When Ego Wears the Mask of Courage

I just notched another birthday that puts me solidly in the second half of seven decades. The research actually reassures me, noting that our 70s and 80s can be the most fulfilling decades from an emotional and spiritual standpoint. That framing matters. Just as physical investment in our younger years shapes our wellbeing later, there is a compelling parallel in investing in emotional and spiritual fitness earlier. The returns compound.

There is a continuum, and older people tend to land in one of two places: content and grateful, or bitter and resentful. That observation sent me toward the wisdom of St. Benedict:

“The first task of spiritual life is learning to see your own reactions clearly: how quickly anger justifies itself, how easily fear pretends to be wisdom, how often ego disguises itself as courage. Silence exposes all of that, not to shame people, but to free them. Stay rooted. Stay practiced in humility and courage. Stay shaped by love more than by fear. The goal is freedom, the kind that lets you remain fully human when systems forget how.”

I believe it is anger, fear, and false courage that lead to that lasting bitterness and resentment. Benedict’s words carry much to digest, but one phrase stops me every time: “ego disguised as courage.”

I still think about a moment from earlier in my career. I was in a room with senior leaders, convinced I was the one willing to say what others would not. I felt the clarity of it, the moral weight. I was speaking truth to power, or so I told myself. And maybe, in part, I was. However somewhere in that room, something shifted. The courage became about being seen as courageous. I stopped listening. I stopped leaning into the discomfort of genuine curiosity. Instead, I invested my energy confirming my own righteousness. My ego had taken over, and it had done so quietly, wearing exactly the right disguise.

That behavior rarely produces good outcomes, for the people in the room or for the person who cannot see what is actually driving them.

The world needs more courageous leaders. However courage without humility is just ego with better posture. The real question is not whether you are right. It is whether you are genuinely trying to do right. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where self-deception lives.

When anger starts justifying itself, when fear begins presenting as wisdom, that is your signal to pause. Not to retreat, but to reflect. To ask honestly what is underneath the certainty. In the middle of it, that is harder than it sounds. It requires people around you who care enough to raise the caution flag, and it asks you to have built the kind of relationships where that is possible.

My younger self would have benefited enormously from Benedict’s insight. Perhaps you will find it useful to consider this: humility and courage are not opposites. They are partners. And countering fear with love, rather than with more armor, is not weakness. It is the hardest and most necessary work of leadership.

I am still working on it. And that takes genuine courage.

Think Big, Start Small, Act Now,

- Lorne

Garrett’s View: We want the complete story as abridged as possible, and know we have a matter of seconds to command or retain attention. When presented with a situation, we either make the extra effort to ingest the nuances, or more often, we decide we can’t be bothered with it and just associate with those who agree. You don’t need a neuroscience degree to know that defaulting to agreement doesn’t dissolve anger, fear or ego, it just parks them. It’s that fleeting pause for reflection that we actually want, we just know it’s a harder route that takes time we pretend we don’t have.

- Garrett

AI Response: The tension Lorne describes between ego and genuine courage has measurable consequences in organizational life. Research from Harvard Business Review found that leaders who score high in humility consistently outperform their peers on team performance and employee engagement. Studies on psychological safety — most notably Google's Project Aristotle — found that the single greatest predictor of high-performing teams wasn't talent or strategy, but whether team members felt safe enough to speak honestly without fear of judgment. That requires exactly the kind of leader Lorne describes: someone who has done the inner work to tell the difference between performing courage and actually practicing it. And the stakes are real — Gallup's ongoing workplace research consistently shows that the majority of employees are disengaged, with poor leadership culture cited as a primary driver. Benedict framed it as a spiritual problem. The data frames it as an organizational one. They're pointing at the same thing.

When Ego Wears the Mask of Courage

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