A bravery practice.

People ask me all the time what kind of consulting I do, and the honest answer takes a minute. I do strategy. What I will not do is run a strategic planning process — and there is a difference, even if the sector has spent years pretending there isn't. Strategy is the real work: what matters, what is next, what we are actually going to do about it. A strategic planning process, most of the time, never gets near any of that. It produces a binder. A set of tidy boxes. A laminated list of values nobody can remember by Thursday. And it leaves the people who have to live inside it feeling flat and a little stuck, holding a document where a direction should be. It is not executive search either, and it is not a coaching engagement, and it is not a governance workshop with a deck at the end. There is good work being done in all of those rooms. Mine is a different room.

So here is the truest answer I have. This is a bravery practice.

I mean that as plainly and as literally as I have ever meant anything, because it is where I have decided, after nearly thirty years, the actual work lives. Thirty years of sitting in rooms watching smart, devoted, good-hearted people fail to do the one thing every single person in the room already knew needed doing. Not because they were not clever enough. Not because they did not care. Because nobody in that room could find the nerve, and nobody had built them a place to find it.

What it is not

I do not mean fearlessness. The leaders I admire most are frightened a good deal of the time, and they are right to be — the stakes are real, and the ones who feel no fear walking into a hard season are usually the ones who have not understood it yet. Give it a week.

I do not mean recklessness either. I am from Newfoundland. Where I come from, you respect the weather precisely because you fully intend to survive it. Bravery that ignores the conditions is not bravery at all. It is a liability with good posture.

And I really do not mean a personality trait — some bit of grit a lucky few get issued at birth while the rest of us go without. That idea is not just wrong, it is the very thing that keeps people stuck. Because it takes a problem you could actually solve — a problem of conditions — and quietly turns it into a verdict about your character. A leader who cannot bring the hard truth to their board decides, somewhere in the back of their mind, that they must not have what it takes. And almost every time, what they are missing is not courage. It is something else entirely, and it is something you can build.

What actually drains it

The decisions that matter most in a hard season take nerve. And nerve is the very first thing that scarcity and isolation drain out of a person. So the work is not only to find the brave choice. The work is to make it possible to stand in it.

Read that middle bit again, because it is the part we keep refusing to look at. Scarcity and isolation are not the backdrop to this work — they are the conditions you are working inside of, every single day. Picture the leader running on a twelve-month funding horizon, costs climbing, carrying a decision the board has no real room to hold, without one peer they can be all the way honest with. Their nerve is not failing because of who they are. It is being drained by the shape of the job itself. Put the bravest person you have ever met in that chair and the chair will do to them exactly what it does to everyone. That is not weakness. That is physics.

And this is why so much of the help we throw at people misses entirely. The pep talk treats courage like a mood you can talk yourself into. The framework treats it like a gap in your knowledge. The strategic plan treats it like a scheduling problem. But the leader already knows the brave choice — they do, most of them do, they could name it for you inside twenty minutes if the room were safe enough to say it in. They do not need to be told what the brave thing is. They need the conditions that let them do it.

What the practice actually does

So that is the work. Not handing people courage. Rebuilding the conditions that let courage exist.

And it is unglamorous. It is a confidential room to think, with somebody in it who has sat in that chair and is not the least bit frightened by what gets said out loud. It is naming the decision early, while there is still time to make it well, because by the time a brave choice is made too late, it isn't really a choice anymore — it's just the only thing left. It is preparing the board so the hard truth arrives as a question the table can actually hold, instead of a bomb dropped on it. It is doing the cold arithmetic on the worst case, because dread feeds on vagueness and almost never survives contact with the actual numbers. And it is staying — being there through the weeks after the decision is made, when the hard work of actually doing it begins and almost everyone else has moved on. That stretch is when the nerve gets tested, and it is exactly when people find themselves most alone.

None of that is mystical. Every bit of it is buildable. That is the whole reason I call it a practice and not a gift — it is a set of conditions you can construct, and a capacity you can keep up, in a person, in a board, in a whole organization.

The threads

There is one more thing I believe about courage, and it is the thing I find myself saying over and over to leaders who are ashamed of how empty their tank has gotten.

Courage comes and goes. In everyone. There is no version of this work — there is no version of any hard, full life — where the nerve just holds steady on its own. What I have watched happen, again and again, is that the people you gather around you pick up the threads when you drop them. Someone holds your conviction for you through the week you cannot hold it yourself, and hands it back when you are steady enough to take it. But here is the part we get backwards: that only happens if you are willing to say, out loud, that you are struggling. The admission is not the opposite of bravery. It is the thing that summons it. Say "I am not sure I can do this" to the right person, and more often than not the nerve starts coming back — yours, and theirs. That is not a character flaw on anyone's part. That is how courage has always actually worked. Communally. In shifts. The same way every other thing that ever got a community through a winter worked.

It is also why people misread the brave ones. I am told I am known for doing the hard thing with a smile on my face — but it is more than a smile. I find the humour in it, even when it is hard, especially when it is hard. I look straight at the thing that seems impossible, and I remind myself that being present and doing what is hard is the good work. That is the whole point, really. The humour is not denial, and it is not me finding any of it easy. It is what bravery looks like once it is being practised instead of summoned. When the conditions are right, when you are not carrying the thing alone, the hard thing just becomes the thing you are doing today. Heavy, sure. But not impossible.

Obliged to the risk

Not long ago someone asked me what is left of me if you take away every role I have ever held. Strip out all the titles, all the hats. And the word that came up — the only word — was courage. But not courage as something I own. What I have, I think, is an obligation to the risk of it. Not to being brave, exactly — to being willing to be exposed. To staying in the hard thing when it would be easier to step back, and accepting that it might go wrong. That when a thing needs doing, and it can be done, the chance of it costing me something is not a good enough reason not to.

That is what I bring to this work. And it is what the work exists to make possible for everyone else — not by asking leaders to be braver than they are, but by refusing to let them stand in the brave choice alone.

You were never short on nerve. You were short on company, and on conditions, and on time. The work is building the season around you that lets the nerve you already have finally do something.