Coffee Shop Courage

The other night my husband, teenage son and I watched the latest episode of Under The Dome. When it was over, my husband grabbed the remote control to look for something else to watch. The movie, We Bought a Zoo, appeared on a channel.

“Oh that’s a great movie! Let’s watch it!” I said.

I have never seen two males scatter to other areas of the house so quickly. And I don’t understand what they don’t like about the movie. It has an all-star cast. I mean, Scarlett Johansson is in it. The kid from Under The Dome is in it. How bad could it be for a guy to watch?

Very bad, apparently.

So I got to watch it by myself and I remembered one of my favorite things about the movie. It’s when the dad, played by Matt Damon, tells his teenage son, “You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.”

Image via Jose Hernandez at Flickr Creative Commons

Isn’t that a great line? Because it’s so true. Think of how many things we avoid in life because of fear. How many relationships never took off because we never had the guts to tell the other person how we felt. How many raises we never received because we were too scared to ask for one.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to witness the aftermath of someone’s insane courage. I was sitting in a coffee shop with my son waiting for a frozen drink. I think they forgot about our drink, which was okay for a while because it allowed us to eavesdrop on two men. They were sitting across a table from each other bent over a cell phone talking to someone on speaker.

One of the men was really worked up and excited. He told the person on the cell phone, “So I sent him an email, and I told him all of the things I would need. Number one: I need you to stop bashing me behind my back. Number two: I need you to support my efforts publicly. Number three: I need a raise. Because I am well qualified to get this company through this audit and I can do an excellent job.”

The person on the cell phone said, “Wow.”

Then the first man said, “Percentage-wise, what do you think my chances are?”

The cell phone guy hemmed and hawed.

“Really, give me a number,” the first guy persisted.

The cell phone guy still didn’t want to respond. Finally they took him off speaker. I don’t know what the cell phone guy said – probably a low number – because the first guy responded, “It doesn’t matter anyway. My office is cleaned out. So either way.”

You could tell this guy felt like he had been taking crap from his boss for a long time. And he’d finally found the guts to tell him how he felt. It was only an email, but still, he seemed like he was on top of the world. I glanced at him and noticed that he could not stop smiling. His friend was equally animated.

The guy may be out of a job now, but I have a feeling his self-esteem is higher this week than it was last week. Hopefully that will help him find a better job where he can apply his newly discovered courage.

I’ll be pulling for him.