Courage

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. - Anais Nin

Again, it’s about your comfort zone. There are people who never leave more than two miles around their parents’ home. They know their neighborhood, and they don’t need to leave it to find what they want. Or so they think. It’s hard to know what you want if you know very little. It’s like asking a paint store for blue paint. If they give you royal blue, then you’re happy. Unless, of course, you know of and perhaps wanted periwinkle, cornflower, baby blue, or aqua.

For others it’s not a matter of physical limitations. The limitations are mental or social. Some people know only accountants or people in their company or people in their club. They have a small group of people and situations they encounter, all very similar to one another. There’s not a whole lot of adventure in jetting off to Europe if you always go to the same hotel with your friends from back home.

What’s wrong with doing things you’re comfortable with? What’s wrong with staying in your comfort zone? Everything, if the Future you want is outside of it. If you want to be a world traveler, but you refuse to take a trip out of state, then there’s a problem. If you want to have a wide variety of friends with whom you can discuss all sorts of political and international issues, yet you won’t join any groups that have different people, not even a newsletter, then there’s a problem. If your Future is within your current comfort zone, congratulations and well done! But if it’s not…

Courage will expand your life. Even if you fail at first, try again and fail better. Or perhaps even succeed. If something is too scary for you, break it down into smaller pieces. Each piece you accomplish is another step towards your Future. Courage is doing what you don’t want to do, because you want what’s on the other side of it.

Two main ways of making things less scary and thus bumping up your courage to actually do them – breaking them down and familiarization. I’ve discussed breaking them down in other posts, so let’s take a look at familiarization.

Do you want to travel the world? Read a book – preferably a picture book – about the countries you want to see. Learn their languages. Get a pen pal from that country. In time, the country will seem more familiar to you, less scary, and you will be able to take that next step of a trip to one foreign country.

Do you want to be more assertive? Start saying hi to people you know but don’t normally say hi to. Join a discussion group (in real life or on line) and participate. Even a book club would work well. Write complaint letters to companies that give you bad service. Eventually, you’ll be able to tell the manager in person about the bad service rather than take it for now and vent later.

Do you want a new job? Audit a course (check with your university or college to see if they allow this) in the profession. Sign up for the newsletter of one of the profession’s organizations (most professions have one or more). Start talking to other people and see if anyone knows someone who is in that field. See if there are any library books about it or websites.

Learn more about what you want so that it becomes familiar to you. The familiar is less scary than the strange. Courage, and you will achieve your Future.