Facing tough decisions and situations is hard backed by fear brought about by your historical belief system. However when you learn to acknowledge ad accept your fears and vulnerabilities you can confront them and change your behaviours.
Courage is often broken down into physical, verbal, emotional and psychological which work together to protect your health and wellbeing from attack. When you enter a fight or flight response, your psychological courage helps you to stand up to a harmful situation and allows you to move forward.
Fear is awakened in everyday circumstances from a sense of discomfort that can trigger the use of your courage. This means there is a conflict between the life you are living compared to the live you want to live.
Your psychological courage is the strength to confront the truth about yourself and your behaviours and take action where change is required. As hard as this might be, it involves deep self-reflection to challenge yourself about your deep rooted fears and beliefs to acknowledge and accept your limitations and vulnerability.
No-one is perfect and we all have faults that are blind to us which impact our health and wellbeing. It takes a great deal of psychological courage to admit to our limitations and even more to accept the distance between who we think we are and who we actually are. (Your ideal and actual self).
Your four strengths of courage
Building your psychological courage allows you to overcome your personal limitations so that you can your best life. By doing this you can maximise, grow and evolve into the best version of yourself.
Integrity
acting with authenticity, being true to yourself in terms of your values and ethics but also about being honest about who you are. That is about taking responsibility for how you think and feel and what you do. Identifying what stops you achieving your goals and actively managing those things. This can be contradictory to integrity, but it is about changing your behaviour to build a more authentic life.
Bravery
Having the strength to see the truth and taking action. This might mean being brave to ask for help when you need it. However, we are talking about proactive courage here where you are going to take action and not just rely on someone to do it for you.
Persistence
This reinforces the first two strengths and draws on your ability to self-regulate so that you can work through the risks and fears of achieving your goals. The courage of persistence helps you to plan and understand the challenges of reaching your goals and what timeframes are reasonable. It is therefore about taking action and is a process of discovery and accepting risk and committing to the outcome.
Vitality
The courage of vitality means living wholeheartedly and accepting the challenges that come with the decisions you make in life. However, then not allowing those challenges to get in the way of accomplishing your desire to a life of abundance.
How to build psychological courage
At the heart of building psychological courage is taking ownership and control of yourself. It is getting out of the habit of blaming outside influences for what has gone wrong and looking internally at ourselves.
You can only control what you think, feel and do and not that of others. It may seem easy to pass control to others, but when you take back responsibility you will feel stronger in your achievements.
Like all things, building psychological courage is a process.
- Take ownership and focus on solutions not problems.
- Learn what triggers your reactions and develop strategies to manage them.
- Learn to appreciate your strengths.
- Learn to recognise your successes.
Building your psychological courage can empower you to be the person you want to be and open up a world of opportunity you never before thought possible. Without fear holding you back from being the best you can be.