What if courage isn’t a trait—but a decision? In this Daily Podcast, Jonathan Doyle unpacks Alfred Adler’s insight that “all living requires risk-taking.” You’ll learn why waiting for certainty kills momentum, how to practice behavioral courage, and how to avoid both cowardice and recklessness by aiming for the golden mean of wise risk. From parenting to leadership, running to career moves, Jonathan gives you a simple way to act now—without needing a guarantee.

You’ll learn

• The courage myth: why it’s a behavior, not a personality type
• The wise-risk spectrum: cowardice ↔︎ courage ↔︎ recklessness
• A 3-step micro-framework to move despite uncertainty
• Faith-fueled boldness: “Be strong and courageous” (Joshua 1:9)

Do this today: Choose one meaningful risk, take one step, reflect for 2 minutes.

Connect: IG @jdoylespeaks | YouTube Jonathan Doyle Speaks | jonathandoyle.co

SEO keywords: courage, take risks, Alfred Adler, personal development, motivation, entrepreneur mindset, leadership, decision-making, discipline, confidence, resilience, virtue ethics

Enquire about booking Jonathan to speak:

https://jonathandoyle.co/

Book a coaching call with me now

https://jonathandoyle.co/

Jonathan is on Youtube here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpCYnW4yVdd93N1OTbsxgyw

Karen's MasterClass for Women is here:

https://bit.ly/geniusmasterclasskaren

hello there, my friend Jonathan Doyle with you once again.

This is the Daily podcast and I am pleased you are here.

It's a joy just to have this time with you and to hopefully offer you a thought

and insight and idea to encourage you on this great journey of life.

Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast, hit that subscribe

button, share this with family and friends, and let us try and make this

great big planet of approximately 8 billion people, fractionally better.

In the next 24 hours.

That's all we have to do.

We just do that ourselves.

Don't worry about the too much about the big picture.

Let's just try and improve ourselves, love the people around us, and

use these incredible gifts and talents that we've been given.

We are on one of my standard Alfred Adler binges.

For those of you who new to this, I'm a. I'm always looking for

content and interesting ideas and people, and Alfred Adler is a

psychologist of the 20th century who I do think has a fair bit to offer.

And yesterday's episode was great and I wanna just share with you another quick

quote and let's break it open together.

He says this, courage is not an ability one either possesses or lacks.

Courage is the willingness.

To engage in a risk taking behavior regardless of whether the consequences

are unknown or possibly adverse.

We are capable of courageous behavior provided we are willing to engage in it.

Given that life offers few guarantees.

All living requires risk taking.

Let's hear that last sentence again.

Given that all life offers few guarantees, all living requires.

Risk taking.

Alright, there is so much in this.

Let's try and make it as useful as possible for you.

Look, I love that last sentence.

Given that life offers few guarantees, what's the standard

cliche That the only thing definite in life are death and taxes though?

Given the way that wealth is polarizing in the world, I'm not even sure taxes are

mandatory for some, but life has very few guarantees, I love the ancient biblical

book of Ecclesiastes talks about, the sun rises, the sun sets and rises again.

That what has been will be again there's certain repetitive patterns, but we

don't get a lot of absolute guarantees.

We don't get guaranteed health.

We don't get guaranteed years of life.

We don't get guaranteed happiness.

So one of the great things about Adlerian psychology, I think, is that it's a very

life oriented, action oriented psychology.

If you look at, look when, I'm gonna do a deep dive on this, but I

think aspects of Freudian analysis, they're very much looking at all

the reasons why you were screwed up.

And we're all screwed up friends.

I said this to Karen today, we're on a walk this morning before I

came to the studio and I said to her yesterday, I said, CAS, do you think

I have like adult onset A DH, D?

Like just some of the quirky things that I do.

And we were joking about it, we're talking about it.

And I said to her, look, CAS.

It everybody does.

Like we're all on this kind of, no one has got it completely together.

I'm sure every single one of us would fail some kind of

psychometric test for something.

But what I like about Alerian psychology is that it's takes that into account.

It's yeah, you are gonna have all sorts of problems and challenges and

difficulties in your personality and in your environment, but what can we do?

Let's have a life focused, let's keep trying to move

forward and let's take action.

So again, to this last sentence, he says, given that life offers a few guarantees.

All living requires risk taking.

It's important to focus on this no guarantees piece.

Why?

Because we have to accept life on its own terms to a degree.

So to live a life where you expect that things are gonna be definite

and guaranteed is to basically resist the data of life itself.

Because if you expect life to give you guarantees and it doesn't

you're going to either get depressed or resentful or bitter or angry.

So we begin from there.

It's okay.

There's nothing guaranteed to me.

Yes, it was at Monday's episode.

I talked about time and how time is just not guaranteed.

You dunno how much we get.

So the decision to get up every single day.

It requires us to take certain risks.

For some bizarre reason at the moment.

I started watching in the evenings again with the kids.

The Lord of the Rings extended trilogy.

If you've never seen it, it's just awesome.

And one of those in the fellowship of the Ring, in the first installment, there's

this the character Bilbo is leaving his home and, he's talking about, he is got

this saying where he says that, if you step out onto the road, you have to keep

your feet because you've got no idea where you might be swept off to that even

the decision to step out your front door and onto the path means that the path

and the road of life, if you wanna take that metaphor, can just sweep you off.

But you've gotta set your foot on the path.

You've gotta start, you've gotta begin.

We don't get the guarantees, and courage is nothing more than this.

It's a behavior.

So many of us might think that courage is like this innate thing.

You're either born with it or you're not born with it.

And some people are more courageous than others.

Churchill said that, the courageous person is not more courageous

than the person next to them.

They're just braver for five minutes longer.

It's a practiced behavior.

So you know, everybody has this capability, especially according

to Adler here, but it's a decision.

You choose to be courageous.

You choose to take risks.

So we're not for a second here talking about being frivolous

or doing dangerous things.

We're talking about a disposition where we've accepted that life doesn't guarantee

us anything and we take and we choose.

To take certain risks.

See, if you don't do that, then you're very much at the mercy of

whatever life decides to serve you up.

So this decision to take risks is the inherent entry fee to developing the

kind of life that you really want.

No one can force you to do it.

It's up to you whether or not you do it.

You see a neurotic personality like neurotics personalities

are interesting because it's not a, any kind of mental illness.

It's just a massive prioritization of security.

So that some people prioritize a secure environment above all other

things, and so they won't take risks.

But this aspect of courage, I like it that it's a decision,

it's a choice, it's a behavior.

I think if I was to critique myself, I'd say I've definitely spent

wasted a lot of time in life wanting things to be clear and definite.

And I think I misunderstood the rules of the game.

I really be honest with you.

I think I did.

I think I was like, I have to know.

I must know that this is the right choice.

So from the background that I come from, there were reasons

why I developed that way.

But I look back now and go, I probably lost a lot along the way by wanting

things to be definite and knowing that this was the right choice, whereas

other people are like, ah, yeah.

Can you, and you can see the extremes here, like when I teach virtues ethics or

virtues based leadership to executives.

In classical philosophy, we talk about what they call the golden mean.

So in virtue ethics, you've got a an absence of the virtue

and an excess of the virtue.

So with something like courage, the absence of the virtue of courage

or risk taking is cowardice, right?

So somebody who has no courage at all and no risk taking ability

is afraid, and they're, it's the actual problem of cowardice, the

extreme of the virtue of courage.

Is recklessness.

So you've got coward to on one end, recklessness on the other,

and in the middle is courage.

So that's why I think one of the beautiful, powerful things about

classical philosophy is that they gave us these incredibly brilliant insights.

So I would suggest, based on this quote, that we have to do things not knowing

how they're gonna turn out sometimes.

And how do you do it?

I think to a degree you can actually follow your heart here.

You look at what you're drawn to.

Not in terms of sin or evil or bad stuff, but if you are excited about

a possibility or something, but it's a little bit scary for you, then

you're just gonna have to do it.

It's like that.

I don't know if you've ever done this, but when I was growing up here where

we live there, there was a swimming pool with a 10 meter Olympic diving

tower, and when you are younger, it might as well be a hundred meters.

It's just like by the time you first get up there, you're like.

This is just a really long way and it just, everything in your body

and mind goes, why would you jump off this perfectly sound structure?

And it's terrifying.

You do it so many times.

Eventually you get annu to it.

But you know what I'm talking about.

You taking that leap is just so hard.

But once you take the leap, it's still scary on the way down, but you hit

the water, you get out the other side and what's the first thing you think?

You always think to yourself, I'm a genius.

That was the greatest thing ever.

That was so much fun.

I gotta do this 10 more times.

Okay, but you don't get that feeling until you've taken the risk.

You've taken the leap.

So my message for you today really is just one of encouragement, one of

going, you're not gonna get guarantees.

You're never gonna know perfectly if something's the right choice, but you've

gotta have the courage to take some risk.

It's a beautiful quote from Joshua in the Old Testament chapter one verse nine.

Be strong and courageous.

For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.

Always like that line.

Be strong and courageous.

Be it's an action word.

Do it.

Be strong.

Be courageous because God's got your back wherever you're

at in your spiritual journey.

I've got a very diverse listenership here, whether you, however

you conceptualize the divine.

I think God just rewards courage even if it's not perfectly organized and

absolutely perfectly thought through.

I think God just likes the fact that we have a go.

All right, my friends, I hope that's useful to you.

Take some risks, reject the idea of guaranteed certainties

and make intelligent.

Prudent risks a part of your life.

Okay?

Please hit subscribe.

Come and say hi on Instagram.

Jade Doyle speaks, everything else is on the website.

Jonathan Doyle dot co.co.

You can book me to speak.

You can book me for consultancy projects and other things.

It's all on the website, Jonathan dole.co.

But if you could subscribe, that'd be great.

I'm also at YouTube at Jonathan Do Speaks.

God bless you.

This has been The Daily Podcast and you and I are gonna talk again tomorrow.