# The Coward in the Mirror - Proposition By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2026-01-25 There's a particular species of person I keep encountering who talks endlessly about "growth mindset" and "continuous improvement" but whose entire philosophical repertoire was assembled from YouTube thumbnails. They'll quote Atomic Habits at you (having read the summary, not the book) while somehow never once asking a follow-up question in conversation or sitting with an idea that challenges their existing framework. Their cousin is the manager who attended a leadership workshop, learned the word "empowerment," and now deploys it like a spell: "You're totally empowered to own this project," they say, before rewriting your entire deliverable because it didn't match the version they'd already imagined. Both of these people share something interesting: they've absorbed the language of development without the actual mechanism, which is the genuinely uncomfortable practice of self-reflection. Research on this suggests that introspective capacity isn't strongly correlated with intelligence. Smart people are just as bad at it, sometimes worse, because they're better at constructing elaborate justifications. So what is the gap? Perhaps real self-reflection requires a kind of ego permeability that most people experience as threatening, a willingness to let your narrative about yourself get destabilized and torn down to the studs. That's not a skill gap. That's a courage gap. Today's society per capita might be the most cowardly in recorded history. #### Related Items [[Coward]] [[Introspection]] [[Reflection]] [[Society]] [[Courage]] [[Skills]]