Courage isn’t the stuff of super hero stories

When things feel hard it’s important to remember that courage doesn’t always feel like courage.

From the outside, courage often looks impressive and powerful and self-assured. From the inside though, it can feel frightening, stressful and unpredictable. It can feel like anxiety, or fear, or constant self-doubt. 

It often looks different from the outside to the way you would expect it to feel on the inside. This is because courage and fear always exist together. It can’t be any other way because if there is no fear, there is no need for courage.

Courage isn’t about something super hero-like that happens inside us to make us ‘not scared’. It’s about something transformational that happens inside us to make us push through fear, self-doubt, anxiety, and do the things that feel hard or risky or frightening. Sometimes, courage only has to happen for seconds at a time – just long enough to be brave enough to do that thing, make that change, face that challenge.