Cultivating Courage
Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the ability to take purposeful action in spite of the fact that you feel fear. Cultivating courage requires the willingness to face your fears, see yourself as capable of dealing with the challenges you are facing and to take risks.
9 Ways To Cultivate Courage
Face Your Fears
1. Change Your Perception: Use your skills of discernment and reframing to change your perception of fearful situations into opportunities for your personal growth. Refuse to let your fears limit your thinking and your ability to see all the possible solutions to the challenges facing you.
2. Focus Your Energy: Overcome your fears by focusing your attention on what you want to see happen. Visualize the realization of your goals. Focus your attention on what’s more important to you than the fear you feel. Don’t waste your emotional energy on what you don’t want!
3. Live In The Now: Practice being in the present moment. Your fears are simply your thoughts about something that might happen in the future. The problem about living in the future is that you are giving up your power to see and realize all the possibilities before you. The present moment is the only place where you can overcome your fear.
See Yourself As Capable
4. Talk To Yourself: Use positive self-talk to re-program your perception that you are, in fact, capable of dealing with the challenges you are facing. Create a personal mantra and use it to affirm that you are capable. For example: “I am capable and courageous in dealing with any and all challenges.”
5. Remember Your Past Successes: Remind yourself of situations in the past when you took courageous action and you were successful in facing your fears.
6. Prepare Yourself: Anticipate moments or events that will challenge you. Educate yourself about the appropriate action to take. Prepare a response strategy and use role-playing to practice your response.
7. Take Baby Steps: Break down your response to a fearful situation and focus your attention on completing one step at a time. To build your confidence, celebrate the successful completion of each step along the way.
Take Risks
8. Develop Your Risk-Taking Muscles: There are five main areas of risk-taking: physical, financial, intellectual, emotional and spiritual. You have different comfort levels for taking risks in each of these areas. For example, you might be more willing to take an intellectual risk that an emotional risk. Develop your risk-taking muscles, by consciously taking risks in those areas or situations in which you feel comfortable taking a risk.
9. Have A Plan “B”: Imagine the worse case scenario and develop a plan of action in the event the worse happens. Having a back up plan will help you to stop worrying and focus instead on succeeding.
On your transformational journey, you will learn to overcome fear. You will learn to manage your emotions and cultivate courage. This in itself will be transformational.
Warmly,
Laureen
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Photographer: © Clip Art | Microsoft Office
(c) The Transformational Journey
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