Professional Courage: What Does It Mean for Practitioner Psychologists?

Are you a brave psychologist? Should you aim to be? What does courage even mean for psychologists? In this article, the concept of professional courage is explored with reference to literature from the fields of philosophy, sociology, management science and psychology. The definition of courage as intentional action towards a worthy goal despite risks to the actor (Rate, 2010) is adopted and applied to professional courage in the course of working as a psychologist.

A holistic process model of professional courage is developed and presented as a flow chart which can be used in supervision to help psychologists consider courage in their own practice. Importantly, professionals, including psychologists, may hold multiple worthy goals in mind, and one way of resolving situations calling for courage may be to reappraise the dominant goal and work towards one with fewer risks, therefore reducing the need for courage in the first place.