Courage comes first, confidence comes after.

Courage comes first, confidence comes after.

Few lessons have been as important for me as that.

Learned from David Gemmell, learned from Rich Litvin, learned from the amazing, inspiring people I’ve seen take leaps into the unknown and return stronger.

It’s so hard to remember from the other side of the trapeze. But - before you leapt - you were different.

More fear, more uncertainty, less confidence, less belief.

You were someone who didn’t know.

Now you are someone who does.

It doesn’t change everything.

At least, not straight away.

To be in front of a large group taps into something deep and powerful in me.

If I leave time leading a workshop with any embodied sense of uncertainty of the judgment of me by others, then I leave with the energy of a frightened rabbit; a frightened boy, confused and spacey. Dissociated.

I don’t know if that will ever change for me.

And yet, after many years of leaping into the unknown, surfing the fear, riding it like a wild stallion, things are different.

The fear in advance is different: the embodied confidence that I am someone who can hold a group is far greater. Someone who can bring things to a group of people that others can’t bring.

The energy of the jester, the trixter, the healer and more.

The kinds of things that a 12-year-old me would find hard to believe that he had the spark for inside him.

And the recovery from the state is different.

It is the processing without the anxiety. Well, without as much. With only a couple of days of frantic thinking; not a couple of weeks.

Courage comes first, confidence comes after.

What would be different if our compasses were set to admire courage first, confidence and competence later?

Courage, of course, is the LEAD indicator for confidence and competence.

If you see someone repeatedly engaged in acts of courage, you can place a pretty good bet that they are growing into their potential.

That in 30 years the them of now will look at themselves and scarcely believe what they see.

That is what is available to you, if you choose to take it.

When I invite people into transformation through the 12-Minute Method, I often use the question: what will you of three years’ time be grateful to you that you started working on now, even 12 minutes at a time?

Almost inevitably, the answers are acts of courage.

Small courage compounds.

Each time you take an act of even the smallest amount of courage you can imagine, your confidence grows.

That means the next time to take an act of the smallest courage you can imagine, you will be doing something that you of yesterday would have needed more courage to do.

All you need to do is continue to take the tiny steps of tiny courage, and over eight years you might find you’ve written hundreds of blog posts, many on the kinds of topics that you (me) of eight years ago would have found far too terrifying to touch.

But these acts of courage don’t all look like exposing our creativity and deeper selves to others.

The you of three years’ time would probably be incredibly grateful if you had spent just 12 minutes a week over those three years sitting quietly.

Or reading.

Or holding the hand of a loved one.

Or standing in the garden with the wind on your face.

Or meditating on a poem.

Or listening to a song.

Each of those, for many of us, is an act of courage.

The courage to nourish ourselves.

The courage to nourish our spirit.

And we don’t have the confidence yet.

We can’t feel it, embodied in our molecules, that these acts of courageous slowness are vital to our essence. More vital, in fact, than 12 more minutes of action. Than 12 more minutes of ‘to do’.

But courage comes first.

The confidence will come later.

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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online. 

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