1 _____ I'm not fully attentive when others speak.
2 _____ I find it hard to respect people who disagree with me.
3 _____ It's very difficult for me to accept negative feedback from others.
4 _____ I tend to deny my own faults.
5 _____ I tend to worry about work and health without having a plan to change.
6 _____ I mostly avoid conflict.
7 _____ Under stress, I'll make excuses or rationalize what I'm doing.
8 _____ When things go wrong, I tend to automatically think others are responsible.
9 _____ I find it easier to shift responsibility than to look hard at myself.
10 _____ I can easily become defensive by blaming others.
11 _____ I'm quickly impatient with or easily frustrated by people.
12 _____ I hate it when people get angry at me, but I express anger at others.
13 _____ I don't always listen very carefully to my spouse/S.O./family members.
14 _____ I don't always respect all people—especially when arguing with someone I dislike.
15 _____ I normally don't respectfully challenge biased or bigoted comments or behaviors.
16 _____ I am not unselfish or self‐centered.
17 _____ I don't consistently improve how I treat others.
18 _____ I don't always govern my emotions when highly stressed or anxious.
19 _____ I don't always learn from my mistakes and I find myself repeating them.
20 _____ I don't see and then improve my deepest faults in every situation.
21 _____ I really don't treat all people as being at least as important as I think I am.
22 _____ I don't always use reason, wiser people, and conscience to see the highest right.
23 _____ I don't consistently value doing the right thing over getting results.
24 _____ I seldom coach others to do the right thing.
25 _____ Seeing a wrong, I don't consistently discern the right action and then do it.
26 _____ When I see someone act wrongly, I almost never ask that person about it.
27 _____ I tend to try “quick fixes” instead of focusing on a problem's moral root cause.
28 _____ I seldom attempt the Highest Right solution because of feared pushback.
These aren't easy but they're important. We'll spend time on them in Steps Three and Four.
Thank you very much for your candor.
Personal inventories can cause discomfort; completing Form 5 is an act of courage.
Take a well‐deserved break!
“The Bio surprised me,” said Gary. “And the last questions, 25 to 53, were tough. I always thought of myself as being calm under pressure. But in Questions 16 and 21, about worst and most disliked behaviors, I realized that I'm quick to judge and I'm impatient. I react badly to negative situations. I eviscerate others with a hard look or sarcastic word. Worst, I let my direct reports bully their people. I'm excited about what we're going to do with this.”
“Good, Gary. Those things stood out to me, too. We'll definitely use them. And Aiden?”
“Aiden,” he said, “underperforms. But when I'm about to fire him, I get a twinge of conscience. Like I'm doing something wrong, or I'm being controlled by my emotional reactions. I think about the impact on his family if I fire him. What's the right thing? I can see that I started my decision‐making cycle out of fear. I think more about fixing things in the moment instead of figuring out the right thing to do. And I don't have a rational way to discuss things with him in a competent way.”
“Good points,” I said. “Research shows we should heed those signals from our conscience,4 our instinctive moral sense of right and wrong. And to not confuse them with our instinctive signals of fear. The truth is that we simply can't reason effectively when we're fearful. We all face tough situations and need a way to reconcile our feelings with doing the right thing. Luckily, we have a tool.”
Completing the Bio has probably raised your awareness of how you relate to your world. It was designed to help you see where you are now as you begin to overcome your fears and become your best self. This is where I start with large groups or individuals.
Another tool I use in courage coaching and teaching that helps us assess where we are is the Tier 4 GPS Tool.
The Tier 4 GPS Tool
“Endless confusion about actions and results can be avoided by simply asking if each choice is correct in the moral frame.”
—Robert Galbreath 5
We saw in the Introduction that we need courage to live without constant anxiety and worry. We also need courage to truly love, to be deeply loved, to actually know others, and to be authentically known. We need courage to know the right thing and to then do it. We need courage to first lead ourselves, and then lead others.
The process of knowing the right from the wrong should be simple, but we clutter up a straightforward sequence with old fears, new stresses, and anxious habits. Finding a tool to help us came about in a surprisingly easy way. My wife, Diane, and I were in remote western Kenya, visiting our daughter and her husband. Each was the CEO of a nonprofit that together brought clean water wells and women's health care to over a million people in eleven African nations. We were in the small village of Lwala, playing Hearts. It's a game that begins by ridding yourself of bad cards and I was able to quickly recognize them. I wondered if we could just as easily and systematically discard poor choices in life—the ones driven by fear, stress, and self‐destructive habits—to leave us better options? The thought became the Tier 4 GPS tool.
Tier 4 quickly helps us to eliminate our worst alternatives, leaving us with the wiser ones. Figure 1.4 reflects this.
Gary Persons and another client, Bella Cruz, would find this helpful. Bella is the director of a health care system's addiction treatment services. She's smart, capable, and hardworking, which won her early promotions. She's young, short, speaks English as a second language, and can be quiet with superiors, all of which have invited disrespect. Gary Persons is stuck with Aiden Bellevue and Bella Cruz is pinned between hard times and a mean boss.
“We hurt before the COVID‐19 hit us,” said Bella. “Staff and budget have been slashed and OD deaths and patient numbers exceed our ability to cope. Now I've been told to cut more staff and to increase service delivery. My staff is tired and angry and pushing back. My boss, he is not a nice man, he said I can be replaced. I don't complain, but Gustavo, I'm a single mom.”
| TIER 4 KEY INFO | TIER 1 | TIER 2 | TIER 3 |
|---|