The Practice of Courage — Adler RevisitedCourage as the engine of transformation, read across Adler, Mencius, and the Stoics

01Not "cannot change" — choosing not to change

Yuki Tanaka (a composite) is a 38-year-old manager in the medical affairs division of a pharmaceutical company. For several years her organisation had pressed her to step up into a team-leader role, and each time she declined: "I'm not ready yet." She described it to herself as a skills gap. Then one day her supervisor said something that stopped her: "Yuki, I don't think you're unprepared. I think you've decided not to risk failure."

The remark cuts straight to Adler's core insight. Adler reads human behaviour not from its causes but from its purposes. "I cannot change" is, in most cases, "I am choosing not to change" — a teleological fact dressed in the language of causation. Having a reason called "lack of readiness" lets you justify not trying. No attempt means no failure. No failure means no wound. The loop is perfectly rational. It just has no room for growth.

The first step of transformation is not discarding the story "I have reasons I cannot change." It begins with quietly acknowledging the fact "I am choosing not to change."

02Adler rediscovered — the revolution of teleology

Alfred Adler (1870–1937) was born in Vienna and joined Freud's circle before founding his own school, Individual Psychology. Where Freud explained behaviour through past experiences, trauma, and libidinal energy, Adler explained it through future purposes. He called this orientation teleology — the study of ends.

A person does not become angry. For the purpose of dominating another person, they manufacture the emotion of anger.— Alfred Adler, The Science of Living (1929), paraphrased

The shift looks modest in print but is revolutionary in practice. Inside a causal worldview, the past is a chain: "Because things were this way in my childhood, I became this." That story closes off change. Inside a teleological worldview there is no chain, because the purpose exists only in this moment — and this moment is always available to be revised.

Adler's ideas, proposed in the early twentieth century, sat in the shadow of Freud and Jung for decades. They returned to vivid life in Japan in 2013, when philosopher Ichiro Kishimi and writer Fumitake Koga published The Courage to Be Disliked (Kirawareru Yūki, Diamond-sha).

03The Courage to Be Disliked — the dialogue on separation of tasks

The Courage to Be Disliked takes the form of a Socratic dialogue between a young man and a philosopher. Within a year of publication it had sold over a million copies; it has since been translated into more than forty languages. Why did it land so hard?

The book's intellectual spine is the concept Kishimi and Koga call separation of tasks (kadai no bunri). The philosopher puts it to the young man directly:

How another person evaluates you is that person's task, not yours. You cannot control it. Your task is only to act in the way you believe is best. When you distort your own behaviour out of fear of another person's judgment, you are trampling uninvited into their task.— Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga, The Courage to Be Disliked (2013, Diamond-sha), condensed

The title sounds provocative, but the interior is quiet. It does not say: aim to be disliked. It says: stop living in fear of being disliked. As long as approval from others fuels your actions, you whittle yourself down to fit what others seem to want. That whittling, Adler argues, is precisely what produces the person who "cannot change."

Three core Adlerian concepts deserve a clear map:

04Gemeinschaftsgefühl — neither individualism nor collectivism

Adler's German term Gemeinschaftsgefühl translates, approximately, as "social interest" or "community feeling," and it is easily misread. It is not the collectivist demand that the individual sacrifice herself to the group. Nor is it the individualist assumption that doing well for yourself is enough.

What Adler means is simpler and more verifiable: human beings cannot sustain a sense of meaning while cut off from others. Isolated self-transformation runs dry. What keeps the engine going is not being praised (evaluation) but sensing that you are contributing (contribution) — a distinction that will return when we discuss encouragement.

There is another layer to Yuki's repeated refusals. She told herself: if I take the leadership role and fail, I will burden the team. That anxiety is a distorted form of community feeling — the genuine wish to contribute has been turned into a justification for avoiding risk. Adler would respond: if you truly want to contribute, you must be willing to stand in the place that is yours to stand, even at the cost of failing.

05Mencius — the heart of shame as a seed of righteousness

Step back 2,300 years from Adler and enter the world of Chinese classical thought. Mencius (c. 372–289 BCE) argued that human beings are born with four moral sprouts — sì duān, the four beginnings — each the embryo of a cardinal virtue.

惻隱之心，仁之端也。羞惡之心，義之端也。辭讓之心，禮之端也。是非之心，智之端也。 The heart of compassion is the beginning of humaneness. The heart of shame and aversion is the beginning of righteousness. The heart of yielding and deference is the beginning of propriety. The heart of approval and disapproval is the beginning of wisdom.— Mencius, Gongsun Chou, Part I (公孫丑章句上), trans. adapted from D.C. Lau

The second sprout — 羞惡之心, the heart of shame and aversion — is the seed of yì, righteousness. This is not the crushing self-condemnation of guilt; Mencius means something more active. The capacity to feel shame at your own failure to act rightly is, he insists, the very impulse that can propel you toward what is right. Left alone it withers. Tended, it grows into the virtue of righteousness.

Notice the structural parallel with Adler: as inferiority feeling can become either a fuel or a lid, the heart of shame can become either a call to action or a sentence of self-punishment. Mencius and Adler, separated by 2,300 years and the full width of Eurasia, are pointing at the same junction. The question is always what you do with the uncomfortable signal — whether you let it close you down or let it open a next step.

When shame arrives, two roads fork. One uses it as evidence to convict yourself. The other uses it as a compass bearing, 30 seconds of orientation, then movement.

06Stoic courage — returning to what is in your control

Roman Stoic philosophy carries a structure surprisingly close to Adler's teleology. Epictetus (c. 50–135 CE) opens the Enchiridion with a distinction that has lost none of its edge in two thousand years:

Some things are in our control and others not. In our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion — in short, whatever is our own doing. Not in our control are body, reputation, command, property — in short, whatever is not our own doing.— Epictetus, Enchiridion, Ch. 1 (1st–2nd century CE), trans. P.E. Matheson, adapted

Seneca refined this into an ethics of action: devote full effort to what you can govern; accept without distress what you cannot. Marcus Aurelius, ruling an empire, rehearsed this principle daily and left it in the Meditations:

You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realise this and you will find strength.— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 8 (2nd century CE), trans. Gregory Hays, adapted

Stoic courage is not "feel no fear." It is "fear is fine — now return to your jurisdiction." Other people's opinions of you, the marketing team's reaction to your review comments, senior management's budget decision — none of these are in your jurisdiction. Whether you state your assessment honestly, whether you ground it in evidence, whether you communicate it with care — those are entirely yours. This is Adler's separation of tasks, spoken two millennia earlier in a different language.

07Encouragement vs. praise — the Adlerian distinction that changes everything

One of the most practically useful gifts Adler left to education — and to self-management — is the distinction between praise and encouragement. They feel similar from the outside. They work on entirely different mechanisms.

This distinction is not confined to parenting. It operates in workplaces, in peer relationships, and — most consequentially — in how you speak to yourself. "I failed again today" is self-praise inverted: a verdict on outcomes. "Today I made an attempt" is self-encouragement: a recognition of agency. Adler held that this difference determines, over time, whether a person retains the capacity for transformation or gradually stops trying.

08A pharma reviewer who feared being disliked

Return to Yuki Tanaka. In her actual daily work she was a materials reviewer — the person whose job is to check that promotional content meets the approved label and regulatory standards. The situation she dreaded most was conflict with the marketing team. Every time she raised a concern — "this phrasing may imply an off-label use" — she watched expressions cloud and the meeting atmosphere thicken.

Over time, almost without noticing, she had developed a habit: soften the language of the objection, add hedges, and in borderline cases say nothing at all. She told herself this was about maintaining relationships. By the Adlerian map, it was something else: she was allowing the marketing team's task — how they would react — to colonise her own task, which was to apply the review standard honestly.

Six months after a product launched, a routine self-audit caught it: several promotional pieces contained efficacy claims that went beyond what the regulatory submission supported. The issue surfaced from a field-sales report, not a regulator, and the damage was contained. But for the first time Yuki sat with the question she had been avoiding: what would have happened if those materials had reached patients without being caught?

The Adlerian reframe is clean. Whether marketing likes Yuki's comments is marketing's task; she cannot control it. Whether she applies the review criteria honestly is her task; she controls it entirely. When the tasks are separated, the words of a review become clearer — not because Yuki has become indifferent to her colleagues, but because she has stopped borrowing their task as an excuse to abandon her own.

What she changed was not dramatic. In every review, she added one sentence of explicit rationale: "This expression, set against page X of the package insert, carries a risk of implying an indication not covered by the approved label." She stripped out the apologetic hedges. The first few cycles, she felt the familiar friction. Six months in, the marketing lead told her: "Your comments are easier to act on now — the reasoning is clear."

09Four ways to train courage

Courage, Adler insisted, is not a character trait you either have or lack. It is a product of habit — which means it can be practised.

1. Test disapproval tolerance in small doses. Once a day, say what you actually think in a low-stakes setting without scanning for the other person's reaction. A comment in a corridor conversation matters more than silence in a large meeting. Tolerance for disapproval grows through accumulated small exposures, not through sudden leaps.
2. Ask "what purpose does avoidance serve?" not "why am I avoiding?" When you notice yourself pulling back, the teleological question is not about causes but about functions: what am I protecting by not acting? Seeing the purpose clearly lets you decide whether what you are protecting is actually worth the cost.
3. Use 羞惡之心 as a compass, not a verdict. When shame or discomfort arrives, run a 30-second exercise: not "what does this say about me?" but "what is my next concrete move?" Mencius's sprout of righteousness points toward action — it withers if you only use it for self-examination.
4. Sort by jurisdiction. When anxiety or anger surfaces, pause and classify: is this within my control, or within someone else's? If it is outside your jurisdiction, release it deliberately — not as indifference but as a recognition that energy spent there is borrowed from what you can actually shape. If it is within your jurisdiction, give it everything. This is the Stoic Dichotomy of Control made into a daily micro-habit.

10Courage is not character — it is habit

Late in his life, Adler wrote: "Human beings can change. From today, from this very moment." This is not an inspirational slogan. It is the logical conclusion of teleology. If behaviour is chosen toward a purpose, and if the purpose exists only in this present moment, then the moment you revise the purpose a different behaviour becomes available. The past is fixed. The purpose is not.

A courageous person does not stop feeling fear. They feel it and still choose: "acting in line with my own honest judgment matters more to me than securing this person's approval." That is a choice about purpose, made moment by moment. Yuki still feels the familiar tightening when a marketing review goes sideways. She does not trim the language of her comment to make it go away. That is courage — not the absence of discomfort but the refusal to let discomfort dictate the task.

Mencius's heart of shame, the Stoic dichotomy of control, and Adler's separation of tasks all point the same direction: stop using others' evaluation as the criterion for your actions, and choose instead what you sincerely believe is right. That thread, running from a Confucian text written in the 4th century BCE through a Roman emperor's private notebook to a Viennese psychiatrist's clinical notes — and on into a pharmaceutical review room in contemporary Japan — is what this series has been calling the practice of courage.

Fear of change is not evidence that you lack courage. It is evidence that you care about the outcome — which is exactly the precondition for courage to operate. The question is only how you read the signal: as proof that you should stop, or as confirmation that something worth doing is at stake.

Adler said it a hundred years ago. Mencius said it 2,300 years ago. Marcus Aurelius wrote it in the middle of an empire's collapse. Courage is not a gift distributed unevenly at birth. It is a small choice, made today, that gradually becomes a habit, which gradually becomes the thing other people call character.