One of the 24 character strengths
Doing or saying the thing you think is right when it costs something — speaking up, facing what frightens you, staying in a hard conversation.
Bravery is the strength of doing or saying the thing that seems right when there is a price attached. The price is what makes it bravery.
Almost none of this looks like a burning building. It looks like being the one who says the plan has a hole in it, in a room where everybody else has already nodded. It looks like staying in a conversation that has become uncomfortable rather than finding a reason to leave.
The feeling underneath is not absence of fear. Somebody who leads here is usually frightened and does the thing anyway, which is the whole of it. People who feel no fear at all are doing something else.
Curious which of these lead in you? Take the free assessment and find out.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
Start your free assessmentA meeting is ten minutes from agreeing something expensive and wrong. Everybody in the room can see it. One person says so, knowing exactly who will be annoyed.
The bill arrives afterwards. Somebody who leads here tends to spend the evening replaying it, and to be the person a group relies on to raise things without ever quite deciding to be. Being the one who speaks up gets lonely faster than it looks.
The caricature is the person who enjoys confrontation. Most of the time it is closer to the opposite: this is somebody who dislikes it and does it because the alternative is worse. The tell is what happens after. Enjoying it looks like a rematch; leading here looks like relief.
Both involve saying the uncomfortable thing. Honesty is about not shading the truth; Bravery is about paying a price to act. Somebody can be scrupulously honest and still stay quiet.
Both are about staying with something hard. Perseverance stays through the boring middle; Bravery stays through the frightening part.
Everybody has all 24 of these. A result puts them in order within one person, so a strength near the bottom of somebody's list is one they reach for less often rather than one they are missing.
That also means nothing here compares one person with another. There is no reference sample behind these scales, and an order made of somebody's own answers cannot say where they stand next to anybody.
Or start with what the 24 character strengths are.
Two hundred and thirteen questions, about twenty minutes. You get all 24 put in your own order, free, with the ones that lead in you named at the top.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
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