Making Brave Choices

We all have shit going on in our lives that scares us, even if we don’t necessarily think of it as fear. And that means we all have to make brave choices sometimes, even if we don’t necessarily think of it as bravery. But facing our shit – whether it’s the big, heavy stuff, or the seemingly inconsequential stuff we keep putting off – requires courage. It requires bravery. 

So this episode is your pep talk for taking action. It’s a reminder that you’re not alone in not wanting to face the thing, and also that you can absolutely face the thing. You can do it! Whatever it is. 

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Transcript:

Hello, sweetheart. 

This one goes out to anyone who is afraid. To anyone who is struggling with being honest about your feelings. To anyone who knows that there’s something that you need to do that you’ve been putting off. And to anyone who knows that there is something that you want for yourself and you’ve known for a long time that you want it and you haven’t been able to get yourself to take any action. This one is for you and for future me, who is definitely gonna need to hear this again at some point.

Because action is where courage lives. Action is where bravery lives. And action is how we make changes in our lives. Even if it’s like itty bitty small actions. 

And making brave choices, which is what we’re gonna talk about today, can be big, life-altering, radical, magical, huge choices like leaving a job, leaving a relationship, doing something big and bold. But the fuel that leads to those kinds of big brave choices comes from little ones. Little everyday choices that we make that are just a little bit brave or a little bit courageous. 

They’re the little choices and actions and steps we take in the face of fear, in the opposite direction of fear, in the flipping-the-bird-to-fear ways that can snowball into big amazing things once we like get that momentum. 

And so, of course, if we’re gonna talk about bravery, if we’re gonna talk about courage, we’re also gonna talk about fear. And that’s probably the best place to start, really, because fear is the mind killer. (To quote Dune, even though I haven’t seen the movies and haven’t read the book in over 10 years.)

Fear is really at the root of our troubles. We talk about that a lot in the recovery rooms, the ways in which, as addicts and alcoholics, we were driven by fear, and that we made really self-centered and often self-destructive choices because of that fear. We talk about it as this evil and corrosive thread that runs through everything. 

And I’ve written about this before, and something that I do believe to be true is that our life curriculum, if there is one – you know, and again, like whether you believe in God or not, spirituality or not, I hope you can relate to this, that if you look at the trajectory of your life, I really do believe that what we’re here to be doing, like what evolution looks like, what growth looks like, what healing looks like, is moving from fear to love. Is recognizing when fear is driving our boat or our bus or our train, whatever vehicle you prefer. Is recognizing that when that’s happening and making choices in the direction of love instead.

And I know for me, I’ve never really like thought of myself as a brave or courageous person. Those aren’t labels that I really claim for myself. When I think about bravery and courage, I think about radical activism. I think standing up to the man, fighting in a war and being a first responder. Like those are the kinds of things that seem like bravery to me.

But the introduction to this podcast and what I really am here to be doing is to help all of us make brave choices and to redefine what that means in our day-to-day lives. Because any time we feel afraid and do the right or the loving or the kind or the hard thing anyway, we are being brave. Any time that we reach for the character building choice over the easy avoidant choice, we’re being brave.

And the road to like joy and fulfillment and self-love and self-confidence and just being an awesome fucking human is built on like making those little brave choices that contribute to our overall sense of love and connection and hope in the universe. 

And so when I’m talking about making brave choices, I’m really talking about the little shit as much as I’m talking about the big shit.

Being honest about your feelings is brave. 

Reaching out to that person that you’ve been thinking about for a really long time, but for whatever reason fell off the radar, like that’s brave. 

Setting a boundary with work or with a loved one and saying like, this doesn’t work for me and I need to do something different, that’s brave. 

Admitting to yourself what you genuinely want, even if it might mean making changes, that’s brave.

I think there’s so much bravery in stepping into self-awareness and stepping into self-compassion and self-care and self-efficacy. 

One of my favorite sayings that I’ve picked up in the recovery rooms is that self-esteem is built on esteemable actions and I really like that and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately in the context of beyond self-esteem and in this idea of self-efficacy and self-confidence. 

And in the context of this episode, I think self-confidence is built on confident actions, or self-confidence is built on brave actions. Because I think that we don’t have to be confident to make confident actions, or to make confident choices. It’s that doing those things builds those muscles and helps us feel more and more self-confident. 

So maybe instead it’s that self-confidence is built on courageous actions. And like courageous in the sense of listening to our heart. That’s the etymological origin of the word courage is heart, kind of Middle English, heart as the seat of feelings, Latin, the word for heart. 

And the definition of courage isn’t feeling unafraid. It’s the ability to do something that frightens us. And I think if we all could just tap into our hearts and like what our yearnings are telling us and make those brave choices, make those courageous choices, even on like little scales, man, the world would be fucking rad. Because I fundamentally believe that we all deserve love, we all deserve joy, we all deserve hope, we all deserve connection, and that all of those things are forged through courage. 

The courage to say no. 

The courage to say yes. 

The courage to admit to ourselves that something isn’t working and to then like do something about it. 

To just throw more kind of recovery catchphrases at you today. There’s a couple of different acronyms for fear. The first one, which is what many of us do in our act of addiction is fuck everything and run. It’s easy to run away in some ways. There’s always usually consequences for that. 

But hiding or avoiding or putting it off or not looking at it feels so much easier than the other acronym for fear is face everything and recover. And facing our shit, whether it’s the stuff that we did, or the stuff that we wanna do, or the stuff that we’re not doing, like facing stuff is hard. 

And especially when it comes to like self-awareness, you know, like, I think the challenge of facing things is that like, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. 

You know, people will joke about like how coming to recovery meetings will really like fuck up your addiction sometimes, cause it’s like once… once we get into things and we’re like, this is, this isn’t great. It’s really hard to go back and be like, no, no, this is fine. It’s fine to do this thing that I know is bad for me. 

On a like totally frivolous scale. I’m discovering that with spicy food. It is, it is not agreeing with my, my body in my forties and, you know, I am currently in the phase of change where I see that and I’m ignoring it and you know, having consequences for those choices. 

But like, the more we like, look at ourselves and tune into ourselves and tune into our yearnings and the messages that our body is sending us, the messages that our heart is sending us, the messages that our spirit is sending us, the more access we have to information that will help our evolution. 

You know, if you’re listening to this podcast, like settling is bullshit. I don’t suspect that you want to be stuck wherever you’re stuck, right? And you know, I do think like we all have areas in our lives where we’re stuck. That’s true for me. 

You know, like food choices, for example. Like I’m in a pretty good place with my like how I feel in my body and about my body and my relationship to food, which is pretty tremendous. It’s been a long road to get here, but that doesn’t mean that I’m eating especially nutritiously or the things that my body actually wants me to be eating. I’m still eating fucking spicy food, even though my body’s like, hey, don’t do that. You know, and that might be the next frontier for me. 

But we have to pick our battles and courageous choices can look a lot of different ways. And we have to sort of pick the arena that we want to step into. I’ve been revisiting Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly lately and she opens it with this quote from Theodore Roosevelt that’s just fucking lovely. 

So I’m gonna read it to you now, but I’m gonna gender neutralize it because this applies to all humans, not just man people. Okay.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the person who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the person who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends themselves in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if they fail, at least fail while daring greatly, so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory or defeat.” 

Okay, so that’s like pretty hyper-masculine for my tastes. However, it’s also like really lovely. And I’ve been thinking about what is our arena? It doesn’t have to be a boxing ring, which is what that’s talking about, or a bull riding ring or any of those sort of more aggressively violent arenas to be in.

But it could be a creative arena. It could be a career arena. It could be a relationship arena. 

We all have arenas that are calling to us. I believe that. 

And the courageous act starts with listening for that calling and acknowledging it and then taking steps towards getting into it. 

I’ve been talking to a lot of creative people on the podcast lately and some of them knew from an early age and like, grew up in environments that fostered that creativity and encouraged it. And some of us didn’t. And it’s been a, like, much longer road. And my journey to where I am today and launching this podcast, launching the blog a couple years ago, was a really long and winding one. 

The arena of creativity and writing specifically and sharing my voice has been calling to me for a long time. And I’ve been finding ways and means to like mosey around it in that I’ve been writing for other people for a very long time. But stepping into my arena, or one of my arenas, by launching the blog that then turned into this podcast and like really starting to write in my own voice and to share it publicly, it’s been scary as shit. It’s been hard. It’s been really vulnerable. My little self-doubt gremlins have crept in a lot.

But it’s also been incredibly empowering and spiritually nourishing and emotionally nourishing and exciting and fun and joyful and tapping into what I believe I am here to be doing. And the more that I do that, the more like comfortable and confident and adept I feel in this particular arena.

And then maybe once I feel like, okay, like I got this, like then maybe I’ll look at my food shit, who knows? But like the point is just that I believe in you and that the road to believing in yourself, the road to believing in ourselves – I’ve been talking about roads a lot on this particular episode. So maybe we’re all on a little journey… 

But the road to believing in ourselves is paved with small brave choices and with people cheering for us. I couldn’t be doing this right now if I didn’t have people in my life who responded when I shared it with them with encouragement, with enthusiasm, with saying like, man, this is great, keep doing it, keep going. 

You know, I’m a long distance runner and I run half marathons with some frequency and the races where there’s like people cheering versus the races where there isn’t anyone on the course. There’s a pretty radical difference. It’s a lot more fun and a lot more energizing and joyful when we have people to share that enthusiasm with and who respect kind of the challenge that we’re conquering or putting ourselves toward. 

So making brave choices also means finding the people who will help us make the brave choices. And broadly speaking, I want to be one of those people. That’s why I launched this podcast. That’s what I talk about in the intro, is that what I am doing here, hopefully, is offering just a little bit of inspiration, a little bit of encouragement, a little bit of, like, “hey, buddy, if you’re listening to this, I believe in you. You can do it.” And in the sort of cosmic energetic scheme, like, I got you. I’m rooting for you. And going after what you want is brave.

Admitting to yourself what you want is brave. 

Doing some emotional archaeology and deep diving into your soul and figuring out what you want is brave. 

It takes courage because the clearer we get on what we want, the more likely it is we’re going to have to make some changes and take action.

But my experience has been, and I do really believe that those yearnings, those like, heart desires, those like things that have been calling to us. That is what we’re here for, is moving closer and closer towards those things. 

For me, it’s been being a writer among other things, but that’s been the big one. And here I am doing it, even though it’s scary. And even though I don’t know who is reading or listening, I think the point is that that doesn’t matter that much. The point is that I’m doing it anyway.

So my invitation to you, my love, at the end of this episode is to make a brave choice today. It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be quitting the job that you know is draining the life out of you. You know, it doesn’t have to be that big. 

It might just be like turning within and getting honest with yourself about what you really want. And then like that’s the first step towards then making choices to move you towards what you really want? 

But today’s episode is an invitation to like, be the brave little toaster, to be the cowardly lion, to be wherever you are on your journey away from fear. 

It’s to ask yourself, what would I do if I wasn’t afraid? And then try to start doing that, even just a little bit. As always, I believe in you. And I’m really excited to see what unfolds.