95: Cultivate a Courage Habit with Kate Swoboda

Kate Swoboda believes that “courage can absolutely be cultivated,” just as we improve other skills with habit-building principles in mind. The problem is that sometimes we apply the cue-routine-reward to our fears instead. We get triggered, fall into familiar patterns, then gloss over it with a reward that's a pale replacement for what our heart really wants.

What is the alternative? Listen to this conversation to learn Kate’s four-step process for avoiding common fear routine traps—perfectionist, saboteur, martyr, or pessimist—and building your courage muscles instead. 

More About Kate Swoboda

Kate Swoboda is creator of YourCourageousLife.com, Director of the Courageous Living Coach Certification at TribeCLCC.com and author of The Courage Habit: How to Accept Your Fears, Release the Past, and Live Your Courageous Life.

She helps individuals, teams, and companies see where old, fear-based habits have kept people stuck or started to limit what’s possible, and then start creating more courageous lives by getting into “the courage habit,” a four-part process for behavioral and organizational change.

Topics We Cover

• Fear as a habit that has worn a groove into your brain; how to learn to recognize fear-based habits and replacing them with courage-based habits

• Four steps of The Courage Habit: access the body, listen without attachment, reframe limiting stories, create community.

• Critic response modes: avoiding, pleasing or attacking

• Four common fear routines: perfectionist, saboteur, martyr, pessimist

• Related model: Drama Triangle: Perpetrator-Victim-Rescuer

• More subtle fear…hiding out, preventing others from seeing us fail or flail

• The Power of Habit: cue-routine-reward loops, even around feeling afraid

• Kate’s conscious crying practice

• Courageous parenting, how she set-up a cue-routine-reward process with her daughter’s bedtime rituals

• Liberated Day exercise to get in touch with your most courageous self: if you woke up tomorrow and your entire life went exactly the way you wanted it to go, from morning until night, what would that day look like?

• 100% fully alive living as a courageous act

Resources Mentioned

• Kate on the web

• Kate’s book: The Courage Habit: How to Accept Your Fears, Release the Past, and Live Your Courageous Life

• Kate’s Liberated Day worksheet

• Jenny’s Ideal Day Mad Lib

• Karpman’s Drama Triangle overview

• Michael Bungay Stanier’s Box of Crayons and The Coaching Habit

• Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

• The Fitness Marshal on YouTube - 5min video

📝 Check out full show notes from this episode with links to resources mentioned at http://pivotmethod.com/95