Conscious Growth.com

July 26th, 2007

Courage is the first major step toward growth. Through courage, you gain the power to be honest about yourself and your situation. Honesty can be painful at times, but it gives you energy to rise above limitation. So before you decide to move forward, take a look in the mirror.

With conscious growth, it’s easy to get stuck in ignorance or inaction. Sometimes, your internal emotions create irrational behavior. Other times, you just aren’t being honest with yourself. Courage is your gateway back to embracing truth and living it. Cultivating courage also has a snowball effect. The more you do it, the easier it is the next time around. To help you cultivate more courage in your life, I’ve listed the following:

1. Be Truthful - Always start with truth. I should make this points 1,2 and 3! If you have the honesty to recognize and accept your current human limitations, you gain the strength and courage to transcend them. When you deny them, you keep them in place.

2. Do What You Fear - While fear is appropriate at times, some fear is plain irrational. So if you feel afraid of something, do it immediately. Experience will soon teach you that it was a thought in your mind and that you’re fine.

3. Surrender Outcome - Courage is about action. Not results. If you have the courage to act, you’ve succeeded. Period. The outcome of the choice has nothing to do with success or failure.

4. Do your Homework - By researching whatever it is you are resisting, you may begin to see it with more clarity. It may remove ambiguity, possible assumptions, and help you be more accepting of it.

5. Ask Questions - If, for example, you were to give a speech, that may take a bit of courage. But you speak everyday don’t you?. The environment in which you speak changes everyday. Why would this amount of people make me nervous? Where does it switch to comfortable? At 100? At 50? At 10? At 1? What if they were all children? What if they were family members? What really makes this large group any different than talking to your grandma on the phone? By doing this, you’ll see your mental model start to break down.

6. Believe in a Higher Power - This is big for me. It doesn’t require that you put a name on the higher power. It’s only important that you allow him/her/it to help bring you closer to truth. It is about the intention and asking for the highest good to be done.

7. Always Be Prepared - The boy scouts motto. They know their stuff. If you do too, you’ll do fine.

8. The Wall of Courage - Any failure is a opportunity to honor courage. Hang your disappointments somewhere and see them as strengths! You must realize that taking action, regardless of outcome, is far greater than mediocrity. It is a wall of courage.

Ultimately, courage is about action. Not your internal state. And not outcome. Examining yourself honestly and taking a few baby steps are all that is needed. It’s OK to human and to experience human emotions. When you simply take action toward truth, you’ve already won.

If you found this article helpful, please share it so that reaches more people. Thanks again for reading!