Finding Courage Where You Least Expect It
In a recent blog post on the subject of finding courage, my dear partner Vered Manasse wrote in her beautiful way about what we can do when we need to find courage. She gave great tips on how to cultivate our own courage and gain access to it when we need it. Her post ended with a note to say that, if you could not find your courage for whatever reason – you should not beat yourself up about it.
Easily said, but not so easy to practice :). I definitely know and remember painfully the moments in my life when I didn’t have the courage to do what I wanted to and would ponder the famous sentences, “what would have happened if … ” or ” I should have done that and everything would be different …” or “I’m such a coward, such an idiot …”.
It’s easy to connect to the moments when we failed and felt our courage was missing. Most of the time this connection doesn’t motivate us to trust that we learned something and will do better the next time. Rather the opposite is happening – these moments add to low self-esteem and promote further insecurity in trusting ourselves and our own abilities. They don’t give us what we’d like – more access to finding courage for challenging times. It makes us wonder – is there a way to regain some of our courage from these moments?
Can We Use Failure to Develop Trust?
How can we use our so-called failures in order to gain more trust in ourselves? How can we transform an experience that impacts negatively on our self-esteem, into one of personal development, that becomes a worthwhile learning experience? The first step is to recover more from this situation than we have remembered. In every situation we experienced, there were more aspects to it than we recall, more to perceive and gain from it than only our failures and lack of courage! The problem is that we don’t like to look at situations in which we believe we failed. Our desire, when overcoming obstacles in life to be over and done with it, maybe even to forget all about it and move on, does not allow us to perceive the whole situation anymore. Even when we do look at it on our own, we often obsess about a specific aspect of it – the part where we failed – the part where we were not courageous enough and we lose sight of the bigger picture.
“I love the possibility that if courage is one of our human abilities,
we can cultivate it together with and for each other.”
If we could manage to look back and see more than just what we didn’t achieve, then there’s hope we can find something more within it. If we could manage to look back and see the courage that was actually present in the moment, we could use it in positive ways in future situations, rather than let only the negative diminish our ability to be courageous.
Enlarge Your Point of View
Try it out for yourself – think about a situation that still today gives you doubts about yourself and the desire that you could have done things differently. Think what really happened there, enlarge your point of view: not through your achievements but based on what really did happen then. Who were you at the time and who else was involved and affected by the situation? What did it result in and then what did it lead you to do later? Don’t try to paint the situation as rosy, or change the story to something pleasing. Simply allow yourself to perceive more of it than just the negative aspects you remembered up until now.
“Courage can be found in the places that we least expect it
and our own courage can grow by helping somebody else out.”
Once you manage to do this, you can now have the courage to be kind to yourself. Allow yourself to understand why you didn’t do what you wanted to and accept that for this situation. See if there isn’t another angle to the story – on in which you did actually use your courage. Again, enlarge your point of view from this particular event, to the events that followed and decide how you wish to be from now on, because of this experience. Embrace your lack of courage in the past so that it will become your courage again into the future.
When I work with my clients, together we try to enlarge their point of view – from the moments in their past where they got stuck, to the ones in the future that will connect to the flow of life. I help them to find their own acceptance and power and to move on from that particular situation. so that their lack of strength in the past will transform into a courageous force they can use today and in the future. It is such an honour to accompany my clients on their way and to assist them inboxed finding courage – to claim back any ounce of courage – that might have been lost in the past, to fuel the direction of their lives today.