How to Have Courage

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader (John Quincy Adams).

Finding your dharma is possibly the most important thing you’ll ever do. Living a life on purpose is not for the faint-hearted because it requires us to dig deep into the darkest aspects of ourselves and shine our light of awareness on what is true for us at any one moment so that we become at cause for what happens in our world. Coaching assists you to become more astute about who you are being in any one moment and who you aspire to be. The word ‘courage’ comes from the Greek word ‘cor’ meaning heart. It takes a courageous soul to inquire into the nature of their existence and whether it is being lived fully and authentically. It takes courage to really see, hear and feel into the areas of our life where we have abandoned our potential, been less than exemplary, failed ourselves in some way or failed others.

There are millions of people around the world who would prefer to drown the songs of silence and inner truth with television, drugs, alcohol, sex, music and noise. Yet when we are truly aligned with the song that wants to sing through us, we become an unstoppable force of grace, light and change which inspires others to become more of who they truly are. The irony is, that it takes so much courage to choose to be a leader in the full knowledge that you are a work in progress, imperfect and flawed, but still committed to being in alignment with goodness and grace.

Being a leader requires you to dream more, learn more, do more and become more and in this process, you naturally lead others to do the same. The moment we wake from ‘dreaming more’ we become suspended in the space between two polarities of density or opacity and lightness or luminosity. It can be deeply painful to wake from the dream and be in between these two polarities because it requires a realisation to occur: that we have been attached to, wounded by, identified with and complicit in the physical reality in ways that have not served the divinity within us. Yet, this pain is ultimately part of the fodder and the dense, dark soil for the lotus flower to grow.

Having true courage requires us to act in spite of our fears. The question ‘what if I fail?’ is a question that doesn’t necessarily stop when one is leading from the heart and living a life in full alignment with purpose. However, courage will keep showing up and loves it when we act in spite of our fears and listen to our internal guidance system. Courage steers us in times of uncertainty to our ‘True North’ which points in no direction in particular (it is a timeless and formless place) but knows exactly which way we are going if we are living our highest path. Witnessing the fluctuating vacillations of the mind with equanimity and living from the heart, we are guided to make decisions that are not born of fear, but are born despite fear. Courage also has generative qualities, the more we exercise, the more we create. So start exercising your courage today. What is one small thing could you do today which would generate more courage in your world?