EMOTIONAL COURAGE

There is hardly any important person today or in the past, who does not have a track record of courageous deeds, decisions and actions. These are people who have stood up for themselves, discovered themselves, accepted themselves and stood up for causes that are far greater than themselves. They have at a point in their life made the decision to accept their own truth, battle their inner demons and come to terms with their own flaws and imperfections. They were able to do this through the realization of the fact that there’s absolutely no impeccable being in the world, hence, they must only keep working towards assuming perfection. When anyone in the world reaches this stage of commitment to self, it means they have a full one hundred percent emotional courage.

Courage as a concept of self has many principles. While the physical courage covers the ability to flinchingly use your body to combat any kind of fear and threat irrespective of how grave or dangerous they appear to be, emotional courage is perhaps even deeper and more important—It is the willingness to face fears and threats that are in relation to your self, thought processes, habits, beliefs, values, conditionings and comfort.

With this, you accept your flaws, your lapses, adversities, failure, suffering and anything relating to your emotions and your sense of self-acceptance. In this same vein, we can define emotional courage as the ability to have self-awareness, to be vulnerable and truthful, to be actively conscious of our core emotions as humans, and choose how we decide to express the language of thought through communication. When we ignore, suppress or deny how we feel and avoid expressing them, we risk a reduction of insight, leading to faulty decision-making and inaccurate mental representation of our experience.

One very important thing to note is that our feelings and thoughts cannot always be positive. We cannot always have positive emotions. Meanwhile, the only thing we can do is dictate the intensity of it, and how much importance and focus we attach to it. Sometimes, we can reduce the intensity of one, to heighten the fervency of the other. For example, when you learn to tone down fear and worry, you learn to enjoy and revel in randomness and other positive feelings.

Beyond acceptance, emotional courage also carries with it the concept of self-love; loving yourself, being proud of yourself, appreciating the process of growing, having self-belief and believing that you deserve to be loved, to be accepted and worthy of happiness. Essentially, it is related to self-acceptance, coupled with a willingness to move outside our comfort zone, to explore new ways of being that may not be familiar.  It also seems related to the quest for self-realization and fulfillment.

Emotional courage requires digging around and uprooting the tangible and mostly intangible sources of fear, resulting in anxiety, worry, sorrow, and depression that can poison the proverbial wellspring of joy. Happiness is the buzz word most associated with emotional courage—having the courage to be unconditionally happy.

What emotional courage encapsulates is beyond the ‘self’, part of it is how you relate to others, how much of yourself you give out without expecting reciprocation; how much you love genuinely just because you can, how much compassion you have for humans like you, how you treat people that are less privileged than you are, the people you listen to, the hands you hold, the number of people you have offered shoulders to cry on, the kind of impact you have had on people around you all without asking for compensation or asking for any favors in return.

My first experience with emotional courage wasn’t personal. I saw it being displayed through a friend about a decade ago and since then; I knew it was a stage worth attaining in one’s life. My friend had lost her father to cancer and the following week, she had to present a paper at a seminar we were both to attend together. Everyone knew it would be very difficult for her to process the loss and deal with the grief, but they also knew how important it was for her to present the paper. Despite this, she was still convinced to drop out from it—of course people understood; she was very close to her father.

My friend however rejected their idea; we knew deep down, she was scared. What if she forgot her speech? What if she blacked out? What if she gets glossed up in grief so much that she can’t say much? These were perturbing and unanswered questions that almost broke my nerves personally, but we knew that just a day to the presentation, there was this amazingly renewed energy around her—it was courage and strength. She knew she had to do this for people on the team irrespective of what had happened to her a week prior. She delivered the speech and it was so excellent that everyone gave a resounding clap and standing ovation after her presentation. Her action that particular day was liberating, empowering and encouraging, she was able to manage her sadness, and show up for people who expected her best.

Most of us are so engrossed in our physicality that we forget to nurture the mind. We are consumed with our outward projection that we ignore the most important kind of appearance—emotions. We get on a diet to watch and maintain our weight, do exercises to build physical strength, we try to maintain the best physiques, climb staircases instead of taking elevators, go to yoga classes and participate in many sports. While this is by no means bad, we make the mistake of ignoring the most important aspect that needs grooming and nurturing- EMOTIONS.

The truth is, grooming your emotional courage every day is one of the best ways to grow. By doing it, you are taking active and conscious steps towards transforming your life from the deepest recesses of your mind, down the every bit of the external. It is a powerful spiritual practice that allows you to deal with vulnerability, reconcile with it, and accept it.

THE PRINCIPLES OF EMOTIONAL COURAGE

You don’t just develop emotional courage just because you say you want to. As stated earlier, it comprises of steady, conscious and deliberate steps which vary in forms, across different situations and from human to human. It entails you taking control of your emotions and choosing what you want to feel, and the things you’d rather not feel at all- the result of this will amaze you in a way you didn’t expect.

There are, however, four steps to take in the process of developing emotional courage and they are listed below:

1. List out the feelings you are willing to accept, and the ones that will only drag you down and derail you from fully accepting who you are.
2. List out various situations, circumstances and scenarios where you wish to display emotional strength and courage- know what it feels like for you, the things you want to attain while wielding it, and how it will turn your life around for the better.
3. Make out the steps you know are achievable for you, and draw out a routine for exhibiting each one of them.
4. Make the steps listed above part of your daily routine. Make it a ritual and observe the ones that work best for you and the ones that are not so favorable.

Like physical strength, emotional courage lets you attain emotional flexibility. It is very important to be able to conform; to be able to adapt to every situation as they come; to display emotion and accept the strength that comes from it. Many of us were told at very tender ages not to show emotions. In some instances, it was seen as a sign of weakness. Men and boys were told that it’s a weakness to cry or display pain. So it didn’t matter if they were in pain, sorrow or fearful; they would be weak to show it.

Many of us have the warped idea that there was strength in shutting down emotions and not allowing ourselves to feel. On the contrary, however, when you stop yourself from feeling what you should allow yourself to feel, you are detaching yourself from a coping mechanism that was naturally designed to help you protect yourself and connect with others who might have been exactly on your spot. To make unavailable, emotions that should protect you, is to completely rid yourself the chance of being human, or of healing. Instead, you are left with a shell- a vacant cocoon of who you should have been.

Let’s take for example a woman who has been abused at some early stages of her life. She doesn’t tell anyone, who doesn’t seek help, she doesn’t have a chance to heal, or give herself a chance to express her feelings of anger, or pain. Gradually she loses herself, and left behind are feelings of denial, detachment from self, self-doubt, avoidance, being addicted to hard drugs, self-loathing, etc. These and many other emotions are what allow you to distract yourself from what you really and genuinely feel and before you know it, you’re headed down a path of self-destruction.

On the contrary, emotional courage forms from your will and openness to accept, tolerate and feel every moment; good or bad as well as possible, and reconciling with every emotion they bring along. This is simply what is described as LIVING YOUR TRUTH. You are vulnerable, authentic and genuine. Emotional courage allows you to pull towards your experience, studying the way you react to issues and increasing your awareness.

SMALL STEPS OF EMOTIONAL COURAGE

As stated earlier, emotional courage takes on many forms and differ from individuals to individuals. The most important thing is to find the one step that works for you and sticking to it. There are many qualities that define emotional courage but first, it is important to know that there are a wide array of emotions that can be felt but there are some that stay at the core of everyone’s being- that we cannot do away with unless we really try to shove them deep down. These are: anger, sadness, anxiety, disgust, shame, surprise, compassion, pride, guilt, admiration, awe and embarrassment amongst many others.

Out of these, the most universal are happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. Beyond feelings, other ways to develop emotional courage is acceptance and admittance of truth- ignorance, strength, arrogance, openness, insecurity, hate, vulnerability. The best form of confidence and acceptance is a deep security in the self, standing as all the validation you need and filtering the kind of outward comments and opinions that are allowed to infiltrate into our defenses. When we build emotional courage, we can be open and vulnerable even in the face of criticism. It doesn’t knock us off our feet because we have the willingness to feel what we’re feeling.

To take deliberate take steps and actions towards developing emotional courage, below is a list of the things we can adopt as routine every day to fully bloom into strong individuals.

1. Truth to self: when we are true to ourselves, we learn to disregard negative remarks from people. We know who we were and what we stand for and no words can penetrate that kind of defense.
2. Step out of your comfort zone. When you do this, you are opening yourself up to learning outside of what you already believe.
3. Be considerate and compassionate towards the plight of others. Let their struggles awake the humanity in you. Allow yourself to feel pity and worry for people other than yourself
4. Allow yourself to open yourself to people. Do not shut yourself down, have tough and difficult conversation with others. Be realistic to our own problems.
5. Make yourself vulnerable. Be hard and deliberate. It is not always going to be easy. Accept hard times for what they are and make hard decisions to get through them.
6. Do not shut yourself out from the world. Open yourself to new opportunities, friendships, relationships, jobs and interactions.
7. Sit up and face uncomfortable emotions no matter how painful it is to do so.
8. Do not be judgmental. Either to yourself or to others. Accept flaws, imperfections and lapses in human relations. Accept that we are all made to make mistakes and accept mistakes as the chance to become better.
9. Be completely honest and open with yourself about how you really feel about something. If you don’t like something, show it, if something does not go in line with your set of beliefs and values, reject it. Do not pretend and accept what you wouldn’t allow in the long run. Every decision you make in your relation with others should never be at your own detriment.
10. Let your guard down and let people really see you for who you are: human. Let people see you when you’re happy, when you’re sad, when you’re glad, when you’re down. Allow people to comfort you and heal you. It is not a weakness. It is strength

It is important to know that there is never an adverse effect to being emotionally courageous. On the contrary, lack of it can push one into a dark hole that can be very difficult to move out of. It can damage one, one’s relationship with others, one’s view of the world, and hinder the overall development of every facet of one’s life. Here are a few benefits of having a strong emotional courage.

1. It eradicates procrastination. You do things when they are due and how they should be done.
2. It allows you to be true to yourself. You are able to sift through the information that comes through to you, choose between what to believe and what not to, and hear what is important to say and what is not.
3. It allows you to fully stay grounded in yourself and not lose yourself while you are interacting or relating with others.
4. We will let people know how to treat us. They know what we are willing to take and the things that do not go down well with us.
5. We will have more self-confidence. In our actions, in our reactions, in our relation to others, in our feelings. We will have total control over our emotions and when we do this, little things have the power to hurt us. We will embrace opportunities, relationships and humanity, and we will never live with regret.

In conclusion, it is necessary to let people know that when we are emotionally comfortable, we are keeping our potentials locked in a box; in a cocoon that is tightly closed. Our possibilities of self are locked away and the only way to expand and attain that is to develop emotional courage and seize your fate into your own hands. That is the only way we can live!