Episode 45: How to be Bold with Dr. Ranjay Gulati

What does it really mean to be bold  not performatively, but existentially?

In this powerful episode of The I AM Well MD Podcast, Dr. Santi Tanikella sits down with Dr. Ranjay Gulati, Harvard Business School professor and author of How to Be Bold, to explore the inner work required to live and lead with courage in a world that often rewards safety, conformity, and silence.

Rather than framing boldness as risk-taking for its own sake, Ranjay invites us to see boldness as alignment, the willingness to act from purpose even when it’s uncomfortable, uncertain, or costly.

Together, we explore:

• Why so many high-achievers feel successful yet internally constrained
• How boldness is built through self-trust, not bravado
• What it takes to step off autopilot and into intentional living
• How purpose becomes a stabilizing force during uncertainty and change

This episode is for anyone who has ever felt a nudge toward something more and hesitated.

About Dr. Ranjay Gulati:
Dr. Gulati is the Paul R. Lawrence Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the author of Deep Purpose and How to Be Bold. His work focuses on unlocking individual and organizational potential through courage, clarity, and purpose-driven leadership. You can find him at ranjaygulati.com and on LinkedIn.

Transcript

Are you a busy parent? Do you feel like you're being pulled in multiple directions all at once? Are you exhausted and overwhelmed? Meet my mom. Her name is Santi Tanikella. She's a pediatrician, expert in mind body medicine, and a life coach. She can help you break free from guilt and overwhelm, so that you can enjoy the life that you've worked so hard to create.

She can also teach you how to support your family in a more holistic way.   📍  

 Hello, and welcome to another episode of the I Am Well MD podcast. Today I have a special guest, Ranjay Gulati. Dr. Gulati is a chaired professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. His pioneering work focuses on unlocking organizational and individual potential,

embracing courage, nurturing purpose- driven leaders, driving growth and transforming businesses. 

He's a Thinker's 50 top management scholar, speaks regularly to executive audiences and serves on the board of several entrepreneurial ventures.  He holds a PhD from Harvard University and a master's degree from MIT.  He's the author of Deep Purpose and How to Be Bold, and I can't wait for you to meet him. 

   It's great to have you on today. Welcome! Santi, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.   Tell me a little bit about your path, how did you get to where you are today and how did boldness, how did courage, bravery, how did these topics come to inspire you.  So,  I wish I could say I had a linear path to where I am today, it was anything but linear. There was a lot of serendipity, there was a lot of people who helped me and gave me the nudges I needed at the right moment in time.   I came to this country as an exchange student,  and I  came to Washington State, uh, out on the West Coast and I was in the middle of nowhere in the Palouse, as they call it, where the wheat fields are and I got myself a summer job at Microsoft, which was only company willing to hire me as a foreign student back then  and, next thing you knew, I was working.

I was gonna stay for one year and bounce out after that, but I stayed for two years, got a degree in computer science  and,  then came to MIT for a master's with a full plan of going back to Microsoft.  Mm-hmm. So, you know, I had it all kind of mapped out. I was gonna work on the intersection of technology and business.

 That was why I was getting the MBA. And then next thing you know, at MIT I have this professor of mine who convinces me that my love for a PhD, which I always thought I would do one day, that now was the time and so next thing I know, I applied to Harvard for a PhD and I got into Harvard and I was doing a PhD and Microsoft was kind of in the distant memory.

But I would say my influences really were,  my parents, uh, like for many of us, you know, who had a strong imprint on me, in terms of kind of foundational beliefs,  both on kind of thinking about knowledge advancement, but I had so many teachers along the way. Both at Washington State, at MIT, at Harvard, who,  really played an instrumental role in shaping my thinking,  and what I wanted to do.

And I think, my last book was called Deep Purpose.  And there's a reason I wrote that book because even for, even though it's about companies and purpose, I realized that, it takes a long time to find our own purpose and whether you're in business or an individual,  purpose provides you an orienting framework to think about what you want to do.

Otherwise, until then, you're confused. Until then you're bouncing from thing to thing and reacting and opportunistically kind of stumbling your way forward.   So that's my kind of  short version of my journey.  There were many stumbles and bumbles along the way and, um,  but again,  having people around me to really,  give me the guidance and the support I needed were very important. 

When I think of my parents and their journey  they moved to Canada back in the 1970s, and that couldn't have been an easy decision,  you know? 

 Just being able to move from one place to another,  how did that influence your trajectory?  So, you know, as a grad student, I had to read a book called The Marginal Man. It was only said Marginal Man because it in 1937, I think, uh, it was an ancient book. I'm sure it meant men and women,  in which  this gentleman talked about people. He didn't talk only about immigrants, but he said immigrants are one of the many people who get marginalized. You're marginalized because you neither belong to your home country anymore because when you go back, you're a foreigner.  And nor are you fully assimilated into the new environment where you're located. 

And of course, that com has its costs, but it also has its advantages in that you're able to  be a little more dispassionate and have a little more insight into things. So his belief back then was that marginal people have an advantage. It may look like a disadvantage, but they also have some advantages.

 I think  being an immigrant had comes at a huge cost. Um, but it also creates opportunities.  It builds resilience. It builds  self-determination. It creates focus and it also allows you to have a more objective understanding of different cultures and learning how to, learning how to blend two different cultures.

It also brings new insights.  Oh, I fully agree. So  I grew up in New York, but when I was growing up, those summers that I would go back to India, I fully remember feeling like I was an outsider.  Yeah. And then coming back and still feeling like an outsider. And it was a very peculiar sort of feeling, but you're absolutely right.

It, it did help me to be more adaptable and I, I have to give my parents  credit. They were both incredibly adaptable to their new environments,  and they still managed to hold onto their heritage, at least the parts that they felt  were aligned with their values, um, while being able to assimilate these new values of American culture and language.

Yeah, it's just a really tremendous feat. And if I was to take it too fast forwarded into my new book that is called How to Be Bold, the Science of Everyday Courage.  You know what is courage? First of all, courage is taking action in the face of fear. Yeah,  right. Second.  Where does fear come from? Fear originates when the human brain encounters uncertainty and loss of control. 

What is uncertainty? Uncertainty is not risk. Risk is where you know the distribution of outcomes. Uncertainties where you don't even know what their distribution of outcomes is, completely unknown.  So even for the immigrant coming to this country,  some came here into the cradle of, family, friends, they had extended relative network. 

I'm not saying  it was easy for them, but you know,  there's a bit of risk, but not so much uncertainty.  But the ones who came totally on their own, there is uncertainty. And uncertainty means loss of control, loss of control means fear, fear means you can either freeze or flight. 

 So I think the immigrant experience can be full of uncertainty  and, and uncertainty creates fear.  Fear in turn activates in us the human impulse for freezing or running- freeze or flight. It's rarely actually the exception who will stand up and fight.  Mm-hmm. In my experience,  this whole journey can be scary. 

 Was it scary for me in some moments? Yes.  You know what mitigated it was people around me who gave me the support I needed.  So then the question becomes how do you resource yourself in the face of uncertainty?  what are the ways in which you find resources?  I'll give you one.

 I found that courage is rarely a solitary sport.  People who are courageous usually have a support system around them. So then I got into the science of support. It turns out there are four forms of support: resource support, information support, moral support, and the last one is appraisal support. 

So turns out if you apply this even to the immigrant experience, resource support. Somebody gave me a job, somebody gave me a loan, somebody gave me shelter, or somebody fed me a meal, right? That's resource support. So information. Somebody gave me information, "oh, this is how you apply for a job and get a green card" and do this, that, or "this is how you navigate this," that and the other.

That's information.  The third one is moral support. "I know you can do it."  And the last one is appraisal support feedback. "Hey, listen, I think you need to change your approach. I don't think what you're doing is working."  So you know, you start to see, that's just one illustration into this project I did about how I never thought about applying it to the immigrant experience, but you can see how that might work.

Or if you're a physician who is about to embark on an alternative path,  right? That can be scary. You know, you have a well-established, you've trained, you've studied, you've done everything and now you're saying, "I think I want to do something different."   and that comes  bears a cost, professional cost too.

So you ask like, "oh my God, how am I gonna do it?" So that was just one of them support systems, that was one chapter in my book and another one was  "The Science of Calm."  So it turns out there's a body of research on emotional regulation, emotional self-regulation.  The science of calming ourselves down. Now in  any Indian tradition, you say, you know, how do you stay calm, you pray. 

Believe it or not, prayer is a very powerful strategy to stay calm, from the most ancient of times, you can look at cave drawings going back thousands of years, and you'll see people doing rituals and praying, and a belief in a higher power has a tremendously calming influence. Others do rituals. I mean, if you look at athletes,  uh, Adele,  before she goes on stage, she always looks at a picture of Celine Dion. 

She was her hero and it calms her down. Katie Ledecky, instead of doing mantras like many meditators would do, she recites her grandmother's name because it calms her down.   So you discover the science of calm, is another way in which people  deal with this.  So similarly, I found interesting, there was a science, it was fragmented research because there's no one body of literature  on courage.

It's kind of all over the place.  So it was interesting to see that this was there, but it was kind of a bit spread out and, and how that plays out.   So that was my journey into the topic. I never thought about it being connected to my being an immigrant experience, but I think maybe you're right that, you know, there were moments when it was scary and, um, I also happened to study entrepreneurs and have done a lot of research on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship in and of itself  can be scary. 

Starting a business, letting go of a job, you know, lack of stability in income.  So there, those are all kind of things that I also looked at.  I can dig deeper into any of those. There was like six of these different ways in which individuals resource themselves.

And then I had three different ways in which organizations can resource themselves. So  I think this is a great topic.   This topic is applicable to all departments in life, whether it's  having children, getting married, or whatever your specific household looks like. It's establishing a life for yourself to move forward with and   sometimes we find ourselves at this crossroads where we have to make a decision.

We're either gonna take this path or this path.  Yeah. And so that can go along with creating a career too.   I mentioned having children. I think that that's a very specific topic right there, and one that is near and dear to my heart simply because of my background as a pediatrician.  Once those kids are born, right, it's how do we act  in such a way that we are doing what's best for our kids, but also doing what's best for us, collectively. 

A lot of this means that we are constantly in this place of decision- making. You know, so I think of people who are just exhausted from decision making all the time. Um,  "Decision fatigue" and this is part of where your work has been so attractive to me, is because sometimes  we have to make big decisions and take big action in order to move into a place in our lives that is more aligned with our values, that  we're not swimming anymore in a sea of purposelessness.  So,  it's really interesting Santi, you say that because, um,  uh, Aristotle who wrote one of the earliest essays on courage, um, now he first of all separately distinguished between courage and reckless,

that's a different conversation.   But he wrote an essay about  human virtue,  and he  made a list of the virtues of the ideal human being.  He made courage the master virtue that unlocks all other virtues.  You know, if you go back even to ancient India and you read the Mahabharata  or any of these ancient scriptures,  you know, without using the word courage, 

it's everywhere,  right? Um, and then you read about culture, ancient cultures. I mean, I read about the Japanese Samurai  cultures celebrate now, okay it happened to be in the context of war. That's where the modern elaboration has happened. Courage is not just in the context of war, nor is it in the context of sports only.

It's not just physical courage, it's also moral courage. Right, courage manifests in so many other aspects of our life, but it's important to recognize and acknowledge that that is not the default response of the human being. Yes. Mm-hmm. Our brain is hardwired  from primitive times. It was a recent book called "The Gift of Fear." 

Fear is a survival impulse. Right, our ancestors were cowards. They were the ones when they saw danger, they ran.  Yeah, they understood that. So fear is so, it's a primitive emotion, hardwired in the amygdala  that to take it on, you almost have to be willing to really  do it. Now, some, occasionally there are a few people born that way,  but Hollywood portrays it like this universal thing that, uh, there are  James Bonds all over the place. 

And that's courage. Um, you know, it's interesting, Tom Cruise, who does many of his own stunts, after one of his stunts for Mission Impossible, he was asked like, "Tom, aren't you scared doing this?"  He said, "absolutely. I'm scared, but I'm okay with being scared." Mm-hmm.  So how do we learn to cope with fear? First of all, even calling it fear.

We're ashamed to say we're scared.  I don't know many people who say, I'm scared. Especially boys, there's a gender bias here,  but I think that there is this kind of  shame around the word fear, but if you don't name it, you can't tame it. So you know, you've gotta like first be able to label it and say, I understand that this is gonna be scary. 

Actually, I am scared. I don't know what to do, but    I'm gonna have to find a way to resource myself to do it.  And I gave you two illustrations of how people resource themselves. Um, one was with the collective, with support. Another one, that I mentioned to you had to do with Calm. Let me give you a third one. 

 This one comes from, um,  research.  Uh, let me give you one of two. I have two different ones. I'll give you one more starts. This was research done by a Stanford psychologist named Albert Bandura, very famous person,  and Bandura wanted to see how kids dealt with fear. So he put an ad in the paper, to find  kids who were terrified of snakes,  a technical term being ophidio phobes.

So he got, I don't know, a couple of dozen people signed up and he told them he's gonna do classic exposure therapy. He's gonna show them a video or whatever, some pictures, and slowly worked their way eventually to touching and holding a snake.  And by the way, the snake was gonna be a corn snake. They're six feet long,

they look scary but they don't bite, they're harmless, completely harmless snakes, but they're scary.  So anyway, in the course of this kind of exposure, before they even got to touching and holding a snake, half the kids dropped out..  So of the half or so that were left, the ones who actually touched and held a snake,  what is interesting is not only did they feel okay with holding a snake, but a couple of months later when they were interviewed, they had this general sense of self-efficacy. 

So the research that Bandura calls it self-efficacy  and this idea that I can do it, I can do anything can do, and their thinking was  if I can overcome my worst fear, which is snakes,  I guess I can overcome anything.  And it was an unlock for them. It was a major unlock in their lives.  So if you look at entrepreneurs and some of these people, they naturally, or through their experience or their upbringing, have this can-do mindset. 

No matter what comes my way, I'm gonna get it done.  So how do you build and resource that inner confidence? Mahatma Gandhi, actually early in his life, was a lawyer. His first job was a lawyer. He went to England and trained to be a barrister, as they called him there. In his first court appearance, he, he was always terrified of public speaking. 

So here he is standing in front of a judge and he froze.  The judge admonished him, asked him to leave and told his client, go find another lawyer,  and that gentleman was Mahatma Gandhi.  So people learn to resource themselves in different ways  to deal with this natural human emotional fear that happens in the context of uncertainty.

Now you can ask me the next question is, why now?  Is there more uncertainty today or less?  Question mark. I think that's a loaded question, right? I mean, I look at the children and teens going through all this political upheaval, climate change, uh, gosh. You know, just being able to live in a real world when the virtual world is so compelling to them.

 Yeah, it feels like there's  just as much uncertainty, but perhaps a different type of uncertainty.  Yeah. You mean there's job uncertainty. AI may take away my job, right? There is climate uncertainty, there's health uncertainty. I don't know if there's another epidemic coming or not vaccine or not.

There's so many and there's geopolitical uncertainty. How many wars are happening around in the world? It's all over the place.    This is something that I think we should acknowledge and accept that a byproduct of this  is fear,  a byproduct of fear is freeze or flight. Look at an extreme example. 

Salman Rushdie is giving a talk.  Some gentleman decides he's gonna come up and stab him, and he's completely, he's immobilized.  Should read his book. It's fascinating. He's unable to even raise his hands to protect himself. 

So the freeze response, and you see this in so many other tragic  instances as well. I mean, I had to write a whole chapter on cowardice, by the way, Santi, because it was like, that's the default response and we vilify cowards. Um, I talk in my book about one section is called the Good Coward.  It's actually, cowardice is a real thing.

Yes. Yeah.  Yeah, we vilify them. We say, oh, you  horrible human being. You're a coward. And the good coward was actually about a soldier in World War I.   What was happening was there was so many people who deserted in World War I, by the way. But this soldier,  he came to the battlefield. He was on the frontline, but as soon as the bombs would start flying, he ran away. 

Mm. And then a few days later, when the bomb stopped flying, he'd come back. And so again, he would try to settle down and he was ready. He was ready. But as soon as the bomber, he ran away.  So one of the soldiers told the commandant like, listen, you should court martial this guy and you know, put him to the ringer.

He said, no, no, no. He's a good coward. He's trying,  he hasn't deserted. He could have run away, but he keeps coming back. He just is not able to. We need to help him cope with his fear.  So I'm gonna interject here because I wanna make an important distinction. You know, cowardice has this negative connotation to it,  but truly what is cowardice?

It's self preservation, is it not?  Yes. Right. We're trying to protect ourselves.  That's why I said it's a natural survivalist human response.   We are hardwired to protect and preserve ourself. And that's, so when you want to be courageous and you wanna do something in spite of your fear response, you're literally fighting against yourself.

Mm-hmm. Your very innate nature. That is why courage is so rare,  that is why it's not everybody doing it.  Right.  In fact one person said, most of us are living our fears, not our dreams.  That's powerful. Yeah. Yeah. So there we are.  As I've been talking about this book, you know, I've heard from a number of people saying,  courage can be an unlock into their life.

You know, the His Holiness Dalai Lama wrote the forward to my book.  In which he also talks about courage as kind of this fundamental unlock,  right? And I came to realize that courage may be rare but it's quietly everywhere.  I was looking for ordinary people.  One person I interviewed was Dr.

Suma Jain. She's an ER physician down in New Orleans and in the early days of COVID, she had to make a decision every day  to go to work. And she had two young kids at home.  Every day she having to deal with the fear that she may bring it back home  and there was no cure. People were dying all over the place and she had to make a call as to whether she was gonna go to work.  And she made the call that she was going to go to work. 

That this is what she had trained for. Yes, in med school no one ever told her that you might, uh, take a risk and die but she said somewhere in that Hippocratic Oath was, you will do what you can to support other people.  The question is, how do you resource yourself? Now, most of these people do it kind of subconsciously, 

or they find some way to do it. In her case, for instance,  there's a whole chapter on what she did to resource. She, she and her ER friends described it as their Olympic moment. They said, this is what I was meant to be doing.  And turns out there's a body of research on this that human beings, we are compelled to do things when we feel there is a moral potency to them. 

And it ties into our own sense of morality.  So not everybody buys into that. Not everybody has a moral grounding, but  if you look at Captain Sullenberger who landed the US Airways flight on Hudson River, you know what he said when he was interviewed afterward, he said, "I realized then my entire life up to that moment was a preparation to handle that moment." 

 When you carry that kind of weight on yourself.  Then you really. We don't see things as they are. We see them as we are.  So you look at the situation differently.  So in her mind she was like, yeah, it's scary, it is dangerous, but you know, I'm a physician. I trained to do this.

I my Olympic moment, I gotta do it. So  you suddenly are able to transcend the fear impulse.  Because of the way you're looking at the situation and the way you're looking at yourself. So that's another way in which people resource themselves into taking action.  So I think  navigating fear,  coping with fear,  embracing fear, outwitting fear,  and not succumbing to fear, I think is the key.

But the problem is  we don't even get there. We don't even get to first base, as we say in baseball because  the common  Hollywood- Bollywood portrayal of courage is absence of fear.  And it's a personality trait. You are congenitally. Either you have it or you don't. 

 

 Life can feel like a constant balancing act, work deadlines, family responsibilities, and everything in between.

It's really easy to get stuck in "go mode" without ever stopping to ask,  "what do I really want?"  Imagine if you could set boundaries with confidence, say no without guilt, and start doing more of the things that light you up. That's what life coaching is all about, helping you get clear on what matters most and giving you the tools to make it happen. 

Your life is unique, your journey's unique, and your solutions should be too. If you're ready to stop surviving and start living with intention, let's talk.  Visit me at iamwellmd.com  and click on the link to contact me.  Send me a little message and we'll get you started with an introductory call.  I hope to see you soon.  

 And that's the beauty of this.

It's not true, right? We can learn how to be courageous even when we're feeling fear.  Right, and this is part of the reason why I love your book. It really teaches people how to overcome their fear so that they can move forward in their lives in a meaningful way  and it's not just blindly jumping into something that's risky.

Right.  Can you tell us a little bit more about how we can cultivate courage?  Let me give you one more. Uh, I've described each of these. These are all chapters in two minutes or less.  Let me give you another chapter. This is actually built off of work by a very famous University of Michigan professor Carl Wyck  Wyck looked at firefighters.

Firefighting is a dangerous profession and people get hurt and even die, you know? 'cause once you're in the building, you are kind of, it's out of your control.  So it turns out that firefighters are not reckless people running into a building  blindly.  So what they'll do is he causes "sense making."   The sense making construct is that  sometimes you don't know everything,  but you can't wait outside to know everything. 

So you gotta go in, in order to know. It's called "acting your way into knowing."  Taking baby steps so you can learn more, so you know what you might want to do.  So a firefighter will look outside the building and see, does anybody need to be rescued? Uh, how quickly is the fire burning? Is the building about to collapse?

Are there combustible materials out there? They form a hypothesis,  and based on that hypothesis, they go into the building.  As soon as they go in the building, they get more data.  Some of those things help them test those hypotheses, revise the hypotheses, and then they go further in.  So it's called acting your way into knowing.  Ancient mariners didn't just say, I'm gonna sail out into the Atlantic and maybe I'll hit land and I'll get there.

No, they do one day sails, two day sails, three day sails. Want, want to get to land?  And if they found any land, it was secure base. From there, they would say, let's go one day, two day, three day to find more land. They were hugging the corners, not going down the middle.  Right. Brilliant. And, and it was called "point to point navigation."

It was a way of sense making.  So sometimes when you're faced with what looks like fog, uncertainty, you don't just run in, nod your weight, you kind of tiptoe your way in and as you go in, you learn more and you tiptoe further in,  you act your way into knowing.  So that's another way in which people kind of resource themselves.

So you know, you have a big decision looming. You don't just say yes or no, yes or no. You say, okay, let me kind of  like, you know, I'm gonna move, I'm gonna pack up and leave Boston and move to San Diego.  I might not just do that right away. I might say, Hey, maybe I'll take a vacation, go down there for a week.

So a friend of mine is thinking of moving to Florida.  He didn't just say, "we're moving to Florida." They went out for a week.  Well, this year they're going out for a month.  Next year he's gonna go and spend two months there. And they're just kind of acclimating their way into understanding if, and then they're trying to see which part of Florida they want to be in.

 So it doesn't feel so scary.   So that's another way in which we will resource themselves.  In each chapter I explored how some individuals did something and then is there some social science research to help us understand that better. 

  The way you have put this is just amazing. So, as we move into 2026, I know a lot of people right now are starting to think about their New Year's resolutions, and  I put that in quotation mark simply because  for me, I don't think of it always as a New Year's resolution. Like in 2026, I'm gonna do this one thing.

No, I'm making a lifestyle change. I'm making a big decision.  How can people feel their way into creating decisive decisions?   Things that can really move boulders in their lives  and be successful at it.  So look, the easiest answer I would give is, Hey, listen. Do one small thing that scares you a little. 

Learn to build a relationship with fear.  Observe yourself saying, yeah, that was scary, but I did it.   How did you deal with fear? Have a conversation with your fear. Right. I mean, I got a pilot's license many years ago and I was terrified of heights.  I was talking to myself and I'll never forget the first day I did a solo flight. 

It was really scary  because until I had the instructor with me, I was still okay.  But once I was no instructor, now it was like life and death. I mean, if I blew it, I was gonna kill myself and I didn't wanna die.  So flying was fun, but like, okay, I mean, really. Yet? No, no. Thank you.  And so do something that scares you a little.

Learn to  have a conversation with fear  but I would also go back to my last project, which was about purpose. Like I was  interested in myself, why I wrote a book about purpose and one about courage.   I think finding your purpose is the biggest gift you can give yourself.  Right. Having a clear understanding, and I think we all wait too long to think about that.

It's like a very academic esoteric  out there. When I'm old and in a wheelchair, I might think about my purpose in life. Well, guess what? It's too late.  You missed yourself an opportunity. I think it is never too early to ask the question, why am I here. 

And if you understand your own purpose, it unlocks possibility. It makes you more courageous. You know, if you look at people like Gandhi and others, Martin Luther King,  Nelson Mandela, all these people you know, they weren't just born great. They became great once they understood that they had a strong purpose and that purpose unlocked courage for them. 

They weren't scared.  And I'll venture to say too, the path for any one of them was not an easy path. I mean, each one of them had a path that was fraught with obstacles, with misunderstanding,  I mean,  some of them were imprisoned.  Yeah. It wasn't an easy path, but because they had that sense of purpose, that desire to further their goals,

which equates to their nation's goals, community goals,  and I think that really helped. Yeah, but I don't wanna do everybody a disservice by talking about these lofty examples because those are like big societal people like, ah, that, you know, that's great, good storytelling, but that's not me.

I'm just living my daily life. I think the question to ask ourselves is how much of our lives are governed by fear?  Hmm.   And to what extent is fear really holding me down?   Then if you understand that, you know, hey, there are ways to cope with fear.  I mean, my entire project  came to me because I felt compelled that  there is social science grounded ways  to build a relationship with fear such that it is no longer controlling you.  That from being this kind of primal emotion that hijacks the brain and the amygdala, you know, it is something that I can,  as Tom Cruise said, you know, I'm okay with being scared.  I want everyone, all of us to feel that way. I'm okay.  I'm okay with being scared.  I'm not gonna let it control me. 

I accept that fear is a natural, normal human response but  I'm not gonna let it tell me what to do.  And I think it becomes a major unlock. 

I mean, there's research on regret that shows that people regret much more inaction than actions they took in life later on. Yes,  that is absolutely true. Mm-hmm. And I would submit that inaction is the root cause, is the Salman Rushdie effect, you know, we're paralyzed.

We're paralyzed by fear, and it is costly.  It's not wrong to, to have fear, right? Yeah. There's the fear of humiliation, fear of repercussions,  fear of failure, you know, but it's being able to sit in that discomfort that I think is  the definition, right.

Being able to sit in that fear and do it anyway that is, that is bravery, that is being bold. Yeah.  You know, and it's sad that in the workplace, let me, let's just switch to the workplace for a second here, that if you, when people are asked, what are the two most salient emotions people experience in the workplace?

It's fear and anger.  Now that's a pretty sad testimony that, you know, we spend most of our time, our living moments at work. And what am I experiencing? Fear and anger.  So it's how we learn to navigate through.  In hindsight after I finished this book,  I'm like, Hey, why wasn't I doing this before? 

'cause I would hear these, I mean, Francis Haugen was my former student who was the whistleblower at Facebook. Took her a year to finally find the courage to do it.  Um, but, you know, it's fascinating. Reading and talking to her about her journey made me realize anybody else could learn. Now, I'm not saying be a whistleblower, but learn to be courageous when you're facing a monumental, life changing decision  and how she resourced herself.

So she found  resource support.  She found information support, she found moral support. She found feedback support,  and all those things together gave her then the inner confidence, the can-do mindset.  I can do it. 

 I remember in your book you had mentioned that she really leaned on her parents for that moral support,  and I thought that that was just such an important testimonial to how truly imperative it is to have that village around you to create and you know that village doesn't just show up.

Right? We cultivate that village, we,  we find the people in our arena who will motivate us, cheerlead for us, as we move forward.  It's a beautiful example. Yeah,  no, absolutely.  Sometimes it is our parents, sometimes it is friends and family. Sometimes it is,  our teachers, our coaches,   i, I have a great fascination with sports and I've interviewed a bunch of coaches and  one thing I've learned from the great coaches are ones who are able to give athletes professional athletes. So here's the thing, think about it. You're taking a professional athlete who is master of motivating themselves and have brought themselves to the world's greatest levels. 

And now me, coach, I'm gonna tell them how to do it even better. 

That is not easy. And I think moral support has a lot. Everyone wants to have someone they believe in  and it unlocks in us possibility.   So I think that is a huge piece of the puzzle, I think is if you're lucky to have your parents nearby who can provide you that, that's wonderful. If it's not them, then it could be  somebody else who believes in you. Could be your sports coach.

 I have seen so many amazing coaches who, not only unlock people as athletes, but also as individuals. So,  and a lot of that runs parallel, right? When it comes to our career or profession and our identity, right?  Initially, I find for a lot of people,  they parallel one another and then they intersect.

All of a sudden the identity becomes the profession or  the career.  The life purpose is the intersection.  So, what a great example.  And  we can be  that type of person for someone else, it's not just us seeking it out, it's us being supporters as well mm-hmm. For others in their phase of growth. 

So Dr. Gulati, this podcast was created to help us to heal ourselves, our children, and our children's children.  Do you have any last words of advice for our listeners? 

You know,   one of the biggest gifts I think we can give to our children and our grandchildren or our next generation of legacy is:  role model courage.  The best place to learn courage is by watching others who've done it.  I was lucky enough to see my parents who were both very courageous in their own way. 

 My mother started a business from scratch. I describe her in the book as well.  My father was a military officer, so he had, he dealt with a different kind of courage. When you see courage, you do courage.   Courage may not  sound like, oh, courage can heal you. I think courage can be a massive healer. It can be a massive unlock. There's a reason why Aristotle called it the master virtue  that unlocks all virtues.  I will end with one kind of quote from, uh, I had recently gone to London and I went to the War Museum where Winston Churchill led the World War II planning and everything from in this basement underneath, uh, Whitehall. 

And, he said, "fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision."  we should all think about that, that  what we are trying to do is resource ourselves to live our dreams and not be consumed by fear,  which is a natural, normal human byproduct  of any uncertainty we might encounter. 

So how do we deal with that impulse that is hardwired into us?  I appreciate that. I appreciate the piece specifically, you know, about role modeling.  I find being a physician in my training.  I always got the sense that I wasn't allowed to show emotion, particularly negative emotion, right?

Fear, anxiety, worry , anger  and  many of us physicians really cut ties with our emotions.  But I think it's very important to recognize, Hey, we're human. You know?  You mentioned men and this cultural  piece where men feel like they're not allowed to say that they're fearful.

I actually think that voicing that is a powerful thing. You know, when we're role modeling, that is how we show our kids. Sometimes they don't pick up just by watching us. Sometimes it's actually saying out loud, "Hey, you know, I'm really worried about doing this great big new venture. This is what it means for me.

This is what it means for us.  Can I, can I count on you for support? Even if it's a five or 6-year-old, can you gimme a hug? Sometimes I need a hug,   yeah. And again, back to the gender bias,  I think we do a tremendous disservice to boys.  I remember my son coming and saying, "oh, I don't wanna go to the basement."

I'm like, "come on, go to the basement."  My daughter comes and "I don't wanna go to the basement." I'm like, "okay, I'll come with you." You know? So we all have our own gender imprinting as well. And I think is instead of teaching them coping systems to deal with fear, we  shame that fear saying how shameful, how dare you feel scared? 

 Instead of saying, Hey, I understand it can be scary, but let's find a way to kind of cope with and figure it out. So that I think becomes, uh, important. I think as we understand that dealing with fear is a powerful unlock into our lives. I think that to me is the message I learned as I researched this book. That fear is paralyzing,

fear is everywhere, and we don't have a well established way of dealing with it.  Courage is an easy buzzword, but you have to really understand the enabling factors. What are the things that people do? Most of people I interviewed didn't know what they were doing. It was like, oh yeah, I did that. I don't know, I don't know. It's all, some people somehow spontaneously resourced themselves either in the moment or, you know, Francis Howen didn't read a book about courage before she, you know, decided she was gonna visit. She just somehow figured it out and the question is can we instead of relying on this, kind of, somehow figuring it out to.

Here is a science grounded way of thinking about it. That's what I tried.  I wrote it for myself. Honestly, the book was for me. I don't think I wrote it for anybody else. I needed a book, so  that's what I wrote it for.  I love that. And I needed this podcast. Right.  It's true. It's the, the things that we need to learn that we delve into. So,  yeah. Amazing. So as we come to a close, I'd like to thank you for being here today and bringing your expertise of psychology,  leadership and business acumen to the table. I genuinely appreciate it. Not at all. My pleasure, Santi. You asked me some great questions, forced me to think, so I'm delighted.

It was really a pleasure to be here with you and I look at what you're trying to do, that alone is an act of courage for a practicing physician to find the time to get out there and do a podcast. Kudos to you.  Thank you for that.  Well, how can our listeners find you?  Well, I think the easiest way is to just go to my website is, is my name, ranjay gulati.com, where the book is described.

I have some resources anybody can tap into or also on LinkedIn. I mean, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I have a newsletter there where actually after I finished the book, I've gone out and looked at other examples of courage and I've continued to write  a weekly newsletter, where I sharpen my thinking. You know, you write the book like two years ago,

since then, your own thinking evolves a little bit. So, uh, if someone wants to do a further study into it,  you'll find a bunch of resources there, both about purpose as well as about courage.  Amazing. Thank you again. This is great.  Thank you so much. Pleasure. Thanks a lot, Santi.  

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