Character Strengths and Virtues A Handbook and Classification

I remember back in the day when I was first running graduate school there was a psychologist who's no longer alive his name was Chris Peterson and he was creating the inventory of character strengths for positive psychology and he was working with my advisor Marty researching carriage as one of the key human virtues and he told this story all is about firefighters he said what carriage is it isn't not being afraid of dying in the fire it's going into the burning house despite the fact that you are feeling fear and I always thought that was just Chris Peterson's insight or maybe from his interviews but it turns out that there is a literature on courage and there's a psychologist named Stanley Rackman who was a lifelong scholar of fear and carriage and he wrote a book of the same title fear and carriage and he said people have the misunderstanding that carriage means lack of fear and I think what Rackman would say is that there may be a class of people who have a minimal fear response but that is not the only way to be courageous because any of us can learn to experience fear and do things nevertheless there was actually a New York Times article called searching for the source of a fountain of carriage where the journalist talked a lot about Rackman's research I thought it was a very nice lay summary this is about paratroopers actually who were being studied by Rackman as they prepared for their very first parachute jump so the article says the work revealed three basic groups the predator naturally fearless who displayed scant signs of the racing heart sweaty palms spike in blood pressure and other fight or flight responses associated with ordinary fear and who jumped without hesitation second group was the hand ringers whose powerful fear response at the critical moment kept them from jumping that's a direct quote from the article oh wow so they just didn't do it yeah that would be me and finally the ones who reacted physiologically like the hand ringers but who acted like the fearless leapers so this study by Rackman so nicely summarized in this article I think gives us some hope those of us who feel like we have the racing heart we have the sweating palms we have the spike in blood pressure we have the fighter flight response we feel like we have a highly functioning amygdala I feel like for me that is the only kind of carriage I'm ever going to be capable of and if I had to choose a surgeon or a collaborator or a friend honestly I think I would choose those courageous jumpers who did it despite the fear not because of the absence of fear right so I don't know permission to feel seems like a good well it's a great book but it's also just a good one liner for this question that Jeff gave us and maybe for life so Jeff there you have it permission to feel.