The dictionary definition of pusillanimity is lack of courage, timidity or cowardliness.
But what pusillanimity really means is smallness of soul. It means shying away from using your gifts, not out of genuine humility, but out of weakness.
It means rejecting what is arduous but what is noble and right. It means seeking the easy road because you desire comfort over the development of virtue.
The opposite of pusillanimity is magnanimity or greatness of soul.
Magnanimity is where you willingly ensure hardness and suffering to pursue excellence according to your talents and gifts.
Examples of Pusillanimity
1. Avoiding Challenges
Life is difficult and no greatness is ever achieved without challenge and difficulty. But the pusillanimous person shirks the challenge, avoids ambition and shies away from anything that requires great effort and sacrifice.
2. Procrastination
Rather than work hard and pursue achievements, the pusillanimous person dithers and procrastinates as a way of avoiding confronting their own inadequacies. It is a tactic used to hide from hard work.
3. Insecurity
A pusillanimous person does not feel secure in themselves. They are scared of failure so they avoid the challenge. They could not handle failure because they have no resilience and no confidence because they have never done anything arduous. They are soft.
4. Indecision
Pusillanimity destroys any sense of magnanimity or righteous ambition. With no direction or drive, pusillanimity causes you to drift without any course or any sense of assertiveness.
The Problems Caused by Pusillanimity
1. Reinforcement of Negative Thinking
Pusillanimity is a negative cycle. Lack of confidence and increased insecurity feed on themselves and increase. You get into such a state of low confidence that even small challenges become insurmountable. The difficulties are purely mental but the pusillanimous person writes themselves off without even making an attempt.
2. Missed Opportunities for Growth
People grow when they are tested. We are refined by the challenges we face.
If you shirk every challenge you avoid opportunities to growth and you stunt yourself. The pusillanimous person voluntarily withdraws themselves from growth. Every missed opportunity compounds over time further reinforcing negativity and timidity.
How To Get Over a Pusillanimous Mindset
1. Give Your All To Everything You Do
The key to getting over pusillanimity is not to try and run away from it. The key is to identify its opposite – magnanimity – and make strides towards that.
One of the pillars of magnanimity is giving your all to everything that you do with great heart and great humility.
2. Stay Humble
Pusillanimous people often tell themselves that they keep themselves small because they are humble. They look at those who achieve success and tell themselves that those people must be arrogant.
But pusillanimity is not humility, it is avoidance of difficulty.
You can be great and be humble.
Humility does not mean avoiding greatness. It means when you strive for greatness you recognise that your success is not entirely your own and you don’t let it inflate your ego.
3. Build Your Confidence and Assertiveness
Confidence and assertiveness are like muscles. They must be trained and used.
You need to build them up over time with slow and regular exercise. Start small and achieve small wins in life and over time you can increase your ambition.
4. Overcome Insecurity
Insecurity is a massive handbrake to magnanimity.
It will keep you down, keep you fearful and keep you mentally weak.
While you actively build your confidence, work to identify and overcome the mental barriers that insecurity places in your path.
Conclusion
Pusillanimity means smallness of soul. It manifests itself in timidity, shyness and a lack of courage.
It is a negative mindset that holds you back from the person you could become if you only reoriented the way that you think.
The opposite of pusillanimity is magnanimity. This is a virtue that you should strive for, where you seek greatness but stay humble.
