The True Meaning of Courage and How it’s Your Key to Fulfillment and Meaningful Impact
How to Live a Life of Courage so You can Live in Alignment and Make a Meaningful Impact
Your Relationship With Courage
Feeling overwhelmed, scattered, and lacking a sense of focus?
Do you find yourself wondering when things will get easier, feeling alone, and desiring to feel supported?
What if I told you that the ONLY thing you needed to make a meaningful impact is to focus on your relationship with courage?
Yep, the ONLY thing!
Once you focus on your relationship with courage, the rest will fall into place.
Anyone can follow a strategy or a framework (and I know you’re great at creating one). But without courage, you could be reinforcing all of the negative feelings instead of overcoming them.
It doesn’t matter where you’re at right now - whether you’ve taken on a new Leadership role at work, moved to a different country, or left your job to take on a passion project. The need for courage shows up in so many areas of our lives - and again, after we finally felt we’ve mastered something.
After a decade of training and coaching thousands of professionals, I’ve found that there isn’t a single one of us who isn’t faced with a need for courage. And that includes me - I’m a work in progress myself.
Once you place your focus on courage, everything transforms.
I knew deep down that I was destined to leave corporate life and become an entrepreneur and I took a leap of faith. But that was just the start of facing courage on a regular basis.
Now, I’m here to show you exactly how to think about Courage so you can start leading with alignment and make a meaningful impact.
What is Courage?
According to the dictionary, courage is “the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear.”
Courage comes from the french word “coeur”, which means “heart” (and spirit). It’s when you follow your heart even though it’s scary in the pursuit of authenticity and growth.
This topic of courage came to me by chance.
Several years ago, I kept getting asked the same kind of question:
“Katheryn, how’d you have the courage to X?”
That “X” was replaced with anything from starting a business to moving to Japan to being an author to being a public speaker.
I found it intriguing how there is a perception that these things require courage to do.
Basically, the person asking me the question can’t see themselves doing what I do (or they wish they could, but the fear is too strong).
Yet from my perspective, some of these things - like authoring a book - didn’t feel courageous at all. It just felt like something I had to do.
That made me think of the sento, which is a Japanese style public bath house. I grew up in a family of sento owners and went to public bath houses everyday.
To a person who has never been to a public bath house before, the idea of getting naked infront of strangers sounds outrageous. But to me, it was just a normal thing to do - a necessary step in the ritual of self-cleansing.
Curious, I started leading workshops about sentos. And I stumbled upon something I found really interesting.
Whenever I asked people how they felt about the idea of needing to undress, they said self-conscious and fearful. But when I asked them how they felt once they were undressed, they used words like “free” and “liberated”.
When you undress, it’s not like you are revealing some horrible secret. You’re just exposing what’s already there: yourself.
It made me realize that there are many things in our daily lives that we perceive as scary but that if we can accept our truth underneath all of the layers, we can actually find liberation.
So what we need in order to be courageous is self-acceptance. And it is through showing courage that we are liberated.
Here’s how challenges with courage show up in our daily lives
The most common scenarios where I see a need for courage is in times of: Transition, Visibility, and Boundaries.
Transition
Transition relates to the period of time after you’ve decided to try something new. It could be transitioning to living and working in another country, transitioning into a new role or company, or even transitioning into parenthood or a major life stage.
One of the major challenges people face when in transition is what I like to call “identity friction”. It’s when who you are hasn’t caught up with who you feel you need to be.
It could be from a literal lack of knowledge, like being a senior executive who knows a lot about their company but has no clue how to lead in another culture like Japan.
Or it could be from a lack of experience, like being a first time parent and feeling the weight of responsibililty for a newborn when you’re simultaneously trying to figure out how to be a parent.
It could also be from thinking that successful people are just different from you, so not recognizing that you can become successful through learned behavior. Like a first time entrepreneur who doesn’t quite believe that they are business savvy and deals with imposter syndrome.
Visibility
Visibility relates to when you need to be seen.
For example, let’s say you were so excited to get a promotion to a senior-level position, but you realize that it means all eyes are on you. Suddenly, your expertise is not the only thing that’s in question: it’s your influence and how people see you.
Or, let’s say you want to start a passion project. You want to launch something that will really make a difference in people’s lives. But you realize that for people to actually know what it is, you need to put yourself out there through marketing and networking.
Boundaries
You may not have thought of it in this way before, but it take courage to set and reinforce boundaries.
Maybe you struggle with daily overtime work and can’t seem to get ahead of all of the work on your plate, which makes you feel you are constantly on a hamster wheel or putting out fires. You may feel like you’re doing everything you can and are drowning, when the solution is to have the courage to communicate boundaries.
To me, the opposite of courage is avoidance. It’s not being honest with yourself, not accepting your needs, and brushing them to the side as if they aren’t as important as the thing in front of you that demands your attention. It takes courage to admit that something needs to change, and even more courage to start making changes when the timing just doesn’t feel right.
9 Signs You Need to Work on Courage
You’re feeling scattered.
You think everyone else is the problem.
You can’t fall asleep because of worrying.
You’re not making the progress you know you could make.
Your vision depends on it.
You’re experiencing burnout - or know you’re on the path to it.
You worry about what other people will think.
You question if what you’re doing is worth it.
You can’t shake an idea in your head.
…there are countless more, but here are some to help you recognize where focusing on courage can help.
The 3 Step Framework for Everyday Courage
Here are the 3 key things to focus on to live a life of courage each day (these are based on The Sento Mindset).
Radical Honesty
If you stripped away everything and there were no consequences for your actions…what is it that you want?
Temperature Check
How does the temperature of this situation feel right now? If it’s too hot (and you’re feeling overwhelmed and pressured), how can you make the process easier? If it’s not hot enough (and you’re feeling demotivated and sluggish), what is needed to up the stakes?
1 Degree Goals
It only takes 1 degree of change to create transformation. If you just made 1 degree shift in this area, what would a doable first step look like?
What happens when you focus on courage?
To be clear, when I say “courage”, I don’t mean doing things that you don’t want to do. I mean doing things that you know deep down are necessary for your growth or impact but can feel scary.
Remember the story of the bathhouse when people described how they feel before and after they undress? The result is simple: Freedom.
When you say what you feel you need to say…
When you pursue what you feel called to pursue…
When you articulate your value…
When you put yourself out there…
You create freedom, alignment, and meaningful impact.