
Leadership
How to Be Fearless Without Being Foolish
Fearlessness is a highly prized leadership quality. Foolishness is not.
Posted April 19, 2018
Fearlessness is a highly prized leadership quality.
Foolishness is not.
Unfortunately, practicing the former often risks revealing the latter, causing significant anxiety in leaders.
In an attempt to bring clarity to the question ‘How to be fearless without being foolish?’ I created the matrix below, which highlights the different kinds of leadership resulting from the combination of these two variables.

The Trusted Leader Matrix.
- Leaders who are smart and scared squander their talents.
- Leaders who are scared and foolish have little to offer in the way of leadership.
- Leaders who are foolish and fearless are positively dangerous.
- Leaders who are smart and fearless tend to be trusted.
The key to being a Trusted Leader is to recognize that we are biologically determined to be both fearful and foolish.
Only by recognizing and overcoming our reflexive thoughts and feelings are we able to become fearless without being foolish.
Fear and Evolutionary Biology

We are who we are today as a result of millennia of evolutionary adaptation, with biological change happening incredibly slowly.
Our bodies are thus optimized to survive in circumstances substantially different to those that we live in today.
To highlight just two of the differences between a leader’s context today compared to that in which our biology developed:

These two differences alone explain why today we:
- overestimate the danger of upsetting our community
- become physically stronger, rather than smarter, when threatened
Only by developing emotional intelligence – the awareness and questioning of emotional responses in relation to our longer-term goals – are we able to overcome these knee-jerk reactions and respond appropriately to threats in our environment as it exists today.
Foolishness and Evolutionary Biology

Just as our emotions are strongly informed by evolutionary biology, so are our thoughts.
Recent research in cognitive science shows we are subject to confirmation bias to an alarming degree.
Our pre-existing beliefs, especially when they are deeply held and emotionally resonant, are hard to shake, no matter how true or false they are, and no matter how convincing the contradictory evidence may be.
We are far more likely to be objective about the opinions of others than we are about our own.
One explanation for this is that our cognitive apparatus developed in a time and place where the capacity to win an argument had more survival value than the capacity to see the world objectively. Hence, we are designed for self-deception and pig-headedness.
That explains why we mostly seek to be right, rather than convinced, in arguments today.
To hedge against this biological propensity, we need to ask ourselves, “What could I discover that would cause me to change my mind on this issue?” instead of the more natural question, “How can I bolster my opinion on this issue?”
Our strongest opinions tend to be the least well-founded.
Conclusion
Nobody said being fearless without being foolish is easy. It requires the discipline to notice and resist the natural tendencies that live in our bodies as a result of millennia of evolutionary history.
But the payoff is substantial. Instead of squandering our leadership potential, or being a danger to others, we are able to realize outcomes that only leaders in positions of trust are able to achieve.