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HABIT 1

Be Courageous

It’s the Universal Requirement

“There’s only one requirement of any of us, and that is to be courageous. Because courage defines all other human behavior. And, I believe—because I’ve done a little of this myself—that pretending to be courageous is just as good as the real thing.”

~David Letterman

Being Courageous is choosing your experience.

The arrows show the two pathways available when we have an experience. We can choose what we experience using our head or using our heart. What we experience is what we think, feel and do.

The dotted paths show the connections within the framework. In our head, we have the opportunity to choose to change. In our heart, we have the opportunity to choose to have courage. When you lead from your heart, you follow your conscience to be respectful and be your best.

Habit 1 uses the first phase of the head-to-heart framework as shown above.

In habit 1, we establish courage as the foundational principle and habit of the heart. Courage in response to our conscience, triggers progression.

Being courageous is a daily experience if we are to live in our heart. When we have experiences that don’t fit where we or others think they should, that is a common place we need courage. One of these experiences for my wife and me was when we decided to become foster parents. At the time we had four children, ages 5, 3, 2 and 7 months. So, understandably, it seemed like a crazy thing to do. Yet we felt strongly about it as we were listening to our conscience.

We had people very close to us disagree with our decision. They had either personal experiences or heard from others’ experiences and felt like it was not a good decision for our children. They were trying to protect us. They even questioned our motives because they felt so strongly about it. It took a lot of courage for Christine and me to talk through what they were experiencing, separating it from what we were experiencing.

It has ended up being an amazing experience for our family to expand to include children from other families. Our children have greatly benefitted from having older sisters. We have had so much progress because of it. As parents, we have had to really intentionally choose how we would parent teenagers who had not been raised in our family culture.

The most magnificent acts of courage have come from our teenage daughters. Their courage to stand up for themselves and choose a different experience than what they were raised in is incredible. Choosing to have courage to change is not easy and is very painful.

Some of the most courageous things they do would not be noticed by anyone except themselves: choosing to walk away when a relationship is one-sided, choosing to talk to a stranger, choosing to forgive. These are the silent, private victories that have brought powerful change to our teenagers.

You may not see the ways you are being courageous, just as our girls do not always recognize fully how courageous they are being. Each night in our home, we try to highlight one family member. We start with a game where they get to act out some sort of animal (think of the zoo we must live in with nine people, average age of thirteen!). We all try to guess what they will choose. Then the rest of the family members take the opportunity to share with that individual the characteristics and attributes that we love about them. Finally, they get to share what they love about themselves. Almost every time, I tell the teenaged girls how proud of them I am and how courageous they are. I do this because every week they are continually choosing courage.