Are you aware that your assets are not only a collection of your greatest hits, your best of’s and your wins? They are a summation of your gains and your pains, losses and failures.
In order to more clearly identify the assets that comprise your career and life, you must do some backcasting and reflection to document the stories that compile what I call your “Inventory of Courage.” For me, my inventory of courage doesn’t start at a failure or traumatic event that happened five years ago or even ten years ago. The first filing in my inventory of courage is indexed at when I was six-years old and finally stood up to a bully. That confidence booster led to the next leap, and then the next, and all along the way taking stock of my pains along with my gains.
Very importantly, your inventory of courage helps you to follow your intuition. That’s because it’s a compilation of data that we rarely discuss — not the data from surveys and excel sheets, but the data from our intuition and personal experiences.
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Stories as data
It turns out that stories are data too. Here’s an example of a data point that led me to a shift out of a 16-year career in academia to entrepreneurship.
It was a Wednesday, around 5:20 p.m. I was walking down the hall in the spacious academic building where I taught most of my classes, from the photocopier with my arms full of eleven more papers to grade, three more recruiting calls to make, and mentally composing a text to my husband explaining that I’d be late again for dinner. And then I heard someone say, through clenched teeth, “I. Don’t. Want. To. Do. This.” It took me a beat to realize the voice was my own.
I gasped, closed my office door, slumped into my chair, and just sat with the uncontrollable admission. I had built a career on following my heart. Long term, I believe that’s the more efficient way to live. But short term, following one’s heart often feels clumsy, scary and like you’re groping in the dark. That Wednesday afternoon was one of those moments that leadership coach Tony Martignetti, host of The Virtual Campfire podcast, calls a “flashpoint.” I eventually left what had been up to that point my dream job in academia, to become an entrepreneur and build my current company. That awkward admission full of unknowns became another entry in my inventory of courage.
Your inventory of courage is built from the moments you walked away, spoke up, or admitted out loud, to yourself that something had to change, long before you had a plan for what came next. Each of these flashpoints becomes proof, retrievable later, that you’ve been brave before and can be brave again.
A fateful exit
When I asked Martignetti about his own flashpoint, he didn’t hesitate. Twenty-five years into a finance and strategy career in biotech, he was sitting in a boardroom watching two executives squabble over something trivial while half the room quietly checked their phones. “This is not real leadership,” he remembers thinking.
He got up and walked out of the boardroom with no plan or landing spot, but just a conviction that he had to “leave this room to change the room.” That single, unglamorous exit reordered the rest of his career. He now coaches leaders on inside-out transformation: the idea that inner clarity has to precede outer change, not follow it.
What struck me most about Martignetti’s walkout was what he does with moments like it afterward. He pointed me to the philosopher Ken Wilber’s idea of “transcend and include”: you don’t discard the chapter that broke you, you fold it into the fuel for what comes next. That’s the inventory of courage exactly! The failed pivot, the burnout or the boardroom you can’t sit in anymore doesn’t get erased, it gets logged.
Martignetti has a diagnostic question he uses with the rigorous, metrics-driven executives he coaches, the ones who’ve spent years compartmentalizing away anything that doesn’t show up on a scorecard: When was the last time you felt fully alive? People’s responses range from woodworking, poetry or dancing to building a website from scratch. The point isn’t nostalgia. It’s finding the thread and bridging it back into how they work because, as Martignetti puts it, brilliance goes dormant when people fragment themselves to perform.
That’s what your inventory of courage is for. It’s not a highlight reel. It’s the evidence file you build by surviving the moments you didn’t plan for, whether that be the clenched jaw at the photocopier or the walkout with no landing spot, and then to transcend and include rather than bury them.
So here’s the practice: the next time you catch yourself mid-flashpoint with a tightened jaw or a voice that’s not quite your own, don’t push it away. Just observe it. You’re filing away a data point into your inventory of courage and someday you’ll need to tap into that reserve to make your leap.
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