5 Tips on how to Effectively Boost Your Courage

I have heard the phrase, “You are so brave,” more times than I can count in the last year and every time, it takes me by surprise. The reason people are declaring my bravery is that after five years of marriage I chose to walk away from my relationship. I never wanted to be a 28-year-old divorcee. In theory, wanted the whole happily ever after with my college sweetheart thing. But it didn’t turn out that way. The dissolution of my marriage was nothing more than two individuals joining a “forever” union who had no idea who they were. We didn’t know ourselves or each other. At 22 I thought that the way to live my best life was to live within dependable restrictions. Marriage was an idea I could depend on, I figured the love and adoration would come later. I believed that I could eliminate hardships in my adult life by planning every detail I thought I could control. I had a plan –marriage, and I thought my plan was safe. What I have learned though, is that courageousness rarely ever falls within safe boundaries.

I thought I could wait out my marriage and one day it would get better. Better for me though was not sticking through years of battling really tough stuff, my better was just seeking happy. It took some time, therapy, and a solo trip to San Francisco for me to give myself permission to be brave enough to fight for my own happiness. And for me, that meant ending a relationship I had been in for my entire 20’s.

Here are five Tips on how to Effectively Boost Your Courage…and maybe fight for your own happiness too.

Name Your Fear:

It is important to know what it is that scares the hell out of you. Figure that out, and then you scream that shit from the rooftops. When you give your fear a name, it becomes less daunting. There is power in being able to verbalize and communicate exactly what you’re afraid of. When you can name your fear, you can overcome your fear. My fear? At 20, I was afraid that I would never be able to find another person who loved me enough to spend the rest of their life with me. I wanted to be wanted. Being a wife –I thought, guaranteed that for me. I felt safe and comfortable in my relationship because I had a title. I was also young, and because refused to be honest with myself –over time my fear transformed into something else entirely. It is an act of courage to face whatever scares you, know that it is impossible to face something you have no awareness of. It wasn’t until I was able to have an authentic conversation with myself about what I feared that I could allow myself to acknowledge it and move on. Once I gave my fear a name (divorce) it became less intimidating.

Of course, new fears come into our lives daily and we have to name those too. Keep in mind that we do not have to own and embody everything we’re afraid of. Sometimes, simply naming it will relinquish the power fear has on your mind.

Acknowledge Your Strengths:

What do you know you’re great at doing? Are you a good listener or are you great at giving advice? Make a list of a handful of things you know you are great at doing, so when you find yourself needing a boost of courage you can remind yourself of all your great attributes. I have a friend who is fantastic at verbalizing her appreciation and gratefulness for people, even if they have done something for her improperly. Instead of focusing on the negative aspect, she will point out the positives without ever having to mention her disapproval. I tease her for it, but it is a quality I admire and I think that it is an important tool in boosting courage. There is great value in putting emphasis on acknowledging our strengths opposed to focusing on weaknesses. When we make it an important practice to focus on our strengths, we will naturally have the courage to do the things we are intimidated by. 

Do something that scares you:

Now that we know that naming our fears can boost courage, how do we take it one step further? We do what it is that scares us. The best way to conquer something that scares us is to be like Nike and just do it. The fear I overcame last year was leaving my marriage. I thought there was so much to be afraid of; things like not being able to afford to live in Los Angeles, being alone for the first time in my adult life, venturing back into the dating world. All things I did not think I was ready or equipped to handle just yet. After naming my fears and considering my options, I was relieved to find that no matter the outcome –I’d be okay. I trusted my gut and allowed myself the permission to want more than the decent marriage I was clinging to. I wanted fireworks and fairytales and at the bare minimum, I wanted to be happy.

Try something new, even if it’s simple and silly:

Trying something new doesn’t have to mean doing something that scares you. It can be doing something you’ve never done before like beach volleyball or taking a pottery class. When we force ourselves out of our comfort zones (and survive the act) we exercise a self-reliance we didn’t know we had. I tried traveling alone. Driving alone for long distances was something I had never done before last year. I didn’t get my license until I was 21 and a senior in college. When I moved to Los Angeles in 2013 it took me almost two years to drive the freeway on a regular basis. Traveling long distances was not something I thought I could do. But once I did it, and lived to talk about it, I realized I had a silly and oftentimes irrational fear.

Fake it ‘til you make it:

Courage. Sometimes we have it, sometimes we don’t. And in the times we need a boost of courage but can’t quite pull it from ourselves, you know what we can do? Fake it. No one else in the world knows what’s going on in your mind unless you tell them. Most times, doubt does not come from the outside world, it comes from inside our minds.  I’m a person who lives inside my head a lot of time I am becoming overwhelmed by ideas and scenarios that I have made up in my mind. This anxiety causes emotional roadblocks that cause me to psyche myself out when meeting new challenges. I have found, that “faking the funk” allows me to trick myself into getting comfortable when I am not. What faking it does is gets us out of our own way for a while, until we become more self-assured. You will learn that after a while, you won’t need to fake it at all, you’ll be courageous in ways you hadn’t imagined before.                 

Boosting courage can happen in many different ways, some larger than others. More times than not, after we have overcome the thing that scares or intimidates us, we realize that the issue was not as large as we believed it to be. It usually isn’t that serious. I used different tools to boost my courage and overtime, I became confident enough to do something that scared the hell out of me. I realized that divorce wasn’t as menacing as I thought it would be. I learned that while divorce can be a very painful and drawn out process. That just wasn’t my story. My ex-husband and I were best friends in college. He was my homeboy. After we split, we needed time and space but we are finding that we are much better friends than we ever were lovers. We are more supportive and patient with one another, and at the end of the day, we just want to see the other person succeed. Initially, I thought that because our divorce didn’t happen exactly the way that I wanted it to, we’d have to have this tumultuous and eventually nonexistent relationship.