“You are so brave and courageous. I wish I was like you.”
We see so clearly courage and bravery in others. Never of ourselves.
My research tells me, that apart from the odd outlier, who refuses to see their own courage and therefore does a disservice to the courage of the rest of us, none of us get to live a life without at least a modicum of courageous decision making and brave action.
We don’t get to live a life freed from risks, fears, adversity and threats. If you are foolish enough to ignore them, or wreckless enough to discount them, perhaps privilege has afforded you a life where the outcomes to your decisions have no bearing on the life you lead. Not the case for the majority of us.
So to the rest of us, courageous souls, building our brave and fighting the good fight, before you think about affording buckets of bravery and courage to those you admire, for being so much braver than you would, or could, ever be. I ask you to think about these questions.
The bravest decisions you have ever done, would anyone know it of you without you telling them?
How do the circumstances and personal experiences of your own life affect what you perceive as a threat, risk or a fear? Do they not make your experience of bravery and courage unique to you?
In what way do the choices you have available to you differ to those of the people you see as brave, where you think that you are not?
What have people said to you you did that was brave ad you thought, not it wasn’t - what might that say about the risks, adversity and fears in a similar circumstances they would find themself in?
How we internally perceive the costs, losses, threats and fears that courageous decisions often ask of us - are more often than not, in day to day life, unique to each of us.
Personal courage, not military, physical or even organisational courage is grounded in our lived experience. Its the culmination of all the lessons we have learned, the trauma we have faced, the situations we have observed and hardships we have faced.
The circumstances in which we find ourselves, and an extraordinary amount of that being outside of our control I might add. The inequities of life looms larger than ever when we look to situate courage it must be said. The greater the inequity, the stronger the courage.
We assume when we look at our brave role models, that we can see in the external world, the inner fears and challenges of a person. Yet often we don’t.
What is brave for me, may not be brave for you. Be careful you discount your own, by affording it to others.
So next time you are in awe of someone else’s courage and bravery.
Ask them ‘was that brave for you?’
And if yes ‘in what way?’.
You’ll probably be surprised by what they say.