This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclosures for more information.
I hope everyone survived (i.e. recovered from) their Super Bowl weekend! We forgot what day it was, eventually watched the Puppy Bowl (and our dog LOVED it!), and did a happy dance when the Eagles won. Here in western NY, whoever beats the Patriots is a team after our hearts. Go Bills!
But enough of that. I’m not even really a football fan, haha!
Anyway, let’s get serious. Today I want to talk to you about something I’ve been thinking about for a few days now. Courage.
Table of Contents
What is courage?
Most of the time when we think of courage, we think of our troops overseas. We think of firefighters. We think of the incredible Good Samaritans helping pull their neighbors out of debris after natural disasters decimate a town.
But maybe we need to stop and take a step back. Maybe there’s heroic courage, like the examples I just mentioned, and maybe there’s such a thing as everyday courage. The courage to get out of bed even when you’re depressed and your world feels like it’s full of bad. Courage to keep moving forward even when you feel lost. To try again (and again) even when failure is far more likely than success. The courage to be vulnerable, to put yourself out there, to try something new. Courage to hold your head up high and say “I CAN do this.”
It’s hard to show this kind of everyday courage.
Risking failure is hard when you know it could devastate you. It’s hard to try something new when your self-esteem is at stake. It’s hard to move forward when the future is unknown and scary.
In your everyday life, where are some places where you show some everyday courage? Maybe it’s making a new connection for your professional networking, or going on a first date. Maybe it’s standing up for what you believe in, or making an effort to change your life somehow.
While I realize that I’m best described as a pessimist at heart, I DO show everyday courage on a regular basis.
Even when I feel totally depressed, demotivated, and overwhelmed, I still get out of bed in the morning.
I mean, someone had to get up and take care of the kids, right? Even when I feel like I’ll never get out of debt, I still make an effort to sit down at least once a week and review my checkbook, my budget for the month, my bills, and maybe even do some quick figuring on what it’ll take to be able to say “I’m debt-free.” Even though every minute of every day I am terrified of failure, here I am, with a blog up and running, and new posts going up regularly; if it all falls through, then so be it. If this blog is a success like I hope, then I’ll be extra glad I found the courage to start!
What that all amounts to is having the everyday courage to say “this needs to change” and mean it. Then actually acting on that and doing something about it. I am afraid of my financial situation. We’ve got debts, we pretty much live paycheck to paycheck, and our investment strategy is absolutely non-existent (not counting my husband’s 401K). But from somewhere, we found the courage to try something new to change that. Courage for me to start this blog, and my husband to start a freelance marketing company.
But where or how do you find that courage?
Does it just appear one day?
Yes and no.
The only one who can find your courage is you. It takes effort to find it, and it takes effort to act on it. And you need to act on it quickly so it’s little flame doesn’t go out.
The easiest way to find your courage is by making sure you’ve always got someone on your side. A spouse, a best friend, a parent (it’s tough but yes, you CAN still do it alone). Someone who will always tell you when they think you’re acting “off,” when you seem sad, and who will also tell you that “you’re ok” and to “give yourself a break.” This is all great support, but it’ll never help you change anything. Make a note (or ask your support person to) of how often and under what circumstances you’re told you should take a break, or stop being hard on yourself.
Does it feel like it’s too often?
Then stop. Write down EVERYTHING that’s bothering you. Dishes piling up, finances are a mess, the dog brings in mud. Maybe you’ve got too much work to do at a job you hate. Whatever it may be, write it. The best way that I’ve found to do this is to write a daily morning journal. I write anything on my mind at the time, good, bad, or otherwise. It gives me a great record of the things that worry me, that make me angry, that make me depressed.
Once all of that is written down, my journal entry still isn’t done. You’ve got to write what you think NEEDS changing and some suggestions for how.
Write what you WISH things could be like. This is key.
It forces you to take a look at things from the side you wish you could be on, instead of always viewing everything from the negative side.
Over time you’ll start to see patterns; you’ll start to see what triggers the slump you find yourself in. But, more importantly, you’ll start to see where you want to make changes and how you can change it.
For example: maybe I’m writing because I’m stressed about our finances. We struggle to find much extra cash each month to put towards debts so we often just feel like we’re spinning our wheels in that area. The obvious solution is to try to make more money; every extra dollar thrown at debts, the better. Then brainstorm some ideas for how to make more money. Maybe we have some things we can try to sell on Craigslist or eBay. I could find a work from home job (or make one for myself). We can reevaluate our budget and see what we can live without (like a Hulu or Netflix subscription).
Do you see how all that effort just gave me an automatic action items list?! No longer am I floundering through the dark, unable to see the path. Now I do have a path forward, with visible steps along the way. As I travel this path, I’ll continue my daily exploration of my problems or upsets to keep generating the next step after the next step! And once I have that path, well, THAT’S your courage. All you have to do is act on the easy little thing that YOU came up with. If you were the one who could dream it up, it has to be in line with your capabilities. And you are capable of more than you know!
An amazing thing happens when you discover even just a little bit of courage – it’s like a seed. It grows.
First, I was courageous enough to just TRY to accomplish a bigger to-do list, despite a high likelihood of failure. This is a weird, sort of reverse psychology sort of thing: if I only ever accomplish, say 20% of my to-do list but I want to get more done, then I need a longer to-do list to be able to accomplish more (read more here). Now, despite having a never-completed list, here I am adding more to it with my blog and supporting my husband’s efforts for his business. Last night, I hosted an online, “virtual party” for Usborne Books & More. And when it was done, somehow I was courageous enough to ask the consultant about the opportunity of selling books for the company. And I truly meant it when I said I might want to sign up.
Yes, it’s one of those direct selling companies you see everywhere lately. No, it’s probably never going to amount to anything. But do you know what else it IS?
It’s a potential opportunity for me to earn even a few extra dollars per month or per year (and oh yeah, the discount on your own purchases is a nice perk too). And somehow, that thought bolsters my courage even more. Now I don’t see small business “side hustle” opportunities as “too much for me” or just extra work. Instead, I see them as opportunities.
An opportunity to tell myself I have even more to get accomplished in a day, because I have more things that are counting on me, alone.
An opportunity to change my situation.
An opportunity to potentially feel an incredible sense of accomplishment
And that sentiment is showing itself throughout my life as well. While I still see us having debts as a failure to better manage our finances in the past, I can also see it as a “how fast can I pay this off” challenge. Something I could never see before.
I have the courage and the strength to fight for a change in my financial situation. It won’t be easy, and some days I’ll slip, but as long as I push forward and try, I CAN do it.
I have the courage and the drive to publish a blog and work hard to turn it into a respectable income source. It will be monumental work sometimes, but without that it will never have a chance to yield monumental rewards.
I don’t see my son being a late talker as a failure on my part (at least not as often as I used to). It’s a challenge for me to try to fix my mistakes and get him caught up to speed with where he should be, as if he was never a late talker.
I have the courage and the perseverance to overcome what feels like a mountain of an obstacle, a frustrating situation, and finally get to have a son who can truly express how smart and silly he really is.
Scale it back (pun intended) to something smaller. The number on the scale isn’t a sign of my failure to maintain a physically fit condition. Now I see a number I don’t like and I feel capable of making it change how I want it to (and lately, I’m pleased to say, I HAVE been changing it).
I have the courage and the determination to work to change what I don’t like about myself.
I have the courage to accept that some things may not be easy to change, and some things may not change at all; I have the courage and peace to accept myself how I am, just in case it never changes.
I’m not “dragging myself out of bed at the butt crack of dawn to try to steal some me time” anymore. Now I think “I really want to get up before everyone else so I have some time to get a few extra things done today; I wonder how much I can accomplish today with that extra time?!”
I have the courage and the ability to change my perspective on something I dislike so that I can find a benefit from it instead.
And take it down to the most basic, yet most difficult scenario. I can actually stand to look at myself in a mirror and somewhere in there manage to see a supportive wife, a sometimes-makes-mistakes but fiercely loving mother who gives her all to raising her kids. There’s a fiercely determined woman who will fight tooth and nail to make her family’s dreams come true.
I DO have the courage to listen when I give myself these affirmations. I DO have the courage to turn the nice words into realities.
Do you see the amazing things that can happen when you can manage to give yourself some affirmations, instead of letting them slip by unnoticed and letting the dark clouds take over? Yes, it takes some effort to force yourself to start. But I KNOW you can do it. I will be your cheerleader on the sideline!
Sure, there are still occasional days where all of that positive stuff gets thrown out the window. But that’s ok. I’ve managed to find the way to consistently shift my perspective about how to define failures and courage, and that’s made those bad days happen less often. When you find ways to make bad things look better, there’s just less bad around to get you down, plain and simple.
Everyday courage can be hard to find, if you’re not actively looking or willing to look – but it’s always there.
I challenge you to try to find the places where even a tiny shift in your perspective may begin to turn everything around.
Leave a Reply