Reframing what if feels like to be brave

If you dare to enter the arena*, you are courageous.
Entering the arena means you speak up, you try something new, outside your comfort zone, you expose yourself, you risk to fail, you put yourself in a position where you can be attacked, judged and criticised.

You are doing something brave, yet confusingly you feel vulnerable. You feel weak, you feel like an imposter or a loser.
Then, you ask yourself: am I doing the right thing? Maybe I’m not made for this. Who do I think I am to attempt this? This was a bad idea. And then, you think of backing out.

What Dr. Brené Brown’s research shows tough is that these feelings of vulnerability never go away.

You can’t do courage without feeling vulnerable.

When entering the arena there’s always fear, self-doubt, uncertainty, comparison and shame present.

So let’s reframe vulnerability and courage:
When I feel vulnerable, actually I’m being courageous.

From the Man in the Arena:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man 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 himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

- Theodore Roosevelt, Excerpt from the speech “Citizenship In A Republic”
delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on 23 April, 1910