A few years ago, I set out to answer a narrow, almost tactical question asked of me by the incomparable Dr. Marty Seligman: What makes a police officer run toward gunfire when every instinct in the human body, and every civilian standing nearby, is oriented toward running away? The psychological theory I built to answer that question, Courageous Optimism, rests on three components: moral will, the desire to act rightly; moral skill, the trained competence to act effectively; and courage, the capacity to carry both past fear. I have applied that framework almost exclusively to law enforcement, because as a retired police officer, that is the world I know best. Two events from the last two weeks have reminded me that Courageous Optimism has no limitations, and these two incidents did not rely on a badge.
The first unfolded in the surf off Seabright Beach in Santa Cruz, California. A 16-year-old lifeguard named Ryder Williams was first into the water when a 10-year-old boy was overtaken by 10-foot shorebreak. Wave after wave buried them both. Bystanders attempted to help and were repelled by the same swells that nearly pulled Williams under, yet his resolve did not waver, and he did not release his grip. A second lifeguard, Aaron Bohnen, fought his way out to the pair, and the three returned to shore together. Williams did not seek a fundraiser, an interview circuit, or a headline. He climbed back into his tower and finished his shift. This is a young man who was not just driven by courageous optimism, but is also humble.
The second unfolded at an In-N-Out in Twin Falls, Idaho, where a gunman opened fire on a lunchtime crowd. Jordan Salinas, a 35-year-old healthcare worker seated nearby with his girlfriend, drew his own weapon when the shooting began. He and an off-duty state trooper returned fire and drove the gunman from the restaurant; law enforcement later credited both men with saving lives before the shooter died by his own hand nearby. Asked afterward whether he’d been afraid, Salinas said he felt no fear at all. “There’s a task that needs to be done,” he told a reporter, “and we’re the ones who need to do it.”
Neither Williams nor Salinas wears a badge. Neither trained at a police academy. Yet both are, in the fullest sense, empirical demonstrations of the theory built to explain why police officers run toward danger. This suggests the theory is not just a law enforcement phenomenon that requires a badge for an actionable response towards imminent life-threatening circumstances. It is a human capacity that can be drawn upon by anyone with the self-determination, the self-efficacy, and the courage to act despite fear.
What tends to get lost in the celebration of moments like these, however, is the piece of the theory that matters most to anyone hoping to become capable of the same response: None of this arrives from nowhere. Popular narrative treats heroism as a switch that flips in an ordinary person at a dangerous moment to perform an extraordinary act. The evidence says otherwise. Research on self-efficacy holds that our belief in our capacity to execute a given action under pressure is built, incrementally, through prior mastery experience, not summoned whole in a crisis. Williams did not discover rescue techniques mid-wave; he had drilled these actions regularly. Salinas did not discover his resolve at the drive-through window; he built it years earlier, after surviving the 2021 mass shooting at Boise Towne Square mall. That earlier trauma did not leave him fragile, but rather anti-fragile. It left him determined to overhaul his firearms training, rehearse a mental framework for exactly this contingency, and adopt a personal creed he had posted publicly two years before anyone knew his name: “Train like your life depends on it, because God forbid, one day it might. Stay free, stay safe, stay frosty.” Salinas did not just survive adversity; he benefited from and excelled because of it.
Salinas’s ethos is Courageous Optimism compressed into 11 words, and it names what self-determination theory would predict of someone who has internalized both competence and autonomy as governing values. Moral will and moral skill are not dispositions we either have or lack; they are cultivated, in the ordinary hours no one is watching, through practice repetitions, mental rehearsal, and a decision made well in advance about who one intends to be if the worst hour of a stranger’s life happens to coincide with one’s own. Salinas did not decide against victimhood the moment the shooting began. He decided to be a victor years earlier. The moment simply asked him to keep the promise.
I resist viewing incidents like these as actions by “extraordinary people.” Doing so lets the rest of us off the hook. The more rigorous, and frankly more useful, belief is that self-determination and self-efficacy are trainable constructs, and that ordinary people who invest in them ahead of time become capable of extraordinary acts when the moment arrives uninvited. A teenager on lifeguard duty and a healthcare worker on his lunch break did not draw on some reserve of exceptional courage in reaction to crisis. They responded intentionally by drawing on ordinary courage, disciplined by deliberate preparation, aimed at a moment neither of them chose.
I offer these two recent accounts not for admiration, though Williams and Salinas should both be admired, but as an invitation. Somewhere ahead of you sits a moment that will ask you to be more than a witness to someone else’s crisis—smaller, probably, than a mass shooting or a riptide, but no less consequential to the person living through it. Courageous Optimism does not ask whether you will be brave enough when that moment comes. It asks whether you are doing the quiet work now that will make bravery available to you then.
