Being brave, choosing courage back to the Be Braver mindset whether personally or professionally is all about discomfort.
It might be fear, pain, shame, dread embarrassment but it also might just be about something that we simply prefer to avoid because it doesn’t seem appealing, meaningful, worthwhile or significant.
We don’t go around being brave and courageous for no reason. As leaders or in our personal lives. That would be rather reckless probably.
We don’t also get to grow, stretch , learn, understand or lead without getting down and dirty with the things we’d rather avoid that all cause us discomfort.
Vulnerability, trust , courage and humility all demand we face uncertainty, discomfort risk and emotional exposure.
To Be Braver than you’ve been before means picking off the situations you avoid, the conversations you don’t want to have, the decisions you’d prefer not to make and the questions you’d rather not ask the choices you don’t want to pick.
Which is why it takes courage, which is why we need to find purpose and meaning in the messy difficult Trixie parts of living fearlessly and leading courageously.
No one wants to be a coward but equally nobody wants to be reckless either.
The fact is that courage inspires courage. It’s contagious, there's no vaccine or antidote, it's quite simply inspiring to behold learnable and something we all have within us.
I’m sure reading this you know where you are going to need to Be Braver than you’ve been before. Do you know what conversation you’re avoiding, what decisions you don’t want to make, which choices you don’t want to decide between.
Fact is if you don’t do it, who will? If you’re waiting for a hero to come riding in on a white horse and make the decisions for you, have the conversations for your magic solution out of thin air that saves you the discomfort of saying the things that nobody else wants to hear then you’re gonna be waiting a long time.
Which means you will stay stuck, the good stuff on the other side will stay there waiting for you and all the extraordinary opportunities that you can’t yet even see will never be given the chance to be realised.
So decide today that you will Be Braver, know that you’ve been brave before you have everything within you to Be Braver again but now is the time to be your own hero.