Foreword

by Sara Blakely, founder of SPANX

“What on earth am I doing?!”

The mind tries to make sense at the strangest times. The irony was, I wasn’t on earth … I was ten thousand feet in the air climbing up the side of a hot air balloon on a dangling rope ladder. (Yes, the girl who is afraid of heights and sometimes cries during airplane takeoffs.)

What led me to that moment? Well, there’s a short answer and a longer one. The short answer is that I was competing for $1 million as a reality show contestant on Sir Richard Branson’s television show, The Rebel Billionaire. The long answer is that my whole life had been preparing me for a moment like this.

The value of courage was taught to me at an early age. Lessons about courage, in my household, were every bit as important as lessons about history or arithmetic. At the dinner table, my dad would ask my brother and me, “So, kids, what did you fail at this week?” If we didn’t have a good answer, he’d be disappointed. If we had failed — for example, “Dad, I tried out for this and I was horrible” — he would congratulat us and give us a big high five! Knowing that my parents supported and expected me to take risks took the fear out of failing.

One of my earliest memories of doing something courageous was in the sixth grade, when I had to transfer to a new school. I was afraid of change. I had been with the same group of friends since I was five, and starting over was terrifying. Knowing that my “crazy” dad encouraged us to fail, I did the most courageous thing I could think of: I ran for class president…after attending the school for only one week! When I told my mom about my plan to run for president, she gently said, “But sweetie, you might not win.” She was right. In fact, I was almost guaranteed to lose. Through that experience, so many wonderful things happened. Among them, I immediately earned the respect of the new students and made fast friends. After a few months, no one remembered that I had lost the run for president; they just remembered me. I started to “get it.”

Now don’t get me wrong—although I consider myself a courageous person, I am scared of almost everything. Through the years, I have developed a mantra: “Sara, if you weren’t afraid, would you do it?” If the answer is yes, I take a deep breath and do it! I made a pact with myself long ago that I would never let fear get in the way of moving my life forward. Courage, not the absence of fear, is just doing it anyway.

All this doesn’t mean that I am fearless or reckless. It just means that if the road in front of me looks scary, I take fear along for the ride—but I keep on moving, with the fear. In every situation where I was ever courageous, you could just as easily substitute the word afraid for courageous. I was afraid, for example, when I started SPANX with $5,000 in savings. I was afraid when I knocked on the doors of textile mills begging them to manufacture my prototype for a new footless pantyhose (for which I had written and earned a patent). I was afraid when I stood in front of the hot TV cameras on the QVC network for the first time. I was afraid when I traveled to Dallas with my lucky red backpack to meet the buyer at Neiman Marcus to interest her in selling SPANX products. I was afraid the first time I was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show. I was afraid when I did the same thing at Saks, Nordstrom, and Bloomingdale’s. I was afraid when I called on Target and suggested that SPANX create a new product line for them called ASSETS. And I was afraid as I inched my way up a flimsy rope ladder on the side of a billowy hot air balloon.

Why do these things? Because courage has never let me down. Courage has brought me great friends, kept life fabulously interesting, and earned me a healthy income. The way I look at it, you are the writer, director, and producer of your own life. I don’t want my movie to be boring. Courage ensures that it won’t.

Courage has been so important to my life that I’ve made instilling courage in others a top priority at SPANX. First, I try to be a courageous role model. People respond with courage of their own when they see me take chances and step up to challenges. Second, when people make mistakes, especially mistakes made by taking risks to move the company forward, I’m never disappointed. Instead, I go up to them and give them a big high five! The third way I instill courage at SPANX is to introduce SPANX’s employees to new and original ideas, particularly if those ideas advance SPANX’s mission of promoting confidence in women. Bill Treasurer’s ideas about courage and risk taking resonated so strongly with the SPANX team that we ended up working with Bill and the Giant Leap team on three separate occasions. By our encouraging people to constantly try new and challenging things, and by our associating with companies that reinforce our values, the $5,000 investment that started SPANX from the back of my apartment grew into a $200 million business. Yep, courage is good business.

How can you fill people with enough confidence that they’ll set aside their fears and do extraordinary things? What can you do to put courage to work for you and the people you lead? Reading Courage Goes to Work is a great start. To be successful in business, you need great mentors—people who’ve “been there” and can help you to “go there.” Bill’s unique insights about courage come from unusual and hard-earned experiences, inside and outside of work. By drawing on his own courageous experiences, as well as on the work he’s done with clients like SPANX, Bill has developed a practical way of understanding, categorizing, and inspiring courageous behavior.

I’m a big reader of books about human performance. Too many of them, though, are both unrealistic and unfulfilling. They tell you obvious things, like “Don’t be afraid!” or “Tell yourself you’re brave, and you will be!” What makes Courage Goes to Work so appealing is that it respects your intelligence by acknowledging that fear and comfort are business (and behavioral) realities. It offers specific suggestions for working with those realities instead of brushing them aside as though they don’t matter. For managers, because they deal with the negative consequences of workers’ fear and comfort on a daily basis, this book is particularly useful. By providing managers with specific advice for building people’s courage, the book strengthens the backbones of managers and workers alike. The result is what every business strives for: higher confidence, higher morale, and higher aim.

To be sure, courage can come with payoffs. But don’t be surprised if those payoffs come in the form of even greater and scarier challenges. My reward for summiting Richard Branson’s hot air balloon, which after forty-five terrifying minutes I eventually did, was the opportunity to travel to Africa. The catch? I had to dive into the outstretched arms of a fellow contestant—after leaping off a 380-foot cliff. As the saying goes, “Just another day at the office!”

Oh, but did I mention that I was runner-up and Richard Branson surprised me with his personal paycheck of $750,000? I used the money to launch the Sara Blakely Foundation to help women and, among other things, sent 278 women to college in South Africa. So this is how transformative it can be when courage goes to work. One courageous moment on your part just might end up having a far greater impact than you could ever have imagined.