What is courage to you?
- Some people make courage
- Some people take courage
- Some people mistake courage
- Some people fake courage
- Some people medicate courage
- Some people ache courage
- Some people rake courage
- Some people forsake courage
- Some people suffocate courage
- Some people detonate courage
- Some people celebrate courage
- Some people underestimate courage
Aristotle believed that an individual develops courage by doing courageous acts.
Plato said that courage is knowing when to be afraid.
Or as the proverb says, fear and courage are brothers.
Courage is certainly not the absence of fear or anxiety or being petrified. These are the things that are right in the middle of all the action. If you have no fear then you have no courage!
The saying Courage Sans Peur which means ‘Courage Without Fear’ is fighting talk for sure but courage is experiencing fear and doing something with it. The essence of heroism is acting in fear but without it overwhelming and consuming you.
Courage can be measured and controlled to some degree and ‘calm’ courage is rare and something we might associate with elite military training. As Mark Twain once said, “Courage is resilience to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”
Merriam-Webster’s definition of courage is the “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere and withstand danger, fear or difficulty.”
For me, Cancer Courage is raw courage, the sort of hardware you display in the midst of a soul-crushing life challenge.
Cancer Courage is a Swiss-Army knife of mettle, a specialist multi-tooled weapon of fortitude and an extremely versatile Jack ‘n’ Jill of all Trades. Cancer Courage is finding what works to get the job done.
Courage is facing your fears, pain, or danger. It is doing hard things when you need to and being scared of something but doing it anyway. Courage is a form of tenacity, a refusal to cave in when you want to throw in the towel because you’re tired or broken.
Courage is saying “One more step. Just one more step,” when your mind is bleeding and pleading for you to stop. Courage is a decision. Courage is love, a self-love. It is also an unbelievable act of self-control.
Courage is showing fortitude when it really matters, showing heart and daring to be brave, bold and enterprising. It is doing the thing you think you cannot do when you are lost, paralysed, or at the end of your tether.
The mental strength, grit, determination and extraordinary spirit required to go through cancer is on another level and this brand of courage is supremely adaptable.
Having cancer courage means you have what the Germans call ‘belastbar’ – resilience and able to handle stress or pressure. Belastbar describes how you are able to cope well with challenging situations and endure.
Sometimes a serious illness or extreme challenge can bring about the gift of courage as something we discover and are then able to present to others.
Going through tough experiences allows us to transform ourselves and transform others and make a tangible difference to the world. Every act of courage is an act of generosity that can benefit others.
The gift of courage is something that unwraps itself when you are required to step up for our own survival.
These situations might be moments of dread where there is a part of you that wished you were dead.
But despite being drenched in anxiety and self-doubts, there is a much bigger part of you that stands tall and wants to live and so we don’t shrink or shirk because to do so would be to give in and that’s something we aren’t going to do.
There is of course more than one type of courage and there have been many attempts to classify it. There are 6 main types commonly identified:
- Physical courage is the ability to face danger, pain and fear.
- Social courage is “the audacity to expose yourself to potentially embarrassing or uncomfortable social situations” (Svitorka, 2023)
- Moral courage is the ability to do what is morally and ethically right, even when it might be unpopular or risky. It’s about having the guts to stand up for your beliefs and values in the face of adversity, even when no one else does.
- Emotional courage is the ability to deal with your emotions in a productive and healthy way rather than a destructive one.
- Intellectual courage is the ability to see beyond the status quo and ask questions that might seem absurd or dangerous without fear of what others will think of them.
- Spiritual courage is the willingness to look at your soul and make difficult choices.
Some argue that there are other types of courage we can add:
- Everyday courage is about the grit and determination to do what it necessary and it comes through small actions and daily choices to carry on and keep going.
- Disciplined courage is the courage to be reflective, strategic and focused in the face of constant distractions, setbacks, failures and opposition.
- Empathetic courage is acknowledging personal bias and having the capacity feel deeply for others and experience their trials and tribulations.
- Creative courage is opening your mind to fresh approaches, new ideas, and acting on them.
Looking at all these types of courage, we can see that ‘Cancer Courage’ encompasses more than one type of courage.
I’ll end with a favourite quote of mine that I think gets at the heart of what courage is all about for me. It is by Marcel France:
The secret of life is this: When you hear the sound of the cannons, walk toward them.
One more thing……if you had just 1% more courage, just imagine what you could do. Remember there are one hundred 1%s to tap into so there is plenty in the tank.