Courage is not a feeling.
It’s an action.
It’s an experience.
It’s a decision.
To be afraid and do it anyway – that’s courage.
And it can be learned
And it can grow, our internal feeling of confidence and courage.
But to learn and grow into your courage, you have to get a wee bit uncomfortable
That’s the way we’re made
That’s the way our brains work.
You see, our brains have changed very little in some respects from those of our prehistoric ancestors, who lived in a time when you were as likely to get munched up by a bear as survive till bedtime. So, our brains have evolved to look for danger always and everywhere. The primitive part of our brain wants us to survive, and it doesn’t care if we thrive. It tells us to keep our heads down, to stay safe, to avoid demanding or unpredictable situations. It’s afraid that if we try new things we will fail. Or look silly. Or get laughed at.
Courage is the conscious and consistent learning to overcome that fear.
Courage is how we thrive.
And anyone can do it.
Actually, everyone must do it, to be happy.
Evolution programmed us to get a reward whenever we go outside our comfort zone – when we feel the fear and do it anyway.
The reward is the feel-good chemical dopamine, which not only makes us feel good when we push through discomfort to do new things, but also helps rewire our brains so that we feel more confident about going out of our comfort zone next time, so we get increasingly courageous and inventive and involved in the world around us, and feel increasingly energised and interested and enthusiastic and BRAVE.
We get addicted to the challenge-stress buzz of dopamine in our systems. This is one chemical addiction we DO want to cultivate!
You see, when we stay small, safe and comfortable, our dopamine levels drop -so we feel restless and unfulfilled and unhappy. We often then look for dopamine hits in unhealthy ways like sugar-munchies or alcohol use or social-media scrolling or excessive anything. This becomes an unconscious pattern so that we get stuck in cycles of negative behaviours, trying to fill the gap in our dopamine levels which are meant to spur us on to new activities, new social interactions, new creative and positive thinking.
Long story short, when we start taking small steps away from what is familiar, safe and unchallenging into creative, unknown, unpredictable terrain it gets a wee bit uncomfortable. Our fear levels rise, our cortisol levels rise, our bodies experience the stress response AND NONE OF THIS IS HARMFUL!
In the short term this is what courage is made of. And when we take those small steps into the unknown – learn a new skill, meet some new people, take up a new activity, do some things differently, we get a surge of dopamine that FEELS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! And that’s courage.
Want to find out how you can take those first steps into cultivating your true, wild and courageous nature?
Get in touch, I’d love to talk to you.
