More on Courage and Fear


Courage is a special kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared.

—Plato,
philosopher

There is a deep core-based sense of courage and confidence that is not something we are born with. It comes from having tried and failed, and risen to try again. It comes from experience, from having confronted one's fears and lived to tell the tale. It comes from the courage that is born in our hearts.

The word courage comes from the Latin cuer, or heart. It means the quality of spirit that enables one to face danger or difficulty instead of withdrawing from it. Courage does not mean the absence of fear. Those who are without fear are reckless and thoughtless, and often cause harm to themselves and others. Those who have courage know fear, yet carry on despite it. They are able to look fear in the face, acknowledge it, and say, "I will not let you stop me."

Courage and fear are inevitably intertwined. We become courageous when we have faith and we take action. When we believe strongly in what we're doing, and we're moving toward a goal that challenges all of our senses, we meet fear head-on.

The problem with courage is one of perception. Most of us think that courage only applies to the big things: to saving someone's life or to bravery in extreme circumstances. But if you struggle day to day to overcome adversities large and small (and we all do), you show a great amount of courage when you press on instead of just giving up. It's the opposite of being discouraged. It's looking inside yourself, being honest with yourself, and knowing that going after your dreams may be difficult and you may not succeed. But in the end, you know that choosing to follow your heart because you know it is right and good is courage.

Courage is being scared to death—and saddling up anyway.

—John Wayne,
actor

I Dare You...

Dream big. There are many people in the world who have little dreams. They don't start out as little dreams, but people make them little. Fear and doubt chip away at them until they're nothing more than fleeting memories and wishes of things that might have been.

Make difficult choices in life. There will always be outside circumstances we can't control, but there are also decisions we can make about how we want to live our lives. We can choose to go through door number one, behind which we know lies a path of uncertainty and rough spots. Or we can choose door number two, which leads to a much gentler, easier road. Neither choice is wrong or right. What's wrong is choosing the easier road without ever having tried something new or different. Every time you step up to try something you've never done before, you learn more than you expect. The uniqueness of the experience gives you insight you could never get unless you take action. When you venture out into new worlds, you open your mind to things you might otherwise never experience. Your knowledge of the world, and of yourself within it, expands tremendously with every new step you take.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I lived through this horror, I can take the next thing that comes along." You must do the things you think you cannot do.

—Eleanor Roosevelt,
humanitarian and writer

We all have to learn to live through "the next thing that comes along." For there will always be a next thing. You have to go out on a limb to get to where the fruit is—you may have to go out on many limbs in order to survive. The fruit may still be out of reach. Limbs can break. Many things can happen even after you've summoned up the courage to make the climb. If you're alive, you're going to face adversity. You're going to fall down. Adversity will test you over and over again. In the next chapter you'll learn what happens when adversity strikes and how you can turn obstacles into opportunities.




Diamond Power. Gems of Wisdom From America's Greatest Marketer
Diamond Power: Gems of Wisdom from Americas Greatest Marketer
ISBN: 1564146987
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 207
Authors: Barry Farber

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