I was reading a romance novel last week.
And before you dismiss romance… this is exactly why I will forever climb onto my soapbox and shout that romance books are not fluff. Not even a little.
The heroine in this story had her world cracked open. Dumped by her fiancé a few months before her wedding, she does the only brave thing she can think of… she books a flight, lands somewhere beautiful and unfamiliar, and sets off on an Eat, Pray, Love-style journey to figure out who she actually is and what she actually wants.
There’s a scene where she’s talking with someone in a local village. And they get onto the subject of courage.
She says something like… I wish I were braver. I wish I weren’t so afraid.
And the response stopped me cold.
The wise older woman in the village says something back like…
Being courageous doesn’t mean the absence of fear. It means doing the thing with fear with as your companion.
I underlined the quote and I put the book down and just sat with that for a minute.
Fear isn’t leaving. It was never going to leave. We’ve been waiting for it to disappear before we give ourselves permission to move and it was never planning to go anywhere..
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about ever since I read that… What if the goal was never to get rid of the fear? What if the goal was just to get so familiar with it that you stop being surprised when it shows up?
I think that’s what happens when you keep doing the hard things anyway. Fear doesn’t shrink exactly… but your relationship with it changes. It goes from being a stop sign to just... a familiar passenger. You start to recognize it. Oh. You again. And then you keep going.
I have a little personal antidote to share… My mom went to her doctor recently. It’s been eleven months since we lost my dad.
Her doctor looked at her and said, You have been so courageous this past year. My mom’s first reaction was to say she didn’t feel courageous. She felt like she’d just been surviving… grieving.
But then we started talking about everything she had pushed herself to do alone in those eleven months.
She traveled out of state to see friends. She redid the backyard. She went back to events she and my dad had always attended together. She showed up to places that held memories and she walked through the door anyway.
The list got longer the more we talked.
She hadn’t been waiting to feel brave. She had just been doing the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing… with fear and grief and loss riding along every single time.
That is courage. That’s exactly what it is.
And sometimes we need someone else to hold up a mirror so we can finally see it in ourselves.
I’ve been thinking about this in my own life too… specifically the last five months.
At the start of this year, I built a 12-week plan following the principles of the book The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks than Others Do in 12 Months. The point of it was to move forward on the things I actually wanted… not the easy things, but the things fear had kept me from. Some of them for years. Some nearly a decade.
One of those things was teaching fitness.
I have wanted to teach for nearly a decade. I’d circle back to the idea, feel that little flutter of excitement, and then let fear talk me out of it. You’re not ready. Who would take a class from you? What if you fail? What if you mix up your right from your left?
I put it in the plan anyway.
Five months later, I passed my Pilates and Barre teaching certifications. And now, starting in June, every week I’ll be teach classes at my local yoga and Pilates studio.
Four months. That’s how long it took from decision to doing, once I stopped waiting for the fear to leave and just brought it with me.
Every time you show up to move… even when you don’t feel like it, even when you’re tired, even when the voice in your head is listing ten reasons to stay on the couch… you are practicing courage. You are training the part of you that says yes anyway.
That’s not a small thing. It compounds. It grows. The 10 minutes you show up for today are building something bigger than today.
So I want to ask you something, and I want you to actually sit with it for a moment before you move on with your day.
What have you wanted to do with your life that you’ve let fear hold you back from?
Not the general, abstract things. The specific ones. The ones you’ve thought about more than once. The ones that light you up for a second and then get quickly buried.
What if you didn’t have to wait until you weren’t afraid?
What if you just brought fear along for the ride, or let it freak you out… and did the thing anyway?
What would we get to see you do?
I’d love to know. Drop it in the comments and inspire others to be courageous.
Read. Move. Build the habit. Change your life.
And bam, you've become a Buddhist! Make friends with fear. How does it feel in your body.
That is courage. That’s exactly what it is.