minutes of her time, and that afterward she’d never see him again.

I showed him into our living room, and he took a seat on the sofa across from her. I watched from a nearby doorway as he took out a document from his pocket, placed it on the table in front of my mother, and glared at her. “I’m here to get you to sign this.” My mother glanced at the document and saw that it was a bill of sale. She pushed it back toward him.

“I’ve already told your boss that I won’t sell. Why do you folks keep wasting my time? I won’t change my mind.”

“I know,” the man said. “I’m here to get you to change your mind. I have brought a check with me. We just need to agree on the amount. I’m not leaving until that contract is signed.”

“Look, you can say anything you want. The land isn’t for sale.” The man stared long and hard at my mother. Slowly, he reached his hand down and pushed back the flap of his jacket, revealing a revolver tucked into his belt.

I froze in terror. I thought of running over and tackling the man, but I did nothing of the sort. Instead, I played out the scene in my head, pondering the risk. How long would it take him to react? Would he fight back? If he did, would I be strong enough to take him? Could I wrestle the gun away from him without endangering my mother?

She, meanwhile, did something incredible. She stood up, walked over to the man, and slapped him—hard—across the face. “You think you can scare me with a gun? Get out of my house right now!” The man sat frozen in his seat, utterly shocked. She pointed toward the front door. “I want you out of my house this minute. And don’t you come back. I don’t ever want to see your face. Get up!”

Incredibly, the man did as she demanded. We never saw him again. Later that day, I asked my mother about this experience and whether she was scared.

“Scared of what?” she asked.

“The man had a gun.”

“You know what?” she said. “No one pushes me around. This is my land. I earned it.”

Knowing my mother, I’m sure that she experienced at least some trepidation in this particular moment. Still, she wasn’t about to let it determine her behavior. Fearful or not, she made a deliberate choice to stand up to a bully. Having fought hard against traditional Indian gender roles, she regarded herself as a tough, decisive person who took charge of her own destiny. That understanding no doubt informed her actions.

What ultimately allows courageous people to take action isn’t their lack of fear but their ability to make sense of situations in helpful ways, and also see themselves as strong, capable people who can control their destinies. Most courageous people experience fear just like any of us do. But they come to understand the world and themselves in ways that incline them to take bold, forceful action when it really counts. Courage is a learned behavior, not an innate one. It hinges not just on our emotional state but on cognition and our interpretation of reality. In other words, it hinges on our development of what we might call a courageous mindset.

Any of us can become braver and more action-oriented at work and at home, but we must spend time understanding, analyzing, and modifying the mental frames we’re using to make sense of our lives and the dangers we face. I came to such insights through a circuitous route, beginning with my childhood observations of my mother and my reactions to them. I felt awed by her boldness—I still do. But I also felt ashamed by my own, relative fearfulness.

What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I jump up and tackle that man with the gun? Why did I tend to shrink from making other bold decisions, like raising my hand with a creative idea in class or challenging authority figures when they seemed to be behaving unjustly? As an avid athlete, I tended to hesitate or freeze up during clutch moments, fearful of disappointing my teammates. Why did that keep happening? My mother managed to conquer her fears, yet it seemed that I couldn’t. I struggled with fear for decades, although I did try my best to rid myself of it.

During my twenties and thirties, I forced myself to take risks in hopes of proving to myself that I was more courageous than I knew myself deep down to be. I signed up for hiking expeditions in the Himalayas. I learned to fly an airplane and earned a pilot’s license. I took up windsurfing. These activities were fun and enriching, and they helped me overcome fears I had in other areas of my life. As I achieved difficult goals, I realized that many challenges I’d feared were actually quite attainable, fueling my confidence to take on new risks.

In my professional life as well, I found myself gradually feeling stronger and more capable of stepping up into situations that required moral courage. Ringing in my head was always my mother’s exhortation: be bold! Over decades, then, I sort of stumbled my way toward becoming bolder—still not as courageous as I aspired to be, but much better. I also wondered if there might have been a quicker, more efficient way of getting to boldness. As I discovered, the answer was yes.

In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, my colleagues Nitin Nohria, Franz Wohlgezogen, and I undertook a study that explored how companies operated during difficult economic times. Our goal: to figure out which approaches to managing through a crisis worked best. Examining 4,700 public companies during three previous recessions, we were intrigued to find that a small group—about 9 percent of companies—emerged from each recession in stronger shape than they had been before it. You might think that these companies were more careful and conservative in their approach than others, but that wasn’t the case.

As our statistical analysis showed, these companies thrived because they behaved more boldly than their peers. They resisted the urge, usually triggered by a fear of failure, to retrench when faced with adversity—a response that in the business world often translates into slashing budgets and workforces. These firms cut costs, surely—but at the same time, they took risks and invested in growth despite the challenging circumstances. Without intending to per se, we had wound up documenting the significant difference that courage makes in business.

Following this study, I began to consider more seriously why some companies and people managed to transcend their fears while others didn’t. For people, this question might seem to have a simple answer: character or temperament. Philosophers as far back as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Mencius perceived courage as an innate virtue, an outgrowth of the hero’s “courageous disposition.”

Scholars as well as the general public have long recognized individuals like Napoleon, General Patton, Joan of Arc, or Florence Nightingale as quintessential examples of courage. They have tended to celebrate the valor of military men in particular; consider the strategist Carl von Clausewitz, who remarked in his 1832 tome, On War, that “[w]ar is the province of danger, and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior.” Yet I suspected that personality couldn’t be the whole answer for why some people behave more courageously than others. Trained as a sociologist, I had learned to explain human behavior by studying not only individuals per se—their talents and personalities—but the social situations in which they’re placed, and in particular, how those situations shape our perceptions of ourselves and others.

Although we do have some ability to choose our environment and at times transcend it, popular notions of a courageous temperament seemed overly simple. Was it really just innate disposition that prompted certain people to overcome their fears and take bold action, or was it perhaps some more complex interaction between themselves and the specific situations they faced? Recognizing that some heroes have no track record of bravery, I wondered if courageous acts reflected how people made sense of their particular situation and their role in the moment. It seemed that something about those two factors might best explain their actions. I spent a decade researching cases in which people in diverse settings felt energized to hang in there, act, and succeed in the face of fear.

Some of these individuals had jobs or careers that were inherently dangerous, but many were everyday people like my mother who had found a need to behave boldly and rose to the challenge. My research assistants and I sometimes looked at extreme situations that had a large impact, recognizing that even if most of us won’t find ourselves in similar circumstances, the lessons we could learn would apply in more mundane settings too. Thus we interviewed leaders and employees who worked during Japan’s 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster to prevent nearby reactors from melting down. We probed the secrets of coach Nick Saban’s massively successful football team at the University of Alabama. We spoke to a foot soldier on the front lines of the war in Ukraine. And we considered many business-related examples, interviewing over three hundred corporate leaders and entrepreneurs. Most of these examples eventually became Harvard Business School case studies that I taught in my classes. Based on all this work, I concluded that courageous people are those who willfully take bold, risky action to serve a purpose that they perceive to be worthy, usually in the face of an abiding fear.

An excerpt from HOW TO BE BOLD. Copyright © 2025 by Ranjay Gulati. Reprinted here with permission from Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.