Welcome to The Concrete Leader Weekly — a weekly leadership and personal growth newsletter where I share inspiring stories, practical insights, and motivational lessons to help you start your week with purpose and clarity.

Issue #144

What Camping Taught Me About Courage

Mark Twain once made an astute observation about human nature and past trauma:

Think about how fast our minds generalize fear.

Imagine a man walking up to a friend’s home. As they reach the front porch, his friend turns and says, "By the way, my friend here has a dog."

If that man was attacked by a dog in early childhood, instant paralysis sets in. He doesn’t want to walk through the door. He doesn't know this specific dog, nor has he ever met it. Yet because of a past "hot stove," his brain equates every dog with danger. The fear is complete, real, and paralyzing.

In leadership, we do this exact same thing. A failed operational rollout, a broken business partnership, or a high-stakes project that blew up years ago becomes our hot stove. Suddenly, every neutral or promising opportunity that even resembles that past event looks scorching hot. We step back, refuse to act, and sit frozen on a completely cold stove.

The Escalation: Facing My Personal Nightmare

I experienced this paralyzing fear firsthand years ago—not on a plant floor, but in a sleeping bag on the frozen ground.

I love my son Joe dearly; but I hated camping. I despised everything about it. When Joe joined the Boy Scouts, I knew I faced a choice: if I wanted to stay involved in his life at that level, I had to confront the reality of sleeping outside.

The first several months only confirmed my worst fears:

• Winter: We went on a winter campout. It was freezing, miserable, and I didn't sleep a single minute. My hatred for sleeping in a tent was fully validated.
• Spring: Indiana spring arrived with relentless thunderstorms, severe flooding, and endless miles of thick mud. It was a total disaster.
• Summer: I hoped for relief at summer camp, but day one hit 98°F heat, immediately followed by three straight days of severe, punishing thunderstorms.

By the time autumn rolled around, I had developed a deep, debilitating fear of camping.

Then came the fall Camporee down in Southern Indiana. Over 3,500 Scouts and leaders were gathering for a major weekend event. We were taking the boys out of school on Friday and staying through Sunday.

I didn't want to go. In fact, I was terrified of going.

In the middle of the night before we left, around 1:00 or 2:00 AM, I woke up my wife, Kara Joy, drenched in a cold sweat of pure panic. "I don't want to go," I told her. "I can't do two nights of this." I was completely paralyzed by the fear of what lay ahead.

Tornadoes and Clear Skies

Despite the cold sweat, I loaded up the gear and joined the troop on Friday anyway.

True to form, Friday evening hit like a hammer. By 5:30 PM, severe weather warnings rolled over the hills. Thunderstorm watches turned into tornado watches, and live tornadoes were confirmed in the surrounding area. As lightning cracked and rain poured down, I thought: Here it is again, my nightmare scenario.

We hunkered down, weathered the storm, and survived the night.

Then Saturday morning came.

I unzipped the tent to a crisp, gorgeous, 72-degree day framed by bright, puffy white clouds. The evening followed with a calm, cool breeze. And for the first time in countless troop outings, I slept all night through to Sunday morning.

When I woke up that Sunday, something fundamental had shifted inside me. I had faced freezing cold, torrential rain, thick mud, brutal heat, and literal tornado warnings, the absolute worst-case scenarios I had spent months fearing, and I survived them all.

I still didn't love winter camping or being out in severe storms, but the crippling fear was gone. The stove wasn't hot anymore.

Courage Isn't the Absence of Fear

President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously noted:

Real leadership courage doesn't mean you never wake up in a cold sweat at 1:00 AM. It doesn't mean you march forward with absolute immunity to anxiety or past pain. Courage simply means deciding that your team, your mission, or your son is worth more than the fear holding you back.

When you finally step onto the ground you've been avoiding, you often realize two things:

1. You are strong enough to survive the worst-case storm.

2. The vast majority of the "stoves" you've been avoiding were cold all along.

Apply, Change, Teach (ACT) This Week

• Apply: Identify one decision or conversation in your plant, team, or personal life that you have been actively avoiding because of a past bad experience. Ask yourself: Is this stove actually hot, or am I just remembering a past burn?
• Change: Separate past facts from present realities. Make the call, schedule the meeting, or initiate the project with a fresh evaluation of the current facts—not old anxiety.
• Teach: When you notice a team member paralyzed by hesitation, help them break down whether their fear is based on a real, immediate threat or a generalized past failure. Teach them how to step past the cold stove.

Going Full Circle

Interestingly, soon afterward, my wife and I bought a tent camper and spent the next eight years camping. Some of our family’s best vacations happened in that camper because we refused to let the weather steal our joy. Had I not overcome my fear, I would have missed those experiences.

Until next week, lead with intention.

See you next week!