Someone once explained to me (or I read, or I heard it said on a podcast, or…) that there’s no difference between courage and fear. Courage contains fear. If you’re not afraid, courage has no meaning.
Another way of saying this is that if you’re afraid of something and you take some action even in the face of that fear — that’s courage. If you’re not afraid, then in what regard are you being courageous? You’re simply taking action. You might be taking bold action, or fearless action, but strictly speaking, if you’re not scared it’s not courage.
I find this incredibly useful as a reminder when I’m caught up in fear. I am, for instance, very anxious right now about taking on a massive new project at work. Not merely massive in the sense that there’s a lot of work, but in the sense that there’s a ton of work that I know almost nothing about and the stakes are very high. It’s the sort of situation where you’d have to be a little nuts not to be scared. I tend to judge myself in these situation and think, well, if I wasn’t so freaked out maybe I could do something worthwhile here.
But no, actually. It’s what you choose to do anyway when you are scared that’s the test of character. This helps me, because it’s easy to assume that fear has the power to stop you from taking action. But it doesn’t. The only thing that has that power is… you.