Can you imagine dikes of courage? So beautifully put. I find this quote by Martin Luther King Jr so inspiring that I decided to write a few lines about it today.

Given all the fears that surround us on a daily basis, take a short moment and imagine the enormous number of floods of fear you could have created so far in your lifetime. You would have no doubt experienced some catastrophes during your life and you would have been confronted with many outcomes, some of which would have been very overwhelming.

Fear is one of our most basic human emotions. It is there to promote our survival. Without it we would not be able to protect ourselves from legitimate threats. We all know this, but we all also know that we go through life with fears, some justified and some not:  fear of failure, of aiming higher, of making decisions, of taking risks, of showing up, of speaking up, fear of fighting for our rights and more… All that in order to keep ourselves safe.

As Mark Twain said: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” It is not about avoiding fear, but about accepting it and looking it in the eye. It is about taking the courage to own it, to overcome it and to analyse it. Why is it there? What would happen if you played along with it and let it drive your decisions? What would you gain if you were to rethink your fear and use its power to move forward?

Every time we overcome a fear, we actually build a dike of courage and we train a courage muscle. By doing so regularly, many dikes and muscles of courage are built which help us to regain our power and to embrace chances, opportunities and new perspectives.  They help us to discover new shores of progress, to be successful and to achieve happiness.

So take the courage to face your fears and to not let them prevent you from achieving what you really want to achieve both professionally and personally. Keeping sight of your goals and the bigger picture will always help you to move forward, to gather new experiences and skills in order to continue to thrive.

Let’s build those courage dikes together: Contact