It’s safe to say that we’ve all been there—that place where you know that something in your job, relationship, or life in general is definitely not working, but you don’t know what the alternative would be. When I realized that the lifestyle I’d hustled so hard for wasn’t a reflection of who I really was, it also dawned on me that I didn’t know what to replace it with. I didn’t really know who I was or know what I truly wanted. More than anything, I felt afraid to make a step in any direction, because I wasn’t sure I could trust myself to make sound decisions. After all, wasn’t I the one who’d made all the choices that had landed me in this position? When I was making decision after decision about my life up to that point, I’d been convinced that I was moving in the direction of what I wanted, only to discover that it was anything but.
When I dug a little deeper into examining the choices I’d made, I realized that for years, I hadn’t been convinced that I was moving in the direction of what I wanted. In hindsight, I could see multiple points where I had been ignoring signals from my body and my intuition, routinely choosing options based on what people thought of me or how great I hoped I would look, rather than listening to my own internal compass.
Shifting from external cues to internal cues is tough work, which is why so many of us avoid doing it if we can. My highly logical and pragmatic self was now trying to tune in to vague, hard-to-articulate desires for change, and I often felt conflicted. A part of me still wanted order and routine and a neat little path to follow, even if it hadn’t led to happiness thus far. At least that was a path that I, and everyone around me, understood. I didn’t want to be one of those people who “listened to her body’s wisdom.” And, intuition? Puh-lease. I wasn’t going to try to listen to something that science couldn’t even prove existed!
The problem was that I was trying to cling to some sense of safety and control by immediately mapping out a new plan to replace my old one. I wanted to both “dream big” and “be realistic” at the same time, which wasn’t getting me anywhere. It was time to go beyond clinging to some sense of control by mapping things out in advance. Whatever plan came next for my life, it had to first be founded in who I really was and what I truly wanted, and that meant asking the harder questions of deep self-inquiry.
We’ve all felt the push and pull of this space. We want radical change, but we also want practical plans. We can have both of those things, just not at the same time, and that’s why beginning with discovering who you truly are and what you truly want is so important for any process of change. We need to ask the questions that require us to take an honest look at ourselves and our lives: Who am I, really? What do I really want? What does a happy life look like for me? How will I make who I truly am on the inside be how I live on the outside?
Getting honest about questions like these is how I begin every coaching relationship. In asking the right questions, possibilities start to open up and an aspect of the self that might have long been dormant starts to emerge. It’s what I call your “most courageous self.”
This chapter seeks to explore those sorts of questions, starting with this big one: What do you deeply, truly want for your life? However you answer that question opens the door to exploring your most courageous self—her way of being, what she values, what arouses her delight, and the experiences that she most wants to have. This most courageous self is already within all of us. We aren’t working hard to turn ourselves “into” our most courageous selves, so much as we need to clear away the stuff (like being paralyzed by self-doubt) that has covered over that self, preventing her from being able to show up.
The exercises in this chapter will range from telling the truth about what is not working, to exploring your wildest dreams, to getting real about your own personal integrity. In many ways, what you uncover will be like receiving a big permission slip that you write for yourself to stop buying into obligation and “shoulds,” and start defining what a free, joyful, and courageous life looks like. When your most courageous self emerges, who you truly are on the inside gets to step forward and become how you live on the outside.
In coaching, we try to get as specific as possible about what a person desires so that we can start creating a map for how to get there. Clients, workshop participants, and seminar attendees have described wanting to live their lives in the following ways:
These desires are completely in alignment with courage psychology, an emerging discipline that seeks to understand how people cultivate and practice courage in their lives. In 2007, researchers even developed a theoretical model of what a person’s courageous mindset looks like, and it includes all these states and traits collectively pulled together (Hannah, Sweeney, and Lester 2010). With that said, your most courageous self isn’t just a compilation of traits; she’s how those traits are expressed, and that’s what makes all the difference.
Take, for instance, Shay, a yoga instructor who tapped into her most courageous self at one of my workshops. Months later, she reached out to share that it had completely revolutionized her approach to teaching yoga. Before clarifying who her most courageous self was, she had been like many other yoga teachers, offering a gentle, breathy “Namaste” at the end of class and reminding people to “Be at one with the pose.” After the workshop with me, Shay said, “My most courageous self is—excuse my French—a fucking badass. I realized that the type of yoga I wanted to offer to people was the kind where I called them out a bit. I’d start saying in classes, ‘People, stop avoiding the poses you don’t like. Get in there, and do the pose to the best of your ability, but don’t cop out on yourself.’ I still remember the first time that I ever said that in a class, and how it felt like this rush. It was so different than anything else I’d ever seen in the yoga world. I literally went out and bought a leather moto jacket after things changed. And, people dig it, and my classes are always full. My most courageous self pushes me, and so I push the students to not be complacent and not to skip out on the stuff we’re resistant to just because that’s easier.”
Shay also realized that one of the areas where she’d been complacent had been in her love life. She had been living with her boyfriend Malcolm for several years, and while she wanted to get married, he resisted commitment. For Shay’s new, increasingly bolder self, it no longer worked for her to be complacent in that relationship. She and Malcolm ended up making the painful decision to break up. “Now I’m dating, again,” Shay shared with me. “And sometimes it sucks. But, it’s like I tell my students: don’t skip out on the hard stuff, on the poses you don’t like. Now I’m doing things that I would never have even considered when I was in a relationship, like I got invited to coteach a yoga teacher training for an entire month in Bali this spring. And, I can do it. I can pack up and go whenever I want. I feel like I’m being myself.”
Being your most courageous self doesn’t always have to be as bold as Shay’s approach. My client Ellen, a sales rep who regularly traveled and gave presentations to clients for her job, expressed that her deepest desire was just to have time to herself and read every book she’d ever put off reading. Initially, I suspected Ellen’s desire to spend more time reading was just her need to rest and recuperate after years of going-going-going, and that other, bolder dreams would emerge once she’d given herself that time. But, as it turned out, that was Ellen’s dream. Ellen ended up creating a life where she could have exactly what she wanted—plenty of time to read. She quit her job and moved into a “tiny house,” a small mobile trailer encompassing only 250 square feet, reducing her costs significantly. Even though this simplified life could be measured by conventional standards as a meager one, this was Ellen’s ultimate expression of her most courageous self.
“Every time I asked myself what a good life looked like, it always included reading more books and talking about books with other people,” Ellen said. “That’s what really got me excited. For so long, I didn’t let myself have that because it wasn’t giving something back or contributing somehow. But, when I really tuned in to what I wanted the most, I realized that I didn’t even know who that person was… I’m not very social. I’m quiet. It’s how I always was as a kid. My nose was always stuck in a book. I wanted it to be stuck in a book again.” Later, Ellen went back to school to get her master’s in literature to be able to talk shop about books in an environment with others who loved the written word.
Shay and Ellen were both cultivating the same courageous qualities, just in different ways. Each woman was clarifying what she truly wanted and following what delighted her. They were both willing to follow unknown paths, make mistakes, and ask themselves along the way what courageous action would look like. They were encountering challenges with a willingness to believe that they’d find their way through. However, how the qualities that comprise courageous living were expressed for each woman was markedly different since both women were defining their lives by what was uniquely important to them. Shay’s path involved getting more “badass” and more vocal about what she truly believed, while Ellen’s path had been one of getting quieter and creating more space for going within. At the outset of making these shifts, both women were just as afraid of taking the risks that naturally come with change. But, both women decided that they were no longer willing to settle for anything less than living in alignment with who they truly knew they were.
One of my favorite exercises to assign clients also opened up the most insight for me when I was trying to figure out how to shift my own life. It is called the “Liberated Day” exercise. You sit down and map out a bold, full-tilt day where you’re living in exactly the way that you wish you were living, with nothing held back and incredible detail about every nuance. One of the best things about this exercise is that it will help you to sink into courageous living as a way of being, rather than as a series of things “to do.”
As you do the exercise, be careful of “dreaming big” while also trying to “be realistic.” This is a place where I got stuck when I first did this exercise. This exercise is the opportunity to give yourself the ultimate permission slip to write down a vision of your life exactly as you want it, with no holds barred and no need to reign yourself in by “being realistic.” If your fear tells you that you’re “asking for too much,” or that what you’re writing about goes beyond the limits of money or time that you have available, this is a rare moment when I’ll tell you to ignore your fear and write down even the things that seem like you’re “asking for too much.” If you reign yourself in or tell yourself to be “realistic” about time or money during this process, you’re only ever going to create a reigned-in, realistic kind of a life. Go bigger. You’ll sort out details of how to create this kind of a life later. For now, stay with the big vision.
You can use a sheet of paper to answer these questions, or head to http://www.yourcourageouslife.com/courage-habit to access the “Liberated Day” worksheet.
Liberated Day
Think about this question: If you woke up tomorrow and your entire life went exactly the way that you wanted it to go, from morning until night, what would that day look like? Describe it from start to finish.
Describe how you wake up. Where do you wake up? How do you feel when you wake up? What are you looking forward to when you wake up?
Tell us about any other rituals that would guide your morning.
Tell us about the work you’d be doing. Let’s assume for this exercise that there’s some kind of work that doesn’t even feel like “work,” because it’s pleasurable. It’s work that lights you up.
Who are you interacting with during the day? What kind of people? What are they interested in that meshes with what you’re interested in?
Tell us about your afternoon, then your evening.
What are some things that you’d be giving back to the world as part of living this life? How would this day have a greater purpose?
What are the passion projects that you make time for during the day? What are the “fun things” that you do “just because,” rather than from a goal-directed place?
Tell us about who you live with.
Tell us about how you express your creative longings.
Tell us about how you relax and wind down.
Describe how you feel as you sink into bed at the end of the day—a day in which you’ve lived a life in alignment with your most courageous self.
People describe all sorts of reactions to the “Liberated Day” exercise. Some leave it feeling excited, and they eagerly begin writing down all sorts of grand plans. Some people immediately start questioning themselves: Did they write down the “right” thing? Did they do the exercise “correctly”? Others worry that what they’ve articulated isn’t bold enough.
Here’s what I share about the exercise: It is just a doorway to thinking about courageous living as a way of being. In other words, it’s less about making specific plans to conform your life to what you’ve written down, and more about an opportunity to think outside the box while honoring the value of courage. People who live courageous lives aren’t necessarily people who sell everything and move to a new country or start skydiving and getting into adventure sports.
While those examples require courage as action and involve facing fears, the truly courageous life is one where a person’s “way of being” in the world reflects the value of courage. In thinking about courage as a way of being, you’re being asked to honor the value of courage and treat “courage” as one of your most highly prioritized personal values.
Honoring courage as a value means that the choices you make take those courageous qualities into account and put them into action—no skydiving required! If you’re a stay-at-home mom who has no intention of selling everything she owns to move to another country, honoring courage as a value could mean asking how you want to feel on a hard parenting day and making choices that align with that. If your dream is to crack the C-suite at your company, you might honor the value of courage by being willing to take risks that involve making mistakes, trusting that you will find your way through.
When you’re honoring the value of courage, you’re regularly and routinely asking yourself, “If my most courageous self was making the decision here, what would I choose?” That’s the question that Ellen was asking herself when she decided to downsize her life, and go back to school for no reason other than because she wanted to. That’s the question that Shay was asking herself, when she rocked a moto jacket, changed how she ran her yoga classes, and decided to end a stagnant relationship rather than stay just because it was comfortable. These two women each honored the value of courage in their actions, and courage as a “way of being” was underlying their processes.
Sometimes, people feel more uncertain than they do excited after completing this exercise. Others share that they don’t feel uncertainty, so much as they just don’t feel much of anything and it was hard to get into the process. If you’re one of those people, this is okay, too. Fear shows up in many ways, and feelings of uncertainty, discomfort, or reluctance to get into the process are just manifestations of fear. This means that something deep within you recognizes that change is at hand and something is at stake in your life. The fact that you’re able to notice this discomfort will be a very valuable part of shifting fears or self-doubt that hold you back. As you continue through each chapter of this book, you’ll meet several people who struggled with various aspects of the process, but they transformed their lives because they stopped thinking of fear or discomfort as some kind of sign to stop moving forward. Every single one of them completed this exercise and wondered if this was the time that things were really going to be different. Instead of letting those doubts stop them, they decided to keep moving in the direction of changing their lives. They got to the other side and found out exactly how capable they really were.
Others may have finished this exercise feeling excited about what’s possible, accompanied by a sense of indecision or of being overwhelmed about what comes next. It’s normal to go back and forth about what you want. You’ve been doing things the old way for a long time and now you’re contemplating new possibilities, which would arouse doubt or uncertainty for anyone. The bottom line? Doubt, uncertainty, and wondering if you’re “doing it right” is par for the course. As you’ll see in later chapters, simply being willing to notice what comes up for you is going to be the start of rerouting some very old patterns. If you’re attuning to what you feel in your body during this process, you’re already doing some of the work!
Before we can go more in-depth with the Courage Habit work, it’s important that we take a moment to actively apply this principle of “honoring the value of courage” to your life. To make the process easier and more focused, I’m going to ask you to start applying the personal value of courage to different areas, using the question, “What would be different in this area of my life if my most courageous self was running the show?” Then, after looking at each area, see what you notice about the whole. It can be helpful to write your answers for these exercises down, though you can just think about them too. (If you’d like to download a worksheet version of this exercise, you can find it at http://www.yourcourageouslife.com/courage-habit.)
Honoring the Value of Courage
Fun and Recreation: What would be different about your spare time if your most courageous self was running the show? In other words, what would you do with your spare time if you could base it solely on your interests and didn’t worry about whether what you chose to do looked cool or was the “most efficient” way to spend your time?
Career and Work: If your most courageous self was calling the shots with the work you do to sustain your life and lifestyle, what would that look like? It can be especially useful to think of any areas of work that you desire to transition into, or the career you dream of having.
Money: How would your most courageous self be spending money? We’re going to consider money separately from career and work for the purposes of this exercise, so that you can examine exactly how you save and spend it, and whether that’s what your courageous self would do.
Family Relationships: What would be different in your relationships with members of your immediate family, such as parents or your siblings? If you have children, how does this courageous self approach parenting? Romantic relationships and friendships are considered separately.
Romantic Relationships and Sensuality: This category encompasses a partner or marriage if you are in a committed relationship, as well as your overall feelings about your sensuality, and can include dating if you are not in a committed relationship. How are things different in your romantic life if your most courageous self is at the helm?
Friendships: This category includes all manner of friends, from the people you’ve known the longest to coworkers that you wish you knew better. Consider how you’d be connecting with these friendships from the vantage point of your most courageous self.
Health and Body: This category is all about the physical body and can include everything from how rested, exercised, and nourished your body is to how you’re treating ongoing illnesses.
Physical Environment: This category is all about your actual physical living space itself and what your most courageous self would do to create a space that feels more like “you,” including addressing any conflicts with others who live in that space with you.
Personal Growth and Development: This category includes personal goals or ways that you’ve wanted to push yourself. For instance, maybe you’ve always wanted to write a book or run a marathon. It can also include feelings that you wish you felt more often. For example, you might say, “If my most courageous self were running the show, I know that I’d feel more grounded and less overwhelmed” or “I’d feel confident about making decisions.”
For the last step of this exercise, please review what you’ve written and notice if anything jumps out at you. You’re looking for those items that have a bit of sizzle, the ones that make you think: “Ooooh, it would scare me to do that, but if it all worked out for the best, that would be an amazing life!” Highlight anything that has that kind of draw for you, taking it as a sign that a bolder part of yourself would love to emerge in that area.
Now that you’ve finished the “Liberated Day” and “Honoring the Value of Courage” exercises, you’ve considered many different possibilities for what your more courageous life can look like. Some of them will be small scale. Some of them will be pretty radical!
Since the idea of a complete life overhaul is impractical—not to mention terrifying—I often encourage people to identify just three things that they’d like to shift, treating them as a Primary Focus for practicing the steps of the Courage Habit throughout the rest of this book. I suggest narrowing it to three things so that you can work on small, digestible pieces of making life changes, instead of trying to do too much at once.
The Primary Focus can consist of both tangible goals that have clear outcomes (that is, cook every recipe in an Alice Waters cookbook, spend two weeks in Morocco, and so forth) and more intangible goals (that is, reconnect to who I know I truly am, understand the patterns that broke up my marriage, and so on). People usually choose a mixture of both, understanding that even though we’re using language that refers to goals or being action oriented, we’re really talking about how you want to feel about yourself and your life as you’re taking action. If you’re writing down the three things for your Primary Focus and feel enlivened, turned on, a little nervous, and completely excited, you’re going in the right direction.
If you already know exactly what your three Primary Focus items would be, great! Go ahead and write them down. If it all feels big and you want a bit of help honing in on your three items, there are a few different approaches that you could take to clarifying your own Primary Focus. Read through each of these to see which approach appeals to you the most, and then pick one to try. To avoid feeling overwhelmed, choose just one and complete it. “Done” is better than “perfect.”
Remember, to make the above changes easeful and sustainable, it’s important that you narrow them down. Choose three things that you’d like to keep as a Primary Focus for the duration of your work with the Courage Habit. If you feel like you really need just one more, remember that when you’ve completed the Courage Habit process, you can always go back for another round. You’ll be more successful at seeing change if you put all your effort into just a few things that excite you, rather than spreading yourself thin.
It’s not uncommon for someone to have at least a moment’s hesitation at this juncture. On one hand, you might feel excited about finally creating the life that you’ve dreamed of having. On the other hand, you might be worrying that you’re wanting “too much.”
“I feel selfish,” one client, Janelle, told me. Her Primary Focus was releasing herself from the pressure to be an on-call, endlessly devoted, twenty-four-seven mom, and start to reclaim who she was before she became a mother. What Janelle shared echoed what I’ve heard from other women, all of whom received the same messages from society—that it’s selfish for women, and particularly for mothers, to focus on or meet one’s own needs.
Here’s the thing: The desire to live with more courage in one’s own life doesn’t have to come down to a choice between benefiting the self versus benefiting others. In my review of the research about how people change, I ran across something that fascinated me. In a 2009 study on self-identity, researchers found that the goal-setting process could be more successful when goals benefited not just the individual, but also the collective. The researchers labeled goals that benefited only the individual as “self-image goals,” and goals that benefited both the individual as well as others as “compassionate goals.” Researchers found that compassionate goals were more attainable, in part because the goal setter was more motivated to stay the course knowing that others would benefit. Compassionate goals also resulted in goal setters who were happier with the results they’d achieved, once they’d arrived at their goal (Crocker, Olivier, and Neur 2009).
It’s pretty cool to think that if you connect the changes you’re making to how they will benefit you and the wider world, you’ll not only do good for others, you’re also more likely to be successful at changing and you’ll feel happier once you’ve made those changes. I think the same can be true of the “goal” of shifting your life to live with more courage, leaving old fear patterns behind. As you become more courageous, your life improves, as do the lives of those around you.
Take some time, now, to think about how your Primary Focus benefits not just you but also the people around you and the wider world. For instance, if your Primary Focus is to travel the world, who are all the people who benefit? Initially, you might think you are the only person who benefits. But if you expand your view a bit, you can see more. For instance, on a purely pragmatic level, how will your travels contribute to the local economies of the places you travel to? On a more visionary level, maybe you’ve been feeling like life is devoid of joy, and traveling the world is the adventure of a lifetime that lifts you out of that. You can’t draw water from a well that’s dry, and if that travel adventure fills your internal reserves again, that reconnection to your personal happiness will positively impact the lives of those around you. Perhaps, because you’re happier, you’ll have more capacity for supporting family members when they’re struggling, you’ll be a better team player at work, or you’ll feel like you finally have the energy to start doing more volunteer work. Remember what I shared in the introduction: unhappiness and discontent are signals that something is off in life, and they are worth paying attention to.
Are there benefits for your partner, children, job, or anyone else because you decide to bring forth your most courageous self? Will feeling braver in your personal life make you feel braver about speaking out on the issues that matter to you? Will giving to yourself make you feel like you have more to offer others? When I talk to people about this and hear their stories of how they reclaimed something essential to who they were and then found it within themselves to start giving back more to others, the answer to these questions is yes.
Women in particular are tasked with endless self-sacrifice and giving. So, let me clarify that this isn’t about making your goals more palatable for others by tying them to service. Rather, I’m pointing out that as you decide how you want to shift your life, the research indicates that when you can make a connection between doing good for you and doing good for others, everyone is happier, and everyone wins.
Expanding your “reason why I’m changing my life” to include the benefits to others can also become a powerful motivator when challenges arise. You’ll be more motivated to keep going even when fear or self-doubt are raging, because your desire to change isn’t just about you.
There’s something very big at stake if you decide to give up on living a life that really means something to you—the world would never be able to experience the gifts that you have to offer.
A life lived with courage is, hands down, a more joyful life. You’re stepping into the adventure of being fully alive in the ups and downs, fun, and challenges. The process of shifting into your most courageous self will of course bring difficult things, but more importantly, it’ll bring oh-my-god-amazing things. We’ve all heard the saying, “Everything you want is on the other side of your fear.” In the pages that come, you’re going to directly experience how that is true.