What It Means To Be Brave

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A brave man is not a fearless man. A brave man still feels fear, but learns to harness his inner strength and courage in order to overcome that fear.

A fearless man is a foolish man and he will not survive long. Fear is an evolutionary trait. We are meant to be afraid. If a situation warrants fear, that fear can help keep us safe by signaling our brain to avoid unnecessary danger. But humans also evolved to feel courage. A man brave enough to hunt a mammoth is rewarded with a full belly and an increase in social status. A man brave enough to approach a beautiful woman may be rewarded with the ability to procreate and pass on his genes.

We are meant to feel fear and we are meant to be courageous in the face of fear. Standing out will make you more powerful than fitting in.

When you are faced with two choices and you have trouble deciding which path to take, choose the one that scares you more. In your mind you have already weighed all of the pros and cons and deemed them equal. The truth is one path is better than the other, but you have subtracted merit from this choice because it scares you. You have placed too much value on a sense of security and comfort and not enough value on what you really want.

A sense of security is just that, a sense. There is no such thing as real security. You can work the same boring job for forty years and still get fired when they decide to downsize. You can stay in your hometown because it’s what you know, but it doesn’t make it any safer than the place you want to travel to. You can stay in a broken relationship because you are afraid of being alone or maybe you are afraid of hurting the other person. If you stay in a bad relationship, your partner will sense your discontent and they will grow unhappy too. Eventually either the relationship will fail, or you will grow miserable together because you are both too afraid to end it.

Of course bravery doesn’t always mean abandoning something. If you want to keep your relationship, it’s important to have the courage to speak your truth. Tell your partner how you feel, even if it’s hard, even if you know it will hurt them. If you are unwilling to work through your problems through dialogue, you will never have a successful relationship. Your ability to get close to someone is 100% correlated with your willingness to be honest with that person.

If something scares you, if it excites you, if it gets your heart racing just thinking about it, choose this path.This doesn’t mean to be reckless. It’s valuable to calculate risk and only take that risk if the potential reward exceeds the risk.

Just know that life doesn’t end when you fail. It is okay to fail. Failure is part of the process. Any successful person will tell you that they failed one hundred times before they finally succeeded. They didn’t get lucky, they persevered. Steve Jobs was fired from Apple, the company he cofounded, before coming back to make Apple more successful than ever. Oprah was told she would never make it on television. Muhammad Ali was told that he couldn’t be openly Muslim. They simply gave a finger to the haters and kept working hard towards their dreams.

Don’t let anyone tell you what you are and aren’t capable of. Only you know your true potential. It’s time for you to face your fears and unlock it. You are the only one holding yourself back from achieving greatness.

So harness your inner warrior. Enjoy the journey. I will see you on the other side.

Which story do you want to tell your grandchildren one day? The one where you faced your fears and slayed the evil dragon, or the one where you stayed in your comfort zone and never even tried to achieve your dreams. Nobody tells stories about the guy who sat on the couch all day. As
Colleen

mentioned in the comments, “ask yourself what will make the better story”. Thats usually the better choice.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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